[Sound of Freeways Directing the Cosmos Back to Its Start], and: Monday Morning

71 GILLIAN CONOLEY [SOUND OF FREEWAYS DIRECTING THE COSMOS BACK TO ITS START] Death’s got some spiraled plenitude in the distance between clocks, both a velocity and a stasis at large. A fly curves its legs in dioptrical, tense moments of rest on the window sill. Try not to stare at the white tiles in a urinal and think what are you doing here postcard face postage stamp face both believing and disbelieving a harder time can come, which keeps believing around. In the amniotic first few moments of the film arrive the windshields we can move in, hot cold color smears of full-length characters drawn in master stroke suck in the cul de sac’s diurnal rotational breeze, 72 the certain blond dream of the sun going down and the gates opening up. A modesty, the nice folks returning to nice homes, a little more tired, no one dying miserably of too much Williams. A white spruce, bay bark underneath, wet pulp inside, twisting up to night sky. Do you still have that project, I no longer have a project, but if you had a project we could blow them toward one another. Let me entertain you. We are here to entertain. To hold the black whips to embroider the day of the week so as to assign it to the towel. If it’s morning, what to read, cut off, wave, tie to the emergency cone? Or if you are waking in the audience, what small clearings will you make to rest from those of us in paradises and hells also, the ecstacies of clover sprouting near manholes amid the thrown down tissue through which we feel we can see it all–– The hillock, a tall oak makes a shade above it, 73 and propped up against the trunk reclines a leisured figure into which we can climb back in and read toward the tonal promises and geographical distances connecting inside our ears at the end, the dead dark stallions the world lets go into meadows, the man turning into a boy walking through those archways as we watch, holding his hat on a dirt road, hearing ourselves implore a strutting mystic whose trading hand is broke. Someone adds elements to the sentences the way a girl out west just laughs. We had lyric time, we had pylons and pylons of it, under low-lying reefs of cloud the 8 notes necessary for infinite melody, a convective heat event. The faces swirling, the little hands uncurling, resuscitating to stay the world of awe. The tiger sleeps until it is hungry, and then the tiger hunts. 74 GILLIAN CONOLEY MONDAY MORNING everything was on sale the pop music was under the heat lamps and the spectacle was on the television and the television was in the spectacle the life that is at least ¾ automatism said to the life that isn’t just look at the great big burden of you quit mail quit mail Beyonce (Beyonce put a ring on it check it out youtube) try to live as though it were morning, said Nietzsche can we show off the backbends in the yoga class and still progress that is a very optimistic statement of Nietzsche’s it was morning and all the white guilt got balled up and tossed through the sky then landed back into the white guilt which had made a very good deal with the white privilege 75 and the light through the burnt-out leaf pattern in the curtain fabric fell to the hands spread-eagle on the yoga mat pushing hard one friend called and said “here we are” and I said “here we are” and the hand picked up the garden hose curled in the calla lilies drips of water in the copper snout and giovanni called and said it never occurred to me there wouldn’t be a black president why is everyone calling me to congratulate me I didn’t do a thing I know a lot of black people with good jobs look there’s one says giovanni with a bad cold who was born after the Civil Rights Movement so I point that out to her...