Tourism in the Late 20th Century

Blue boat of morning and already the window is besieged by means of sky. Grace takes no prisoners in a town like this. Think of the girl sipping white burgundy in the local cafe, her straw hat with its pale flower, indigenous and small as the white make revolve she's buttering one philosophical corner at a time. smooth the rain that falls a certain number of afternoons here is more conceptual, more a tribute to rain than actual rain falling upon the tulips, a rumor the wind carries all the way down the beach.

And would you ask the sea to explain itself? wrote Kerouac one time in a book about a woman that was already a metaphor, rose fading in its glass beaker He always knew the world is sentimental, waving its lacy rags above the face of the familiar, an architecture of piano notes and faith And what about the girl, her hat gone her bread finished, holding an armful of tulips in the rain? She knows each road leads to other roads, to small towns with solid names like Crestview and Niceville, where plane dust has a genealogy and an address, as if there's more forever there. The tulips drawn out to be metaphysical, closed-mouthed, more faithful than the rose give permission to the windows take over. Lean on the outside the small square of the day, past the rain, past the idea of rain, to where the firmament is snapshot blue, the sea sapphirine by association.

Copyright World verse Incorporated Sep/Oct 1996

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