There’s this guy at the bus stop with a heavy face carved from water. We nod, but we don’t speak. There were these guys in Target, circling as my girlfriend shopped for men’s polo shirts, orbiting us on some unseen current, men twice our height, watching us with disbelieving eyes.
As I stood at the first ground zero, I once
Again shuddered to feel the pull of madness
(though I knew not if it was my own or some
Remains of that evil which brought the fire
And brimstone of a world wide war….)
I'm barely able in a dream to juggle, as if in a steaming jungle, as if underwater. Swept by ten, by ten a.m. and by ten men, the data mine bears profane fruit. What causes blue hallucinations and has wheels.
In the desert, death did not translate as tragedy or adage. Death was ordinary. Mendicant friars on donkeys trudged by his body without so much as a rosary prayer. Government lorries didn’t stop.
Remember that
you were once golden
standing tall with dignity.
Now the gold has darkened to sepia
and dignity is dying.
Soon the rivers will be
running with dead fish again.
Down at your feet,
a bumblebee struggles to keep aloft;
It was a swift and menacing time.
One of the local dogs was having a phantom pregnancy.
Things were leaving one place and showing up in another.
It was springtime when I arrived, an east wind blowing,
an uncanny wind as it turned out.
The girl remained on Fender’s mind for the rest of the week. Every time a customer, dark-eyed and caffeine deprived, shuffled in from the late winter darkness, carrying the scent of the dying season– dirty snow piles and stale road salt– a new question was planted in his head.
Despite the train racing toward Philadelphia, everything came to a halt for Alan. She made him feel twenty again. Her presence was intoxicating and confusing. What was he supposed to do with this surprise admiration?
"I can't help you, little one." Jimmy tears up a little himself now with the baby quiet around his finger. "Everybody'd be asking what you doing with a little brand new baby, Jimmy. They'd think I'd done something wrong...
