Mutations
I have been worshiping with all of my ornaments intact
Your lute leans in the darkness against a wall of years
And we dance
We have always danced well together
The lie throws my body into aching
My knees bend from the strain of bearing
This particular dress
This white habit
This choking sari with butterfly sleeves
No matter how many turns I maneuver
How often I conjure new ways of wrapping
It never conceals my flesh
But dances out from me like separate skin
I molt in a reversal of seasons
Larva in your stunned hands
My love, did you order this garment from a gifted seamstress?
Did I?
We are out of step
My knees already crusty with kneeling grow limp
As a pair of crabs
Washed up, searching
Searching
For the sea
“Mutations” appeared in Gargoyle 1978.
Perpetual Care
I will visit the grave
when the distance
between us becomes
reliable
In the spring perhaps
when the mound is plowed
of old grief
I will bring azaleas
hard pink and hearty
The headstone will be ordered
unveiled
and I will find
an epitaph
And I will come again
and again
to this place
because it is in me
to grant perpetual care
to all things
dead or living
And this is home, is it not
this graveyard
where each mound is marked
only after failure
have we not lain here together
blending with our limestone walls
losing
ourselves
to our jerry-built mausoleum
daddy (and mummy)
but this is no joke
has become rather
a prayer
a poultice
“Perpetual Care” appeared in Gargoyle 1978.
The Information Superhighway and Me (1991-2011)
Twenty years ago, in 1991, Senator Al Gore sponsored a bill to fund an “information superhighway” that would “tie together millions of computers, providing capabilities that we cannot even imagine.” I was reminded of that fact today, when I ‘googled’ the term ‘1991’ on my laptop, clicked on the ‘wikipedia.com’ entry, and immediately viewed a year’s worth of significant events: Cold War ended, Soviet Union collapsed into 15 sovereign republics, Oakland Hills fire killed 25 people, Dow closed above 3,000 for first time, Nadine Gordimer won Nobel Prize for Literature, UN-sponsored coalition swiftly dislodged Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein from Kuwait . . . .
Websites like Wikipedia, which also notes that the number 1991 is a palindrome, provide broad, instantaneous knowledge, a luxury that did not exist in 1991, unless you had access to a savant. In those days, we drove to the library and scoured myriad reference books or consulted World Book, which took up several shelves in our homes. We mourned the trees felled to support our quest and suffered painful paper cuts.
E-mail preceded the information superhighway at the publishing house where I worked in 1991. Word processors and typewriters used by clerical assistants were replaced by ungainly desk top machines wired to an intranet system. When executives realized they could wield this technology like an Uzi to issue orders and assignments, they overcame a fear of typing and they, too, became ‘connected.’
No one I knew anticipated the devastation that the information superhighway > World Wide Web > Internet would bring to our industry. One minute we were attending seminars on how to “milk the potential” of the new phenomenon, and a nanosecond later, as free global news proliferated 24/7, our loyal followers had canceled their subscriptions. Our advertising lifeline began to dry up. Printing plants were shuttered, bullpens downsized, foreign bureaus decimated.
Technology became king and publishers scrambled to meet the boundless news and entertainment needs of ‘users’ (formerly known as readers), throwing together ‘portals’ of varying coherence. Laid-off journalists, editors and graphic designers were recruited to feed these hungry beasts from the comfort of their home offices, and ‘telecommuter’ entered the lexicon.
Yahoo shed its former meanings and joined a gaggle of new nonsense words in everyday conversation, Google became a verb, and pejoratives like ‘nerd’ and ‘geek’ were coined to describe people who avidly navigate the electronic world with pleasure and without ambivalence. That’s not me. I love my computer when it works, I hate it when it doesn’t. But I can’t imagine life without the information superhighway.
(Oops! I just lost my Internet connection. H-E-E-L-P!)