ISSUE: Autumn 1974
Nobody knows what anything
means anymore.
Sea-turtles run inland
at birth.
The spectacled
anthropologist
cannot decipher
the strange pictures
carved by the
Aztec Kings.
In Antarctica, Little
America freezes
and Scott’s film of the last
mornings,
or afternoons,
alive seems oddly
serene: “Hope is on
the way,” he wrote,
misspelling it
from the
cold. It is normal to chew
the dead leather
of shoes and with Donner
one and
another. Yet
after all, no one
painted that and the
names of friends drift
in and out
of doorways
in the electric ruins
in which I live, like
dreams of pizza and beer,
and we
move on our slow
bellies in hungry
and invisible
silence across
the frozen
sand.
