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Sunday at 1 is my time for study - one Carrie is instructor of a poetry group up at St Mark’s now I’ve dropped Vonne the life-writing instructor. At last Sunday’s class, one of the four women (men: two) said of my ‘Christmas Trees’ piece: It gives us plenty to see, but there’s not much that’s relational - trying to make out your partner there… I laughed, saying: when my wife hears this she’ll agree. Marilyn says to me: Don’t show me your poems about things, I want them to be relational. Went home and told this to Marilyn... So next morning with a great effort I began with a thing and… [best wishes from Max] The Globe for Marilyn Wandering Seattle idly on Pike - or is this Pine? - next to the tattoo shop and its welcome sign: No Pets. Must be 18 & Sober I pause with my dog outside the thrift store: for fifty cents - no more! - I should buy this globe, carry it home from the tea-trolley piled with sad remnants here, this out of date world - the late Soviet Union, colonial south-east Asia! - remember exotic French Indo-China? All colored nicely before it faded, which adds to its charm. My hand is longer, larger and lumpier than these mottled Himalayas. Tibet! hello and goodbye. How well does it turn on its metal poles? - this relic of twentieth-century earnestness, left-over curiosity - creakingly, rustily, precariously. Still, you feel your power - let the whole world spin! What stable base is it fixed to? Turtles all the way down? Sadly, no, a tin disc almost heavy enough to prevent disaster, not quite. World tilts, equator first, off and down - only I, quick-reflexed Atlas, clutch, clasp and lift it back to the trolley. Apocalypse not now. I see myself, loaded with it, puzzling the dog, entering our flat - Darling, look what we’ve brought home for you! a useful ornament. And hear her Not here, not now, not near me. Kitsch so bulky she fancies not one bit. I linger over my hemisphere, the South, relegated almost out of sight by the crowded busy North. Down under: Australia seems all desert, New Zealand two blobby islands - two towns, no harbors. In the scheme of things that’s all globe-makers could offer, back then. I can’t go home, wherever home was or is, unless it’s where she is for now in our tidy flat-earth flat all day today and some tomorrows.