You
fell asleep during the movie,
your
feet on my lap, and like some actor
playing
a recurring role as a father
I
felt myself very carefully concentrate
on
maintaining the nameless feeling
moving
through me as I watched you.
You
were a little out of breath,
as
if you were climbing the steps
of
a great tower while saying
something
important. Very
small
translucent ovals droplets
from
your exertions formed
on
the formation people once
called
the brow. Your countenance
became
grave, perfectly balanced
with
a small smile indicating
resolve
in the face of some
monster
who would ultimately
stop
rampaging just in time
when
he realized he didn't know
his
motivation. Now I was
a
doctor hearing far off bells,
either
a church or a fire alarm coming
gradually
closer. Soon I would
be
called into action, and I would
leap
in brightness forward. For
now
I will guard you from the nothing
that
is and the nothing that is not.
No
matter how many times I tell you
you
are right you don't believe me,
no
one made the sea.
---
CHARMER
That
man looks like a snake charmer
Rufus
said, holding his beer. That
man
has skills. Rufus works
with
me at the university. Border
wars,
rebellions, inspectors. Like
a
9th century T'ang Dynasty bureaucrat
Rufus
had survived them all. He
told
me about several attempts
on
his life disguised as practical jokes
and
birthday parties. The department
secretary
it's true does bare
her
teeth when you come near
the
Xerox machine like a beaver fearing
an
enema. Years ago Rufus read
a
book about Zeno of Citium and invented
a
brilliant infallible system of relying
on
divine intelligence to organize
university
forms. No longer
did
he try to shape circumstances
to
his desires. The world is a blindly
running
machine. Now he is ever
more
slowly coasting towards
without
reaching total stasis. His desk
is
a medium sized wooden lake
on
which floats two staplers. I don't
even
remember where I was born.
I
might be a replicant. How would
I
know? The snake charmer was sitting
at
the bar, holding a glass full
of
ice and clear liquid, watching a game.
I
had to admit he had the air
of
someone wearing a turban.
Any
skills he had were very well hidden.
---
HONU
Honu
loved her geodesic dome.
She
lived in it beside the sea.
Of
the turtle that was
she
and her dome she was
the
head. At night she sat
inside
and watched headlights
from
the dune buggies hit
the
glass outside surface
of
the roof and split
into
their diamond star-like forms.
If
ever she heard the tsunami
warning
horn she knew
she
could put the ultralight
dome
on her back
and
move to high ground
to
regard the great wave
destroy
the makeshift
wooden
structures the surfers
and
their families live in
then
slowly withdraw, leaving
human
and wooden wreckage.
Or
so she imagined. If only
to
forget she wasn’t one
of
thousands of little hatchlings
in
the black sand listening
for
the call of the green
mothers
deep in the pelagic zones.