Mine eyes have seen the glory of....

I have watched you crank the sun up in the morning, then drop it like a sandbag that raises the curtain as the house lights fade; I have seen you churn those waters up, then suck them back, or stop them with a freezing wind, monuments to their own motion, standing waves of ice, polar bears stranded without a radio, seals knocking their heads against the glass ceiling, trying to rise. I have seen you eat the scenery of a forest with a storm; raise a volcano in a vacant lot, hot lava swallowing the housing development; dry up the wetlands just when the long-legged heron was eyeing a fish; or, on the sunniest day – when the pastoral seems like a documentary – loose a swarm of locusts to devour the grain; set species against species, roll the dice, two stars collide: time’s assassin, I have grown tired of keeping your accounts, shaping a story from the chaos of your caprice, the endless invention of your unconcern; I tire of the argument, the contention, the attempt to make a plot out of quicksand and fog, to rouse the wind when becalmed, to comfort the dead with a song: ergo I request reassignment, a change of vocation, a more reasonable situation: perhaps as a maker of kites – something for the wind to take in passing, the sweet unravel of string, line’s pure invention – a part of speech, the monologist’s ersatz auditor, gone with a kite, back, into airy nothing, recalled: a local habitation, and a name. Eleanor Wilner