This is one that is a collaboration between me
and Lyn Hejinian.
February 24, yesterday, there was weather,
tomorrow there will be none.
I'm in an academic office surrounded by screens,
each with a keyboard attached.
The screens depict scenes and cityscapes I'm to type in words.
I type play, and the section in the Southeast of the city blows
up.
A seven story parking structure and a big boxy sewage treatment
facility with its attendant pond goes boom.
A grainy spray of particles expands up in a V
and then falls while the sound system produces
a sharp burst of static, until the particles have vanished,
leaving a tan crater.
Guilt, on the other hand, creates
a whole, flat, small town on a screen,
which had shown verdant forest.
I see a little car moving down Main Street.
It stops and makes a right.
I go over to a third screen with a generic big city.
I type, I like horses but nothing happens.
I happen to get off on the horses of instruction
to hell with the Marlboro man, nothing.
Apparently, syntax cancels out the effects.
OK, so just plain horses.
Anything?
Yes.
A tiny pup tent has appeared in a lower right hand
corner on the sidewalk in front of a department store.
I try, I a second pup tent like a third.
The power of writing in this particular game
is starting to feel, shall we say, illusory.
An authority dressed in blue is in the doorway with three
large yellow envelopes.
He is holding them out to me.
None have returned addresses and the authority is both
offering and withholding them.
It is mail not mail, perhaps one is a letter bomb.
I can see the address on the top envelope.
It was written with a sweeping gesture
by someone using a two tone red and silver pen
and shows great flourish.
I know from this that the top envelope
contains a literary magazine.
Suddenly, I feel deeply vexed, tears start,
though I hold them and I feel dizzy.
I don't know about the other two envelopes, I don't take them.
A gesture toward the screens: you take a turn I say,
but he pauses.
A turn doesn't compute.
He seems to feel that the screens and keyboards are
a sight fraught with dignity and heroic challenge.
I offer him a cigarette, he takes it
with earnest gratefulness.
As I offer the match, he's in bureaucratic heaven. inhaling
with rapt concentration.
I drop the pack to the floor squash it, rubbing it--
rubbing it heavily with the ball of my foot
until tobacco and paper are spread,
tears are flowing down my cheeks,
he's smoking, wide eyed, silent.
Sullen, I'm standing on the grass
near home, which is set amid an array of terraced gardens.
Other people are there, including T three times
in quick succession, a terrific thunderous roar
fills the air and the ground rumbles and shakes.
We all know then that hundreds of miles away great monsters
have emerged from the ground.
They are reptilian, but insect like giant ants
with nimble alligator limbs.
It is comforting to know they are maybe
thousands of miles away but eventually they will come.
It's common knowledge that they particularly hate poets.
Their most fearsome postures when they arrange themselves
into words.
They can get us at a distance that way.
We talked nervously trying to inhabit our seconds
with the timbres of our voices, we
make long sentences, we gesture and laugh
as accurately as we can.
Timing is crucial.