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“How Was Your Day?” by James Tate 🇺🇸 (8 Dec 19438 Jul 2015)
After a morning of miniature golf, everything everything seemed smaller. The cardplayers at the club?tiny. And what I wanted most was grandeur! So I checked into the Grand Hotel. Things were beginning to turn around. On an outing, I clambered up the tomb of some monstrous dictator?feeling really excellent now. I had tea with several obese bluestockings, a beer with an encyclopedist who himself resembled a mosque. Some days nothing arrives in its proper package, and I hate that. There are the flattened bodies, the diaphanous tabloids, the speckled sauces. All I can do is clutch the phone in my Thinkery, popping seedless grapes? poor seeds? and in an almost devotional or neutral voice I ask room service for an eagle sandwich? I am suddenly suffocating?cancel that? make that a knuckle sandwich, chopped lips? oh, hell?please connect me with the horticulture consultant standing this minute beneath the pyramids. I’m checking out, I’m going home to my little bungalow? actually, it’s the perfect size. I’m going to kneel down on the veranda and toss kisses at the setting sun. On the horizon, a pregnant woman blots out the sun. It’s okay, I tell myself, since she herself is crimson. Chopped hps, nodding off in a life of perpetual learning. Tranquility weaves its dim web around my imperfect rags.