8918. CANNOT PING

CANNOT PING

Have deliberately gone awry.

Polish home at the basin bottom;

men in pork-pie hats, holding hands,

blessing hams. We are drinking this

gold liquid very late on a Saturday

night. The kitchens are still filled with

food, and all the people in this building

yet mill around. Feast of this or that.

St. Stephen, or Sylvester, or Stanislaus.

One of those inveterate foreigners who

another world go 'round. They bless the

food and then the booze and then the

klieg lights and then the cars outside and

then the clothing that people are wearing

and then intentions and hidden meanings,

and then mistakes in case of do-overs and

then the make-up and make-up, both kinds,

and the weddings and the divorces and the faint

explanations at the end of a stick and the children

to come and the mantelpiece relics from Sevastopol

and things Crimean and things Polish or not and

those twin brothers who died apart when they were

ruling that fair land and the caged birds and the flounder

fish and the eels and the waterways too. Everything,

everything including things that cannot ping.