100718 it’s not so much that i don’t want to do my morning session, it’s more just that i don’t want to be awake yet every time we open the door, we have to get a meteor count. soon as you open the door, the meteor shower starts up again. some of them come streaming into the house. i’m starting to think something’s up. it seems too much to just be a coincidence. but what could be causing it? a story was made of broken highway lines. back in the days before there were rules about what stories entailed. back becore aristotle or confucious or any of them guys; back in the days before anyone had risen up out of the mud of experience and started to catalog things. back when stories were told but nobody knew we were telling stories. back before there was a meteor count. back when meteors were just a felt presence. we gathered around the freshly fallen. we made noises that comforted each other. back when traveling meant one broken white highway line after another an endless procession of dashes, punctuating nothingness the constancy of motion. someone else driving. someone reliable. someone so trustworthy and constant that you literally can fall asleep and dream. you can be in a moving house that floats effortlessly through the night. the motion is so constant that it ceases to be motion. the motion becomes a hum that you feel in your bones. back before we tried too hard for le mot juste. back when stories were things we made up by walking through the woods just looking at the stories. we really didn’t have to try. i’m not sure you’re understanding this part. we went down to the river and held out our plates and the trout would just jump up onto the plates. We could either take them back to home and cook them up, or we could just eat them, standing right there in the clearing next to the bend in the river, greasy-muzzled and looking at each other in the naked starlight. as the meteors danced and splashed and hissed into the river uncounted. pull off here willya. i want to get a diet coke. then it’s back on the road. the place you stopped was probably a gas station with a convenience store. you will forget everything about it once you leave. and yet it will remain utterly familiar; the chain of gas stations across this wide country is a network of deja vu. A scatter pattern of outposts of generic memory. One broken line after another. There is the golden light. There is the red and white plastic. There is the motor oil, overpriced. There is the restroom, where you don’t want to touch anything. There is the soda dispenser, farting carbon dioxide into the back room. Sticky with syrup, its teats squirt out the stuff of shortsighted solutions to long term bad dreams. It’s like we squeezed the rainforest tight in our fists, added some dark magic chemicals, and this syrup dripped out, and because this is back in the days before analysis, we just gathered around, put up our wide eyed furry faces and started to suckle. Suckle at the syrup. There’s a train track in between this gas station and the on-ramp. Stop and wait for a train. One broken line after another, the cars thunder past uncounted. Each one has a story painted on its ribs. Reclining, stretching, they sail past your vision in a neverending blur. Blue, yellow, black, lurid faces, dreaming languages, insinuating names, proof of existence, twisted wonderment, great green heavy lidded eyes staring out across the countryside. it’s some form of asynchronous communication but it doesn’t mean anything. because this is back before things meant things. this is the day of the amber field. this is the night of the long slash of forest filling up the troughs between the great waves of rock. this is the high piercing midnight of climbing to the top of one of those rocks, and gazing down at the pubic fur of evergreen valleys. this is the timeless time, but we don’t know that yet because we don’t have time to compare it to. this is the day and the night. this is the crepuscular parenthesis between which the restless wander. this is the wide eyed owl. this is the hints and murmurs of distant lightning. this is the land before fiction. this is the reminder of death. it’s ok for death to be sad here. it’s ok for death to be scary here. we come together and make the noises and make the movements and touch each other skin to skin to make each other feel better. we huddle together as the sky turns into a tangle of exclamation marks. As the sky turns into a scribble of furious lines of electric rain. As the sky falls out of the sky and pounds down upon us. This is the place where yesterday we were a group and then we were a different group. How do you notify of a death when there is no counting? another meteor pierces the ground, steaming and hissing, cutting a scissors line through everything between the sky and the ground. death is defined by simple things like sadness and loss. there is no poetry when you live inside a poem. until one day there is. that day is the beginning of the end, but you don’t know it yet. it’s just something that happens. perhaps poetry was brought into our poem by one of the meteors. archaeologists and cosmologists and cosmetologists and taxi drivers and teachers and mailmen and dog groomers and physicists and geologists and iron workers and witch doctors will eventually debate about this, while drinking their sticky syrup. How did we get into this mess? Why do we have to work so hard to catch the trout now? But by then it will be too late. Because as soon as you notice that poetry has been born, you start to worry about it, and then allegory is born, and then you might as well go back to sleep. This is the time of the present time. Fully conscious, fully metacognitive, fully epistemologically verified and authorized. We have names for all the meteors now. We have to play games with ourselves to understand a story now. We know when we are telling stories and when we’re not. That’s the problem. When did all this start? When goddamed poetry crept in. We make blanket statements about poetry. “Poetry is...” we say, using our quotation marks, another invention wrought at the expense of the rainforest. The meteors don’t fall as much anymore. Sometimes they still do. My youngest daughter bumbles downstairs in her pajamas. What’s for breakfast? She opens the sliding door to the back patio. A meteor slices thru the backyard’s peaceful clouds like a sniper’s bullet. It slices through a tree branch, lighting it on fire, slams into the patio, bounces off a lawn chair, knocks over the grill, and morse-codes like an exhausted bouncy ball into the living room. It comes to rest by the fireplace like a cat. My daughter looks at it. I bite my tongue, resisting the powerful urge to tell her what it means.