Industry

Solstice

Summer lies over the meadow crest
of the longest day --
generation, heat, and green --
and I wink back.



The keen eye knows
how to read the strata,
the intercalations of blood and black,
against which ghost weeds
like pilgrims
strain at their roots.



The unctuous dead
well and gush
through the least fissure.
They are our treasure,
our memento, boiling
in the noonday sun,



as in the heavy air
birdsong queers --

parasol parapluie

parasol parapluie

and rain snakes down from heaven
in disguise.



Stanzas, filaments --
wind through the grass field
weaves
an ocean, a breathing
beast or breast,



and there are births
that seem to fast
forward into a last
feast, you know the one,

you scan the linen length
and, as far as you can see,
is the presence of enemies.

Oh, Christ,
you mutter, Mother,
prayer and curse,



into the ear of the world,
waiting for the te
absolvo
that never comes.



Here, tiny as bedstraw --

entheo-

incarn -

and, for the sport of it,
the meadow's working celebrations

from which, Dear God, your Christ can't be deduced,
in which He wanders, nonetheless,



graceful

in the din and dust of the world's
original sin and original blessing,



graceful, in a loud boy,



graceful, in a burned-out boat,



graceful in the thing that clutches at my throat,
the that I am
and its unkind obverse,

once nausea,

now You, Dear Three-in-One.

I Have Desired To Go

I Would Prefer Not To

The big envelope from the Gigantatron Pharmaceutical Managing company was emblazoned with "May Contained Protected Health Information," a HIPAA-engendered bit of jargon that means "there's stuff about a patient inside," so, rather than chuck it unread in the circular file along with all the other medical marketing junk mail, I opened it.

It was packed full of papers. I scanned the the "Dear Doctor" boilerplate and, on page 2, found the patient and drug in question, "Mr X.," to whom, a few months ago, I had prescribed "prednisone 10mg," a standard treatment for asthma-gone-wild. I pulled him up in the EMR and reviewed the case, fretting inwardly about the pile of new Mr X's queued up in walk-in clutching their Gigantatron cards and their chests. I remembered Mr X. His doc, also in the EMR, had been treating him for a respiratory infection with an antibiotic Mercedesbenzafloxacin, and he had showed up in walk-in wheezing. Hence the prednisone. And a standard inhaler, which I shall call PuffGrand

I turned back to the massive offering from Gigatatron. They began by informing me there were two Gigantatron "preferred" inhalers , PuffGrand (GlaxoSmithKline) and PuffSupreme (AstraZeneca.) This puzzled me because, as I said, I had given a prescription to Mr X for his own, personal PuffGrand inhaler ! Gigantatron didn't seem to be acknowledging this. How could it not be aware ? Gigantatron knows all, after all. It knew about the (generic) prednisone ! If I had tried to prescribe PuffOther, not on their "preferred" list, I would have heard right at the point of Mr X. hitting the pharmacy and being asked for $350 in exchange for the right to breathe. So what was up ?

I read on. After the puzzling Dear Doctor boilerplate letter about Mr X, prednisone and "our 2 preferred inhalers" was a massive packet of glossy info about "PuffSupreme." Nothing about PuffGrand, no head-to-head studies comparing PuffGrand and PuffSupreme, just reams of glossy text about PuffSupreme. I was growing increasingly annoyed.

What was Gigantatron trying to tell me ? That some preferred drugs are more preferred than others ? Was it even aware that I had given Mr X. his prednisone with a side of PuffGrand and, on a second visit, I discovered that he'd done great ?

I turned back to the EMR and scrolled upward. Looks like Mr X had visited his PCP after his two visits to me. I read Dr. PCP's progress note. "Patient went to walk in and got antibiotics. I think he has a virus and antibiotics will not help."

WHAT ! WHAT !!! Wait a minute, Mr. Dr. PCP, if that's really your name, YOU, sir, are the one who prescribed Mercedesbenzafloxacin in the first place !!!!! I gave no freaking antibiotics ! I prescribed prednisone and PuffGrand and now I am being doggedd by the hellhounds of Gigantatron ! And you, sir, are vilifying ME in the medical record as an overprescriber of the ridiculously strong and expensive and unnecessary antibiotics that you, yourself prescribed ???

Now I had a double annoyance roiling me and, probably, even more patients queuing up.

I glanced back at the mailing. There was some

very small print

on the bottom of the first page that I had missed. I squinted at it.

All became clear.

Funding for this communication was provided by AstraZeneca LP -- the purveyors of of PuffSupreme, the "preferred" inhaler I did NOT prescribe to Mr. X..

I slumped in my chair. I had fallen for it. It was the oldest trick in the book. It was a drug ad dressed up in Protected Health Information clothing. It was a trojan horse, and the marketing armies were swarming, triumphant, all over me.

Fifty Million Tons

I've had a number stuck in my head for weeks.

