bob perelman

a narrative experiment:

speeches to a city no larger than the reach of a single voice

One says: My method involves waking up every morning and slamming the fridge door after pulling out the pb & j for breakfast. The rain outside is causing my impervious bucket to overflow in frustration at the gloom in a very real way. I miss the ocean, the feeling that descends on my soul to enter a particular wave, in a particular place. And sometimes I bring my camera JD, adjust it so that the aperture admits exactly enough water to fill the interior, to paint the sensor with light. I can see this bucket as sentence, my frustration as words on a page, with the handle, handle as readership. I no longer want to be chained to the benches of the galley, stuck in the Phillies dugout as hope rises once again tonight only to be possibly crushed by the indomitable beasts that are the Yankees. By my earlier terminological conquests, I have noted your terminological inexactitudes - actually, I am no Churchill and you are just straight up lying. Of the formerly merely wet ocean I am soaked, now charted, drawn & quartered.

The other says: how are you always managing? How are you always getting by? I have no method, I say. I wander alone, I merely undress in the powerful moonlight. Surely this is an act of delighting the wretched few, with my only audience as the birds who cover their heads with wings in the night, eyes clenched shut waiting for daybreak. As they fall from the branches sometimes they are above the water; they fall and plunge in and drown each time.