“Rooms by the Sea, 1951″
This time I’m not going to say a thing
about Blue. It isn’t the logging days,
its centuries after. No dogs tracking out
in the bark-scatter and dust. Pilings stand still
in the lake, waiting to be docked. In New York,
John is at his desk blank words ticking by, and even
money has a seating chart these days.
In the slums of Florida, Hemingway kept
a cellar full of first editions, let them
rot of their own accord. Maybe roaches loved them,
made nests curled up and read. “Start at page one
and write like a son of a bitch” was not something
Hemingway said, it was Harrison
blind in one eye, Indian in the other
but hey, he’s not shot-gun prone
at least. My father cried when I lost
a tooth. Do not spend a lot of time crying
over lost teeth that aren’t yours, is the mantra. But
I loved him for it, sunk down on linoleum tragedy
in the bric-a-brac and Pine Sol of modern-day.
There are asteroid tumors in the universe
of the brain which start large, shatter into smaller
fragments, spread slowly out. When scanned,
they glow like fireflies in glue. Vanessa told me this
in the waiting room, all its magazines
dirty with staph. One Hopper we saw
opens on sea, no steps down
just water and the doorframe. It’s a surprise
the room doesn’t flood during storms.
…
for another Field Note by Erin…
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