CHAPTER 1
Thicket
Men outside the mission look biblical,
barefoot on sidewalks,
blankets for raiment.
Elsewhere that city an expert perfects
the crackle of liquor over ice in digital audio,
mist a sizzle and hiss.
Someone believes invisible threads
extend through all matter. Someone's haunted
by objects in pawnshops: power tools,
wedding rings, guns. Another wonders
with what is a body synonymous,
of what is a thicket indicative.
The Night There
"In the night there are no guardian angels, but there is sleep."
Poor strategy combating insomnia
calculating hurdles a sleepwalking
Robert Desnos leaps around an oval.
Not "leaps" so much as swings one leg over,
straddles, then wiggles free from, slowly,
as if under water, jersey number less
number than punctuation mark or wiggling
scribble. As cinders crackle under slippers
he utters marvelous, improbable sentences,
eyelids maroon and hooded. Less "hooded"
than drooping as theater curtains or violet
cravat and smoking jacket I wish he wore
instead of striped pajamas in last known
photograph, Theresienstadt, 1945.
Fortune
Searching surgery mortality statistics
on phone in waiting room returns
Complete Concordance to Holy Scripture,
"I beheld, and, lo, there was no man,
and all the birds of the heavens were fled."
Thank whomever I will not return
to my old job baiting vermin traps,
hands damp in surgical gloves, thumbing
poisoned cubes of food all day into plastic
hollows then go home and drink beer
until I have to go and buy more. Workers
of the world, my brain knows better
but my heart's a communist, redistributing
wealth in perpetual revolution. No joke,
the specters. Hunger. Poverty.
Late-Era Capitalism, what next? Yes,
the long nineteenth century repressed
then killed everyone. Yes, all history
plague and conquest, tangle of skeletons,
every extremity of What We'll Do for Money.
Yes, life mostly tedium when not histrionic
as opera. For years I carried the fortune
in my wallet All of your troubles will soon
be over. Pixels across the Internet portray
anatomy and famous people's babies.
Names create in the mouth and brain
the pucker and taste of things, fish, pepper,
onion, lemon, but do not, alas, replenish.
And now, thank whomever, among the 99%
surviving this procedure, you and your 1,200
thread-count laugh in the 900 thread-count air.
Geographic Cure
Say this for the universe: at least it's merciless
everywhere equally. Likely we're alone
in longing for clouds to collaborate with wind
and spell, elaborate, wavery script, This Way
to the Grand As-Is, then leak and spill where needed.
Land on fire, for instance, and where people thirst.
Number among my umpteen flaws detached glibness.
Who would disagree that little's glitchless?
I withdraw my petition for Arbortrary Day,
when I thought we'd rise in multitudes to fell
trees at random and appease the minor deities
who've not yet provided a passable answer
to the general question "Why?" Some say water
clairvoyant and render as evidence telepathy
of electrical current. Some assert a name not
worth the breath to say it. Some allege a raspberry
one seed's most direct and eloquent expression.
Parable
Multiply quantity of sunlight through windows
by total any Friday "At least it's Friday"
guffawed in offices.
How often I think you alive again.
Which will not happen.
Even if the latest celebrity tyrant commanded it.
Then my feelings feel burlap, texture and color.
Then I call on the fabled
shoulder angel and demon to help me,
but nothing. Not even a shimmering.
If it pleases the court
let me submit as Exhibit A my memory
of friend I last saw on earth
walking one block ahead in mid-size American city.
I did not hail and detain him. And then he turned.
Weather stringent, almost winter,
light paltry as frayed string, I recall sleet
in my ears and on my neck's skin, then eyes stinging
with tinge of chemicals from drycleaner's doorway,
smell not quite ammonia, not quite vinegar.
Moreover
We might graph weeks of life
waiting at red lights, days weeping
and sneezing, hours believing
little real, decades asleep and sleepy.
Good theory, we're all God's dream.
If only arcana marginalia penetralia
answered all. A "florid raggedness"
may describe the text or time.
