My subject’s still the wind still difficult to present being invisible:
Someone combs through the hill. It is dire. He does not look in as he
pisses the deer. You latch him as he guesses and pisses foam straight toward the buck
sulphur-colored light. That’s the one trouble with this coun-
try: everything, weather, all hangs on too long. Like our
rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating
He’s uncomfortable with his desire for them to fail, to fall utterly
on their faces. It wouldn’t be them who would fall, but their minions,
the many who do not know what they choose. How could he desire
a massacre at the same time he decried that no one should die?
He passionately believes we all have to hit bottom before we
can be on top of the world, active agents in our own lives.
So now we need schools, weekend workshops and retreats, chat
rooms, listservs, and government programs to push us over the brink.
But what do we gain from those who don’t get up?
an Iraqi sitting on top of the
statue’s head, I thought
about how memorable this
single event was to that
man, and how so many peo-
ple would love to be in his
had the fear; pride, who never had the pride. I knew that it
had been, not that they had dirty noses, but that we had had
to use one another by words like spiders dangling by their
mouths from a beam, swinging and twisting and never touch-
ing, and that only through the blows of the switch could my
blood and their blood flow as one stream. I knew that it had
been, not that my aloneness had to be violated over and over
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