January. Tall, spare, lone
turbine thrashing by
the abandoned interstate.
I play my game.
I await the next campaign.
How We Programmed the Apocalypse
Remember the sonic attack? Kind of like that.
Simulate the sounds of crickets, then decimate the crickets.
Sounds of a lover who can see in sixteen colors.
Sound of un-dread heretofore heard only by the dead.
Soon the people hear our sound. Each wants her own
private symphony. In a long queue they gradually accrue.
From a distance they seem to stretch continuous,
smoothly defined as a smile line. But up close?
One sees discontinuities. Up-raised fists, cupping palms.
Trading sundries. Shouldering past sisters and Sundays.
Casting around for ways to afford the sound.
Neighbor came to mean She Who Queued in My Vicinity.
As the queue shortened everyone could afford it.
Then everyone was plural: data. Everything
served and being served on metal servers.
It was never our intent to punctuate the sentences
of others. But now it’s late. Too late to unstate our
importance. And besides, the crickets died for this.
Pulses quicken, slipping across our screens.
We play the quieting machines. We pity the soon unseen.
A thought arrives. Ask forgiveness instead?
No. Everyone we pity dies. The rest rust in line.
Silent Auction
Look what we did to me
inside the sun
warm blue hue
my varnish cracking
ice sheets
gliding
nothing clings to me
see the trail of hair
wisping behind me
we have done this
I measure constant flux
+ it is not a transit
I meter constant albedo
+ it is not eclipse
nothing left when
we measure the amplitudes
what is left when
we circumscribe a wave
do I salt the sea
+ curl myself into it
or salt the sea
with stinging ants
if only I might bathe again
(when)
if only I might eat again
(when)
what I mean when
(when) I say matter is
I will give this to you
but you will give it back
Huttonian Theory of Earth
When the swallows haul up into sky
we would correct their color with digital
projection. We would look into the eye
of the projector. It will singe our retinas.
Make lace of them. We swoon
over the geometry of vision. It is
the geometry of a postcard plus a point.
Sleeping above rooftops I hear a truck
loading / unloading as the dawn still
takes requests. Its long low lowing
the desperate voice of granite pushing
metamorphic schist or the corporate
announcement that another uncomformity
has been amassed by the seabed.
But you know this. You finger the palmlines
of the seafloor. Tell me does evolution fail
to track independent truth or must we construct
finer tools, weightier estimations? Tell me—
On Styrofoam
Despite the fruitfly’s humming gusto often
I believe my waste hazardous, the jaundiced
hazard produced as I consume I cannot escape
the thought. I peel the sticking stigma off
the table to immure it in the Styrofoam cup
with traces still of rooibos. I hazard how
Styrofoam is borax and heat, expansion
blithe as a solid can be and
the thermal resistance of the hoof
of an ox. How thoroughly opposed
to flesh. Fathom the body in the Bar
where Ray Krone throws darts. Or Ray McIntire
when he makes a life raft for
the U.S. Coast Guard (Styrofoam is
after all ninety-nine percent air
enough to save a life). And
the first inklings of napalm in an adjacent
cell cavorting with plutonium triggers—
the Inventors Hall of Fame
inducts McIntire just four years
after Arizona inducts Krone into freedom
again, and as I write
Styrofoam insulation products
save billions in energy costs.
I too am only the expansion
of polymers when, as the apple
was once exuberant and whole,
I remember the time in the park
after the afternoon bell I charged
my teeth into my forearm and the force
hurtled me over myself and I knew new
power as trace as mark and said
mom look what sister did to me
Triple Witching
That’s not smog sitting on the lake
but smoke blown south from the fires
in Saskatchewan. The sky never asks
our opinion and yet we charge all manner
of missive through it, casual as the first
man (surely it was “man”) who cried
“This is mine” or the man who believed him.
I do not know whose smoke-curtain
this is, falling now to subdue,
pressing down over humming
flesh and interaction.
But I think my chest is a pocket of sky—
slow, heart. Speed, up and up.
Find. Cadence, frequency at which to
resist, enclosure. Oppose motion.
Suspend of ever-maddening.
Frenzy, maddening for want of
space, volatility implied by the threat of
expiration. The nothing-and-every-
thing-to-lose. As we turn down to sleep
the nocturnal crowds in bushes and
trees play from where we have paused.
A gnat traps himself in my left ear.
Options—drone, hum, buzz—expire.
War of the Currents
Telephone lines gallop outside.
