just like baseball and apple pie

P and I went to the stadium tonight, and it's become one of my favorite places, for the hum of the crowd and pleasant chord of leather on wood at a fantastic velocity. Tonight we had been invited to the luxury suites, an untofore unexplored privileged region of leather seats and private hot dog dispensers. And the late afternoon sky is parading it's best shade of palest azealea, within the red brick of the stadium we are gratefully sheltered from the juvenile wind playing with hemlines and unpinned locks. Tonight we were high enough for the flirty blue tailed swallows, high enough to gaze across the lapping bay and survey our domain like a pair of crownless queens, yet not high enough for a nosebleed, and that the Giants aren't doing so hot meant nothing to me but to be there as the full moon crested in the fifth inning bright orange and so edible, like James' giant peach needing to be plucked from the sky. I only love baseball for the atmospherics and sheboygans and I love both equally and without measure.

Later as I am walking home on the lookout for shooting stars I can hear the fireworks rumbling the very stadium I am now miles from. And it sends a chill and a thrill shimmying down my spine, the thrill of imminent danger and fire in the sky and chill running from the shrapnel in the sky and brick and glass melting like sand castles at high tide.

I have been doing a lot of thinking about bodies, about sturdiness and fragility, survival and resiliance and then the ease with which our flesh is ripped to ribbons. Specifically I have been thinking of the places that are far from here, and how easily those ribbons of flesh are neatly tied up into suitably non-horrifying digestable morsels. I keep asking myself how many police recruits can be blown up in Iraq, and how many people will wreath themselves in dynamite to blow up the police recruits and all I can come up with is the option of the dual many headed hydra, lop one off and another will rise it's stead, and so it goes, til the youngest son of the youngest son has blossomed to his own bright firework, exploding in a spray of metal and blood, pulling all of those struck dumb by the spectacle into deafening vortex of the red and the charred.

Elsewhere in America I heard a radio audience sing "Summertime" as I was driving through the gilt hills of California, and hawks were circling for carrion high above the freeway, your daddy's rich and your ma is good lookin'. I fell hard for that song, hard when I first heard my mother weeping over it when Janis sang it, but for me, when I heard honeyed Ella sing it with that melancholy orchestra and Louis Armstong's silver trumpet, and when he sings in his hesitant vibratto, one of these mornings you're gonna rise up singing, I thought I heard a long vanished god of a lesser pantheon whisper in my ear, one of these mornings you're gonna rise up singing, and I have been waiting ever since, but mostly I just wake up late and cranky, but I am still waiting. Like I am waiting for a pheonix, like I am waiting for the flood.

And now I have a few tasty morsels that I would like to share. The following snippets were gleaned after I had written under the influence of a semi lethal combination of vodka jello shots and margaritas which leads to a state I'd like to call extreme maudlin:

But I am tighter than the tightest clam. and also slightly swaying.

before night fell and the moon rose, and across the land and red threaded through my dreams a thousand blossoms bloomed, and a thousand gentle spoors spurred a velvet revolution.

I shift in my seat angry and ribald, and a week and a day passes like heaven in an old car, and all the words that were sure things get bent out of context

all of the good songs fall like leaves, and everybody leaves, in burnt auburns and dead summer greens, spring colors begging an operatic exit, choking on thoatfuls of grass and begging for October.

the meridien blue in the distant east

soft as a mellon, conch shell pink

crossing bridges at top speed, unafraid of the inevitable crash.