Others were building new cities in the east, where life is blue space, where so many beaches and low dry mountains are overhovered by vultures. I heard the cities growing loudly. They grew like the voices on their radios, and cars made noise between them. Forests of houses mingled with palms in the canyons, orange-roofed condos and hotels, everything owned, but green ran through it like revenge. Ivory-nippled mission phalli became erect on palm-starred hillsides, the palms bushy, grainy like phosphor from shooting stars. Houses built themselves with hammering rackets. Garage doors hummed shut. Lawn mowers ate my scream. The lizard crawled under a house and said: You can study something for years and have no conclusions, but that's not to say you've gotten nowhere. — He didn't hear his own voice.
The eagle said: This desert might look green if I fly high enough. — He didn't hear his own voice.
I saw a girl naked outside a house and said: You're too glowing to find meaning in, but I can find meaning around you. — I heard my own voice.
She said: I can't hear you until you kill the lizard under my house.
I caught the lizard and said: I'm going to kill you. — He was screaming but I couldn't hear him. I killed him, and the girl and I poisoned his body together. We threw him on the road and watched. The eagle came to eat him and I said: You're going to die. — The eagle couldn't hear me, and 1 knew that and laughed. The eagle rose with the lizard in his beak. Then he screamed and the whole world heard. He fell out of the sky.
The feeling that I had to become something left me then, in that house where she and I always lived naked together. I knew that I was something, and did not feel trapped. Yes, I became something more evil and more good. Now that it is over, I can say that I was happy.
Once we went outside to look for lizards, but found none. We comforted each other, saying: Here we'll always hear flies. We'll always hear wind blowing until our ears ache.
Snow geese ascended from pond and field like leaves returning to the trees. I could hear them crying like Indians. I could see their flickering shadows by the hundreds on the ground. That was in Iowa. The difference between Iowa and Nebraska was more arcane than the shading between silver and rust on a corncrib, but crossing back into Nebraska I saw ever fewer snow geese. Omaha was not the chalice. Outside the city, among the grasses, tawny, red and brown, fields of barley watched the bluffs on the Iowa side, those steep bluffs which commemorated themselves with trees. Pale light, chilly and dusty over the plains, weakened as it crossed the river. Maybe that was why there were no snow geese anymore. Naturally I discovered birdbaths in the backyards (starlings by the dozen), houses window-eyed and door-mouthed like Chalcolithic ossuaries. One house even owned a picture of a snow goose on the wall. That house would have denied that it was jealous or that it worshipped icons. I never saw anyone stop to gaze at the picture, which does not mean that it was without influence. While its situation was not lethal, however, that same pale light declined even further en route to the living room, where there were power tool ads on the TV and blonde cheerleaders yelled prettily.
Like a chicken on a June bug, said the TV. Six-thirty to go in the third. Looks like a
A cheerleader shot her arm up and did a miniskirted somersault, momentarily displaying something like the underside of a mushroom. She was from Nebraska.
That pass went right through Nebraska, said the TV. Nebraska's gettin' blown away thirty-five to ten. They've beaten the stuffing out of Nebraska. And the fullback today — a hundred seventy-seven yards. Let those guys go back to Lincoln. Let's not rub it in.
