Well if I’m in the wrong from when I was where I was when I was way back.

And what can one say now? The fir pines circle round and the leaders wear white. I cannot see their faces. It is dark. A certain certainty seeps into the political climate. The crack and see in the morning light that the old flake-barked mountain pine has been split down the center, long winding limbs drooping defeated, pencil-sized needles holding tight in tassle-clumps: hopeless, looks hopeless to me. That kind of pine always lives in the dry air in the blue sky when you are a young boy with springy white-soled sneakers walking up the criss-crossing dirt path to an easy summit, canteen and cowboy hat in tow–envious of a cousin’s Bowie knife in a black leather scabbard (with a rectangular pouch on top for the sharpening stone).

I’m sorry, but you can’t come in. I’m sorry but we can’t complain. The lower-middle-squeezes resent the hand-outs of the impoverished. The impoverished are afraid to work because if they do what squeak-by they get will be self-righteously wrenched from them. The cities have gates of stone and the enemies carry doomsday powder in their long pockets. We are so rich in this place, a deceased great Aunt’s giant green painting hangs over the yellow soft-leather couch in a living room where nothing matches anything else. The picture is a hundred swooping compartments drawn by random slashes through through the canvas (white scars on the arms of a Nordic warrior, some old Viking who finally got his). Then inside all the compartments, shades of green. Mason Profit sang country rock and made an album and wore the outfits and did the kicks forty years ago; now, turned into digital pinpricks held in a little flat silver-backed rectangle, they travel through wires and make cones shake, and “So today the evil in men is sparked in self-destruction. From the fires that … if we could only turn to loving. If we could only turn to loving. If we could only turn to loving. If we could only turn to loving. If we could only turn to loving. If we could only turn to loving.” A tiny boy runs laps around the downstair circle, his long blond hair flaxen mud-flapping behind. And his white sweatshirt is decorated in green dinosaurs, his pink pants–made apparently of fleece–are decorated with fiddles and other stringed instruments. He runs nimbly, just as his thin father previously bragged. Why is he walking on all fours now?