Sunday, November 2, 2008

113. "No, I won't pay for postage from here..."

No, I won’t pay for postage from here—postage to where the windsock might point, Windhoek, or to the Walloons, Nepalese hamlets accessible by dirigible flights, or commonplace Iowan whistlestop—your dreary excursions to where windsocks may point, at beck to addled pointer-dogs. You want to stroke with your same slight nail extremities of the terrestrial catalogue; arise atop the terrestrial litany with your own peepy cry. To sketch talking magpies, seated on hills of filched stickpins hid in the Badlands’ stripes; to sketch the medallion-marked bridges surmounting the Po, Potomac, and Don; next, the crest of the dinosaur Cassowary. Cosmopolitan days unspooled from a windlass; a line of mayors scarcely distinguishable by their hundred separate sashes. Predict the pleasing sequel—captive by threadbare phalanxes of Darfur—a figure in half-meter mosaic photos, at baton’s end ‘tween Kuala Lampur’s towers—a lonesome point, helping to plot a Soviet asphalt polygon.

-2005