Despite repeated warnings
Catalpa trees converse in summer wind. Imagine that they whisper hurricane as leaves display their sequin sides and spin wildly around, portending violent rain. Our oldest instincts help enforce their hint: the street is empty as a lunar plain.
(Existence would rest lightly on the mind if every omen were as well-defined.) No slouch myself, I too retreat inside and watch a film about an alien spore that duplicates the human race, hiding in basements, slowly taking human form while people sleep (a kind of homicide that kills the soul), becoming you before you are yourself. Mother is not Mother.
Each loved one is an odd, familiar other.
The breaking clouds pour out a hard, white noise.
Above them, geosynchronous with earth, a necklace of steel satellites hangs poised in space. The images they send are worth a thousand inner jolts: small Moslem boys caressing automatic rifles, birth defects near toxic sites — a longer list would only seem to overstate my gist, and what good would more overstatement do? We've seen our share of wailing women comb through rubble for their sons, more than a few recorded tests of the latest doomsday bomb. If I'm no longer me, and you're not you, what can these signals mean to us, hearts numb from life lived second-hand, the dreams we keep as lovers growing monstrous as we sleep?
Fred Muratori
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