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Mind Sweep #5
The summer solstice strikes its brazen chime
like an incessant
mechanical clock.
Right on time the humidity shoots up
into the
seventies and the mercury
explodes the glass tube at the porch window.
People flock to the malls
and mill around
in great revolving circles like a wonderful
machine,
until the widening gyres of their
ambulatory quests go straight to their heads
and like good folk on
their best behavior
spend money like crazy. Again the ship
with
Liberian refugees has been refused a port.
Mind Sweep #6
I walk the dogs in the morning before
cars take up their insistence to
own the road.
The female goes for the mud stream every time,
shaking
clay smears across my legs,
afterward, planting paw prints on my shirt.
Has one a right to pant
with her innocence,
be so eager? Surely she'd laugh like a baby laughs
if dogs could laugh. But would I
laugh with her? Could I? What
after all does laughter mean, once our
innocence
is used up and we look at the world out of ours,
and its,
anguish? OK, girl, let's run home now!
Mind Sweep #7
One can look too hard for a lost thing,
Delbert says. His
grandmother, middle of nine daughters,
Scot's sheep herders on Prince
Edward Island,
like her sisters before her and those after,
at age 15, was pulled from school,
put on the train to Boston with a
one-way ticket,
two fresh smocks, her old felt coat and hat,
one pair
of shoes and five dollars--
where she entered housekeeping service in Malden
or Walton or Taunton--
English not good enough
for Cambridge or the Back Bay-- never to go back--
parents fading-- letters only to announce a death.
Mind Sweep #8
Although the news reports much about presidential scandals,
the
Liberian refugee freighter on the high seas, briefly noted,
has not been
heard from for two days. Doreen perceives
everything going on around her
just as correctly as before,
but it has become totally dissociated and alienated.
Her own emotions
seem foreign to her,
as if someone else were feeling them,
or as if
they were drifting around the world,
no longer able to maintain through inner actions
equilibrium with
events of the world. She feels
unspeakable anguish. Hoping for bigger
and better
scandals, the non-incumbent's campaign limps on.
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