October 29-November 4, 2007: Christopher Mulrooney and I.B Rad

the family of togetherness duplex A let’s drown the cat why not? you sit or think the cat thinks about things you don’t know about let’s go out the screen door and make merry on the lawn awhile the sky is blue the grass is green there are fireflies in the sunset after the housemates are gone the breakfast oatmeal and milk with apples and of course tea the screed of any journalist Wonder bread around the lunch with the missile site on the hill and the great expanse of tarred dirt the clinging of one’s shadows in the daylight walking to and fro the city in which you are lost and wandering or following the sidewalk or walking on a wall to school the great entertainments the baths and pools for drowning cats in duplex B the singsong radius of the old gift for treacheries comes upon one who says encore encore une fois and do not forget your lunch in a bag the glad times sweet times you would have forgotten but for this reminder ah the trees they are spoiled now fruits are springing unripe it isn’t the fashion now maybe if all this discourse were to spend itself on you it might pass for a wood beam over the fireplace like a movie set you would have enjoyed that you would have thought hey nonny nonny you would have enjoyed that

Even the Smallest Stone* I’ve read “even the smallest stone in a riverbed has the entire history of the universe inscribed on it” and, in view of modern cosmology and the Earth’s geology, it’s true, there’s something to it So who’d ever dream I’d leave a stone unturned? Yet, curiously, I seldom stoop to scoop up rocks and if I do all I can ever see is a missile to skim over water, to fling at a pesky dog, or, at best, a hefty lump to pose as a paperweight – such is our basic metaphysics. *Written after reading Hikaru Okuizumi’s marvelously crafted, “The Stones Cry Out “