All I's
"I am a small-eye poet."
--E. E. Cummings
A woman leaving Hank Stuever's reading at Elliott Bay Book Company last week said, "That was a blast. His eyes are huge. When he rolls his eyes it's such a big gesture."
Some hours later, a woman who wasn't at Stuever's reading boarded a bus on Capitol Hill and, after a terse exchange with the driver, made bug-eyes in exaggerated imitation of the driver as she made her way toward a seat in the back, where someone was reading.
Almost concurrently, at Broadway Grocery, the cashier handed a customer who had been at Stuever's reading a plastic bag of groceries and, in doing so, noticed that the bag was missing a handle on one side, so the cashier poked an eye through the bag with his finger where the opening should have been.
One night last week, a person walking through Capitol Hill after dark could have overheard someone in a moving car shout, "I think you're hot!" and then someone at a backyard gathering say, "See, I don't think it's a very large city," and then someone in a pleasant-looking house with all the windows open say, "You know, I was reading Howard Zinn."
On Sunday evening, a man at Rosebud Restaurant and Bar was staring at the woman next to him when a stranger came up and said to each of them, "Name your favorite book," and the man, who was wearing eyeglasses, said, "Exquisite Corpse," and the woman said, utterly confused, "Book?"
Then at the Twilight Exit, a white guy asked his African friend what he did last week, and the African said, "I got started on Ulysses again," and not long after that someone got up on the karaoke stage and started on "Stacy's Mom," whereupon one of the two bartenders said, "Hey man, it's your favorite song," and the other bartender, rolling his eyes, said, "I hate this fucking song."
Rebecca Brown, in a short essay called "Week" in the current issue of the local magazine Harness, writes: "Then you reach the end of it (December 31st) and in a second, a millisecond, in less time than it takes the ball to drop in New York City, than it takes for every drunken wet mouthed sloppy kissing lech to have his moment, it's over. Not just the moment you've all been waiting for... but also the previous year is over. Just like that. In the twinkling of an eye."
"Did you see the moon last night?" a computer programmer driving north from Pioneer Square at 2:00 a.m. on Saturday said (without making eye contact) to the person in his passenger seat, referring to the previous night's almost-full moon, which had hung over the city and its bookstores like the bright hard dot of an exclamation mark, or a lowercase i.
