A seagull rises in a white flurry from the blacktop with a series of heartrending shrieks, a vocabulary very few of us understand, such a waste of wisdom. It’s why Rimbaud, for all his poetic genius, sighed in his lover Paul Verlaine’s ear that sometimes he just wanted to be a beggar in Africa. And yet ballsy acts of creation as destruction do occur. After a day of drinking wine, for instance, I view things through a kind of reddish mist. “Stop the car!” my passenger screams. “Let me out!” I push the accelerator all the way to the floor.



Howie Good is the author most recently of Gunmetal Sky (Thirty West Publishing).