When someone tells me a story, even a newspaper headline, I ask, “Where was that? Where did that happen?” From the context—the who, the where, and the when—I construct meaning. I believe I’m not alone. We have a fundamental desire to understand our environments, to understand how they affect who we are and what we care about.
All day those stones have writhed with myth,
roots have snaked necks, have had the cheek
to prod gods and kings, crack armies, cities, ships;
mocked Shiva, made him sprout arthritic wrists.
By DON SHARE
Rabbit fur and hair strewn through the lawns
of the Midwest!
The famous feral parakeets of Chicago
are chattering
With cold.
By DON SHARE
I have a bone to pick
with whoever runs this joint.
I don’t much like
being stuck out in the rain
By DON SHARE
Hobo, Bono, boneheap.
I mutilate dandelions in the sun,
rattle my rake like a saber
When Michelle-my-neighbor,
over compost, opines
that Aqualung’s a classic
I took three stones from there:
one from the water
one from the sun
and a small one
to grow.
The puzzle of the sun’s longing for
the sea
The marvel: her love fills the sky overflows the rim till the
sea is one
with the sky
| We said a prayer for the rats and fleas as the plague abated. We laid a wreath for Justinian. The streets of London were no longer smoke-choked, just smoking, and Rome started to smell more like Rome. At least whoever remembered “before” said as much. In the last days of the plague, the days that followed the days that had been called “last,” we made a sport of showing up at restaurants where we had never been beautiful enough to get a table, just to see if people still ate at tables, or if the food tasted like anything. We appeared at the homes of our favorite people to see if they were around, too, or if they had changed, or if they could be unchanged. We moved slowly through the halls of near-empty museums, each of us indistinguishable from the art, to be touched only with the eyes from a safe Kantian distance. As the plague’s grip on our lives slackened, we slackened too, like a body pretending it can will itself back into sleep. We prepared for travel, arranged our documents, scheduled shots. We packed—clothes, books—and packed—the spider plant with all its apostles, anything that might spoil in our absence—and kept on packing. It didn’t matter that we had no idea where we were going. This time we would be more careful to leave none of ourselves behind. |
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