Dinner Plans
You will cook a space needle.
You will cook the longest grain of rice.
The longest, most slender grain of rice
it will stretch around the world.
It will be the finest filament, it will shimmer.
It will loop and curl over the continents.
It will be a meridian.
People will walk up to it
and toss stones over it
and the stones they toss over it
will take on its sheen
and those stones will become very valuable
and we will have tossed the most stones
over our looping strand of rice
and so people will walk up to us
and begin tossing stones over us.
Say, for instance,
when we are pushing a shopping cart to our car,
a shopping cart that is
naturally full of bananas and crackers
and celery stalks jutting out the tops of bags
and the soft sides of grapefruit
squeezing out through the shopping cart’s bars,
it will be when we are doing ordinary things
that the air above us will be studded with precious minerals
doing their hopeful arcs from hand to hand,
which is to say that we will constantly
be in a kind of mineral shower;
a kind of regular and small meteor shower of mixed colors
will decorate the space around us
even when we pump gas
and this is, of course, because you will be so talented with rice,
and eventually we will wind the filament up
and coil it around all of our posts
and of course, during its journey,
our filament will have become encrusted
with all these minerals
and so all of our posts will be completely studded with minerals,
they will be unlike any posts
and you will be able to see them from space
and astronauts, when they are lonely
and eating their dried bananas and astronaut ice cream
will look longingly out their windows
at the gray space debris around them
and they will want to reach out and toss some debris
through the distance of the solar system
and some of the debris will reach us,
for instance, when we are lying in bed
watching television shows about aliens,
some small, gray piece of space debris
might filter through the curtains, like some kind of bird
and its feathers will become spectacular
just for its proximity to us
and so as time and space travel both continue and expand
we will become ever more surrounded by these birds.
So I hope you like birds. There will be a lot of them.
And they will lay very fine eggs
and so we will never run out of eggs.
Posted 01/13/10