Interstate 84

Since no one reads the signs anymore,what we know of place and history leakslike the slow seep of the Housatonicthrough the purgatory of pine between my presentcompromises and my past ideals, no timefor the purchase of indulgences, for simony,for a day of good works to speed us along.

We dip into a dreary obscurity,a corridor of listless industry—Hartford,Waterbury, Danbury—the stolid sort that comesto Connecticut to stay until the bitter end,like the outcast Irish annealing themselvesin the brass foundries, now micro-breweries, poundingthemselves pliant, drinking themselves to sleepand leaving their families to the liquor merchantswho turned Father McGivney's temperate zealinto life insurance, the marginaladvantage of presence over absence,

an enterprise that proves the fertilityof boredom, distance as the muse of originality,the ghoulish ingenuity of the fly-over,the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Companylike an impossible quilt geometry, a giant ballof twine, hubcap sculptures and drive-through trees,

and sometimes a soul who takes of his tieto tinker in secret and trifle something new.

I note points of interest to remind usthat true genius is not a blue educationbut the absence of mediation, ignoringthe stone voices of the high priests, remainingout of earshot long enough for the unspooling,the clean transfer of music to paper,the pairing of bright color with dark thought,the joyful warble of a carrion bird,royal fanfare on the village common, the echoof orchestras thundering across the valley.

In stolen moments, patronless and personal,the right man may wring out whatever sound remainsafter a day among clerks and accountants.The janitor clears the shred to make spacefor an actuarial mind devising a syntaxthat defies the probability of fading away,or the taming of transcendence to a simpleequation, or a policy protecting againstthe inevitable, or the body yieldingannuities, or the surety that investmentdelivers profit, that wealth survives the transaction,that someone always pays to take a risk.

Along the edge of the ledger, a foreignnotation, a holy script in a heavenly hand.

Look closer, my children. As commerce crawls forwardin a slow roll of reinforced rubber,this road simmers with a different possibilityconceived in discontent, a righteous determinationto live a second life of extravagance,of adornment spread over heavy metal,of the thrill of an unappraised thought:a bric-a-brac of the spirit, the fireworksof the first idea, an ice-cream cone as brokenreligion, a self in its glory unfurlinglike a fag, a home, a legacy, a dream.