3325. THE PERIODIC TABLE OF THE ELEMENTS

THE PERIODIC TABLE

OF THE ELEMENTS

('we drove 9 hours up to Planet Vermont')

Somehow ideas that work seem never

problematical. Mendelev himself arrayed a

certain world with a standing, scheming logic

we live with yet today. How smug are the

assumptions still in use to make this world's

array. Words scatter like gas from the conclusions.

There  -  in a stream where never maple water

stops flowing, this deep in old Vermont. Sitting there,

a man as well who talks with a voice like honey (I

can only call it that). And such a one is talking still.

His small wife listens, as the people pause. Blood

brothers, to the bone grafted, exchanging spittle

and harm and grime. In the hotel room, I heard

Helen on the radio and  -  with a Gideon's Bible

in his ancient hands, the man from the Bennington

Hotel  -  a huge, cranial skull depression where his

forehead should have been  -  stood standing,

quietly, on the third floor landing.