For Paul

The Explosion

On the day of the explosion
Shadows pointed towards the pithead:
In the sun the slagheap slept.

Down the lane came men in pitboots
Coughing oath-edged talk and pipe-smoke
Shouldering off the freshened silence.

One chased after rabbits; lost them;
Came back with a nest of lark's eggs;
Showed them; lodged them in the grasses.

So they passed in beards and moleskins
Fathers brothers nicknames laughter
Through the tall gates standing open.

At noon there came a tremor; cows
Stopped chewing for a second; sun
Scarfed as in a heat-haze dimmed.

The dead go on before us they
Are sitting in God's house in comfort
We shall see them face to face--

plain as lettering in the chapels
It was said and for a second
Wives saw men of the explosion

Larger than in life they managed--
Gold as on a coin or walking
Somehow from the sun towards them

One showing the eggs unbroken.

-- Philip Larkin

Here in Macondo

I took a two-day Word 2007 class at the Macondo Chamber of Commerce Thursday and Friday. Class, 15 middle-aged to old people, with say, 390 actual teeth among us. The most toothless was actually the savviest, and, of course, the least likely to be hired. So when villagecharm reports that NC is cutting Medicaid dental care for the poor, it is truly the knell of permanent joblessness and under-employment for the toothless.

The woman to my right had taken a computer class 20 years prevously and walked out when it ordered her to "cut and paste". "How the hell am I going to do that," she said, accusingly. Now she says she has a computer at home but it's not hooked up to the internet. I don't email , she says. She and the Tea Bagger in front of me started talking about how everything started to go downhill in the 60s, and computers are the devil's work they hoped would go away. As one lady was black and the other white, I kind of bugged out.

The teacher was of course Hispano -- it is the Hispano We-Are-Not-Wabs-We-Are-Castilians Chamber of Commerce, Hispano having an explicit meaning here in Macondo, including the Buena Vista Social Club acoustic guitar music on the website -- and very very good with his crew of maniacs.

There is a moment in life where you realize that you're not the prettiest girl in the room any more -- both bad news and good. There are, however places where you remain the prettiest and the smartest -- one is at the opera, and the other is in computer training classes at the Macondo Chamber of Commerce. It's a beautiful new colonial-style adobe building in the old Hispano part of town, with balconies, overlooking adobe bungalows overgrown with trumpet vines and palo fences, cats and pigeons flickering in and out of the shadows, and men in big white campesino cowboy hats. Proper office wear for the Macondo Chamber of Commerce women (as opposed to anglo offices such as the Vast Mammography Factory, where cargo capris, hiking sandals and tank tops are what the medical receptionists all wear to work) is a skirt, and stilettoes of the hardcore fuck-me variety, not just 6-inch tacones, but peep-toe, pompoms, red and with straps.

I had a leaden lunch of tamales and delicious curandera iced herb tea at the venerable Barelas Coffee House across the street -- I must avoid the tamales -- where a newborn baby was drinking formula (?!?) with three generations of mamis around the figured Formica table.

Came home to discover the mountain of what panjianlien calls "urbanite" had been removed, along with the junk juniper and Spanish broom bush two stories high which, according to Mr. B. cannot be trimmed back into a nice looking small bush. So all the concrete is out of the yard, most of the overgrowth. What remains of demo is the river rock, which made the place hideous and unwalkable and which, with the concrete, was killing the trees.

I am feeling very happy after a really stormy period.