Friday, December 22, 2006

I waited for the bus last night, reading in the dim glow from the streetlights. The power lines above me collected flecks of the misty rain and then loosed their supply of drops onto my book or the too-long sleeves of my soft pink sweater. As I stood there a man walked past, bald and with no hat, in a suit and a red striped tie. A few feet past me he stopped and turned back, said, "Excuse me..." and then pulled a quarter out of my ear. He handed the quarter to me and continued down the street, and I dropped the quarter in the shrubbery. Ear quarters, even conceptual ear quarters, kind of freak me out.

A little while ago I was rifling through a book, trying to find that Baudelaire poem where he compares a lady to roadkill (which, you know, needles and haystacks and all, but my copy of Les Fleurs is entirely in French and I'm just not that patient) and I came across lines from a Beckian Fritz Goldberg poem scribbled on part of a sheet of graph paper: "Each time we fall out of love we/ say it wasn't really love at all as if/ landing, a plane would say no, not/ actual sky."
So then there's that.

No comments: