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“Saturdays Are For Bathing Betsy” by James Tate 🇺🇸 (8 Dec 19438 Jul 2015)
I am thinking about Betsy almost all the time now. I am also thinking about the relationship between a man and his watch. I am amazed at how each sort of animal and plant manages to keep its kind alive. Shocking poultry. Maybe there’s a movie playing downtown about a dotty fat woman with a long knife who dismembers innocent ducks and chickens. But it is the reconstruction of the villa of the mysteries that is killing me. How each sort of animal and plant prevents itself from returning to dust just a little while longer while I transfer some assets to a region where there are no thinking creatures, just worshipping ones. They oscillate along like magicians, deranged seaweed fellows and their gals, a Nile landscape littered with Pygmies. I’m lolling on the banks. I am not just a bunch of white stuff inside my skull. No, there is this villa, and in the villa there is a bathing pool, and on Saturdays Betsy always visits. I am not the first rational man, but my tongue does resemble a transmitter. And, when wet, she is a triangle. And when she’s wet, time has a fluffiness about it, and that has me trotting about, loathing any locomotion not yoked to her own.