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WHIP CRACK

Near the remnant oak, in a shaft of light through the barn door, the fire truck slumbers. A fly alights. There are pressure gauges. Desiccated wood spoke wheels clutch dried paint like coagulated blood. Just behind the engine are two bald domes of sand grey metal. Do they remember the apricot trees? Rip Van Fire Truck? The fly decides to take off, leaving a yellowed photograph on which technicolor credits are cued to scroll.

Oh, it's slightly out of kilter. Just a slight adjustment will be necessary to arrange comfortable seats for the show, which won't be about toasting marshmallows. As long as there are no Pythagorean angles, it could get funky. Post a red shirt over the door for accelerator technicians, who are just as welcome.

In past asylums scrambled

where stuff satisfied not a soul

cactus dreams

outstared an ostrich

hired for playing Sweeny Todd on a pogo stick

scritching grass under the eucalyptus where Bruebeck slept

laying red carpet auras

for a coiled garden hose

though I'm no taxidermist

So there, the candelabra of scented candles. They are not for a theater lacking humor, with no popcorn. The cure ~ know a shortcut through residential neighborhoods, ignore the twenty-year denizens who are posting photos of your car on Nextdoor ~ there's the kilter!

But no marshmallows.

First day out of the womb is when buzzards circle. Propaganda leaflets rain down like pumpkin pies. Each screed paddling to its pond. Wavelets are channeled into crayon drawings with songs that magically become swan spoons, destined to mix plaster for statues.

Sirens stage a choreography of broom sticks, sprouting peacock feathers. Cowboys munch as Indians hide behind rocks. Rip Van Fire Truck dreams clouds that sing hallelujah, pass the ozone! The wheels creak.

Learning to play the spoons, Ouija juice trickles through sitar strings to charm a green garter snake sunning on a redwood stump. Everyone laughs, thinking they know why I do.

In the transported Congo, a brown skinned drum sizzles Zig Zag papers. A deluge of chocolate grass hoppers leaps from trees, mysterious in their Spanish moss. And on Boys Day, after playing the Oki drum, a journalist moves through halls of Congress proving that laptops are the Artificial Government.

Having earned immunity in degrees of concentration, I banished echoes of diodes in a shed with a braided garden hose. No camera obscura can match this. And all the best efforts of piffle wafflers pissing through wind vine cranes, chimes swirling through diesel fumes, blowing diesel horns, screaming onto hot radiators and the hiss . . . no explanation is needed.

Patience needs no locality.

Tomb stones will listen as carefully as a chorus of the living on Memorial Day. Whitman's subtle breeze, reborn to ashes, shuffles through green park benches barking. Somewhere beneath city streets are knuckle cracking cot cutters who parse telemetry from Cassini's last dive through Saturn's famous rings.

Fog of war drifting through the Golden Gate calls for dredging, to permit advanced shipping. The toll is paid in silence. Why is that?

And where will we find the silence of redwood trees? I can tell you that.

At 1AM, past the Lawrence Expressway, is a distant shore. Reason breaks where rhythm speaks. Blue temple tiles play second fiddle at water's edge, and around the campfire there are no ifs, ands or butts scrambling past some Ouija reed. And there's an end of it.

Roll the credits.

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