The Thirteen Colonies

July 4th. Noisy, incandescent bouquets of explosive lithium salts (hollyhock red) and barium compounds (chrysanthemum green) bruise the sky, already bruised with toxic greenhouse gas emissions. Bombs bursting in air like liberty’s aneurysm. Paroxysms of public anxiety masquerading as celebration. The great national stupor. Eyeballs hammered with explosive percussions so loud you can’t see. Windows to the soul. Stiff breeze rattles the shutters closed. Take five. Rationality’s snooze. Good for the national psyche. Cudgeled brains soak up more patriotic music. Mallet for tenderizing the meat. Like Ariel, I drink the air before me and depart. Goodbye, anxiety, says America. Don’t bother to write. We never liked your cucumber vinaigrette. And the twee silk socks you wore under your tailored suits.

My name is anxiety. I fled your feast to lighten your festivities. Small thanks I get, or expect. I am designing a new Independence Day. My musket is propped beside the drafting table. But first I must assemble my thirteen colonies for review. Parade ground, march!  À nous la liberté!

From the moment explorers and navigators discovered a new world—me—I have been intent on colonizing this virgin continent (though I blush to say “virgin.”) The explorers and navigators published their findings in the poetic tomes and novels of my youth. But I have always been a careless reader. And the progress of colonization has been, I confess, painfully slow. But I intend to let it proceed under the strictest ecological principles. I approach the whole problem of colonization like a naturalist, not a planter. I embark on a study of the wilderness behind the curvature of my own cheekbone, where splashing rivulets of blood course through rugged channels of bone and cortex. Special emphasis will be directed to avian specimens of imagination and memory, lurking in the vegetation of time. All of it will be written up in a special calf-bound box set, available only by subscription. Reserve yours now.

There is a pool called the Eye of Time. A stone pitched into its center slides with a gulp down a long gullet of water and disappears into another world. Around it are ranged the thirteen cavities—I mean colonies. Here yeast cultures flourish in humid clefts of rock. One yields the wine of courage (really more like a seasonal artisanal beer). Another breeds the strong milk of retrospection. One sweats a fermented concoction of enlightened desperation and hope. Beads of icy sangfroid collect on a cold stone curtain of granite obscured by ferns. One cleft echoes with the laughter of knowledge.

Here fortitude, a master free-climber, wedges two chalky fingertips in a minute crack, on a sheer rock face thousands of meters below the spongy forest floor. In one dripping crevice a lone salamander bathes in royal perfume. In this chink, a visitor sniffs inevitability. In that one, top notes of demure sadness steeped in revery, disenchantment and remorse.

Pain luxuriates in another recess, with its children. This one reeks with the good old barley malt. A third gives off poisons of ratiocination. Finally, this one stinks like a female orifice.

These are the thirteen colonies in which I nurture cultures of freedom. Out of them flows the serpent of freedom. Divided by seven cervical and five thoracic vertebrae (the ones directly between the shoulder blades) like the tail of a rattlesnake, it coils like incense through the hole at the base of my skull to blossom like a fruit tree. Unite, or Die. Don’t Tread On Me. Burnished apples blaze like eyes in the dark.