Fireside

August 7, 2006

Had yet another beautiful time with the woman.
I kept picturing our children running around up here,
as we stayed for weeks on end;
I pictured teaching the boys to wear their camouflage,
so as to avoid tick and spider bites, to provide protection from
poison oak and ivy. She will be gorgeous pregnant.
I think of when to kneel, and the list of things to accomplish first
continue to rise in the frontal regions of my mind: I’m unemployed
and work at home on my knowledge—this will change soon.

Being up here, in the woods on the lake, where the fire
hushes a slow burning wet sigh, and where mosquitoes hatch
and find flight for the first time, the city seems so squalid.
And yet, or still, the city is the dwelling in which the accomplishments
of my knowledge will allow the children in the bush,
unhooking sunfish and admiring the cuteness of baby snapping turtles.

There is no “pornucopia” television out here; in fact,
there is no television out here at all.
And, I find myself wondering if in the last fifty years, we stopped seeing dragons because of the media leviathan. Up here, the gaping maw of Gap has no reach,
and the taloned grip of News Corp. finds only clumps of dirt and browned grasses after its lofty dive for prey.
Dragons inhabit so much of our myth, are even mentioned as the “Behemoth”
in Song of Solomon, or is it Lamentations: at any rate, it was written by Solomon. Fire came out its nose.
Doesn’t every culture have a vision of some flying monster in the sky?
And yet, we don’t believe in them anymore, because our brains have been so bashed
in the creative hemisphere, that there is no more any
imagination that requires genuine exercise.
The bashing tells us there is no such thing as "dragon"; and yet, in the air, silently and invisible, machinations and calculations
and consuming algorithms centered on profit and persuasion penetrate the chainmail of our quiet desires.