First Law of Cartoon Physics
My dog dreams like a surrealist, but then, don’t we all? He’s all Danny Kaye, twitching paws, elbows flap-flipping, legs jitterbugging in the yelp-yellow mornings. I subscribe to Scientific American.
I need to understand why it is that when we succumb to physics, only some of us bleed and why Wile E. Coyote, like Esther Williams, always comes up for air. Why, when we listen to Vivaldi under water, in any season, we become un-baptised by the buzzing of bluebottles and broken chords. Why it is that we carry a medal of St. Brendan, patron saint of mariners, whales and oceanographers into sandstorms and badlands.
I need to grasp the names of those lost pastries dozing, sun-dappled in the windows of west-end bakeries - nun’s bellies, paradise cakes, angel’s chins - doppelgängers of antiquated gastronomical glee. I need to establish causality, that x before y and nothing by chance = I will comprehend the fact that Chuck Berry’s voice continues orbiting further and further past the heliopause aboard Voyager 1.
I need an explanation for why every day is fifteen million trees wailing at us to put down the axe. Why this poem is a doohickey- gadget-machine increasing the amount of force applied to the medial temporal lobe. And why a sad-eyed spotted lake in Osoyoos, Okanogan Valley waits ever so patiently for me at the end of every dream. I find no answers and cancel my subscription.
My mood turns all Buster Keaton. I know there must be a sound to love, I just can’t prove it. I hear the Soggy Bottom Boys singing I’m a man of constant sorrow. I look down and suddenly I am falling through grace.