Pawn Slip
How hard to price a loan. How simple to tell a story—
eke out a life in sentences. Themes, motifs, old mares
in dreams—but a day here is like a day no where. How
heat here rises, is also white. Hundred thirty degrees
up there, hundred seventy-five, hundred ninety-two.
Wardens worry about diabetes type II, hepatitis,
innocence, all factors which increase incidence of
heat-related illness. What is earthed in the prison limits?
Four million pounds of vegetables. Generous lodgings
for a few thousand brood cows whose young have
futures more explicitly traded. A match for the signature
on a pawn slip. A travel clock a silver ring a pocket
watch. Possession is a pledge and a pledge is proof of
what might have been but probably wasn’t.
Which is the wind that nuzzles the wall and enters
the chamber. A jeweler is an investor long on metals.
Possession is also a position. Carbon paper prostrate
against a paper slip. A travel clock a silver ring a pocket
watch. Possession is a pledge and a pledge is proof
of what might have been but probably wasn’t.
Which is a story. Stories do not heed the danger
in counterfactuals nor recognize their brokering value.
The state’s compensation sums to eleven thousand per year,
but if he didn’t prove the value of the collateral
they’d destroy it.
The List
at the Heart Institute
Who lords this list anyway. Whose lists is
the lord of this list on. Eighty days of next
on the list after a lifetime of lists. Of
strip-mined tar sands + petrified dunes.
Creasing the terrain of your forehead.
Behind which blinking synapses wait.
Restless geothermal features. The city also
waits. Heaving + short of breath, strapped in
by busy blood-bridges. Red taillights mirror blue
headlights. Color-coded weight cresting toward
some walled-off core. Machine that gives
+ receives. The city (your body) is full of division.
Welcomes metal + flesh. Vestigial appendages.
Futuristic ordnance. The hungry + fed mingle
in aortic alleys. The well + unwell mosh in your
rib cage. Rib cage as runaway truck ramp. As layby.
New home to active-duty batteries extracted from
the broken flashlight. Carrier for ammo + gun
from the just-dead soldier. Rewired
stand-in for the melting circuit on the fuse box.
Snug cavern for the exiled apostle—
would we take to it as we took to your son
would you take to it as you took to your wife
would it take after you like your son takes
your hand now, fingers contorted around
your thumb like veins dodging behind
the vena cava, as the nurse announces the news.
Pulsing from a heap of crackling synapses
the small bivalve machine you are waiting for
unpledges its allegiance to another body veering
off the curve of homeostatic indifference. The body
skids into a plane of infinitesimal mirrors. This still-
splintering stranger is our gift no more lists—
we will take to it as we took to your son
you will take to it as you took to your wife
will it take after you like the other father
whose son is not tugging the gauze of your wife’s
moss-green dress as she lifts him onto your hospital bed.
The other father whose son’s body the slow moss
arranges to cover. Body in surrender. To surrender
is to empty oneself of allegiance. So that all sums
are zero-sum. So that the moss may take its place.
Proxy Means
a test. In a morning
blue suit the Census Taker
drops his credentials
and picks them up
by a lanyard
gingered in the red dust
between his shiny black
shoes.
The eyes in the village
hide. The glinting wink
of the sun is in
the Census Taker’s shoes.
The laminated Census
Taker marches to procure
evidence. Evidence of
need. Evidence of
mistake. This Census
Taker tells them
What they need
to mean and promises
protection. Proxy means
need. The Census Taker
enumerates proxies for
means. What stove,
what kind of stove.
How much kerosene.
Take your identification
card. Take care.
Do they really make TVs
so big. How much kerosene
per month. How many deaths
occurred in your empty
cupboard. Don’t look
at the shoe. Who
after all is living.
Here.
Division Day
I.
Perhaps a detailed appendix will do.
On the measurement of birthweight
in this environment. Triangulate
the measure across facility records. What
is record, I ask you. Neonatal
weight loss is known to be quite severe.
