Robert Lunday: Thaumatropic

Thaumatropic

Robert Lunday 120 Cutting Horse Trail Bastrop, TX 78602 [email protected] (512) 718-9352 1 of 66

Acknowledgments New Madrid: “The Old Tools,” “Reading Plato”

Contents Zoographia........................................................................................ The Ship Sailed................................................................................. Spiritual............................................................................................ Sleep................................................................................................. Stallion.............................................................................................. Time to Kill....................................................................................... Skin................................................................................................... Eventually......................................................................................... Fires.................................................................................................. Daybreak........................................................................................... Miniature.......................................................................................... Out of One, Many............................................................................. Some Days........................................................................................ The Wild Things............................................................................... Diorama............................................................................................ The Photograph of My Wife............................................................. Too Many.......................................................................................... I Trust You........................................................................................ Like Most People.............................................................................. At the Stop Sign................................................................................ The Old Tools................................................................................... Candle............................................................................................... Faustus.............................................................................................. “The Stone Surgery” by Bosch......................................................... Bookstore Days................................................................................. The Falls........................................................................................... The Hotel by the Bay........................................................................ Walking............................................................................................. Bookstore Days II............................................................................. Believer............................................................................................. 3 of 66

Rust Belt........................................................................................... Palos Verdes...................................................................................... A Vision............................................................................................ The Eagle.......................................................................................... I’m Looking...................................................................................... Perfume............................................................................................. Bookstore Days III............................................................................ Naked Day........................................................................................ The Professor.................................................................................... The Secret Book............................................................................... The Cooper’s Hawk.......................................................................... Cheating............................................................................................ Every Tree is a Bonsai...................................................................... The Old Forest.................................................................................. My Head is in the Mud..................................................................... Gravel Was on the Menu.................................................................. Standing Up Too Fast....................................................................... Dream Catcher.................................................................................. Reading Plato.................................................................................... Pearl Harbor...................................................................................... Hiroshima......................................................................................... String Theory.................................................................................... The Veil............................................................................................. Son of Sam........................................................................................ Hole.................................................................................................. Parliament of Fowls..........................................................................

Zoographia I type and various creatures alight: moths who read ahead to what I’ll say, drawn to its flair; crows pecking at lines already there, a middling meal. I drive them all away and black larvae fill the page: my writing is their writhing.

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The Ship Sailed The ship sailed in the kitchen sink from one side to the other. An ant was on board pretending to be me. I was pretending to be God. Somewhere above God was pretending to be.

Spiritual Spirit is motion. Can’t you go any faster? says the guy behind me but we’re running in place.

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Sleep I can’t sleep and it’s imperative that I sleep. I can’t sleep and I really need to sleep but I already told you that in different words. I can’t sleep and the minutes feel like hours the hours like forced marches and the seconds like wet, heavy sand. I can’t sleep but soon you’ll have no trouble sleeping because I’ll keep telling you I can’t sleep. Sleep for me, cast a sleep-vote as my proxy, sleep for two, sleep redundantly.

Stallion The stallion whispers in the mare’s ears except he is no stallion but a crazy gelding. The mare’s in heat and thrilled at the language of the stallion who isn’t really there at all. As the boy-horse talks the mare’s eyes open wide and if you walk behind you see her expressive vulva believing everything she hears. The love-talker turns in the middle of his suit and runs across the field of cruel mesquite, chasing his own words it seems as the mare sends out her heart then whinnies, and shakes the feeling off.

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Time to Kill Punk-rock girl with sawtooth hair caught me in the mirror as we waited for the loo. Her eyes were edgy, too, and something in me really set her off (which happens when someone looks me over long enough). The people in the john were doing lines oblivious to our pounding on the door. Time and I were worth the killing. I worried most about the knees and Doc Martens but she was steel-toed and knee-jerk everywhere. I couldn’t help but stare; she slapped me hard. You are a striking woman I declared and she struck me again to prove me right.

