The Bread We Eat in Dreams

the Tunguska event

the ultimate star-spangled obliteration of all empires.

I will hold everything tawdry

in my gloved four fingered hand

and hold it high

high

high.

It’s 1940. What you don’t know

is going to break you. Listen to the Greek chorus

of my Kids

lining up toward the long downward slide of the century

like sacrifices.

Their song comes backward and upside

down

from the unguessable extropy

of that strangesad orgiastic corporate

electrical parade

of a future

Listen to it.

The sound of my name

the letters forty feet high.

See ya

see ya

see ya real soon.

The Blueberry Queen of Wiscasset

In the end, we felt it safest to hide the whole business under as many sequins and feathers and tiaras as we could find. These days, folk are so eager to judge. But Wiscasset has been around since ‘63—that’s 1663 to you—and we do things the way we’ve always done them. The advantage of having four hundred years under the municipal belt is continuity; we play the parts we were born to play.

The thing is, Salem was sloppy. They got over excited, girls screaming in the street, beating their breasts, accusations flying like broomsticks. Goody Osborne this, Goody Proctor that. Once you get a civic body throwing a tantrum like that it’s hard to back off. You have to save face. The other towns will know you’re weak. Towns in New England are gossipy things, and they’ll shun a village for a bad harvest and an ugly memorial bell, let alone business like Salem got herself messed up in. No one knew what to say about Salem. It wasn’t decent, I can tell you that. It would be at least a century before the place was invited to the fashionable commonwealths again.

And we all learned a lesson about discretion.

The girls line up in the spring, right after the last frost. Down by the lovely old clock tower in the town square. Beautiful Wiscasset girls, all in purple. They have their dresses made down in Portland, every shade of violet: indigo, midnight, grape, lilac, amaranthine, mulberry, wine, ink, lavender, heliotrope, plum. Some of them wear lovely amethyst and diamond earrings, pendants, rings, fascinators to set off the deeper shades of their hair: golden or fiery or black as the depths of a well. The local shoemaker does a brisk business in purple slingbacks. They’re all between the ages of sixteen and nineteen—the prime years of temptation. Sometimes the noon sun hits them just right and you’d think they were just made of light.

But they’re not, and that’s the trouble.