From the Fire Hills

From the New Republic

24 FROM THE NEW REPUBLIC The flamingoes in their carnival garb are plentiful in plastic here. Trolling the meticulous Bermuda, anachronistic, hieratical with their Frenchmaid formality, they keep one-legged vigil at the fiercely contested and crepe-myrtled borders of our collective happiness. Bewitched by the gazing ball’s stare among the pansies, we have come to envy such stalwart defense of their own frivolity, some home-improvement version of the spiced apple garnish by the charred chicken at the church luncheon, God bless. And though the sun, for its part, might so lovingly tend to their backs, compassion-driven, that composite seams swell and blossom as for a surgeon curing cancer, still those bleached, fist-sized heads call from the mythic island of the herb garden, amid the spidery hosta that rises like equity each year, Miracle-Grown, ascends like saints from the ash of martyrdom, to behold the world they desired, verdant, bereft of pain, where hope is a strictly outside cat, and love—love is money. ...