Skin The skin shines and reflects from inside and out. The sun could fit inside it and does. The skin is a book, a sign, a wall. The bones press out here and there, every bone has a jaw that wants to get out and a face that has something to say. The skin tells a different story backwards and forwards, up and down. The skin is full of error and grace. I get outside my skin in various ways but mainly I let the wind pass through my skin and place me just behind or ahead of myself, feeling back to the nerve points and pores where an argument of definition is taking place.

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Eventually Eventually, the men called the girl's mother to demand ransom. A police officer took the phone and informed the men they had the wrong girl. She was released relatively unharmed in the suburb of Surprise. - news account

What do you do with the wrong girl, Gangster? Marry her and spend twenty years protecting her from yourself. Try to keep each other perpetually surprised: incorporate, elect a mayor, a town council, construct a jail; slide the bars shut and see who forgets which side of them he’s on.

Fires All the fires are raging: inside and outside fires, small fires and conflagrations, home fires and eternal flames and pilot lights which are between eternal and ephemeral. I too combust, so betweenly not immortal nor fading fast – my fires fueled by pages read, desires unmet and always smoky and hot.

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Daybreak Not an angel, just a bird a vulture with a face like Victor Mature’s. The tree tortures the sky. Or is it the other way around? Why am I here? Not for angels actors or vultures but for the brilliant flash of light. Not even that but the afterthought when the torture’s just another day.

Miniature A rice grain with the Gettysburg Address, a goldfish prepped for brain surgery. Technology will someday inject me with nanofriends. I bought a Bible the size of a matchbox at the Gutenberg Museum but the Word of God is downright microscopic. Molecules are crown jewels of the monarch swimming in my blood. Hold a magnifying glass to the things I believe and you’ll see little Scotsmen looking back at you, incredulous.

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Out of One, Many There are many me’s in different cities: I’ve sprouted, flourished, and died repeatedly, spread like a virus, multiple strains and dialects of me. My versions number in the thousands. It’s hard to say which one is really me: totally bug-free, classic, best-loved of all otherwise unpopular me’s, most friended, footnoted, named-after and generally admired me. Let me be free of all other me’s who track me down at self reunions demanding money they’ll never repay; save me, while you’re at it, from strangers seeking revenge for slights in bars somewhere, big apes who want a piece of me but which me? Certainly not this me, who’s too busy maintaining the directory and writing home to family of our doings and undoings; telling the news of me, working hard to give it consistency.

Some Days For the day is thus the consciousness of the planet said Novalis, who was the brains of Oberwiederstedt. Some days are smarter than other days; some are genius days that seem to have reinvented the world and finally gotten it right. But some days are totally out of it; some days are in a bad mood and should stay in bed. The best days feel like whole-planet days, as if the sun were impossibly spreading its light all around the globe: everyone feels the same euphoria under the same high noon. On those days an infinite lens films us all: Right Now is the most incredible home movie and everyone is family, everywhere is home.

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The Wild Things The wild things invade the living room where I’ve been building a fire without a hearth. The living room is deadly and I don’t mean the tiger traps beneath the rug; I mean you, Responsibility – the only program on a thousand channels.

Diorama When I put my hands together while I sit beneath the live oak and look through the doorway of my arching thumbs into the green lacing of my fingers, I see multiple bays of the saints and martyrs who have labored for my soul swabbing it and shoring it and filtering the light’s second-story accusations and praises; and I see cracks in the walls below which are themselves a wreckage of narratives, connecting and separating and counter to the witnessing of the light.

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The Photograph of My Wife Looking at the photograph of my wife when she was only seven I imagine what it might have been like if I’d met her when I was eleven. I imagine standing on the roof of the house behind the photographer (my future mother-in-law no doubt) standing there and looking down at the severe-looking child who doesn’t speak a word of English and wears a kimono with obi because it’s Japan on a festival day. The flashbulb goes off like a nova light years away. We are pulled into the passage of years again, the children we are fade and die, but when we meet in the future and marry, we discover the beauty and the horror of knowing the one you love.

