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Letter to Levity
- Utah State University Press
- Chapter
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[39] LET TER TO LEVIT Y Dear buoyancy, dear levity, dear little digression; dear necessary respite from gravity and circumspection, your voice is just audible over the wind like a junco’s chitter— Leaves like tongues lift from the newly melted forest floor, busily trading all kinds of news from the world—for instance, why did I not know before today of Qaddafi’s all-girl coterie of virgin bodyguards, smart as models in their khaki outfits; or of how he sometimes likes to camp out in fivestar hotel gardens in a sumptuous, heated Bedouin tent guarded by a camel? Or of Unsinkable Molly B, the cow that jumped a slaughterhouse gate and fled authorities by swimming across the Missouri river? (She’s safe now in a Montana sanctuary.) They say that Elton John’s in town this weekend: I want to know if he’s traveled with the same grand piano that workers in Tsarkoye Selo scratched their heads over, wondering how to hoist it through the narrow windows of Catherine the Great’s gilded ballroom. And what about those three men in Malaysia who made off with 725,000 condoms (still missing), or the Mexican woman now on her ninth day of a hunger strike, demanding an invitation to Prince William’s wedding? A 35-year-old naked man was captured on surveillance video taking sausages from the kitchen of a retirement home. Who knows why these things happen? Perhaps an inexplicable longing seized them all in the night, some order not to be disobeyed flashed on in the cortex of the brain. Once, my daughter’s piano teacher mistook a gift of strawberry body butter for yogurt. She called, half laughing and half in pain, saying she was just so hungry, that it smelled so beautiful and good; and suddenly she wanted it, more than anything in the world. ...