They trace lines in palms. Surmise
these poles are our trees now. Palm after palm.
I’m lucky my
currents alternate, can be direct,
conform to National Electrical Safety
Code, conform the way George Fore-
man’s indoor/outdoor grill cools
on a countertop even as the power grid
ails. The grid is not cerebral.
In its circuitry is systematic. Does not
employ given-to-us structures. Deploys
those agreed-upon—lattice not
scale-free, lattice not small-
world, lattice not Erdös-Rényi-random—
& remember the blackout, remember
the solar flare, remember forgetting the complex
conduits, vast, unseen, busy with volts,
fragile. I can take single or split phase
supply streams. I can take the pastoral nodes
& urban junctions & make them less dependable.
A spatial network. Dependence
lends trouble to the interdependent.
with quick & unanticipated collapse, lapse
fragile as our overwhelmed, unwell trelliswork,
courses invisible. Split phase. Single phase.
Phase LOCK. Phase shift.
We are all in, all in to a
chieve our
economies of scale which achieve
the opposite of balance, traffic flows toward defeat—
what is economy but this train on which
a conductor wakes sleepers before the last stop,
cues the soprano, mutes the horn
without pausing to sense we all conduct well, well
enough that it is tough to engineer
a quick & anticipated death, death
by fibrillation by two thousand volts—
prophase, metaphase, anaphase: continues.
Phase LOCK. Phase out—
Last month a utility pole made news in Mariposa County.
Was charged with manslaughter after
lighting a wildfire. They called it
negligence. Call it revolt. Call it warning.
Generalized Method of Moments
Find moments like tiny razors.
Arrange into blades. Harvest them
as a leisure gardener. First yield, gloved
and methodical. Impose structure.
Inspect roots. Inspect stems for infection.
Or pluck them unhandily. Wings
off a fruitfly before the dreaded experiment.
But too often the moments find you.
Arrive in legislated chaos hurtled
By a chagrined wind, sandstorm
of needles— eddy of nettle-hairs . . .
How to order in the midst
the mist of the stinging field,
where memory is a rash in the tall
grass. Moments as hives. As slices
of indifference from which to estimate
some parameter of interest.
Blinking, eyelids too become blades.
The scrim of our error matrix
shudders with imprecision.
It shakes itself out. We forget.
Trial for the New Aubade
Day is brushing the brush off my back. No. Dawn is
tracing the margin of my being with unpleasant certainty.
Today is a truck? It shakes this structure in which we sleep.
Yes. That’s our new definition of dawn. No reason to share
dawns these days with strangers. And that something so arbitrary
as Sun played scheduler for so many centuries?—like Feudalism,
then Welfare State. Like secrets swelling in your absence.
In my new dawn you are barely a face. Inkblot eyes and mouth
a simple laceration. You know how easily you appear
in the corner of my vision to remind me where I am not,
in the corner of what I am not to remind myself of,
in the corner of my screen to furl, unfurl, tap, there, there’s
the slender magnet arresting the iron flecks of my data . . .
You will betray me. Leave me alone unsure of my own
periphery. My eyes, these tiny factories of forgiveness,
at what rate will my optic machinery depreciate—do I worry
about these decreasing returns to scale? The splat sound
of the shower water as I wring my hair in my new dawn. My day,
my data, how much of you do I lose with this dawn?
1st Trial for the New Aubade
Does the season match the birdsong,
did I hear the birdsong over the white noise machine,
who brought the white noise machine here,
was it the other, heaving next to me under a shroud,
for how many seasons has he/she been sleeping here
next to me, was there a logic of want to begin with
in a seaside town or a dark box rattling underground,
did he/she come through a revolving door like the termite
winding up through the drain of my sink basin,
was there a seasonal contract or perpetual exchange,
who installed this sour drain in my middle, is it time
to adjust my angles, for whom, whom today, tomorrow,
what is history cloaking, as burlap wraps around wet figs,
is there a logic of want, when will my season match my song.
2nd Trial for the New Aubade
There are hands on my body, how many.
Do they belong to the other, heaving.
These hands that want to touch me, my skin.
A burlap wrap around the roots. A transplanted tree.
I just remembered how these hands came in here.
Was it the last blond moon after the last
full day. I strayed beyond my sliding door
to switch off the terrace lamp. A figure spilled out
of shadow. As if night had waited all those
years. Time is indexed by tones of abandon.
