In a Country
By Larry Levis
My love and I are inventing a country, which we
can already see taking shape, as if wheels were
passing through yellow mud. But there is a prob-
lem: if we put a river in the country, it will thaw
and begin flooding. If we put the river on the bor-
der, there will be trouble. If we forget about the
river, there will be no way out. There is already a
sky over that country, waiting for clouds or smoke.
Birds have flown into it, too. Each evening more
trees fill with their eyes, and what they see we can
never erase.
One day it was snowing heavily, and again we were
lying in bed, watching our country: we could
make out the wide river for the first time, blue and
moving. We seemed to be getting closer; we saw
our wheel tracks leading into it and curving out
of sight behind us. It looked like the land we had
left, some smoke in the distance, but I wasn't sure.
There were birds calling. The creaking of our
wheels. And as we entered that country, it felt as if
someone was touching our bare shoulders, lightly,
for the last time.
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I know that I swore I wasn't going to do this, but Jack insisted.
I watched the Sex and the City finale, and was going to try to say something about it, until I realized that thinking about that show is a really silly thing to do. It just makes me remember that I really don't like it or care about it all that much, and I'd probably actively loathe Carrie if I paid enough attention. It's a world in which the things that made people popular in junior high school remain relevant throughout life, and that makes it really hard to root for the grrlz with their prissy little problems and their shoes -- yes, I know infertility and cancer aren't prissy little problems, and only that show could manage to make me think of them as such! But I started watching the series during a year when some really, really awful things were happening to my family, and it completely erased everything else in my brain for the half-hour that it was on each week, and I will always love it for that.
It has recently come to my attention that even some very educated people don't know this, so here is a New York Times article on Will Eisner and the history of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. If you are aware of this document but not its origins, it's well worth reading.
Am rushing to go have lunch and hang out with
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