flesh is grass and flesh is ash and all of it together
has been touched with the finger of death coming
at its own pace until the night of power this is none
of it news. but someone said it was lent now and i
thought about it for some time because it has been lent
for a while i replied where you have to do so much.
because it has been so hard to create anything beautiful
really to create anything since january. sometimes one
feels like the only thing alive as if it were just me and the
ice but the frogs and the dandelions have been raptured.
flesh is grass i repeat to myself and God is a shout in the
street and as i walked through olivet i thought does
anybody live in these buildings? i saw a man sleeping in a parked
buick and no one else and i thought to myself i have neither
grass nor a street. i am in olivet but i may
as well be at the bottom of the sea or on a far moon.
i am over olivet but not in it olivet and everything else the town
charlotte potterville and delta township strung out on
trenches of frozen blood grey as the night that we had
in january the last time it rained i am just vapor in them. really my whole time
here has been an exercise in vaporous wandering along roads
frozen in rictuses of knowing derision negating
the very cause of a road. i can still remember that
a road has to go somewhere but south of lansing
everything is called highway there is island highway and packard highway
and bellevue highway and kinsell and gresham and butterfield and nye
highways but
most of them are not even paved.
