How I Got the Job
The first thing I had to do was understand the process
Memory is a trail of bread crumbs Wine bottles banging around in the bin, when I got here and asked about the job the man said it’s about eating and shitting mostly.
He pointed toward a feedlot on one side of the road and then to a farm on the other side of the road and said, you’ve got to process all this meat and greens and grain before you’re dead so you better get started.
That’s what he said.
Sometimes I read poetry, and it has roots as well as wings. It aspires toward that moment of aesthetic arrest, where the opposites are united. I recall a native woodcut depicting a bird which has dived down to catch a fish. It has the fish by the tail and the fish has simultaneously grabbed the bird by the tail, so they are in a struggle. The fish can’t drag the bird down into the water and the bird can’t drag the fish out of the water. There is a part of me that is like the bird and another part that is like the fish. Neither can win the struggle and survive the victory. They are different systems which depend on each other. And what the bird and the fish have in common is that they process organic materials in an ecosystem. That’s the job. Food comes first. Everything else follows on.