Who did not lose 10% (of something)
within 24–48 hours of being born? Is
there reason to trust maternal recall
in this setting. Given the centrality
of this measure please test there is no
clustering—around round numbers—
that the number of deaths accords roughly
with regional averages—that the data
satisfy Benford’s Law, that they could
not have been invented in the bedlam
of birth, of being born. And to record?
Why the forensic attitude is a question
I’ve learned to no longer ask. Here, a
new year, we are on a rural health mission.
We have helical insignia on our lapels.
We have a census; we have maps, we have
museum. These institutions code what we
owe only incompletely. There may be pockets
of space that destroy the information falling
into them. Those would form evidence
of a similar kind. Evidence of a similar
paradox, a paradox of information.
II.
I am trigger happy as the horizon
of a black hole. Today I am a fantastically small
coefficient. Yesterday I was helical as hellfire.
Always I feel at home in acid rain, it burrows
into pores to locate the core of me, impurity
joining the spine with all its familial plasmic
fluids. One rainy day, you will find me
naked but for the black shroud of my own
ambition, folded in a geometry you have
seen before. As that night, remember when?
Coming home I couldn’t in my compromise
stand up to gravity stepping out of the taxi,
fell, held onto the grate of the sewage drain
like a handle to wring out my neck and
look up at you. This is how I will remember
you you said and you did not mean to say
something hurtful. We are full of saying,
coding rhymes, one dog-tag dropping
into a bin of them, after the division
enters the system, entered by whom, by
UNIQ_ARMY_ID // DOB // HOME-
TOWN // YRS_SERVED // by near-tragic
longing for uncompromised completeness.
When you find me in that naked geometry
of compromise I will tell you I never lied
to you, I will tell you I cannot to you or
in general lie, tell you I cannot even if
I wanted to lie about all that I have forgotten.
III.
Division is a form of forgetting.
You know Photograph 51 that breathy
out-of-focus evidence, discovery
of the geometry of information.
See the scatter diffracted the strands
antiparallel the curvature the crucial
crystallographic patterns of restriction
restricting parameters—our iron-clad
cardinality is bound up in this hellfire
of helices. As I struggle to zip my skirt
arms contorted, zipper behind me,
light patterns inching across my wall,
I am Rosalind Franklin who in
the same motion discovered a bulge, her
skirt would not zip, friends asked if she
could be pregnant. In a way she was—
raped by x-rays, pregnant and bulging
with division. Uterus absorbing
the shock of discovery not as a martyr
but as a fantastically small coefficient.
How many times such attacks have
been leveled against me. You think your
self so self-contained. Abstemious with
respect to influence. As if to record
is to be neutral. When my colleague asks
how are you doing today what I want to say is
what Franklin was known to say often:
I am good, though female.
IV.
Division occurs when we exit with or
without intention one ruthless enclosure
for another. As when I exit your kitchen
every Sunday after you have painted
for several hours a portrait of me reading
the same page over and over I leave my best
blouse on the coatrack between sittings—
black silk. Thick knuckle-sized knots
for buttons. Is it too warm in here, what tone.
Your stacks of inverted-color photographs
of travels, of ephemera, photographs taken
by one camera through the viewfinder
of another. That’s Prussian blue below your
lower lip. If a machine were to photo-shoot
division day it would also have two lenses
in inexact relation to one another. I have
learned to thrive on these inexact relations
stemming from my own vexed dualism,
from my understanding that the number
attached to me at birth was all too trust-
worthy, from my acknowledgment that
division occurs on day one for too many,
from my desire to be washed on that day
divine day of divisive resolution in acid
rain, misguided forensics, UNIQ_ID //
DOB // HOMETOWN, I am
a fantastically small coefficient but not
yet small enough, let me be self let me
be finally fantastically alone.
V.
As when the father opens the door
for the prophet drinks the wine at the empty
seat and closes the door again.
The eyes of the family open again.
Measurement, outcome,
we have museum. You there. You
are fidgeting in your seat, burn most
of your daily caloric intake this way,
shuffling your proud joints past
each other. I know, you would dive
out of your own lithe already-godlike
body to be that prophet, harbinger
of never-forgetting, for being him
you might justify your bearish but
inevitable bearing on geometry,
on the hellish helix of history—
shift, slide, rise, tilt, roll, twist—
on the field equations that describe
a tender invitation, the elegant
curve of the neck of a black hole.
