of every face every three seconds or so rippling
and producing in turn other feelings. Oh regarder,
if I call this one green bee mating with a dragonfly
in pain it will already be too late for both of us.
I am here with that one gone and now inside this one
I am right now naming feeling of having named
something already gone, and you just about to know
I saw gentle insects crawling in a line from a crack
in the corner of the base of the original White Castle
towards only they know what point in the darkness.
Screaming Skull
Near Geneva the Hadron Collider
lies underground. Almost
complete, whispers the giant
screaming skull. Your species
is obsessed with the search
for tiny links in the chain you do
not know leads to the collar
of an enormous dragon. You
have fallen completely in love
with metal thinking. You are in great
immaculate aluminum vats
that make the tiny workers
in their suits and helmets glint
a ferocious silver cooling
sections of the giant collider
and preparing to send pulses
of proton beams through it
in opposing directions. Detectors
will sort the microscopic
particles searching for the elusive
Higgs boson or strangelets.
For years beneath the sea I have
been dreaming of the proper time
to emerge and signal my ally the Sun
to rain fire down on all
your towers. Together we
with our retarded cousin the Moon
would watch your cities sink
into the boiling oceans. You search
for the grand unified theory
but will find only a tiny black hole
we will all be sucked into.
And now I will never have my revenge!
Ceasing to Be
The idea is simple. Lucretius wanted to rid
the world of death fear by writing
On the Nature of Things. He says we fear
death only believing the mind somehow
continues even after the skull that holds it
is broken and harmless vapor leaks out
into everything dissolving. It’s
true I fear my death, but I fear
the death of others more, because that’s
a death without death through which
I must live. Or I fear my death
for the death others will have to live through
without me. That and probably pain
are why people are afraid. Anyway a world
without death fear would be even more scary.
Not that it matters. Death and fear. One
hand of steel, one of gold. Even you
wouldn’t know which to cut off or reach
out for first, Lucretius, because it is always
very dark here in the future.
Sad News
We have some sad news this morning
from Mars. But I’m thinking about lions. Someone
said something salient and my head became
a light bulb full of power exactly
the shape of my head. Sinister thoughts
at the Xerox machine. A chat with a retired
torturer. Now the sharp blade. Apparently
some solar wind pushed a few specklets of actually
not red but grey Mars dust through the seal
into the vacuum where the very tiny oiled hydraulics
of the light from the distant future collector seized.
What was it my brother said to me once? Like
a vampire bat on a unicorn Change rides
every moment. Houston is full of dead elephants
and empty labs experimenting on silence, open any mouth
and out blows some hope in a binary data stream.
Poem for Jim Zorn
in the photograph you are holding a green helmet
and smiling directly into the future
but the straight and the square rarely advance
a Chinese poet working a minor bureaucratic post
a few miles north of the capital
wrote 1200 years ago
when they called the emperor The Immortal
I know you tried
a seahawk is not even a real bird
and somewhere it is still 1976
and I have just lofted
a football over the head of my very cold brother
who turns in his blue down coat
that used to belong to me
and runs with his arms stretched
out as far as he can
towards the pine trees
and I fear when he comes back
he will tell me something everyone knows
The Pavilion of Vague Blues
In the airport bar the lady singer’s
voice reminded him of a blue
praying mantis he had seen
in a painting riding on
the shoulder of a very young
knight into battle. She was
singing about how she felt
always full of emptiness. He could
almost physically grasp what
that meant. Then he did.
Then he knew he would never
be happier than when he was
living in that medium-sized
Midwestern city, writing stories
about the lives of the inhabitants
of its highest skyscraper.
He could see exactly what
it looked like then, shining upward
like an ancient lighthouse
in the snow. He saw a man
with a beer reading a book
called 8 Amazing Things You Do
Not Know. Now she was
looking at him, singing about flying
in wondering circles above your life.
On the placard it said she was
available for all events except funerals.
Her name was Lady McDust.
Fortune
I went last night to see a Chinese movie
with an old friend who seems to love
everything. Equanimity I can only
aspire towards like a leaf or a reflection
of a tower in a pond. The entire
movie took place inside a storm
of totally synthesized feelings. A father
and son leave the city on a desultory
journey out into the countryside
for the mystical purpose of dropping
a stone into a well. Periodically they are
assaulted for a time then joined
by monks who guard citadels presumably
filled with riches or ancient instructive texts.
Every time just as I started to like
a character he would be assassinated
right before my eyes by ninjas or meet
some other horrible unjustified fate.
One particularly mild Shaolin monk leaned
against a wall and his shoulder fell off
and his hair attacked his face. Fortune
said the subtitles is a giant dragon
with flowers in its antlers. A widow
in a white dress appeared in the father’s
dream then emerged into the actual
world and caressed the face of the child.
They walked off towards the well. The stone
glowed in a close-up. Decades passed.
Then the music suddenly stopped
and I found myself holding an empty
bag of popcorn I don’t remember eating.
Goodbye I
said to my friend but she
had already long ago gone off into the future
to feed her brand new digital snake
a couple of digital crickets.
Charmer
That man looks like a snake charmer
Rufus said, holding his beer. That
man has skills. Rufus works
with me at the university. Border
wars, rebellions, inspectors. Like
a 9th century T’ang Dynasty bureaucrat
Rufus had survived them all. He
told me about several attempts
on his life disguised as practical jokes
and birthday parties. The department
secretary it’s true does bare
her teeth when you come near
the Xerox machine like a beaver fearing
an enema. Years ago Rufus read
a book about Zeno of Citium and invented
a brilliant infallible system of relying
on divine intelligence to organize
university forms. No longer
did he try to shape circumstances
to his desires. The world is a blindly
running machine. Now he is ever
more slowly coasting towards
without reaching total stasis. His desk
is a medium sized wooden lake
on which float two staplers. I don’t
even remember where I was born.
