Backwards beryllium, controversial cesium.
A collection of crows is a murder, of turkeys a rafter.
I could sit here and spew facts all day. The deepest
part of the ocean is the Mariana Trench. It doesn't
even matter how deep it is. It is as deep as twice the
size of Texas. It's filling with garbage...
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Indeed, the coffee maker was in the lazy susan. The apple cider vinegar was also still here, all that mother settling like ore to the bottom of the bottle. Days earlier I had bought some black pepper style pea snap snacks for my wife, who shunned them hard. I brought them down and will stash them for some(one's) future use.
I've found over these last several years of my life that my favorite hobby concerns this Farm. I have developed a fascination with the place. I love bringing things down and stashing them here. Then when I return a quarter of a year later—is it still here? Do I even remember having stashed it? I get a kick out of that moment, "Oh yeah, I did bring down a tube of marine caulk, awesome!"
You look down at yourself from above, then you awake. You realize you have flies buzzing about you. Not a ton, but more than you would expect and somebody tells you,
"They'll go away after a while."
The flies are there because you have been dead. But you have come back and your second existence has started. You always go back to an existence that you have already had. That's why you want to have good existences.
I. Neck Willow.
I'm an untapped resource. I'm a gathering storm.
"Place the six and the eight for $12 each." My total investment: $24. If either number is rolled before the next seven, I win $14. If a seven is rolled first, I lose both bets. If I hit a couple of my numbers, I deploy some of those profits as bets on the five and the nine. Then I have five, six, eight and nine covered. A seven still means I lose all of my chips on the table.
It is broken. Does it require of me that I buy a new spacer kit? What if I counter-offer with a brand new ball assembly?
The right answer ran between the left guard and the left tackle, to the house.
I am from Illinois but I live in Missouri. This does not make me anxious. I do not spend an hour a day imagining the explanations I will offer as justification when someone asks me, "What are you doing here?" Or says, in the pejorative, "Go back to your Land of Lincoln..."
1
I was struck by the rightness of a Morandi still life, leading me to believe (again) I could paint something similar, or should try in any case. Are my old oils still any good? Am I better with either color or depth?
2
"There's a dead branch out there," she said, pointing out the window.
"You dissembler," he said, raising a knee and tapping it with the opposite hand. Then raising the other knee, tapping it with the other hand. "These are my new calisthenics," he said.
And tomorrow I will circumautolate another part of the country, virgin to me, assuming I make it onto the plane. We fly to AriZona to visit River's parents. They say they have enough water but I am afraid they will try to tap into her, claiming genetic rights of appropriation. Gila, Salt, Colorado, her. I imagine large red rock formations, poisonous creatures of sand, water-hoarding cacti, shimmers of heat appearing to rise in the distance off of the road we are traveling. Lizards, near-tropical birds, political animals, billboards, a pool, a cadre of golf courses. I need only the stars, a red light and enough sobriety to make a little sense of a timeless sky. I will not pack any of my meths but I shall be able to get plenty of them there, for paper scratch.
Farmhouse fajitas, nachos, Helm at the helm, old time music, fiddles, a nearly full moon, clean cool air. Chucking my banana peel toward the brushline, cabbage shards. My nose is cold and runny. Hat on, hoody, vest, thermal, two pair sox, crox. Hot dog on the stove in foil this morning, baked potato on and then in the stove last night. Splitting wood, getting wood, arranging wood, burning wood. Excursion to Iberia via Brays Church Road, church there at 42, Mount Gilead, cemetery too. Pastures, cows, farm dogs just chillin not chasin. I cut up a fallen ash that wasn't nearly as dead as I thought, somehow still going at a forty-five degree angle and living on and through the v-trunk of another tree, maybe the second hickory species here, without shaggy bark and difficult to split—pignut? The four horses are still here, two white, one black, one...Appaloosa? I thought that word and then Helm said that word so it must be so. A sparse, low fog rolled in. I spoke of Misty at Chincoteague, we talked about wild horses...
I. Strep To.
Who wants to riverboat gamble? Bramblewine, Charley Pride, kiss an angel good morning. At 4:35 a car on St. Ann honked, a woman whooped and I coughed this cough I've got, craning for health, for a clear cranium, for enriched uranium, for heavy water—Enough. It's not a cough I've got but a sore throat and a wicked one. All my life I'd hear about other people getting strep throat and I can't recall ever having it myself...until now? Dunh, dunh, dunhhhh! I have been under the weather for weeks and now I'm in New Orleans, Louisiana—what am I doing here? Sipping room coffee at five a.m. because I can't sleep and my throat hurts and I don't have my trusty foam contour pillow, upon which I have grown heavily reliant. The day will unfold, though, and it might just get better. The only tool of destruction I have here is the liquid—no grass and no pills. I have a legitimate chance of remembering the good time I'm going to have out there on those patchworked cobblestone streets in this old amorous city on the river...
2017. Year of the Turd. That's pretty crude, I can do better. OK. 2017, Year of the Flying Squirrel. I like the idea of a flying squirrel, they have pluck. No wings but they make do. They fly somehow anyway, though not as well as a bumblebee.
I've heard references to 2016 being a bad year. Because of Trump? Please. My dog died—or, rather, I had my dog put down. I invited some horrible woman with a needle to come into my house and kill my dog. If 2016 was a bad year it was because I had to make that hasty and rude introduction with death, the reaper. Or for the people in Aleppo was 2016 a bad year. It was a bad year for the people who lost mothers, fathers, daughters and sons, brothers and sisters, wives and husbands, friends they have known for most of their lives...
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