Now I'm going to stand here
and tell you silence imagines itself
darkness in wooden desk, confined
to drawer with lingering scent
of pencils, dust, licorice. Insert
your face and whiff. Doesn't the grain
of air resist description, slippery grit?
Don't bones endure, numerous, named,
and the visible from distance stay
luminous and vague? These neighborhoods,
chain link and rubble, missile shells, bodies,
how to keep seeing? Smallest cathedral
that country that city an actual skeleton
ornaments the altar. An apple on black
plate decomposes, sheds its shape.
Hopeful, that the brain remains
lit all night like franchise on interstate.
Yes, No, Sure
Consider the notion of a thrown voice
traveling implausible distances, 12,450 miles,
for instance, half the circumference of earth,
from the ventriloquist's trachea, larynx,
pharynx, tongue, and lips to your ears, elongated
sound waves hovering like comic thought
balloons or miasmic veils over people, pastures,
promontories, water. Difficult to unhinge
from the present, then the future, wreck
toward which we slant. Oh, irrevocable if-then,
I want to believe an intelligence guides us
like I believed as a child Venus flytraps
eat lizards, small monkeys, birds. Like whatever
the ventriloquist said, approaching incrementally,
sunlight, none, are untouchable and anyone's.
Spell
"Wring out the clothes! Wring in the dew!"
— Finnegans Wake
Acquire vessel clear and clean as unobstructed air.
Erlenmeyer flask or whisked and scoured jar.
Into this, with eyedropper through blank page strain:
• Scintilla Ganges
• One dose Thames
• Iota Amazon
• One dash Seine
• Glimmer Volga
• Soupçon Yangtze
• Suspicion Yukon, Skagit, Mississippi
• Syllable Limpopo, Maputo, Sanaga
Outdoors, toss the water into any wind at hand.
Trace a ripple in the page's grit.
Smear each eyelid with a pinch of silt.
Limits
In my heart, that decaying neighborhood,
there stands a tavern, apt and shifting
name in neon: Pour House, of course.
Worse days, Shots. Everyone's drunken
uncles watch for hours waiting for horses,
Fat Chance,No Such,Didn't Ask,
to splatter silks across a sloppy track
or men to beat each other. Elsewhere,
flamingos and volcanoes, avalanches
and lovers' trembling breaths. Here,
through glass brick windows and burglar
bars, sunlight swells and fades across
increasing calendars, same and changing
faces, floorboards threadbare beneath the rail.
What You Mean by "I"
Maybe you've consumed so many substances
you're more chemical reaction than flesh,
more concept than substance and now must shush
your brain, that bossy loudmouth, with your brain,
but it's lizard, limbic, and won't be hushed.
Maybe I'm in barroom bathroom inhaling
capsules' contents from toilet tank ceramic,
off-white on off-white, while through sepia
tint of charcoaled liquor imagining more earth
under the earth, recent and vintage skeletons,
hidden rivers, tunneling mammals, umpteen
insects biding time. Who longs more for the exotic
promises of childhood comics: X-ray specs,
monster-size monsters, for God to collapse
the windstorms then fold them small as maps?
You who one morning oversaw windowsill's
miniature snow drifts, arctic past breakfast? Me
who traveled states and fell in love with the visible
skin between boot top and skirt hem ample at evening
bluegrass concert in Austin, Texas, sunset palpable?
Who's most dumbstruck anything exists?
Subject
Which simpler: Smuggling
surveillance schematics
through time zones as tattoos
under eyelids, calculating
word count — just verbs —
over cell phones one hour
one city, Mumbai, maybe,
or counting beds across
the continents in which
laborers sleep in shifts?
Please explain your answer.
Surgery channels on basic cable
show glistening innards but not
restricted skin, so many dots per inch.
Are you for or against?
Perhaps we grant the actual
too much credit. Now
write the steps between tree
and ember, portrait, ash.
Thinglish the universe speaks
through objects in syntactical,
rebus-like relation. Suppose
a sentence of gutter debris says
all matter resided in space
smaller than a match head.
