Clerical Error

The library gods and their puppetshave won their lawsuit over identity theftand how the coast bendsjust at that place where the pharmaceuticalheiress wanted to build her summertraining camp. What's important nowis the collective outrage overarchitectural futures and how psittacosisis either more or lessdeadly than we think.When we went to the beach —to that particular segment of coast —we thought about how everythingelse was OK, as long as the chrome sluiceskept bringing water downfrom the high Sierraand the fiberglass stars hung in placebeneath the great domeof the antique mall. So we built a raft.We'd watched how to do iton television, when we were children,using tarps and bayberry,only we couldn't find any bayberry,so we used small woodland creaturesinstead, the names they discard,the music they play when they aren'tpregnant or on-line.It was a messy raft, but thenwe weren't the ones wanting moreoxygen, tungsten, morefantasy baseball extravaganzas.When the raft was done, we built a newlake, a few miles from the ocean:which seemed a little redundant, yes,but we needed something we could depend on,something of our own.We wanted children, thoughthe timing wasn't especially good.The lake kept agreeingwith everything we said, which was fine —we'd trained it that way — butthere was still so much morecryptopyrographycrowded in the basement, among the Fisher-Price dirigibles and castoff balalaikas,illegal flight plans, popes trappedbeneath their small regional universities.If you lift aquacultureto your ear, it's your own bankaccount you find yourself listening to.Together we rowed outonto that still, reflective surface,tape recorders Glocked to ourgood hands. What we really wanted wasa new leather, some new glistening.