1
Ordinary things in the world interested Chardin. That doesn’t sound rare, but, oh, it is.
"Here's a horse accident!"
"Here's a candlestick accident!"
Basically, any time an organization needed someone to go, expenses paid,
to a country that had crocodiles, he was interested.
He hated the United States, but, outside the United States, that is not a rare sentiment.
He had a vision of God on a croquet lawn around the age of seventeen, but he let this pass until four years later, when he fell in love with Vivien, a Catholic who wasn’t at all sure she wanted to marry him, what with his being a Protestant and also, as he seemed to her, a rather strange person.
She developed a social circle, went out to night clubs, rejected the advances of various male friends - a window washer, a private chef, a bodega worker, a sex worker and Occupy protester, a charming young man who wrote deft jacket copy, and a lice consultant - and came back home afterward to eat toast with Alice in the living room. Her ideal occupation she thought might be "nun farmer" or "nun park ranger."
Occupations come and go, their life spans following trend and technology. Town criers, soda jerks, lamplighters, clock winders, pinsetters, and ice cutters give way to air-traffic controllers, genetic counsellors, drone operators, influencers, and social-media managers.
2
In February, 2014, Putin was a very busy autocrat.
He hosted the winter Olympics, in Sochi,
shipped a new batch of activists to prison colonies,
and seized Crimea.
Trump. They tried to freeze him,
but the scientists say that when they removed his head
there was nothing inside but lint, paper clips, and pennies,
like an old piggy bank in a landfill.
3
She tells me about the giants carrying trees and bushes on what she calls zip lines, which I am able to identify as telephone wires. Beneath the busy giants, she explains, there is a marching band playing familiar tunes by John Philip Sousa. Plays and operas were staged in our back yard, spontaneous parades appeared in the streets.
In the house, nothing held still: objects danced on the mantel, the ideograms on our hanging scroll of Chinese calligraphy flew around like butterflies. At the beginning, many of these transformations had given her pleasure. More and more, however, they annoyed and alarmed her. Three women were hanging in her closet and refused to leave. The Flowery Man roamed the house.
“We certainly can’t stay any longer in this person’s house, in a place where we don’t even speak the language.”
Do the chickens think of warmer times?
They do not.
By the time a snowflake has landed,
snowflakes are all a chicken has ever known.
4
The Museum of Sex, in New York City,
the Museum of Ice Cream, in San Francisco,
The Disgusting Food Museum, in Malö, Sweden,
the Museum of Failure in Helsingborg, Sweden,
the Museum of Broken Relationships, in Zagreb, Croatia:
photos of hookup spots,
a diet book that a woman received from her fiancé,
three-week-old cheese from the garbage that had also
been pissed on by every dog in the neighborhood,
self-destructing DVDs,
a collection of Harley Davidson perfumes
that smelled like socks at the bottom of a gym locker,
drizzled with paint thinner,
like taking a bite out of a corpse.
If you know how to pick up a roadkill and eat it
(Are its eyes clear, or are they clouded over?)
and tan its hide and wear it,
(Are the guts blown? How many insects are on it?)
you don't have to work that forty-hour-a-week office job that you hate.
5
Old people in advertisements smile with a certain optimism.
Young people laugh and laugh, opening their mouths wide
and showing their gums and tongues.
One contestant entered the show
in the hope of hiring a carpenter to patch
the bullet holes above her bed left
by her husband's suicide.
Another, a Holocaust survivor,
wanted funds to have her tattoo from Auschwitz removed.
They have trouble maintaining eye contact with the host,
and nervously wrap their handkerchiefs around their fingers.
"I had two handicapped sons. I lost them,
and then I took care of an elderly lady
in a wheelchair. She passed away,
along with my mother and my father,
and then my husband passed away.
I feel that I would like to have a vacation."
Many requests had been fulfilled
(airships, telegraph, harvest)
some hadn't
(Hop o' my thumb, bootblack in the act, Alex the Gt. cutting the Gordian knot)
“Haunted Ouija doll - Blinks, Noisy, demonic spirit portal”
ships for free anywhere in the United States;
a horror fantasy in which
a woman with a titanium plate in her head
is impregnated by a car.
This ugly, ugly America,
all machine, it is excruciating!
6
There hadn't been much time for sightseeing in Rome
so our young driver circled past the Colosseum,
shouting out fun facts
"Five hundred years before Christ was built
the first sewer system!"
as Strong, trying to describe a scene from "Succession,"
quoted passages from "The Wasteland":
“Thank You! Can’t wait to start experiencing things!!
Going from doing my homework
to putting on my rawhide sandals that I made and
going out in the woods.
But it's good to get off TikTok and go out and make cedar-bark cordage."
