Eggs: Omelette au fromage du Holiday Inn Express avec des tranches de bacon.
Song: “Palmcorder Yajna” by the Mountain Goats
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Poem: from The Book of Questions by Pablo Neruda (I-II)
I.
Why don’t the immense airplanes
fly around with their children?
Which yellow bird
fills its nest with lemons?
Why don’t they train helicopters
to suck honey from the sunlight?
Where did the full moon leave
its sack of flour tonight?
II.
Tell me, is the rose naked
or is that her only dress?
Why do trees conceal
the splendor of their roots?
Who hears the regrets
of the thieving automobile?
Is there anything in the world sadder
than a train standing in the rain?
Translated by William O’Daly. Copper Canyon Press. 1974, 2001.
Notes: The fine folks at Holiday Inn Express run a far finer establishment than the Travelodges John Darnielle sings about in “Palmcorder Yajna.” And I feel like it’s bad form to knock a complimentary breakfast. With those disclaimers out of the way, I will say these eggs were a little weird. I couldn’t figure out if a chef, like actually, made these, or whether a machine did. Sort of the way a possibility of AI now destabilizes the actuality of anything too beautiful. My guess is these are a chef’s work. If so, stars for precision. But there was also an automatic pancake machine on hand, so that complicates the analysis. And a surprising uniformity in size and fold among the few dozen of these beauties warming in the chafing dish. What are the morals here, the touchstones as to how to live, how to stay awake? Maybe we are closest to the strangeness of the real where it dissolves, where it is faked or approximated by formula, at places like the edge of sleep in the slurry between reality and dream or the mind of a tweaker like the world of “Palmcorder Yajna.” And/or maybe the beauty is, as in Neruda’s constraint, just asking the questions.
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