in celebration of the things we consume (365 Poems #44)

Hot actress: Katee Sackhoff

The Book of a Thousand Eyes [The Lost Pines Inn would be a good name for a motel]

 

by Lyn Hejinian

The Lost Pines Inn would be a good name for a motel, or No Sheep in the Meadow, The Lost Egos, The Downtown Country Inn, Mike and Ann's, Doug and Diane's, Bob and Joe's or Just Joe's Hotel, Warm Toes Hotel, Anything Goes Inn, The Come Inn, The Company Retreat, The Hermit's Den, La Cave, The Little House Hotel, The Reliquary, The Happy Family Inn, The Rooster's Coop, The Corky Floor, The Henhouse Hotel, The Egg-in-a-Nest, The Rooks Retreat, The Cooks Inn, The Beat A Retreat, and a music group could call itself Crested Loader, or 10-Second Crossing, or 9 Car Train, or Thumb on the Space Bar, or the Unlike Minimums, The Shepherds Without Sheep, Sheep Without Sleep, Two Feminines, Autism, The Twice Maniacs, The Genetics, The Nasty Uncles, Interfering Women, but streets get named typically after numbers or trees of they're given the names of prominent as well as lesser-known citizens or the names of great cities of the world or the great letters of the alphabet from A to Z but in celebration of the things we consume the names of products and objects should be given to some streets (Tagliatelle Lane, Glue Stick Street, iPod Alley) and to encourage pursuit of intellectual professions a city's central thoroughfare might be called Mathematics Avenue, Neurochemistry Street, Jurisprudence Boulevard, or Lit Crit Street while at the edge of town the thoroughways and by ways could commemorate abstractions and generalized conditions (as in Global Capital Street, Logic Throughway, Affluence Alley, Interruption Boulevard, Domination Interstate, Accumulation Highway) and another great name for a motel would be The Soporif's Inn, or The Archive, and Duke, High Spot, Drummer, Archimedes, Shadow, Ranger, and Gamelon might name some of the 220 horses at work under the hood of the blue 2003 220-horse power P.T. Cruiser that got me home by bedtime.

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The actual title of this series of posts is "365 Awesome Poems That Rhyme And Are Worth Reading," as part of the point of the series was to find poems that rhyme, because in my opinion poems that don't are not.  Poems, that is: they exist, but if they not rhyme they are not true poems.  They are horses to poetry's zebras.

This poem rhymes a bit, in the beginning, if you read it aloud, and I picked it on that basis even though rhyme and meter get sort of thrown out the door by the end, but I stuck it in here anyway because I liked it, for a couple of reasons:

First, I like to think up what would be good names for things, sometimes, especially bands, a habit I picked up even though I was never in a band, from reading Dave Barry's column way back when.

Second, I was driving home yesterday listening to the book Look Me In The Eyes and the book was saying how the author had moved to a place where all the city streets had the word "hill" in them, and I began thinking what might make good street names.  I decided it would be kind of neat to name a whole neighborhood's streets after science-y stuff, like "Quark Lane" and so on.

Then I saw this poem this morning, where the poet did me one better.  So I chose it and it's got enough rhymes in it to count.