On our visit we stayed at the octagon house— and were sleepless in view of the eight-sided land. Uncombed grass webbed the sides of the angled veranda. And on one side of the eight-sided land the incandescent lanterns of the doll shops flickered on.
And we stretched out to sleep in the blue rosemaling houses of Uvdal, and the melon-colored houses of Forget-Me-Not, under the cool, peninsular hills beyond the spruces and glass-covered A-frames.
And we were stressed out and wakeful on Zoloft and Asendin in the atomic houses of Pripyat, and insomniac in the blue-stanchioned shadows of Shasta Dam—and through the blackberry vines that covered the round cement window grew dizzy watching distant water falling silently over the spillway. Some heaven-shining-august child seemed to be petting a deer that was grazing yellow grass beyond the hydroelectric building.
And we were somnambulists at sunset in Anchorage where German tourists had gathered around a gargantuan piece of jade, saying nothing, while it revolved there before them, cold as a fire clock steeped in withering rebukes.
And we dozed in the bean-pod houses in the fields under the mushroom umbrellas of Poisonville. Our nerves were stretched out on the grass like sea kelp or sea nerves that have washed up and been strung out to dry in the high seagrass. And we came to a boil in the teakettle houses, became bird people living off the grid, became rebels, bearcats, masters of inadvertency.
Will you then lie spent on the cool mushroom bed when you are down again by the mill-track and the fernery? Will you contemplate the stupid grapefruit, the tedious eggplant, the intellectual thorn? And will you wake up fresh and confused in a place you have been borne to for asylum like a chick just hatched from a fire-colored egg? And will you see the starships drifting over rain-colored mountains? The copper-streaked leaves that shine in the pattering rain?
"Parry, who had earned a position at Harvard at age 27, would in the intervening years completely revolutionize the study of Homer’s 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey,' showing that the epics had not been written, as had long been thought, but were oral—composed in the act of performance."
"The bus ride in the poem seems timeless in the way of an allegory or a parable, partly because travel is a metaphor we all recognize but also because the poem uses a perspective that is intermittently omniscient. The long opening sentence describes the bus from the outside as it travels toward the setting sun with its 'windshield flashing pink'—not as the passengers inside, or the lone traveler waiting some miles away, could have seen it."
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