Where Are The Stars Pristine

Everyone's spending Christmas Eve adrift in the corporal skirmish, mixing up the darks with the lights, fending with elbows and dirty looks. Wet wool and down crowd the air. Where are the stars, pristine as great ideas? Behind clouds the heavens saturate with luminous dust, shuttles wearing halos of earthdirt, light pollution from jets fired to keep things on course. Boys rickrack a ball off floor and ceiling past the table tree bubbling with giveaway ornaments from Burger King and lights that manage an occasional lackadaisical flash. Showstoppers: everyone looks every time and keeps looking to make sure it happened. The double frontloaders are going like abstract TVs. And the program is important: all about the boggling sullied lives we'd like to hide. But this is no place to do so, where known and unknown perverts come to pirate underpants and the innocent clutch their Cheer and Shout. The rules are posted: only the toughest habiliments, the superego of raiment can take such agitation. And only the poor are invited to endure the sneezy powders and clean resentment. Imagine a museum installation— 200 hypnotic washers stuffed with somersaulting cloth. Critics could rise to the challenge, their statements settling like coats of gold and silver chain mail over each machine: "These Speed Queen pieces thrust ahead of art- for-art's sake to confront us with a realism of socio-political magnitude. The vortex-like movement of pattern, color, and texture infuses these works with an abundance of unconscious bliss. The soft forms circulate with vigor across the screens. The viewer is not privy to the cause of dirt though one is witness to the dirt's ablutions. The point is we are not impeccable." Everyone would be happy to know that! And so we're forced to scoop and pour a fine white empathy over the hairy flannels, snaggy nylons, the glass front that gives forth this light industry, the silly tree and jingles about blue and white Christmases, chestnuts, sleighbells, just as snow settles on every unsequestered thing: from blistered gum - ball machines, clumsy bumpers, crepuscular theaters with sticky floors, to ramshackle mansions choked with smiling china animals where light shakes itself out from TVs and old women frail as walking sticks sweep their stoops at eight a.m. Just as snow makes the less than impeccable classical, stroking the merely drab or passing, quickly or slowly, so we can count only on its leaving, teaching liquidity to what seems solid.