Michael Ives

Softening the Stone

It’s difficult to resurrect the delicious, transitory sadness of the motel, because we rarely leave the motel in the first place. It’s everywhere except for the place we think of as the actual motel. The only actual thing in what we consider the actual motel is the loneliness we feel when we’re there, so we actually leave the motel by staying in one from time to time. Sleeping in a motel for no apparent reason is like a tradition among family members of occasionally pretending they are not at all related. When the son arrives at his parents’ door for Thanksgiving, he introduces himself as if he had never met them before and, smiling, asks if he might have a bit of their time. The parents are always very cordial. They ask him in, offer him a drink, invite him to stay for dinner, introduce him to his sister and brother-in-law and niece, who hands him a picture she’s just finished drawing, which has his name written across the top of it. “Forgive her,” the mother will say, “she still doesn’t quite have the hang of it.” The niece’s apparent impertinence is another part of the tradition, as is the mother’s apology. Anything that happens counter to the tradition preserves the tradition, the way sleeping preserves wakefulness, the way one can – by grinding a stone into dust, then coating each particle of that dust with a fine glue and reassembling those dust particles into a single slightly larger mass – accomplish what is usually dismissed as “softening a stone.”

Food Court Rococo

Jerk a watercolor around behind the

doll call it the doll’s circumstance

but there remains a chancre quantum

dorking itself so we missed the

tryout again it’s a lullaby-on-

lullaby crime wave you want

I carve you an attitude out of

humming right along

sprays carbonated sepsis under

the marguerita tent we’re up

and running an ancient talk daddy oscillates

between two chair smashing youths

in rotarian banquet hall the “He just

rubbed against me!” the “Could I

really communicate with you here?”

yet asterisk in record book casts grave

doubt convinced it’s the beauty mark

that makes me so irresistable and

randy with middle management “qualms” have

raged since mid-adolescence much like

terraced orthogonals of dragonfly’s flight aren’t

movement rather the divining earth beneath

orients also knock toddly infant falling

over this-be-that walks into

simple pop-out “Threw it all

away” – type experience qua dry leaves

castle momently along faux promontories of

wind will suffice for meaning pendant

as a hangnail fly away don’t

fly away fly away ( ) ( )