So I'm Running In The Street

So I’m running in the street, the sidewalks full of people, not a lot, not really, just enough to make the necessity of social distancing a nuisance, & with pedestrians on either side, the street makes sense, I keep close to the parked cars, but as a white sedan goes by the driver yells something at me, can’t make out the words, but he flips me off, so they can’t be good, I flip him off in return & shout to him to go get fucked, don’t think he heard me, he keeps going, & I have to wonder, what if he did stop, took a swing, would my 73 year old bones hold together, would my knuckles break, all these old bones are so brittle, so old, who knows how that might’ve gone. Did Vivaldi really live in Venice? Feeding the crows in our neighborhood is becoming more of a problem. These are wealthy homes with wealthy people living in them & they do not like finding peanuts in their rain gutters or squirrels burying peanuts in their gardens. We get the stink eye a lot. Vivaldi spent most of his life composing music at the Ospedale della Pietà, an orphanage. I sometimes wonder if it’s the song that draws the voice out of the body. Charles Mingus in the air like some form of meat that my ears can chew. I go for the nucleus of things, the glow inside, the hectic photography of the pharmacist on his day off, & encampments & herbivores. Poetry as an undertaking that might actually make you sweat, the rapture of words transmitting epitomes. If you dig a hole into darkness, does the light come rushing out? If not light, then what? A hunchbacked horticulturist from another dimension? Frankenstein on a unicycle? Our neighbor has sawn enough wood for a high school gymnasium. I guess that’s one way to get through a pandemic. If I see a saw I say I saw a see saw. And furthermore, the perceiving of what is known is not a process of returning with one’s booty to the cabinet of consciousness after one has gone out & grasped it. It’s more like catching a butterfly in the desert. That great word dépaysant in the French news tonight, which means, roughly, in English ‘exotic’ or ‘unfamiliar.’ Literally translated it means traveling outside one’s country. Tonight it was used to refer to La Réunion. The drop in tourism has been catastrophic. Shame. Such beautiful hotels, surrounded by palms, cooled by ocean breezes. Not sure how truly exotic that is, but it would do. All things take pleasure in the definition they give themselves, writes Guillevic. That moment when you step inside a big stone cathedral & time seems to stop, the vaults & walls keeping temporal time at bay, the world of commerce, I can see why people go for religion. It’s a respite from the hectic pace of the streets. Light diffused in a stained glass window: wine pressers & saints.