Forget It

Forget it, she said.  There's no time for that extra trip to the buffet, for that extra-extra large carrot cake muffin with the cream-cheese frosting and the extra nugget of goo in the middle.  It just won't work to keep piling French-toast-and-meatball sandwiches into your belly, when we've got a series of suspicious death-by-anteater cases to solve, and we know the culprit's still out there, shaggily on the loose.

Forget it, said the giant anteater.  I've been good for the last two months, but that woman needs a hug.  C'mere honey!  That's right.  Come to Poppa.  Come to my fuzzy, fuzzy belly.    Come to the lumbering myth of me, my tiny snout and powerful arms with long, shiny claws.  The night's made for  you and me.

Forget it, said the curator.  Even if I AM pulling together a show of meditative artists, this is no morning for venturing out into April snow-nonsense.  I don't care.  My bed is warm, and you all can stick it.  There's an extra-extra carrot muffin cake with my name on it.

Forget it, said the snow.  It's not like I'm actually aching to come down on your 2" delphinium shoots, your crocuses and your rhubarb ​buds.  It's just I don't have any other place to go, and this is part of my long goodbye to you.  Enjoy!  The black flies are just behind me, and none of you have gotten around to putting away your snow shovels, have you?  I'll just settle here and there, refreezing the sewery ponds your dogs have been leaping into ever since the thaw.

Forget it, say the dogs.  We may be badass, but there's no way we're jumping in frozen sewer-water this morning.  We'd rather just roll on these frozen fox-turds over here.  Ahh!  That's good.  Would you like a giant fuzzy hug?

Forget it, say the delphiniums.  This weather is some bullshit.  We've put out the prettiest shoots we have, and then, bam!  Snow.  How're we supposed to produce six-foot trunks of sky-blue organs, when this snow is hugging us all to death?

Forget it, said the French-toast-and-meatball sandwich.  Anyone mad enough to eat this for breakfast is aching for the anteater's final embrace, and it's just too bad all the people shot all the anteaters for fear of being hugged to death.  As for me, I'll take a big musky hug over a gutbusting breakfast any day.

​Forget it, said the muffin.  I'm not even really a muffin anymore.  Ever since Panera Corporate Recipes Version 4.4.16, I'm a bastard donut cakenstein, and no one should come anywhere near me, except maybe that anteater everyone keeps talking about, and only then because that tiny anteating tube of hers won't know what to do with this awful goo they've squirted up inside me.

 Forget it, said the goo.  I was supposed to be snow.

Forget it, said my brakes.  It's April, and we're done with sudden stops on gooey snow.

Remember, I said, the body is where we all find home, no matter what's happening, in or out, near or far.

Remember said the giant anteater, I'll hug you if that's what you're really into, but my fuzzy belly's for ants and no more.  Let me live, so that your nocturnal need for love in the forest may have some shadowy focus, and so that my body can know what only it can know.

Remember, said the delphiniums, you have no idea how we began, and as for us, the mind of cycles is our mind.  This snow is no ending.

Remember, said the April snow, I'm to thank for half of Texas not moving up here.

Remember, said the meatballs and the French toast, the syrup, and the weird silicate carrot-colored butter: we were once pigs, chickens, cows, corn, trees, sun, shit, and grass.  How much of us do you really need, in order to feel embraced from within?

Remember, oh, remember!  Your forgetting is the birth of the world.

I am having trouble remembering who else is a character in this little story, and I refuse to go back and look.  The brakes?  The woman gathering wood in the forest?  Myself, from the dream last night, where I hugged the riverman who offered to give me an oral excuse from being married?  It was a sweet sideways embrace, looking out over the water we'd just crossed together.  It was a hug we knew would end in the death of no one.  He went back to Chicago, and I went back to being married.

Forget it!  The snow will keep falling for as long as it does, and the curator will sleep in her warm bed for as long as she can.  The central task of remembering, of re-membering the body, will continue to present itself in moment after moment.  

Remember me,
but Ah-ah-aaa
forget my fate.

So sings Dido, in Purcell's aria.   It's a silly thing to say, actually, and kind of the opposite of what would be useful.  Forget me, but Ah-ah-aaa remember my fate.  Remember: this kind of possessing and being possessed is nothing but an anteater fantasy.  Forget all that, and learn to be where you are.