12/6/10

The nurses belly-dancing in their group exercise class. Among them an overweight woman purses her lips. Each dancer sports a belt of golden tassels at her hips that the exercise instructor handed out.

When I rose from the dentist's chair, the hygienist handed me a day-lily. I placed it on my car's dashboard. They spend the afternoon excavating caries from a human cave. On the dashboard, the day-lily dried, not leaving any fragrance.

In the clan the shaman was the weakest member of the group, the one most prone to outsider status, helpless at felling the macroceros or wooly mammoth with a spear. The rest let him stay by the hearth and hallucinate. Was mama the first word uttered from the mouth of the human species when it could shape vocables, or was it a hissing mnemonic sound meant to represent the snake? Whether you're inclined to the former or the latter reveals whether you are Lockean or Hobbesian in outlook. If of the latter stamp, like Dr. Moreau you believe the human species must be tamed, his toenails clipped, his excess hair removed by electrolysis, his impulses medicated to the grave. From womb to tomb, the species can only be constrained. Only harsh lessons lead to the learning necessary for the tribe's survival.

What at first sounds like a woodpecker driving its beak into the already hollowed out and rain-softened trunk of a dying maple tree must instead be the sound of a hammer as it either breaks up concrete or drives a stake into the ground, perhaps hammering a post where a highway guardrail had once been.

With the arrival of winter acoustics are crystal clear, but the sunlight is harsh and blinding, as on the facade of the new library, all picture windows and brushed aluminum siding. The characters that grace the glass panels nearly vanish in the winter sun's reflections. They spell library in several languages. But the ring of hammers is as bright as if they struck the rim of a crystal flagon, or piece of solid quartz whose molecular alignments were so straight the minutest light-beam could travel far within the blink of an eye. Now I hear the chainsaw taking down the dead tree at last. In languages other than our own, library means biblioteca, bibliotek from Biblos, Greek port city that supplied all the papyrus strained from the bulrushes among which Moses' barque drifted, lost.

A glass and metal wall of words forcing passersby to crane their heads to view completely, only for them to be blinded.