Speed of Life (Daily Planet email #944)
If you live fast enough (depending on your reference point), you can sit in a chair and hear decline. The shudder and shedding of trees, the settling of scores of foundations, the sun rising quickly over and over again and again like a batting cage. A fence post fail, a drain collapse, even the slow emptying of tires, sharp as a drop of water upon a griddle. Or, if you turn your umbrella upside down, you can also hear the building of progress, concerted endeavor in a rising, enthusiastic tussle and swell as if a goal is about to be made. Celebratory arms of steel, reaching for the sky! Then a silent, fulsome crest, a breath held before the labored, inevitable exhale, an unbuckling of right angles sloughing into loss. More cranes, in a pas de un.
If you live slow enough (depending on your point of reference), the butterfly’s arrow bends in leisure. Your oxygenated skin stands so evenly still through the weather as on desert waves. Like an oar to the current, your call and its concomitant, through the brush through the night, over cooled sidewalks, under porch lights, so deliberate. The brilliant pulse of refraction on the rumpled sheets of time, the gradient light, the even song. A child on a swing, ever in thrilling ascent. Beauty lasts forever and problems never cease.
If you live exactly wrong enough (no dependencies), where your peaks and valleys are inverted in some sort of phase cancellation, you can hear the constant hum of the parts racking factory. You come in at ten p.m., a forklift dumps the parts on the floor (pinions? calipers? — no one’s ever asked), then you bend down to pick them up and put them on swinging arrays of large metal plates with hooks, where they are pulleyed and dipped into some sort of acid. This was in the eighties, maybe it’s done by robot now. Maybe it’s better to do it in China, cheaper than a bunch of six dollar people on Groesbeck. In this life, your suspension needs work. You can spend an hour on the phone with Verizon, three with your insurance, two cars make it through the arrow, and password password six digit code prove you’re a human I’m very irritated is that proof enough?
If you live just enough (depending yeah, yeah), you can see yourself reflected in other people’s eyes, you can watch your words forming in their mouths. Plates of food appear beneath your cutlery and magic eyebrows keep the rivulets from your eyes. Your dream and its waking, two sides of a coin, and the shadows? They’re just background. A glistening glass, a necessary nest, and the tissue, handed to you before your tears, under a sweetened warming wind in the palm trees’ canopy, saying, “…shhh.”