Too Many Loving too many he loved no one; No one loved him back ardently, No one loved him with an intensity astronomical and deadly. No one settled into the mud that had become his sky with all the stars like splinters of bone of the too many he loved.

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I Trust You Love from family, love from friends. Love is union; but union leaves something out: loneliness, which I enjoy. Yes, it’s bitter! – but I like it. Friendship is trust – trust, an oversight. I trust you as far as I can throw you, little bird.

with lines from Stephen Crane

Like Most People Like most people I hate the sound of my own voice. I don’t mean most people hate the sound of my voice, I mean that most people hate the sound of their own voices. But some people do hate the sound of my voice. Once someone told me that I had a voice like a radio announcer’s without actually specifying whether she liked the sound of a radio announcer’s voice; but that doesn’t happen often that I have a voice like a radio announcer’s or that somebody tells me. I have a voice like a radio announcer’s only when I’m being really pedantic and getting away with it only because the person who told me I have a voice like a radio announcer’s is trying to get into my pants. It doesn’t often happen that someone tries to get into my pants and it never happens literally anymore that someone actually does get into my pants except me. I always get into my pants except when I try to get into the pants I keep stored in the back of the closet and keep moving around with me through the years in hopes that I will get back my 29” waist and we all know that happens mainly from hoping.

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At the Stop Sign At the Stop sign I Stopped no one ever said Go I’m still there

The Old Tools Sometimes picking one of the old tools out of a toolbox like a strange galley – slaves rowing themselves slowly through the eons – I feel that the tool has chosen my hand for this moment and offers, threatens creation of a thing unimagined.

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Candle The light bulb scorns the candle but the candle dines on shadows all down the long spiral of marble stairs. The light bulb, supposing it will never die, holds the present in its glare; the candle shines so warmly on then and now and dies forever.

Faustus The man, Faustus, seeking the heights of knowledge, climbed to the roof of the church and threw himself out. He believed he could fly: he flew and flew and splat his flying was done. What happened next? He was merely dead but legend says he’d sold his soul to hell. Here we are today, climbing to the roof dragging our carry-ons behind us: our hell’s Security and we’re getting through it.

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“The Stone Surgery” by Bosch Doctor cut the stone of folly from my skull make me a rill for kingdom’s coming. Let the engines of the sky come down to nail and helmet me funnel me beneath a metal mouth an eye. Fill my simple mind with wisdom of the stars give me knowledge pure, celestial like yours. Take up the scoring blade Doctor and core the stone from me the less, the more than me.

Bookstore Days I remember the red-headed junkie thief with acne and a limp but respect enough for the stack of Playboys he’d jacked to argue with me for putting them down on the sidewalk and not the dirty street after I’d chased him around the corner to Thompson where the Portuguese deli-man cut off his escape with a knife he’d shown me every time I ordered lunch there declaring proudly his intent to someday stop a thief with it as he’d slice my hero sandwich.

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The Falls The falls fell as I watched the water stay still or the falls were what could not fall, nothing fell but the water waited until I wasn’t there. When I left the water disappeared. The falls never were. Before and after were slow, forgetful, changing places without fail.

The Hotel by the Bay The hotel was by the bay and when a spring tide rolled in you could feel the water lapping beneath the floor. The fog horn was a bad neighbor and the walls were so thin everyone was everyone else’s bad roommate: you couldn’t make love or enjoy your own flatulence without everyone else enjoying it, too. In winter the wind was the worst roommate of all. It came in drunk and ornery and you’d wonder if there was any left outdoors so much cold air was in there with you. But those were good, rich years: so good, I have two favorite ways of remembering them. In one, all the residents of the hotel were close friends and we sat around all night drinking each other’s liquor; and in the other, I never once spoke to another soul.

