hertz from hertz until there was just air

• Nothing wrecks me like a photo of an animal killed for fun and/or treasure
• nothing bombs me more than a video of an animal wounded and left for dead after poachers hacked off the horn and the rhino is crying as vets try to save 
• it's still all I can see
• The hate
• makes me realize my hate for Republican shitsmears and motherfucking Democrats a hobby
• Republican shitsmears and motherfucking Democrats work for the same assholes as poachers
• Our ruling sociopaths willfully (and 
• happily if they think about it at 
• all) ruin planet for profit
• what's the threat of a rhino extinction to them but a warning to go kill one now and/or get horn's dust for imaginary boner while product still available
• Same calculation applies to you

• Earthgirl and I rediscovered that a half mile from our house walking in the rain Sunday past
• (w/o comma)
• I stopped thinking about the rhino for a minute or two
• I'll play.
• Our sociopath overlords, hoo-wee, our sociopath overlords killing the planet beneath the story of birth in House of Windsor in NYT webpage 20:45 EDT last night
• Blowback, Russiagate, 2020
• Our Sociopath Overlords, they've already opened a Micronesian sports book taking bets on American Civil War II, World War V
• But it is worse than that
• Cornelius Cardew born 83 years ago today:

RARIFIED

Albert Goldbarth

This sweater is made from only the finest, softest underhairs of the Mongolian camel.                

“Fancy-schmancy,” my father would have said,   

whose snazziest sweater was still a declassé   

synthetic from the sweatshops of Taiwan. My friend   

Deloris, however, who really owns such clothes,   

would say “exquisite” or “sublime”—her opened closet’s   

row of shoulders teases late-day bedroomlight   

along such textures, there are days when the laboring brain   

and throbbing crotch appear to us to be not much more   

than her wardrobe’s tasteful accessories. “. . . woven   

from genital-down of prepubescent yeti, and then   

hand-sewn in our undersea domes.” “Untouched   

by anyone other than albino elves, this wool is . . . .”

______________

Rarefied—to Helthi Hart, the diet guru, it’s   

a cup of clear organic cauliflower broth. And for   

the Emperor Excessia, it’s a mad dessert of swans’ tongues   

—there were, what? ten thousand?—dipped in a slip   

of stiffening honey and set out to await the banqueteers   

like a field of fresh shoots they could graze.   

Some Roman party hosts had great roped bowls of snow   

brought from the mountaintops to entertain their guests   

with dishes of rose-petal sherbet and chilled roe.   

They might even allow the household slaves to slide   

leftover snow along the burning welts the ropes ate   

into their shoulders all down the mountainside.   

______________

   

Afterwards it was an unrecognizable tatter.   

But an image of my father’s worn-thin Bargain City   

“all-weather” jacket is still whole in its polyester glory.   

This is what happened: the alley dog (he later called the thing   

a “cur”) had cornered Livia, and she screamed once,   

with a seven-year-old’s unselfconscious terror.   

And then my father was there, with his jacket wound around his arm,   

and a rock. When it was over, he tore the sleeves off, tied the poor dog   

quiet and, after comforting Livia, they both kneeled down   

to comfort the dog. He was like that. And the jacket   

that served as weapon and restraint?—was like him,   

every day of his life. It did what was needed.   

______________

I misread “migraine.” Which of the two   

would we call the most rarefied? “Margarine”?   

Or maybe comparison isn’t the point. A ghost   

is a person rarefied through the fine, fine colander   

death; that doesn’t make, for most of us, extinction   

an ideal. It was hard to think of Frank and Deloris   

divorcing, since it was hard to imagine the two of them   

engaging in anything so mundane as sex or rage or envy   

with the rest of the hoi polloi. They seemed unearthly   

in close to a literal way, like radio waves. And yet divorce

they did. They found something real they could unjoin,   

hertz from hertz until there just was air.   

______________

A dream: We own the softest of the soft   

Mongolian camel underhair sweaters. One day   

(we think we’re doing the “right thing”) we release it   

into the wild, to romp with its brother and sister   

desert sweaters, out where it “belongs.”

You know, however, what happens by now: it’s unfit   

to fend for itself amid that hardened herd.   

They beat it. It’s hungry. It crawls back   

into the city, mewing, curling up at night against a door   

my father opens and, seeing something in need, brings it inside,   

wraps it in flannel. That’s how he was.   

He’d give you the cheap shirt off his back.