Sunday Evening Retrospective in the Dead Battery Museum (Early Winter 1977)

 

cigarette and pipe smoke

bottles of locally produced beer

fifty-two playing cards

unintended gender role separation

 

remembering how different it felt

knowing how common it was

wishing it were meaningful

to you and you and you

[RK, 9/29/2020]

 

 

 

 

Arachnoid Mater

 

greeting hands slip among protective web filaments

what about that wine, was it domestic or fantastic?

napkins covered with scrawled

sonnets, mathematical equations, caricatures

 

the maître d’ bangs doors, curses the sous chef

fires the clumsy waiter, flirts with the bus boy

you nod, falsify sleepiness for the faithful

 

you fall forward into the next week

Monday is wash day

you separate whites and darks

tunics streaked with mud, coal dust, grease,

handbills, torn train tickets, lumpy hotels

the detritus of your travel dialog

 

this firm composure

fled to falter

fleshed out until Friday

[RK, 9/29/2020]

 

 

 

World’s Largest Ball of String

 

taxidermist’s two headed calf

faded sideshow advertisements

 

playing cards eternally spread beneath

the insect mottled automaton magician

 

5¢ coin slot sealed with electrical tape

amazed that anything was ever five cents

 

place of pride in a Baraboo warehouse

euphemistically called a circus museum

 

that ball of string big as an asteroid

trails a tiny trickle of cotton

 

Ariadne and Theseus

puppeteer and marionette

 

this daily labyrinth shift between

journal entries and bedsheets on the line

[RK, 9/29/2020]