Our Eye Goes Past the Hieroglyphic Tree to the Swimmer Carving a Wake in the Water and Almost to the Railroad Bridge from Which the Swimmer Might Have Dived

• Planet is still asleep in her dorm and Earthgirl is still asleep over there so here I am. The above is the long-abandoned railroad bridge over the Kokosing River of a long-abandoned railroad as seen out the window of our room at the Comfort Inn in Mt V, Ohio. This will be the next-to-last trip to Mt V, at least to visit Planet at college. I can imagine myself passing near enough on some trip to somewhere else twenty years from now diverting to Mt V for a memory's sake drive-through. Mt V's dining options are limited - bad pizza, fast food, Ruby Applebee's and Thank God It's Panera, and fuck those. There is a mediocre local Mexican restaurant and a better than mediocre by a smidgen Greek/Indian place, but by seven last night both had lines out the door. There's a diner, Planet said, we get breakfast and pie there, never tried dinner, it looks rundown from the outside but is nice inside, and BLAMMO! in our penultimate trip to Mt V, after dozens and dozens of mediocre meals over eight semesters, the best effing road trip dinner in I can't remember how long. Fine metaphors abound.
• The diner was almost full, filled with locals, friendly loud locals, shouting across the room at each other and the waitresses, lots of laughter, for forty-five minutes, loud, laughing conversations, not a single word about Iran or Indiana or motherfucking this person or motherfucking that person. No one was seething like I am always seething like I think everyone always seethes. Pleasant lessons abound.
• Friends have new posts that I've read since starting this post:
• Chelsea Manning is NOT on twitter.
• Don't vote.
• Blood moons.
• :-p has three new posts.
• Together they fight crime.
• We have not digitally met, but read this guy too:
• The anthropocene and the postmodern.
• Since I started this post Earthgirl's gotten up and gone outside to take photos of the bridge, here:

BRIDGE AND SWIMMER

Forrest Gander

Our eye goes past the hieroglyphic tree to the swimmer

carving a wake in the water. And almost to the railroad bridge

from which the swimmer might have dived. Then, as though

come to the end of its tether,

our gaze returns, pulling toward the blemish

on the surface of the print. An L-shaped chemical dribble,

it sabotages the scene’s transparence

and siphons off its easy appeal.
   

At the same time, the blemish

joins together the realms

of seer and swimmer

in our experience of plunging

into and out of the image.