Today the Refrigerators Hum

The price of milk matches the price at the pump. New ice cubes clunk in all the freezers. Yesterday a man got out of prison after serving three years for throwing his black worker in a lion cage to be eaten. A startling parody. A rise in measles, radiation for spinach, keeps the E-coli at bay, no need to worry about poop in the fields or the kitchens. Bucks to be made, a little zipper for the tummy, a few Rads for the soul. Plastic ducks from China dance in the ponds from San Francisco to Bennington.

Sirens wail, the limos drive candidates to froth and crowd management to the latest condo, the fervent backyard B B Qs, the fallow rooms, deer heads nailed to old wood, their glass eyes witness from coonskin cap to tipping one for Jesus. The band thumps in time to clanking tanks rolling the sands, the hills, along the rivers from Georgia, Palestine, Darfur and Pakistan, the latter, a perpetual shrug, cash passed under the table, fists around the oil pipes from Venezuela to Afghanistan.

Who will be the Vice of Whom? The obvious napkin and fork, the plate on the table in the house of discontent. the cluttered week soon to scatter and subside, the clap trap-the unwizardry of zigzag politics fading in quiz shows, crime repeats and soft porn until dawn. Then Saturday and the roads, the parking lots, the giant warehouses stuffed with must-have 10 pound packs of chicken wings, wide screen TVs, Martha Stewart bedding specials, millions of chemically ripened tomatoes, Georgia peaches from New Jersey, entire mountains of cell phone possibilities, eight pound Gorgonzolas, one a day Cialus for a daily crack at the prize, all on tap for a simple swipe of the card.

Whatever you want to be owned by. Slip on the Bible of your dreams, get real, the organ will play and for a few short minutes, perhaps America can fake attentiveness between the wafer and the wine, the signs, the blessings, perhaps a sacred universe, a digression to quieter times, of ruthless crucifixions, promises of renewal, awakening, sitting in the pews, restless.

Today fades in newsworthy bombs, the theft of America’s wallet, change chanted again and again with the working, unemployed Americans, reaching for something, somewhere beyond the weekend off, or the howling, drooling, speculating, electrically magnified news, wheedling, and gnawing at the remotes, the hearts, the very strings of the sweet harp we thought we heard in the clouds.