From July 3-4 2011

Out lazy indolent peasantry must awake by the lash!
A visit to the empty panopticon as devised by Jeremy Bentham will convince the guest of his method’s wisdom, the skylights in the domed roof blinding the guard box and stairwell with several shafts of sunlight, at nightfall the harvest moon descended. A flock of crows visit the powerlines. Irradiated melons growing as large as unlanced boils. So the poete maudit in his night-robes sung to the broken Doric columns and to the trees. When you grow up son, what would you like to be? How’s your report card? Which bacteria can consume both banana peels and coffee-grounds? In the dormitory courtyard he practiced the high-pitched peals meant to shatter glass as in those old Memorex commercials. And glasses of daguerreotypes and plate glass windows. But instead he sounded like a banshee and they wanted to lock him up. The very cover of the book announces an important cultural moment, an arrival. Significance before meaning. I am writing as if English were my second language—this was intended. In the cafeteria the jocks are still drinking two chocolate milks and double scoops of mashed potatoes. Another fight breaks out at Chuck E. Cheese. With the rain the summer vacation at the camp is ruined. A bundle of clothes in the dryer awaits my hand. She wrote entirely about the displaced people she had settled, mixing their dialog with bits from their own language. The skin of smoked trout as if flayed and peeled away.

Let’s face it. When you’re not opening old wounds, you’re opening a new can of worms. You’ll eat some worms since nobody likes you enough to visit you. Worms in compost work. They work through the various foods buried there. I lick the wounds I open clean.

Yesterday I ran part of Lake Morey. Summer camp was in session, and there were two camps. The tents were set up like barracks, their flaps open. One camp was for girls. Many bicyclists appeared, making me wish I’d brought my bike, although the sky had been overcast when I’d departed my house. At the end of my run, I picked a few ripe wild strawberries growing at the edge of the road, then walked upon a footpath that coiled into the woods, scattered with needles. A brook pooled before me. The fallen logs by the brook were matted with moss. The shade was thick, cooling the footpath. At some point, you could barely see the summer houses through the firs.

But before my run ended, a succession of exploding thuds sounded above me from a modernized log cabin on the hill, agitating the beagle led along by a short elfin woman whose face was strained as she upheld her arms almost as if in supplication, the leash in one hand, the tail of the beagle with its white tip waving wildly as the dog turned whichaway seeking the noise’s source—the explosions (M-80s) drowned the music in my ears, played to establish rhythm, boost the runner’s adrenaline level. The old woman’s eyes were turning wildly in her head as the beagle thrashed its tail as she wished aloud for an end to the noise, to the thudding explosions, the percussion shaking the air. When the V-2 dropped, the children died from the evacuation of air from their lungs: the blast was noiseless. The beagle, a pointer, moved in circles, searching for the source of noise, the tips of its white tail swinging. In thunder dogs do not know where to turn. The old woman shook her arms in the air.

The tiny succulents on the rock have bright yellow flowers. Beneath them stands a dwarf arbor vitae purchased on sale at Shaw’s. I filled the bird feeder to the top—that’s why I’m hearing so much bird song—or was there just a squabble? I’m waiting for the time when I can pluck the fruit from the vine without worrying where the rest comes from.

The worm in the compost forms a thread of air behind him. Thus all signs of his work collapse and leave no trace.

Moving in circles, the beagle’s tail wildly flailed as it searched for the source of those booms from the M-80s launched by the household up hill, a modern log cabin atop a lawn made by driving trees and boulders back, made from what must be a thousand trips to Home Depot. A faint memory of the sacrifices of pagan antiquity in the barbeque, lighter fluid and charred meat, fat off the bone sizzling among the embers. The smoke from the barbeques rises to the gods, Mars savoring the smell the most, appreciates the offerings. Would not the crash of a passenger jet smell like that, the fuel tanks torched, the victims twisted and fallen? His nostrils flared wide, Mars appreciates the comparison, not thinking it hyperbolic in the slightest. Offerings of modern life far exceed in number and scale those paltry offerings of the bronze age. Hats off to Vulcan the ironsmith, deft facilitator! Metallurgical advances intensify the event.