CIRCUS WAX
Before recycling got traction and the drought dug in, there were chocolate eclairs in there. Rows of them in their long boxes. I shut the freezer door. A vapor cloud swirls out and a hum begins.
We've teleported Aleppo! Remodel your kitchen with Home Adviser! Or maybe an EMP, electromagnetic pulse over the Arctic. The virtual circus is in town. The Pope has called out capitalism over Climate Change.
Eclairs merge with Aleppo. The circus is about popcorn, isn't it?
The war-dead?
CLOWNS
Reality is what we make it, they say. This eminent logic might be an infringement of Photo Shop's First Amendment rights.
Or eclairs for pop corn, it's possible to opt out.
Our national power grid is vulnerable to an EMP, more likely since North Korea's announcement of a Polaris-style sub. And now it threatens a preemptive strike. Maybe we won't have to wait and see if Trump gets elected. And hackers can take down the grid. The circus trades in bit coins that can vanish in a hacker's instant.
Paid experts will worry for us, and the side effects of drugs, pandemics. Used to be – in the golden days – sailing ships and sealing wax. Some things it just doesn't pay to be concerned with. Though there are always earthquakes, asteroids and bee stings. Angry killer bees! Armageddon, shading off into paranoia, psychosis, a leaf skittering in the breeze.
ELEPHANTS
Not everyone has a backyard, maybe not a tent, or a creek for discovering found objects that make stoned statements skittering out to another dimension by leaps and bounds, disappearing over the horizon. Armstrong's gravelly anthem gets there.
Of course he was right. It's A Wonderful World. And show us the way to LA, legalize dope not abortion, a way for everyone. Our choices and opportunities – work hard if you can find it – and don't end up in the freezer. But who wants to think about all that?
THE RING MASTER
It's a time-lapse, global collection of Hiroshimas. A matter of scale. Compare a couple of cities with every city on earth. A couple of megatons of TNT to a drag racer's roar, to the sun.
People, trees, insects and other creatures have lived here up til now. There are actually “uncontacted” tribes still to be found, staring up in wonder as the anthropologist’s Piper Cub scouts overhead.
Backyards do exist, full of people in next door tribes, neighborhood associations and city councils. There is no mushroom cloud.
Reports of the weather can't be avoided, however, in spite of a war on of scientific evidence. The forest fires, floods, tornadoes heat waves and hurricanes are getting worse. But our tribes are not remote. All the news can't be hidden all the time, even as there are attempts to conceal why it's happening. Blackout curtains will not forestall Hiroshima.
THE SIDE SHOW
Denizens fly in from distant places, hop in over the fence, emerge from the kitchen. A small dish of water, some seeds. And this backyard has an internet connection. The gathering is not large, but the meaning penetrates. We all see the Change, and at least I know why. I want to sound the tocsin even while sipping tea. An absurd juxtaposition.
But the usual, usual doesn't fly here. Reality is not remote. Compare: A firefly is to Hiroshima as our sun is to all the suns in the galaxy, or as our galaxy is to all the galaxies of the universe. Are we apart from this universe? The size of our earth village includes all of this. It is beyond words or songs. Looking through the other end of the telescope at the circus, the word awesome becomes a pale joke.
I think conversations with birds, which at first felt foolish, have something to do with it. Lady Hummingbird, by the compost one morning last year, started our conversation by flying up to within a couple of inches of the brim of my hat. And just hovered there, bobbing up and down. There was no reason for that.
Then built her nest outside the kitchen window where I could see the progress of her brood. And Charlie's Christmas gift translated into a feeder that, for somewhat mysterious reasons, ended up costing $0.01. Though the most beautiful one Orchard Supply had, it was on sale. A ghost in the machine?
Now it's just outside the patio door and just a few feet from my chair. While her chicks were growing she would visit, swooping down over my book. Susan guessed it might be the red patches in my quilt. Lady Hummingbird would hover around me before finally going to the feeder, and then kept an eye on me as she sipped nectar. So I would talk to her, which she seemed to like.
She showed up with a friend this year. He has a brilliant flashing red neck and is very businesslike, does not loiter, abrupt and almost aggressive.
Big Bee visits and is friendly, bumbles into me and likes being spoken to. Doves sit on the fence, return my gaze, and gradually venture closer, hopping around my feet. And looking up at the red dish with seeds on my table, there for the little birds. And lately the brave dove who hops onto the table, looking me right in the eye, eating seeds, listening intently as I speak in a quiet tone of voice.
This morning, as I was going out with the compost bowl, Mr. Flash was sitting in the hackberry tree. “Hello, hummingbird,” I said and he flew right over. Was it the contents of my bowl? He came directly opposite my nose, bobbing up and down and listening as I told him, “You're such a fine looking bird!” He took a closer look into the bowl I was holding and seemed to enjoy being talked to. There was no objection or flying away and he continued looking right at me while going to perch on the feeder a couple of inches away.
Previously I wrote about a young squirrel who relaxed and began to enjoy foraging for hackberry seeds beneath the tree after I said it would be OK, that the seeds were there for him.
DEW DROPS
At last I will say, along with dogs and horses and cats and other tamed animals with whom we speak, that wild creatures like being spoken to. We communicate and become friends, here in the time-lapse.
