- So I rerouted the above version to honor Serendipity.
- Contact was wonderful but haiku nine of ten times true.
- The above bigger.
- Dangers of the journey to Happyland.
- Postcard from Lancaster PA.
- Maggie's weekly links.
- UPDATE! Important rhetorical question about the police.
- { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
- Ange Mlinko is new to me, good thing I have access to a university library's stacks.
- Woke up with Rain Parade in my head.
A NOT UNRUFFLED SURFACE
Ange Mlinko
The sky was laced
with Irish cream mist, that mellow tan overhanging the hills, which were
studded with deathmasks and baskets spilling flowers from both ends.
We scanned the haze for lightning.
They
were studded with earthworks and iron forks inserted between leaves of
grass, jacks and bearings and balances, sinuous fingers of pink marble
and synovial joints in bronze.
But
if we got struck by lightning—not a lot; say glanced, or shaved, there
was a chance (we heard) it wouldn't be so bad: a little refreshing, a
little like La Vita Nuova in a readable translation.
"In
a flash," as they say, we could acquire a self-renewing subscription to
classical music (it's always classical in the scientific literature)
accessible at all hours and piped into the forebrain from the
hypothalamus.
This space available for celebrations.
Someone visits for the first time and says, "Oh, let's get married here" and guests drive in and eye the hors d'oeuvre tent before finding a folding chair.
But it isn't long before the mirroring going on between, for instance, the sculptures and
the
trees—the trees looking more like sculptures, the sculptures getting
seasoned, growing bark (patinas) even—it isn't long before it hypnotizes
the guests.
Who
would wear a wedding dress in such a charged atmosphere, having heard
that ghost story of the wedding dress with the power to possess the soul
of the bride?
Actually it was a horror flick from somewhere, Tokyo or Calcutta . . .
It
was a wedding dress that took possession of the soul of its bride the
minute she saw it in the mirror, or it saw itself—and this we know
happens, but not with the malevolence of this dress that wreaked havoc
at the reception, set the hall on fire and dropped a crate of champagne
on the string trio.
"Aha,"
cries the groom as he realizes the chrysalis of evil he must divide
from his bride: "You are hardly an unruffled surface!"
No you would not want to wear that dress amid the wireless network of gigantic sculptures and their wind-scraped murmuring.
When the wind stirs, is it not the gardeners?
The gardeners are invisible, they don't garden during business hours.
As
you'd put a dye in the air in order to see it, a bird sucked through
its drafts advertises the invisible and upgrades it to naked.