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A coming-of-age for the Arctic,

where mammoth bodies can finally rot,

and polar bears will be mythical. 

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Drove past  the ACI and was reminded of a spring day that kept me hostage on that same campus, years ago, dealing with some legal bullshit, the same day that I vowed to let my thirteen years of apprenticeship begin, like Muhammad–without really knowing what that meant.  The sight of the barbed wire fences caused a pang of outrage in me, and it was the ebullience of the spring that gave special intesity to the emotion.  The whitewalled office with the flag on display, the low-rising wall that divided the public from the bureaucrats–all of it like the fingers of a rapist sinking into his victim’s skin. 

Even though both are alive, they stand on opposite sides of a life-death dialectic, and the defining force of each runs down into their every cell.  So it is with prisons and springtime.    

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Pigeons are agents of the world redemption,

zeppelins in flight with heavy loads,

guardians of the swaying ladder,

not shamed to see you naked.

bottomless vessels of sorrow,

nibbling at your leaden past.

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A note on the dangers of city planning:

The built environment is the reification of the mind.

The translation of the mental landscape into matter is total.

The dark or diseased acres of the mental landscape–

the walled-off colonies, the demonic, the unloved regions–

send their burrs riding on the tails of the kingdom’s white horses,

from the mind they gallop into matter, dropping the burrs everywhere.

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Some see the resurrection of Christ as a rupture in the space-time continuum–an exit door, as it were, from the cycle of birth and death.  By virtue of the event, they say, like Harold with his purple crayon, he who attains sainthood draws a circle around where he stands and–whoosh!–the frozen chain of centuries breaks open to the waters of eternal life.  It is a mostly private affair, this redemption, this mastery of death.  It concerns not the world at large, but humanity only, and only an elite class of humans at that.  The approach to the end is the spiritual deflation of life; the attrition of “good people” from a damned world.

Suppose instead that the crucifixion initiates a time line, one that ends at some moment in the future, and through the resurrection, that line is bent to form a loop, an ouroboros, a donut.  Suppose that all beings have been sentenced to run this loop, again and again, until every one learns to master itself and end its suffering thereby.  Such that “the end of the world” would be no end at all, but a return to the world’s material configuration circa AD 33, from which point everything starts over, but with a cellular memory of the loop’s last run.  Until children are no longer raped, limbs no longer hacked off the living, bison no longer shot for hide, grain stores no longer hoarded.

I’m not professing a belief here, only teasing out the strands of a daymare.  Something like Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence, but as a long and winding road to the absolute redemption of all things.  It is a horrible vision, because it entails the reenactment of many traumas, many crimes, over and over.  I find it horrible because I have not learned to love life as it is, the way he claimed to, syphilitic warts and all.

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Some would say–who are these “some” that keep haunting my page?–that the memories of a place oft-revisited are not pure, because one’s chronology gets confused, and the recent past begins to fill the cracks in the distant past like fresh plaster on an old wall.  In the case of say, a murder trial witness, I suppose that’s true.  But when it comes to remembering a childhood neighborhood or home, the line between dream space and the lost actuality of spaces past is meant to be blurred.  So, unless my forgetting-of and retrospective filling-in of details serves to conceal something important, I have no problem with it.

That said, what I remember of South Providence is most of all a fierce sunlight filling every corner; sagging, garishly painted triple-deckers in tight rows like troops in a poor man’s army.  Exhaust fumes, junk lots, diners.  A black man named Melvin who always wore a yellow shirt, who my grandmother called “The Melvin Bee.”  Garlicy breezes.

Television does funny things to the mind, which has no filing folder for television shows per se, and this is especially true for children.  Sanford and Son’s junk shop, the Taxi garage, Sesame Street; are all addresses in eighties Providence, at least on the map that my childhood travels describe.  Were I to suffer dementia, I’d probably go looking for them.

I’m trying to find a single word that would capture the geist of that time and place, but unlike nets, words don’t capture things so surely.  Instead, they trace the contours of what they describe, like wind, and only in the hands of the best scribes, at that.  Sundried. Wheezing.  Proletariat.  Post-Industrial.  Demagnetized.  Low-rise.

If the city were a woman, she would be barefooted, her black hair wrapped in a rag, thirty-something, her skin smooth but aged, petite but soft bellied, and still pretty.

My Nana’s shopping list from a recent night:

3 cans of corned beef hash.

1 can of bug spray.

2 Mounds coconut candy bars.

10 bars of Irish Spring soap.

1 can of Lysol disinfectant spray.

…we drove across two city lines to find these treasures, at 9:00 at night.