A PARABLE.

ON THE PREMISES always, this being Alaska, see how many ways there are to move.

THE WHOLE town needs release. When summer is gone, when the metalsmith’s wife has finished with suicide, the carpenter’s son has come home after sudden hip surgery, his dancing career uncertain, and you have given up on the moose you had waded the bog after, when the most extravagant tide of the year leaves even the far rocks tilty in the naked mud — the town then comes to the water, burns their prayers in a basket, burns their losses, avoids the smoky side of the pyre the best they can. Above their basket, they might let loose some paper balloons with a fire in them, to get swallowed by the sky or by orcas. I find I have been navigating by these lately. The paper balloons, I mean.

IN ABSENTIA : Why so much missing? I’ll say it is because we were living with the hot. Perspiration shot from our temples, behind the ears, flooded out the inside of the elbows and any attempt to record taken with the flood. We found new places to sweat. We shot perspiration at each other, at our friends, then tired of the sport. I had a handkerchief for my brow, but across my neck, it turned to pulp on the second day.

My eye has become soft. And the world. Send ice.

*

Where does the hot come from? So it says.

When the heaven-dwellers, the sages, the gods performed the horse sacrifice, Shiva got no share. Why should he not? His wife demanded. Perspiration came he was so angry. He dispersed the gods, threw blood in the altar fire. The sacrifice took the form of a deer and fled. Shiva flew after. The perspiration grew a heavy droplet at the tip of his nose. Where it hit the earth, a little red man, hairy like an owl or a hawk, stormed the earth : Fever. Granted, his anger was justified, but could he not at least dilute this terrible Fever, Indra suggested. Who could withstand such energy?

And so we find the traces of Fever — sullen laterite soils, pens gone dry or missing, all maladies concerning sheeps’ livers, headaches of elephants, constipation of horses, fatigue among tigers, hiccuping among parrots, crossword puzzles left incomplete, lassitude in travelers, deafness between lovers, a certainty that the rains are laughing at you.

AN ESSAY on cosmogony. First comes desert. Then, eggs. A tussle over who is bound, wherein the myna says “Now, Now” amidst the trash and there is everywhere trash. Meanwhile the forms elaborate, but the eye, in the center, stays very black. Looking for what to eat. Sparrows find a door into our room. A monkey falls from our tree. Again, a hungry ghost, considering the palace wall, looks up.

OUR HEART, shifting. How does one spend a revolutionary holiday, and if it falls on a weekend? Bravely. Pullout sections of the newspapers cataloged the new paths of love in this country. They told of how, in a bar, love can be a danger — that is, the people will come to bludgeon you for it. Also, of the rebellion, mountains of ladies’ underpants through the post, on the desks of the religious right (bludgeon wielding).

And for our part : We went to the mall. Proudly. Later, twenty five floors up, we ate at a restaurant that revolves, slowly, revealing this new city. Tandoori sweet potatoes. Fine, crusty little monuments enough.

HOW it is done. There are some things to learn in travel. We hope most to learn not to be a hurdle, or anything else.

In eight days, a cake thinks only of swimming.

HOW we groom for the year. Hair, check. Ears, check. Stash, check. Don’t we look very good? We should be in Hollywood.

THE PILLS : Assuming you have felt like gray pastry, filled with gray jelly, poorly-filled, and look how you ooze on your friends.

Or like you are trapped in a gallery with an indifferent coyote.

Or like a gray coyote asleep among newsprint and trashy pastries.

The blues last night turned the past into talk and we fell for it.