Clive Matson Calliope Mind Across town in a borrowed auto, clasping a corroded radiator in a blue rag and carrying my ailing toddler on my shoulders. 104 degrees the last p.m. He pulls his face into a wrinkled mask and squeezes tears out the corners. "I'm doing better than he is," proclaims the expert who scratches radiator lacework with a ball point. Ruined copper flakes off in stringy batches. How to pay for it. This: no squeakless sight of reality. Unless it's on the way home ginkgo leaves blur green overhead. Asphalt expands gray- black toward whispering tires. When I touch this bomb's accelerator 2 1/2 tons of metal leap up the avenue trailing rubber marks, oil droplets, mists of decaying vinyl, yards of 30-some half-combusted hydrocarbons and what else? How to pay for it. This moment different from 40, 400, 4,000 years ago. But not much. My mind spins like a calliope. Behind soothing pictures waste accumulates, dog carcasses in piles with hair pulling out from pus-y flesh. How to pay for it. The soothing pictures: 1) A basketball spinning high off the backboard and swish. 2) Crystals glinting black through surface crud of a six-inch slab. 3) The straight line out my wife's strong shoulders and down. 4) The little boy well again, clapping hands for my song: "To market, to market, to buy a fat pig. Home again, home again, jiggedy-jig." |