To all FAWC fellows past and present

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Walking Walking down in the gulley where the vines hang and the mud dries or higher up, across the ridge where a view of the neighbor’s farm reminds me of work to be done: which is the better path for gathering my thoughts? – or a different cluster of them between the high and the low path: I am the work to be done, I am the undoing.

Bookstore Days II David Bowie came in once to buy The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. I’d read it and was cool at the register but declined to make small talk with the rock star. He had a girl on each arm and they were sexy and he looked nervous but from what? – being noticed, not being noticed – a bicameral anxiety. Susan Sontag browsed and bought nothing, having read everything already. Two young men accompanied her, photogenic bookends clinging to her every silent word. Fred Gwynne came on a busy Saturday night, Sunday Times night, ink stains everywhere in a frenzy of slapping together and doling it out for a dollar, a dollar! – Oh how long ago that was. Dear Herman Munster with a beauty on each arm, decidedly unmonstrous ladies, both red-headed and wrapped in fur for the trio had had a night on Broadway I am sure.

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Believer I’m not sure I believe you, she said. I’m not sure I believe you, either, I said. Then she went inside the store and I waited on the sidewalk. I was waiting for her to come back out and tell me she was sorry and that she really did believe me, and then I was going to say Sorry and that I really did believe her, too, and so I waited and waited the way those dogs, the really patient ones (often Labrador Retrievers, I’ve noticed) wait for their masters or mistresses on their leashes outside the store. I was waiting and then I forgot what I was waiting for. I remembered later, long after she’d come back out, but meanwhile I’d gotten lost in my crazy thoughts and was so happy to see her again, and home we went.

Rust Belt A smokestack jabs the sky like the middle finger of all Ohio. There’s no traffic, half the houses are vacant, but the milk in the Dairy section’s unexpired and you can choose from a spare half-dozen brands of cereal on a desert aisle, Number 12. Had my pick of rooms in the last hotel; went for a stroll downtown where the mortuary had one show. Saw a pot-bellied girl in a frayed halter top and a cop trying to decide which one of us deserved his stare. Artists don’t want to move here until a Starbucks leads the way; I say, look to the skies for the convergence of stars heralding the birth of an altogether new franchise.

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Palos Verdes The smog lifted and Santa Catalina appeared. Natalie Wood had died: fallen into the harbor too drunk to get out of her clothes. Someone lovely was gone but the view was still beautiful. Meanwhile, on the mainland I, too, had had a drink. Several houses in Palos Verdes were about to fall into the sea and the residents were unfazed. How could they all be so at ease? Cocaine was a contributing cause; but also, the beautiful view.

A Vision I see all the buildings downtown stripped to their elevators and the elevators rise and fall before becoming transparent and I see all the people in them traveling the sky, some up and some down, some stopped and disappearing and others materializing at random heights. It’s a dream like Jacob’s but multiplied, sharp young professionals and corporate lions instead of angels ascending and descending the ladders of heaven all down the avenues from which the buildings have disappeared.

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The Eagle The eagle lands in the field and the sky is there at the tops of the grasses under her folding wings. The cattle – Charolais, Angus – are cumuli under the elms. One paint trots toward the pickup coming to drop hay; the road behind flies all the way home.

I’m Looking I’m looking for something to carry; don’t know what it should be but my hands need to hold, my fingers need to grasp. I’m looking for something to kick but everything’s fixed to the ground waiting to break my toes so I’ll just reach around and kick myself in the ass. I’m looking for something to look at; eyeballs are fascinating the way they rotate and the way you can see down into them, the way they grow out of the brain – the way they detach, the way they float around in the glass.

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Perfume Perfume makes a body where solid slides away and dream breaks through the flume of eyes blind but when closed. The lids flicker Victorian floaters and old friends. Night is an attitude, purple is black bleeding, sex the dream breathing, a hurricane and then the eye: my Dear please stop looking at me when I’m sleeping.

