Visions of Apocalypse

Begin with a simple case of conjunctivitis. There are times when it's hard to distinguish between crying and tearing. Last night, for instance. At the onset of my second night of sleeplessness, my eyes were rough and gritty and tearing. After midnight, I went to the roof and sat watching the rats fleeing the sinking ship in their black SUVs with tinted glass and Iraqi army escorts, 36 hours before the Day of Rage. I tossed my just-poured Teachers onto the rooftop and put my head in my hands, hoping that a mortar round would land on my roof.

Then I went back to bed, and lay there, observing the aura that had formed around the ceiling lights. I turned off the lights and tried to sleep again. I imagined that a mortar round had landed on our side of the Tigris, and a toxic cloud was floating over the Green Zone. (A security report I read yesterday had indicated that Al Quaeda had been trying to acquire chemical and biological weapons from Iran.) I imagined that the generator, which had been running all day and night, and is due to be repaired on Saturday, had malfunctioned and was pouring toxic fumes into my room. I pondered what to do, what I could do, whether the guards were experiencing the same eye irritation, whether I was in fact experiencing some psychosomatic response to my anxiety, which of course could lead to heart failure. So it went for several hours.

I reached for my iPod, and put on Joanna Newsom's Milk Eyed Mender, deciding to displace apocalypse with fantasy. At the end of Sadie, "So exhume your bone, dig up your pinecone, my Sadie," I began to cry in earnest. It helped. Maybe it flushed out my tear ducts. Shortly after that, I fell asleep.

The world was still here this morning.

The sight of bridges and balloons

makes calm canaries irritable;

they caw and claw all afternoon:

"Catenaries and dirigibles

brace and buoy the living-room --

a loom of metal, warp - woof - wimble."

And a thimble's worth of milky moon

can touch hearts larger than a thimble.

O my love,

O it was a funny little thing

to be the ones to've seen