Whose. On the terrace the logic of want
placed one by one its hands on my body.
It invited itself. Now day after day
my body tenses. The hands never flinch.
Fragments from the Imagined Epic: The Song of Have Blue
the hawk moth alone detects Lockheed’s
Nighthawk % Nighthawk’s faceted wings %
the energy that might announce his design
% Nighthawk is stealthy %
sister was afraid of darkness until godfather
% put her in boots and hat % rustled
in the leaves % “See better, night friend” %
“we too can steal, have inward-canted stabilizers
to countermeasure us manned demonstrators”
% on the waistline of a woman on sand in slack
desert night the hawk moth listens, shifts pin-
feet on her skin % skin stretched taut across pelvic
bones % translucent under the moon’s glow
% desert sways beneath the survivable
testbed % the woman lusts % sketches circles
in the sand with the bone that bisects the crest
of her pelvis % for Nighthawk % for Nighthawk
snuck into this night his up-swept wing to sigh %
sister has joined to fight him with him %
a more honest blue hue to say have blue
% say that her pelvis too is faceted
as his wings % sister sighs godfather-blue %
lusts for Nighthawk’s stolen maiden flight %
pelvis dips into sand % “you are more beautiful,”
whispers the hawk moth to Nighthawk %
“than anything I’ve let myself sing to”
The War Gone Wrong Room
More like the maximum-security playground on the street with all the riots.
More hedgefund-glass enclosures as if the riots were landscape,
with waterfall. More cross armed supervisors with first-aid kits
strapped onto ankles, next to pistols. More puzzling over numbers
like truth : how many watering cans . . . and truth : how long ’til the color
left her . . . and dare : take the scent of metal off take Alice’s hands off
the monkey bars . . . More like playgroundless—more tangling in nets
more ropes for nets to avoid the void below. More no-ground ground.
More forts, more bows, more sterns. More ornately decorated wheels
in the helm, please. More play to distract from lack of ground. More so
now that Alice is no more. Moreover, what of the supervisors?
More budget cuts. More for your dollar? More for the Dollar. More
exotic juice in the juiceboxes to trade with the bullies. More juice
to burn into smoke to soot up the ceiling fan. More keypads to catch
our twiddling thumbs. More tangling bodies in nets. More nets
filling with corpses. More decals for ships and chests. More juice
to bargain for, then burn. More fire blankets on our lungs. More
casual more indifference. Mere casualties. More Alice can you hear her?
More distant grows Alice. “More?” she moans, “it just keeps going.”
More war gone wrong. More wounds. More soon. More keep going
don’t stop no. More please no. More I can’t. More can’t breathe.
Objectivity as Blanket
Nor the police, hyenas on hearing five confessions, four false and
one too irresistible. Nor the mental health elephant, tusked by the state.
Nor the common sense stork twisting at the prosecutor’s feet. Nor the one
the one juror, uneasy facing eleven pale sheep that bay all day
all night for conviction. Nor the Governor, sir! Nor the common sense
stork, now in a knot. Nor the shots. Nor the clause, unbending. Nor
the clause, bending. Nor, seeing his fitful approach, did one turn back
to flip the window latch for the lifeform nearly breaking himself on glass.
Nor the next Governor. Nor the state—carriage horses trotting ever
steady blinders acute to the eye. Nor the widower how could he, puma
in pull-focus. Nor the defense counsel, not for lack of it. Nor the stork,
is she breathing? Is there such a thing as breathing here and does it mean—?
The polyester the royal blue the blanket on the bed of the mother of two.
Silent Auction
Please let me tell you what it is to make market. Paint the sky Purple-K. Hospital gown-blue. Parent’s house violet. Daub above the fiscal river I can see from my office oriel. Where I am writing now. Pretty pricing patterns contain damning dispatches. Think of the market as your rain. It is rain. High frequency rain and there is never a highest bidder. It is bullets. Blown to sky and deflected. High frequency bullets filling the sea with their shells. Pick this one. Pick high frequency. Pick no one.
You are in bed with your stun gun. We have a market failure. We prepare to cover the sky. In sodium bicarbonate. We already have empire. Let us make market. Here. Where. The other side is shadows. The huddling audience bids against us. Against time. Against blueprint. The negative space is time. It is not enough to press into vellum and displace natural dye. Vellum that came from ancient mammoth? The mammoth ate stellar gas. At noon time. Being too large noon for him is always. Be too large. Amortize the sun.