June 26, 2010

Taxonomy and the evolution of primates teaches the relation of fingers to intelligence, the more articulated the finger the greater the dexterity, until vocables come next. Symbol-making, what distinguishes humans, results from hands, not the tongue. What were the symbols? Cairns, crosses, fertility objects, painted herds of deer or bison, geese effigies above altars. Not the symbol but an image to invoke one creature, the image being the creature until the creature comes of its own accord. For the sake of shorthand, the symbol arrives, maybe the synecdoche.

A French prisoner, his face tattooed, had killed his cell-mate to eat his lung—I can’t recall if he’d consumed both lobes. Maybe one was enough. Was a sexual impulse involved, the desire to consume the beloved, just as a man might bite the shoulder of a woman during the act? On that sunny arid day I’d taken my Claritin D and was as high as a kite. I was jogging slowly besides a drainage ditch choked with wildflowers—buttercups, white-petalled daisies, and purple vetch. As I breathed deeply and looked at the flower-filled ditch and the lowlands around it, so suitable for a vernal pool the size of a large cow-pond, nearly as wide as some playing-field for an aboriginal sport, I thought of the lungs as a sieve pulling in waves of air as the ditch and the nearly level swampland breathes in water, filtering the nutrients from these elements through wild plants or capillaries until the whole field bursts into flower or the running subject rejuvenates, witnessing the actions of weeds comb the rainwater and the runoff untilo the sun comes out and the eyes and pistils of the wildflowers burst into irregular nebulas of color. Ahead was an access road of unusually red soil with the spruce on either side cut down, looking as if an expansion of housing developments into the woods were being planned, descending into the woods in sharper, more rutted steps. I was taken by the odor of sap, but as it became clear that the road would be harder to negotiate, I about-faced. Once in sight the aquatic center resembled a secure block of semi-clear glass or burnished steel, reflecting the sky and its sparse clouds.

Lebanon, an old mill town, quiet in summer evenings, deserted almost, the largest crowds beneath the lights of the ice-cream stand. Otherwise the parking spaces around the darkened commons free, a handful of boys in their early teens in the commons, others either home or by the lakeside with their families; the families have left their roomy white Colonials for the weekend.
………………………….

Those engineers are going to steer the course of the stars someday, re-route the gorges, merge rivers.
And after flooding their ancestors’ hamlets,
Maybe colonize Mars, and drive canals between craters.
How the salesmen with that frosted hair would like a little piece of their magic.
They’ll colonize the castles made among the stars
They control like some stage machinery.
The perpetual shift of stage sets revealing their machinery.
Certainly I won’t have the key to this sideshow
Half-infatuated by Lindsay Lohan in her backless dress
In transit to the courtroom on the MS network dot-com—
Let me read my messages. Rather, I don’t get much mail.

Come to think of it, that dress looks made of mylar foil,
A fabric that can be propelled through pure space
By sunlight alone. Lift it from the figure,
Lift your skirt and fly.
…………………………..

Six pots of nearly withering Romaine lettuce leaves, three other potted plants, two peppers, one tomato, bought at the Price Chopper on sale, about to dessicate on the vine. Two bags of dessicant in the basement, deemed not enough by the housing inspector. A bag of poison boken open, a bucket of antifreeze, a dead mouse. Old clay pots with dried up stems still inside them. Cobwebs on all the beams and joists. Why does this side of the house sink from the other side, as if it wished to fall? Weeds of an especially tenacious dandelion not flowering yet that I most deftly tug from the root ball to remove the plant, a plant thriving in the most granitic of soils, where the dirt drive meets the street among rubble almost too stony to walk upright, better to crawl or coax your car above the first abrupt hump before the splash of tiger-lillies that conceal the incertitude of the storage shed’s foundations.