You remember all the details so that
you will not become one—shear,
stretch, buckle, stagger, pitch, tip,
propeller—when will you give up
this self-image, self-as-singular, self-
as-self, same, separate, singularity?
VI.
I woke alone in a hotel, where?
Perhaps where finally is meaningless.
Why was I not afraid. I am always
afraid with you. Yesterday I was told
black holes are not as black. Not as I am
afraid. With you the sun is fragile
as the constant. Speed of light.
Yesterday I was told information
can escape, can hold shape on exit,
the sun also a shape inside eyelids.
The morning in the hotel, woke.
To evidence. Pewter chargers
on linen, smoked fish. Morning
in the hotel. Woke to poached eggs—
pewter chargers smoked fish wedge
of lemon—there was someone else
here. Imagine the coefficient. Still,
life. Bring me a scale. There was
someone else here. Still let me be
coefficient. Fantastically small.
There is someone else here.
Fragments from the Imagined Epic: The Island of Stone Money
ONE
I exchanged a small short-handled axe for a good white rai, fifty centimeters in diameter.
I
need an
axe
or
something
to axe
my
weeds I
need
TWO
For another rai, a little larger, I gave a fifty-pound bag of rice.
a house. Whose
house. That house.
The one with copra
and rice inside.
One to grow out
of. Step out. To hoist
on my shoulders and
throw at the men
in pants. What do
we have that they need.
We have stone. We have
strong straight backs.
THREE
I was told that a well-finished rai, about four feet
in diameter, is the price usually paid either to
the parents or to the headman of the village as a
compensation of the theft of a mispil [woman].
In pants is all he is today. And yesterday. And envious.
He is envious of the net of interlocking hands that leaves us alone.
We can be left alone. The net an inverted parachute conveys and bears our
unswerving value. He is jealous of our system of value. He and his kamerads
are colorless prisms protruding from the earth, ruts in earth eczemic as the
Spanish suzerains before them. As the Spanish before them
they strip-mine the fissures of our seashells. Take
the shells too. Call them aragonite. I am one
of many stones that says Bezirksamt. You are
the one with the vocabulary to say these things. I am the anti-
pneumatic. The numismatic. Who’s to say numeraire.
A stone lost at sea is strong as a
villanelle sung in stone.
A five days voyage. Longer in storm.
Come bearing betel nut. Come bearing form.
For the man at the mine site. Bring your seashell adze.
Feel the flintstrike of value when you cleave the
cold-clad stone.
Take coral, a large piece grind circles in stone-center.
What makes this difficult. The tools are softer than
stone. Hence labor. Why the hole. For transport. For all
future loans. Where is the bamboo raft? As sturdy as the last? So many lost at
sea. We are like joules. If I were you I’d begin. To conduct business in joules. I
am one of many stones with a black X in paint. I am the one leaning.
Into the bosom of a house. My owner will earn me back.
He is smoothing the roads. No, we enjoyed it.
The way our roads teased our feet.
The feathers of the blos-bird
sweeping faces in the gale.
A five days voyage. Longer in storm.
Come bearing betel nut. Come bearing form.
For the man at the mine site. Bring your seashell adze.
The flintstrike of value when you cleave the cold-clad stone.
Take coral, a large. Piece grind circles in center.
Make this difficult. The tools are softer than.
Labor. Why the hole. For transport. For all future.
Is the bamboo raft as. Sturdy as the last. So lost at sea.
We are like joules. Do you conduct business in joules. I do.
As I am one of many. Stone with a black X in paint.
I am the one leaning to the bosom of a house.
My owner will earn me back as.
The roads teased our feet.
FOUR
I am the stone lost at sea, there is a hole
at my center. / A stone lodged in the fold
of the sea. / I am still dense with value. Why am
I missing a center. / What is arrogant. Simply know I
am. Am smoother and bigger. / The Blarney Stone. Someone is