Fifty million.

As in fifty million tons of pork consumed each year in China. For those of us who are vegans because we feel it is wrong to regard a sentient being as a commodity to produce, sell and consume, what does this represent ?

I'm not dumping on China. There are plenty of statistics to go around. Lets focus down to per capita, USA, 2005: 65 pounds of beef, 49 pounds of pork, 100 pounds of chicken, and 16 pounds apiece of turkey and fish, or 2/3 pound of flesh a day.

And let's take the long view. In 1950, according to another source, the per capita US meat consumption (chicken turkey veal lamb beef pork) was 144 pounds. In 2007 ? 222 pounds. Over that time, per capita chicken consumption skyrocketed from 21 pounds per annum to 87 pounds per annum. Beef went from 44 to 66 pounds a year, after peaking in 1975 at 85 pounds per year. Pork starts at 65 pounds per year in 1950 and, by 1990 levels off to 40-51 pounds a year.

And slaughter ? 98 million pigs, 34 million cattle. Nine billion chickens. Billion.

What is a vegan to do in face of this rising tide of meat ? In face of the carnivorous arguments ?

It tastes good.

Humankind has always eaten meat.

God permits it.

Well, "God," if you want to get scriptural, "permits" -- even orders --a lot of unsavory things. Like what ? Oh imperialistic genocide for example.

Nothing new under the sun.



I am glad the BCP Daily Office Lectionary is about to enter Ecclesiastes. I have been weary, lately, and I need to spend time with a voice of canonical weariness. In September I'll have finished the two year cycle of readings where I began it, just after the book of Job. Between the Preacher and the famously afflicted righteous man lies a vast swath of Old Testament law and history, Numbers, Joshua and Judges. As I said, I have been weary lately. Weary of the whole, unending, unchanging historical cavalcade of affliction: war, oppression, degradation. And weary of the fungible, unscrolling bolt of grief and absurdity that forms our collective imagery, from Iraq to Walmart to sweatshops to foreign aid workers sexually abusing children to the titillating and asinine discourse that passes for political discussion, to flag pins and mouthy preachers, to a cluster bomb ban unsigned by the nations most apt to clusterbomb.

And listen: Can you hear that ? It's the sound of people busily strip mining the Bible for passages that will justify and excuse every prejudice and appetite, from homophobia to mysogyny, from meat eating to the pursuit of wealth, from murder to war. In God's Name.

I close my eyes. I see a parade of smug faces, mouths working furiously, veins bulging above the clerical collars, eyes glazed with the marmoreal conviction of an absolutely finished faith.

I speak to them. They smile, as if saddened by my ignorance and apostasy. "Yes, but...." they reply. I am always wrong.

I whipsaw from the There is no one who does good, no, not one of Psalm 53 to the confession, we have denied your goodness in each other, in ourselves, and in the world you have created.

Fifty million tons of pork. I see it piled high as Babel, a meat cathedral putrifying in the desert sun.

Here, in its reeking shadow, we pray for daily bread. And Kingdom, even though the metaphor hurts our mouths.

A NOTE ON THE TYPE

The text of this book was set in Krafft-Ebing,*
a fin-de-siècle corruption of the roman typeface, Macula,
a typeface adapted by the Dutch type cutter Jakobius Bathybius
from Johannes Cantrip’s long-suppressed Immacula,
a beautiful roman face censored by Pope Sixtus IV in 1481
for its innumerabilibus peccatis,
including the secular canting of the e’s cross-stroke,
and the crassitudo diabolico of the S’s sinistral curve.

Cantrip’s matrices, rediscovered
in a root cellar in Middenmeer (1745),
prompted a radical rethinking of the serif
among the region’s younger typographers.
Jakobius Bathybius’ Macula represents
the apotheosis of the resultant typefaces.
Noted for its muscular brackets
and gracefully tapering ascenders,
it has been described as a “a typographical fusion
of the mundane and the divine.” (Caslon, 1766)

In 1881, Hieronymo Glyphe,
a Parisian typesetter’s apprentice,
while handsetting the text of Didier Consommé ‘s
712-page Histoire De Mes Cacoëthes in Nonpareil Macula,
after five days straight of neither food nor sleep
dreamed the typeface transmogrified
into a mummery of limbs, bellies and holes,
all carousing, hermaphrodisiacal, across the blanc-
mange of sense, a play upon a play, a semaphor.

Krafft-Ebing, a bastard fount of unsurpassed eloquence,
grafts rack and crux, crook and genuflex,
groin and crotch, to the lunulate curves
of rictus, opisthotonos and gravidity.
Its strokes and serifs self-flagellate
to an abecediary tarantelle, and meaning
escapes its fenestrations, exorcised.
It is type’s trump. Huzzah ! Ghaxt. Plygqi. Vlo.

(1999)