Bookstore Days III We were owned by High Times magazine and sold a wide and highly unfocused selection of periodicals, including BOMB, NAMBLA News, American Splendor, Film Comment, The Economist, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Soldier of Fortune. America is somewhere in that list but you will never find her.

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New Morning Bookstore, SoHo, R.I.P. 1983

Naked Day Once a year in grade school tradition called for the solemn observance of Naked Day, on which (as you might have guessed) everyone came to school undressed. It was not each year, actually, but only when I was in Fifth Grade. Now that I recall it was not the whole school but only Mrs. Dunn’s room. Truth be told it was only Mrs. Dunn herself. Obviously it never happened. But I swear she’s still standing there before the many-colored map of the world and between the flags of the United States and our own state of Georgia; and the lipstick-colored apple sits fresh as ever on her desk: shining, vivid Red Delicious that no one dares to touch.

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The Professor There’s the Professor of Latin and Greek trudging up the hill-road at the edge of campus, and there I am a few steps behind carrying his Macy’s bags filled with Sappho and laundry. He’s a night owl, always in rumpled white shirt and black trousers: lapsed Orthodox Jew, he calls himself. I clean the dust bunnies from under his bed in the faculty guesthouse, transcribe variant versions of poems in the Greek onto pairs of yellowed index cards, and listen to his alternations of scholarly obiter dictum and campus scuttlebutt: the Professor always knows who’s sleeping with whom no matter what century it is.

The Secret Book In the Secret Book words are scripted on parchment in a hand like God’s. But it wasn’t God who wrote them, having authored already the elements themselves: the sheep who gave the parchment, the stones and herbs that gave the inks and lamplight, the man who strung the words in rows, planting them in the parchment where they might grow into the eyes of reader upon reader. The Secret Book is secret only in being first: origin is secrecy, secrecy is fruition. The Secret Book was never written. It was made, but not composed; read, but never found.

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The Cooper’s Hawk The Cooper’s Hawk caught a rat then flew from the pond’s-edge grass to the top of the dead tree I’ve been meaning to saw down if the strong winds don’t fell it first. My laziness is a form of patience; and my patience, vigilance.

Cheating At night you have dreams and I’m the evil-doer in them. In your dreams – your nightmares, I mean – you see me having affairs with old friends of yours I’ve never met, or women you know now, or women who aren’t even there except in your head. In the dreams you’re sad but then you wake up and your sadness has upgraded to wrath. You wake me up – I’m right there next to you, with nobody else around – you wake me up, glare at me, and slap me. Then you go back to sleep and pleasant dreams.

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Every Tree is a Bonsai Every tree is a bonsai when you see it from fifty yards away. Everybody is an ant from fifty stories up – or an amoeba, even; nobody is taller than anyone else because tall is moot. The sky is a dome because the mind is a dome and at night the stars twinkle not only from atmospherics but from a wavering faith. Faith has troughs and crests; one entire life might be lived in a single valley or on one glorious peak.

The Old Forest Your bones are somewhere in the swamp but I don’t know where the swamp is. When I try to walk there the desert gets in the way. The old forest would have been a better resting-place: peaceful and shady, not too damp or dry. Plus, we could have marked where you were buried and visited you, or told ourselves now and then that we should visit. But in the swamp, which I can’t get to, there can be no marker and no visiting. What does a burial-spot have to do with being dead; with an afterlife, which must be an after-place as well beyond our space-bound fantasies? In the old forest I might better appreciate imagination’s failures.

a cenotaph for Major (ret.) James. E. Lewis, gone missing 10/03/82

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My Head is in the Mud My head is in the mud with ears to grab like rope-handles and carry in a mad rush to the ramparts so the Doughboys can crack it open and load their weapons with the wrong ideas.

Gravel Was on the Menu Gravel was on the menu. It was the thing you weren’t supposed to eat. It was there to make everything else look so darned good; it was there to make sure you ordered dessert, something soft, creamy, and sweet – at the other end of the taste universe from gravel.

