lifting the trap door at the bottom of the world

A nest of growling ogres perhaps. Dante's pit of horrors. Freud's Id, repressed desires. Thanatos. A squashed fly, list of fantasies stuffed in a bottle, deck chairs thrown off the Titanic, a misplaced winning lottery ticket, but not under this trap door.

Assumptions as out of place as a kerosene lantern on a camping trip to hell. It's knit one, pearl two, click heels.

Not to say that it's smooth sailing, or a trip without a cell phone, wearing a troubadour wide brim hat. Eyes shielded from the sun, it's a snooze, and that's not hyperbole. Just the only way to mow a lawn, in a masterpiece of understatement. Once the grass is level, an endless horizon appears. No crickets or grasshoppers intervene, and the sun is no mirage. A dripping faucet stops. A clock stops ticking. A dust storm folds its tent. A bamboo flute playing softly.

Dice rolls eventually cancel out. Waves of the tide fill each other in. What would have been acquiring a tan at the nude beach dismounts, leaving a horse with reins hanging slack. Thanatos is dead. God cogitates for a moment. The sun rolls back. An entire panoply of eastern liturgy assembles in the hot tub. Silence goes supreme.

One might question whether all of this could stay, or even fit, under the trap door. One would be mistaken.

Words speak for themselves. The mysterious key is revealed, yet we don't get it. Something being talked about, pick a war. Any war. A current one, sure to stir some anger, and the mystery borders on a superstition – should we condone this?

Until we get to Jews versus Arabs, or the sarcophagus at Chernobyl. For a more carefully tinted picture, try the climate catastrophe.

The mystery is in writing anything at all. A succulent in a pot on the patio suffers the fate of favored words. Without either of us knowing how, it blooms for all the world like a blue poppy. Robin coming in for a visit hops around it. Known meaning must be abandoned. We glance at each other, and it's not anything to write home about. Except we are home. Robin's chirp and the words blend to an impromptu symphony.

Nothing is proved. It has no end. There is no origin of the mystery. Who ever heard of a blue poppy?

A FAIRY TALE

Mary, Mary, quite contrary

how your garden grows!

rows and rows of cockle shells

lightning in the sky

twenty one blackbirds baked in a pie

before the shuttered eye

opens

and the word bucket

over flows