insipid ruin

The granite island was never pristine, but it’s been sullied with the detritus of a shipwreck for too long… the floating crumbs of sesame seeds shed from bagels and flecks cast away by bread crusts are tiny, stubborn, and are still visible in the murk of grey and black…that is the least offensive garbage, except that they multiply overnight like swarms of shrimp, and all the scooping away is futile. The provisions are sad: two glass jars made in Italy, one with a pile of stiff tri-colored pasta, the other with a layer of brown rice that barely coats the bottom. Behind them floats a plastic doll the size of a palm, a pink strawberry girl with a square head of tofu; she was made in Japan. She stares with slanted eyebrows at the serpents, untangling themselves for a breath, snarling in and out of portals. Green, white, black, blue. Cannot be controlled.

There is a radio that survives… it tells the time, announces the news, soothes with music, annoys with silence. The navigation systems still blink with lights, some still – some fervent. A grass green bird perches on them – nature’s dippy effort to conquer silicon chips with feathers, a heartbeat. Most likely the bird will starve there if it doesn’t escape. We needed these machines, although not for survival… and now they take up more space than the food. They are not beautiful.

At first, the people nearby searched the wreckage… At night, the ghosts pilfer, unsatisfied. A set of keys, waterproof colored pens, a pack of gum, some newspapers that no longer belong to the day. All feel powerless to clear the scene, for lack of clarity on what is refuse and what should remain. Emerson sent Thoreau to find Margaret Fuller’s floating manuscripts; instead he found bones, and a button.* * *



Spring will decide. She has the vision, the impetus, the artful solution to bail out the landscape. Unfettered by tragedy, buoyed by possibility. That the ruin of a journey is waiting to be discovered as treasure by the next traveling fool…


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*From “A Button and a Few Bones” in Gail Sher’s One Continuous Mistake, published by Penguin Compass in Arkana, 1999.