"The Pluses
and the Minuses” is only one example,
though a favorite. And the extra t
in “Putrify Your Water,” or the missing e:
“Relive Your Stress.” As usual it isn’t
funny once it’s us and not some verbal
analogue: a single gene gone wrong
(or, more extreme, a single gone gene)
and it’s Amy Lazer’s very real
and fatal disorder. I remember stories
of her mother, every morning, rolling up
like yarn the gluey strings
that webbed her daughter’s lungs. And also
Kelso in the last stage of what AIDS did
underneath his raw-meat skin
(“a foreign lesionaire,” he said, the wit
a flicker of his earlier panache) until
there wasn’t Kelso-ness below
to feed on any longer. What I mean is
this: the small things that we need to love,
we need to love as if they were epic;
as if they held great portions of the oceans,
as the glaciers do. The small things
that we need to fear . . . let’s tremble
as if they were meteor collisions, even if
they fit on a microscope slide.
Well how’s that for didactic! But our days
are sick with error, and need
a dose of the prescriptive. “Pulses,”
by the way, is the right word in that title
of a medical text I quoted for you.
But who misread the penmanship
enough to misprint “Viruses”?
- Albert Goldbarth