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Standing Up Too Fast Standing Up Too Fast, You have always been my favorite cheap high. In fact, you are free. You are always there, Standing Up Too Fast, when I’m in the bookstore and browse books on the bottom-most shelf then rise to browse them on the topmost shelf to the right. one stack over I asked my physician what you were called in the literature and she looked at me as if I were a nuisance, or worse, a patient and she named you orthostatic hypotension and you have never been the same, Standing Up Too Fast.

Dream Catcher Robert Hughes, art critic, said of flea markets that they are the unconscious mind of capitalism, which presumes a heedfulness on Wall Street. I read somewhere that the really sickest jokes originate among stock brokers – a way to release stress, evidently. The obvious analogy is that we’re steam-powered machines, and when we build up too much steam we need to open one of our release valves. That’s why I like poetry: you don’t need steam and you don’t need valves. What you have instead is a fine but strong mesh of variously woven lines, a kind of ultimate dream catcher which you can build to suit; and anything you’ve got you sift through the dream catcher and it comes out pretty much useless but looks priceless to somebody.

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Reading Plato - the Theaetetus

I used your book to kill a moth and then the moth was an illustration of your lines on the soul’s path and how its destination is its place of origin. I meant no disrespect to book or insect. I would not hang your book on a string to catch flies or lean it on the floor to trap rodents. I would not have killed more and indeed I didn’t. I finished the book then read it again and the moth was gone because you hadn’t written it.

Pearl Harbor “You know, Dear” Mom said to my Japanese bride, “We Americans have pretty much forgotten Pearl Harbor” – then paused to add: “except for once a year.”

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Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the things she didn’t mention, my wife: a chain reaction of discretion.

String Theory Some things turn to dust while others come apart as threads. Dust scatters to the winds whereas the threads get caught in trees, on the potted cactuses, in the hair on our heads. The dust might never recombine but threads could be collected and rewoven; you wouldn’t have the same look but you’d recognize colors and textures from before. Dust is what the Book of Common Prayer says we’ll be; threads is what I think, fate as strings attached fraying to infinity.

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The Veil Reality is the thing we use so often it wears thin and we see right through it. It’s not the air, which you can almost see, in cities especially, or on windy days; and it’s not an ether, which Michelson & Morley showed did not exist. But it’s not science, either, and it’s not belief, which disprove each other like pistons thrusting at varying speeds, up and down in each person. The combined force wears at what is, which is the intaglio or the relief if you prefer on a vanishing surface.

Son of Sam In 1977 in Yonkers, New York I was walking one rainy late-afternoon across an empty street. The rain was cleansing and cooling; summer so far had been oppressive. Before I was out of the intersection and back onto land (sidewalk, I mean – sometimes when I’m walking I pretend the streets are rivers and the sidewalks are shores) before I was back to land I heard a voice cry out: SON OF SAM! and I froze. Then I turned but saw no one: only random parked cars, empty houses, traffic lights bleeding color in their rain-reflections beneath a darkening sky. But I hadn’t turned around to see the Son of Sam; I’d turned around because I’d assumed 59 of 66

that someone was calling out to me; I was the Son of Sam. But I am not the Son of Sam! I told myself – why did I need to tell myself? – I am not the Son of Sam I almost said out loud, there beneath the rain in the middle of the road I’d pretended was a river. That was the summer I lived on Midland Avenue sharing a sublet with June, my girlfriend, who years later hired me as a nanny for the first of her eventually-four children – and I was a good nanny I still like to say. Barbara Kopple, who won an Oscar for Harlan County, USA wanted to hire me away from June and her then-husband, Evan; so I might have become a male nanny to the stars! But it was a life that never came to be. In 1977 I and my girlfriend, June, took the Midland Avenue rooms and had summer jobs in Yonkers. The rooms were sublet to us by the daughter

of a famous Abstract Expressionist. The daughter was a painter, too, and a couple years later I got drunk, and roaming after midnight with the son of another, somewhat less-famous painter, decided to redo one of her canvases. Oh, it was a nasty business! But we worked it out over the next few days amongst ourselves – my painter’s-son friend, my girlfriend/protector, June, the painter’s daughter, and I – and I got off with an apology and cleaning her studio really, really well. The Yonkers apartment had been quite a mess: dog hair imbedded in grease on the stove, dust balls and clothes scattered everywhere – a work in progress, you could have called it. But it was spacious, with a stereo that wasn’t broken on which we played Lou Reed or Talking Heads after work, dancing intermittently

