Epistle. To: Wollstonecraft

Ah finally a springtime afternoon to have. Radical sunlight and a fine breeze. Easy walking weather and so that's it, up one street and down another, like not actually caring about anything or I imagine what it might be like being timeless if that were something we might ever know. People around tend to their small gardens as in a fever, fussing over designs for stone footsteps and arrangements of new bought flowers, you might think it all was a manner like in a grand English landscape and not a precious bit of earth turned over at the end of a lawn on Catherine Street. Moving slow like some clumsy monster on the loose and having first steps. If this ever was just a taste of life then give me more. But can you appreciate anywhere present unless you've been someplace else in the past? What is that accord that has us to remember? When I contrast - this walking about - with being held in a hospital room just last week- the experience seems to travel from one to the other and back around as though these moments were partners in bed together and pain and pleasure were united for all the influence. Like waking up in the recovery room and suddenly playing over what the knock-out doc said about the anesthesia he would administer - we're going to put you to sleep etc. - but no that was a medical sleight of hand - and I told him so -  no what you're going to do is place me inside a chemically induced coma so let's just do it like that. Alas nobody listens! To digress is to live in the first place! And woke up - really the stuff is fantastic for taking a load off your head - and was attached to so much hardware it was difficult to find either place or time in the most basic decent sense.  EKG machine - blood pressure cuff - oxygen lines in the nose - oxygen meter taped to left index finger - a pair of tubes wrapped around my legs that on rhythm every few minutes would inflate and squeeze my legs   for blood flow like hands belonging to some fiend - even still had the surgical cap on - everybody looks terrible in those anyway - and what was like a ton of blankets smothering the instinct to be up and away - And of course the IV where streams of synthetic dope ran down from the headwaters of a computer terminal and gathered in my blood and like clockwork once a button was pushed washed me away time and again. I tried to imagine I was in a crime movie. And soon other members of the gang would burst into the hospital, overpower my captors, and spring me out to the door to a waiting ambulance that had been stolen for the occasion. Sometimes it all seems so literal. That you are trapped in a space until something better comes along. Ah. This walking about. A pretty foolproof system. Clouds building from the north. Cleaning the garage on Howard. Demolition of a garage on Hayward. A woman weeding her flower bed with tools scattered on the sidewalk, and a red wheelbarrow - so much depends on it - in the way. Certain obstacles for me in the slow bound lane. Kinds of expressions or even a joy for her. It's the differences which unite us. She looked up at my sunglasses and ski pole tapping the sidewalk and said oh I'm sorry I didn't realize you couldn't see. That's how it goes. The misunderstood. The beautiful. I'll just step around this stuff I said. There was a small musical device she was listening to in the tulips. And a dog who looked up at me and I swear he winked.