one more from Matthea

Museum of the Middle

You're walking down the middle of the road when you start sinking.

Each white stripe gets successively softer, like strips of gum left out

in the sun.  You pass daffodils, coffins, and fossils until you're at the

earth's core.  The doorknob burns your hand but inside is the usual

cool, museum-ish hush.  A tapestry (2' x 48') charting the rise and fall

of the middle class is backlit so that the stitched line fluoresces like a

heartbeat on a monitor.  Most prized is a worm segment in the foyer,

a pink accordion mounted on black velvet and framed in gold. They

say a worm can live if you cut it in half but not if you extract its exact

middle.  In the next room and spilling into the one after that is the

ever-expanding gallery of middle-management--almost all white

men.  Today there are two special exhibits--to your left, Hermes

and Other Intermediaries; to your right, The Middle Distance: For-

gotten Focus. In each painting, the foreground and background have

been blacked out, leaving fragments of fields, flagstones, the occa-

sional midsized sheep.  But why are you here? Do your parents love

you exactly 5 % less than your brother and 5% more than the dog?

What museum-worthy mediocrity do the curators see in you?

from Modern Life

Reading Harvey's latest is a graphic experience. I'm learning how to lighten up. 

Not that she's funny haha. Rather that she's looser and kind of darkly playful 

in her associations and subject matter. Some of it is spookily goofy, 

if that makes sense.  Anyway, good reading.

dead line

Implications for Modern Life

The ham flowers have veins and are rimmed in rind, each petal a

little meat sunset. I deny all connections with the ham flowers, the

barge floating by loaded with lard, the white flagstones like platelets

in the blood-red road. I'll put the calves in coats so the ravens can't

gore them, bandage up the cut gate and when the wind rustles its

muscles, I'll gather the seeds and burn them.  But then I see a horse

lying on the side of the road and think You are sleeping, you are sleep-

ing, I will make you be sleeping.  But if I didn't make the ham flow-

ers, how can I make him get up? I made the ham flowers. Get up,

dear animal. Here is your pasture flecked with pink, your oily river,

your bleeding barn. Decide what to look at and how. If you lower

your lashes, the blood looks like mud. If you stay, I will find you

fresh hay.

Matthea Harvey