Monday, June 20
THE WEALTH The truth is money is in war, not poetry. Money is in real estate and clean water. Money is in other people’s money. Not pitted antique linens with slight stains at the hand stitch Mom swears are “worth a lot.” Money is in country, in USA! In Fiction, in the numbered ether. Not square nails rusted brittle to the touch kept in tin cans around the house for the strange subversive opulence of one day “selling.” Money is not in our wistful, near-mint antiques. More critically, it is not in abstinence. In blank space between ink. Absorbed by a single cell when all the mind wants is to indulge— money is not in not indulging. Not in the flushed ranks of your crippled piety. I will miss money. Miss lush foliage. The abundance of summer. I will miss apples and asters and frogs, the smell of weed, the acridness of body, when we drive ourselves out of luck with cars. Money is an abstract scream, not the silence that hangs from the head in a broken nimbus, lighting near the edge of what you know. I know nothing of money. Of wealth. And from the torqued maw comes bitter truths. The wading bird that thinks it can eat the ocean. Our becoming that has gone septic. Money is in the oasis, in mirage and delirious hunt. (Bianca Stone)