Arrange an infinite number of items
to keep it from doing so again.
Landscape with Disclaimers
Dear Antipodal Who-Are-You, Polar Coeval,
Maybe you're anachronistic hypochondriac
beset with longing for antique maladies:
Barber's Itch, The Vapors. Maybe you're proofreading
pamphlets, eyes weakening each word,
maybe envisioning pigment in petrified insect,
color of its final prehistoric meal — bird's blood?
grass sap? — intact. To reach you, oh, palindrome:
crust, mantle, outer core, inner core, and so on
backwards. Magical thinking, thinking
you physically opposite thus antithesis.
When bubbles cycloned clockwise one noon
in my refilled beer glass while live on television
my government invaded compounds, what
did you feel? Were you also like me drafting
catalog description for imaginary painting,
Landscape with Disclaimers, "For this blank space
picture grasses in which several winds contend"?
Is that how you squander days, so-and-so I'm lonely for?
Red Star Shells
Make an argument with the earth.
Walk through a doorway with one idea
inside your mind and another all around you.
Now argue it.
Question of money.
Unravel a bird's nest and disperse
its elements to their origins:
straw to what field, scrap of newsprint to that day's paper.
Such headlines, all languages, changing faces.
Find one torn page and align the words.
Imagine the flight path and how many days
to gather such bits: shirt thread, hair.
Whose head, yes?
What wages?
The joke goes Jesus
says, "Peter, I can see your house from here!"
Apparently
While my government authorized attacks
and across the planet more people than fathomable
suffered in ancient and latest ways,
I documented software procedures, repeatedly
mistyping "appears." In ordinary strip malls
somebody's children navigated drones over distant villages
with keystrokes and joysticks as I touched your legs and neck.
Sea levels rose and species disappeared.
I wondered what I would say to calm the panicked
young man who thought before he died
he wanted to get drunk first eight- or nine-thousand times.
I knew many hurt and did little.
I worried I'd stay no better than the worst I'd been.
The People
Say it plainly: the country breaks
my heart, its heartlessness, the ragged
all day in libraries, our suffering
industrial complex, killer drifting
motel to motel, mother in kitchen,
coffee cup of vodka, pills on counter,
blur and sheen on look of things.
All winter fields and poems
fill with snow, almost audibly.
Snow settles and sifts. In blanks
between buildings, shadows darken
drifts. Pointing to distance circled by birds,
"Over farther yonder" hollers father.
Children pelt each other as corporations
measure viewers' eyeballs' flick and jitter,
the better to sell so much during programming.
Where mice exist, they represent the stubborn,
burrowing inscriptions. Landscapes stun,
and vistas: the word created, the word equal.
There Arose a Smoke
Sooner in photographs of lens flare
discern strangers' faces and wager
dollars on their guessed names as walk
a distance to oust the powers. See
photographs of extinct animals as elegies
for swarms and herds, the collective
nouns they were named. While we slept
dew assembled, then steamed free
of leaves and grasses. Perhaps you
should call your journal of one-word
poems and stories Squander. Insofar
as our brains seem bundles of protocols
to render the immaterial physical, the physical
immaterial, we're constrained to hemispheres.
Suppose the body has inhabitants. Who claims
it facile to declare it vessel? Say the sun's
remorseless. Squint and blot it with a thumb.
Body a Lot of Territory
"I drank a jar of coffee, and then I took some of these."
— The Fall, "Totally Wired"
Deliver, dear Lord, please, pronto,
capsule I swallow so time goes
time-lapse, everything everything's
palimpsest, overlap, all-at-once
all at once, but please, please,
sometimes slo-mo (dear God, bullets,
shrapnel, us all agile) and any speed
calligraphy of bloodstreams stained glass,
as delicate, valuable. You most resemble you
when I have powers, when I muddle
house numbers, scramble place names
to fool invaders, when I cobble
planet's landmass from alleyway's
archipelago of particles of bottles.
When I have powers, I levitate, I land
on successive specks unmapped on any map.
