According to the “Raleigh’s Best” magazine-like object I received in today’s mail, the three best places to work here are a real estate brokerage, a dermatology clinic, and Dump & Pump Septic. If those were your choices, which job would you take? Honestly… I’d shovel sh!t.
Let’s just consider this my Hallowe’en decorations.
I am, off and on, working on a jigsaw puzzle of a 1630s world map. Every time I sit down at the table “It’s a Small World After All” starts playing in my head. The unconscious will have its little joke, but it’s getting tiresome.
Once more I find the ripe persimmons
After they have rotted in the ground.
Homestyle tofu
Coagulated crushings of legumes
Fried, with fruits of last year’s rotting dead.
Prune the leafy excess of a kingdom.
Add garlic, chilies, soy sauce. Simmer briefly.
Winning the battle of Halloween decorations without even trying.
Somewhere along Crabtree Creek this morning. Also seen but not photographed, where the creek floods into a lake, the tiniest turtle I have ever seen—its shell could not have been two inches long—swimming with desperate and ineffective persistence against the current.
Ode to a (now vanished) used book store, 2005
The used book store beckoned. The door when he opened it to the cool dark air welcomed with the old-fashioned jangle of a metal bell; the tattooed clerk looked up over squarish glasses and smiled. Classical music, of course, on the radio. He wandered the aisles, ran his finger rippling along the spines, the titles a blur, the smell of dust and mold enfolding. So many books. A ludicrous number of books, unimaginably many.