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while sipping beer and piña coladas. Manhattan was a half-hour away and we went there when we didn’t have to work (I was a busboy at an Italian restaurant; June wrote high-school textbooks), and New York City was our rich and nutty uncle who gave us many small distractions. That was the summer of the Blackout and walking after sundown for ice cream at the mall we remarked before we knew what it was on the odd shadow to the south: the lights in Manhattan and the Bronx had already gone out, and then ours. The odd shadow was the city itself, humbled; fascinating I thought later – that New York City could be turned off! So we had ice cream and went home as the blackout reached us; lit candles, opened the windows, looked wistfully at the turntable. A month later Elvis was dead

and we heard about it on the radio: a hot night, the stereo viable once more; and Elvis – dead! Well, fuck Elvis. Today you’ll find a 25-year-old bottle of “Love Me Tender” moisturizing lotion among my collectibles, but in 1977 he reminded me of the South: everything I’d tried to leave. A few days earlier David Berkowitz had been caught. The “Son of Sam” looked nothing like me. He didn’t look like anyone, really, but he looked sad and mean enough. I was still bussing tables every night at the Italian restaurant and though summer was nearly over, I had this feeling I’d be bussing tables forever. Sometimes, when I was alone – when June had a “cat’s night out“ with friends or was back Upstate with family – I’d feel vaguely guilty about something

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and would think of walking to work in the rain and being taken for the Son of Sam; turning and seeing no one, but feeling watched all the same. I am not the Son of Sam! I am not the Son of Sam! I’m not a sadist, a monster, or a killer; I am not an evil man, I’m not half bad at all; I’m not a jerk, an asshole, or a prick – I’d lie there consoling myself half the night; and if the window fan was purring I’d travel on it, as on a plane soaring high to somewhere far away; the hot, lonely night was a cage, a trap, and I would dream of my escape.

Hole “Save me, my hole!” - as quoted in V. Soloviev War, Progress, and the End of History

I used to imagine finding a hole that no one else had ever found. I don’t mean cave – I’m no spelunker – and I don’t mean crater; I mean just a hole, a hole in the ground. It was always of significance that hole and whole were homonyms; it was always important that holy sounded like the essence of holes. There was absolutely nothing sexual about my hole. My hole was not a body cavity and it was not exactly a receptacle. It might have been a passage, and so a tunnel, really, and not a hole. It might even have been a shadow, the face of an overhang or the breath of a void. No one dug the hole, yet it was not specifically geological. It was just a little bigger than I was as I envisioned it; and it was not a womb, and it was not a grave.

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Parliament of Fowls The chickens squawk and it means something but from where I sit it might as well be the trees and bushes squawking though I know it’s a fight between cocks or an invader landing in their midst or perhaps the avian equivalent of a lecture or recital. – awkward, putting human forms on nature; but even calling chickens “nature” is the imposition of a form, right? I’m one of them, hidden from view, riding a hammock past the sun’s setting over the neighbor’s land where his chickens are conversing. In another frame of mind I’d hear them gossiping about me, maybe, or confessing where the money was. The sounds themselves are a pestilence, all my years trailing me and even my hammock isn’t fast enough to shake them off. So let them squawk. It will end and start up again some other time. I will end, too, and my hammock will be a poor shroud or a canoe designed to sink as soon as I get in it. Don’t chop their heads off for making noise and don’t chop mine off, either.