Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, or Physics for Poets
1. Seeing around corners. Waves of light lap on different shores a susurration in blinks. The scale of it all, so small, makes for fun-house distortions. 2. Where am I? No one knows except when I am at rest, and really, when is that? In my sleep, I may swim, or fly, or explode. 3. That cat. There has to be something better to do with the time than to put imaginary cats in boxes, or hats, or whatever. 4. Speaking of time. I guess I’m glad we have a Spandex universe, because sometimes it’s Thanksgiving and we need more room. But somehow it always works out to infinite math class and no jam today. 5. And when time becomes matter. A whole other kettle of quarks. It’s impossible for things in this universe to touch without fusing. Contact is an illusion. 6. But love. Somehow, in the order becoming chaos, in the spinning probability of galaxies and the spirograph paths of electrons, we manage, in fact, to love each other.
Vacuuming Up the Outdoors (2008)
Yesterday morning I took Cricket for a long walk. This was good for her because she has more energy than a small dog can reasonably use in a day and good for me because I have plenty of energy stored in the form of thighs and belly and butt than a short woman should reasonably have to carry around. When I take the time, I particularly like to walk down to the beach and back. There is something about seeing the water that opens my perspective like a deep breath opens my chest.
And there are things out there in the world that are unexpected and weird and sometimes beautiful.
In a parking lot, I saw a suicidal vacuum cleaner slumped over the drain. It couldn’t suck it up anymore. It had no more power. With its last gasps, it had dragged itself to the drain so that when it could no longer contain all the grime and pet hair and dead flies and pennies and cracker crumbs it would not leave a mess for some other unfortunate cleaning being to deal with.
Maybe it was my vacuum cleaner, despondent because I have spent years trying to avoid ever seeing it. I slowly stripped it of its usefulness, having found that I prefer the bare floors to carpet and even rugs. Then I gave it away. If it was my vacuum, depression changed it to the point it was unrecognizable. It was no longer upright. It had turned red in a fruitless bid for attention. Its hoses drooped and it had lost track of all its attachments.
See what happens when I leave home?
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