I might be a replicant. How would
I know? The snake charmer was sitting
at the bar, holding a glass full
of ice and clear liquid, watching a game.
I had to admit he had the air
of someone wearing a turban.
Any skills he had were very well hidden.
This Little Game
When I’m washing my hands I think of a name
of someone I don’t know. Like Evangeline
or Rufus or BobBob. And I sing Happy Birthday
inserting that name at the proper time,
stopping only and turning off the water
when I reach the end of the song. This
little game ensures I am washing my hands
just long enough for the little soap particles
to bind to all the nasty dirt ones
and wash them down the drain.
Which makes me feel protected.
Like going to what we called “temple”
but actually was a church we shared
with some Ursulines, an order of Christians
dedicated to the education of girls and care
of the sick and otherwise needy. We
used it on Friday nights and Saturday days
and they on Sundays of course, sometimes
Saturday evenings all full of emptiness
troubles and peace and done with our final
service we saw them crossing the street
and moving like phantoms towards the building
already no longer ours. In the lobby
there was a giant baptismal font made of stone
and at Christmas little carvings of Jesus
on the cross hung up on every wall. None
of us cared and we thought ourselves
good and brave for sharing and also safe
from all true Christian soldiers. Never
with terrible swords made of virtue and light
shall they trouble us, they shall pass us by.
To a Predator
I woke up early and saw a fox.
It was leaping and dragging its glorious
red and white tail behind it across
the road. It held a grasshopper in its mouth,
which it dropped when it saw the small
carcass of a young javelina. Last night
I was woken by their hairless rooting through
a field of cactus in moonlight. They all
stood together, ears rotated forward into
the breeze, protecting the single mother
protecting a pair of young. Their
mustachioed labium superius oris i.e.
upper lip protects a gentle tusk
the color of greywater. I almost sympathize
with their corporate need to snuffle
and roam in packs until dawn returns them
to hollows they made in the ground.
But my sleep does not. Thus I shone
a very powerful flashlight into their midst
and watched them scramble across
the highway, dispersing. Thus I walked
out into this morning, wearing a shirt
the color of a dandelion, whistling
an uncertain tune about the mild unequal
life I would like to know better of a rich
acquaintance in the Mexican city of Guadalajara.
Global Warming
In old black and white documentaries
sometimes you can see
the young at a concert or demonstration
staring in a certain way as if
a giant golden banjo
is somewhere sparkling
just too far off to hear.
They really didn’t know there was a camera.
Cross legged on the lawn
they are patiently listening to speeches
or the folk singer hunched
over his little brown guitar.
They look as tired as the young today.
The calm manner in which their eyes
just like the camera rest
on certain things then move
to others shows they know
no amount of sunlight
will keep them from growing suddenly older.
I have seen the new five-dollar bills
with their huge pink hypertrophied numbers
in the lower right hand corner and feel
excited and betrayed.
Which things should never change?
The famous cherry trees
I grew up under
drop all their brand new buds
a little earlier each year.
Now it’s all over before the festival begins.
The young.
Maybe they’ll let us be in their dreams.
A Summer Rainstorm
Sometimes I am happy to be
here in this bright room
drifting through music made by others
looking down on the heads of the people passing
teaching each other that life is forgoing
I think everyone I can see is partially sad
because we will never be fully forgiven
this apartment building has seen so much moving through the city
well ordered troops
many proud careful mothers and fathers pushing carriages
many people holding hands or talking on their cell phones and crying
hundreds of girls each wearing a plastic tiara
carefully placed on her head by the mayor at the annual spring parade
this building with the ordinary green facade
no one will see as they wait for the storm to pass
their breath creating giant cloud forms
from my window I can see their heads
it makes me smile a little with love how much they look like moose in the zoo
how they stand very patiently close to one another
under the door of the sky
their memories gracefully blundering into the long cool forest
full of shadows
our life is the one we already have
The Painted Desert
Right now in the rest area it’s sunny and cold. Someone
is taking a picture of the vending machine. I have
never been sad for appropriate reasons. Never
have I sat in the wet grass looking not at dark sky
but blue paper someone had carefully taken
hours to punch out in a shape invisible
until the flashlight is turned on below. Earlier
when I said everything is a switch immediately
the interlocking gears in the self-hatred mechanism
began to grind. Part of me is always about to turn
in a direction I will never go. Trucks roar
filled with things people need. Sometimes I sound
to myself like a robot. Too many times as a teen
I stared onto the surface of a mysterious
solvable multifaceted cube. I can see you don’t need
me to stretch out my hand to point to dread
and its little button. The door swings open,
one entire miserable summer I should have been happy
flashes in the word molybdenum. I saw people
mining cinder from volcanoes. Cinder
is made into blocks lighter than cement to hold
the plywood shelves holding one or more
than one person’s books. To intermingle
is so difficult to extricate. Shells marine organisms
abandon dissolve into ooze. Found near waterfalls
it’s known as travertine. Goodbye, someday
I’ll invent the magic lantern, then music,
then whatever’s the opposite of the need
to control everything so it can be perfect for you.
For You in Full Bloom
In the park the giant gold head
of some expired tyrant
watches everyone
breathing and thinking
old mothers with their prams
solitary lovers
not realizing they are stretching
out their fingers and grasping the air
during the day the gold dome
of his head
grows unbearably hot
then during the night
cools when no one is in the garden
but the trees