Transience
A jackhammer, a green leisure
suit drying
near
a white house, an elderly neighbor, mowing
happening
somewhere the bleet bleet of
trucks
as
Travis Tritt twangs on the radio "oh darlin'"
and the phone rings,
it rings Sunday Sunday
wherever
you are, mid-morning static "this is NPR..."
all things
considered it's the American drill
and
the phone rings. It's a telemarketerÐhello?Ðand she
tells me this is not about
money. You see she's from
the
Leukemia FoundationÐdo you know
about the Luekemia
Foundation? "it's
the
only medical organization in America whose sole purpose
is to develop cures for child and
adult leukemia..."
I'm
sympathetic I'm leary and I listen
to her pitch which
turns to magazines offered
"at
a very substantial discount for a twelve month period
entirely of
your own choosing" while I work
on the Times a poem
an interview. I'm trying or will be
politely to conduct the
day the interview which this
is
curiously. Irony? Between lines the whole thing is oddly
yes
Sunday, metacognition, alignment of planets and watches,
overly familiar endless projects I
will finish today I will.
Time
passes. Minute delays and switches pave the air.
Despite my
confusion my voice is strong in the connection
something
happens. Happiness, oh dialogic otherness!
except of course I
don't want the magazines and so must
come
up with a version of "no" which resembles the brush off
of
"moving..."
But
I don't say that ("I didn't say that!") I tell her that I will
in
the near future "be transient and so have no need
for
the magazines." It's ventriloquisms, invention,
exchange
of voices, roosts, perturbrations the point of which
her tone changes she changes
as
she wishes me an upturn in my events for the coming year.
It is a new year on the verge of the millenium and I
appreciate
it. We have spun a strange pact in the mowing gaps,
despite
the most obvious intention we have and here the word
transient
burns my ear. Electrical silence, a slippage,
a
lost in flow moving on one place to another giving way
to
another...
The assumption of
course is I'm homeless or imminently
will
be, and we talk talk on my
telephone in my cozy apartment
about my
lack of a future phone. Stupendous! Why it's
the
most effective brush off ever delivered goddammit
Teri
Gross it's true!
Where will I be when I need the magazines?
I
feel so much voice in her voice a plea for home, all of our Sundays
strung
together during this "now
it's
the Folk Hour..."
Dillation
of iris, gather and swarm of the flock. Tail of a comet
a minstrel a kite. The
Prairie Home I'm after yet again?
It's
love shack, poem hole, fleeting stare. I know
I know? I'm
vagrant to a place in the need for one
like
June or Ruby or Patsy Cline, this passing quickly
in and out of
existence such a brief stay or unwashed sojourn affecting results beyond
itself, how the oscillation of a circuit
because of a sudden change
in load that is our natural state,
embodied
on-line happiness
fugitive
in its vanishing...