This is not fantasy, this is our life.
We are the characters
who have invaded the moon,
who cannot stop their computers.
We are the gods who can unmake
the world in seven days.
Both hands are stopped at noon.
We are beginning to live forever,
in lightweight, aluminum bodies
with numbers stamped on our backs.
We dial our words like Muzak.
We hear each other through water.
In the America of the dream
the first rise of the moon
swings free of the ocean,
and she reigns in her shining flesh
over a good, great valley
of plumped, untrampled grasses
and beasts with solemn eyes,
of lovers infallibly pitched
in their ascendant phase.
....................... hello hello hello ... Weiwei ... where have you been? ... I see you in dreams ... bleeding ... in the darkness of the sun ... 81 spots in the flame ... each a nightmare one cannot wake up from ... Weiwei ... the last son ... you told me as we said goodbye ... your last night on the Lower East Side ... 未未 ... the last child of your Mother and Father ... born in the labor camp ... exiled from Beijing to the far desert ... watching your Father clean public latrines for singing the truth
Despite that you
wrote your name
and number
on its fuselage
in magic marker
neither your quiet
hours at the kitchen
table assembling
it with glue
nor your choice of
paint and lacquer
nor your seemingly
equally perfect
choice of a seemingly
breezeless day
for the launch of
your ambition
nor the thrill
of its swift ignition
nor the heights
it streaks
nor the dancing
way you chase
beneath its
dot
O little-know facts — how Robinson attracts them!
Pilgrims rocked ashore here, before Plymouth Rock.
The word scrimshaw is of unknown origin.
The stock name of the archaic two-lane main road? Route 6A. Really
it’ s Old King’ s Highway.
Some facts are useless: the paper bag was invented in Dennis.
Some facts are not: Wellfleet’ s town clock sings out ship’ s time.
19th century Americans observed only three holidays. The Fourth of
July was one.
O witty aperçus — how Robinson accrues them!
What is desire
But the hardwire argument given
To the mind’ s unstoppable mouth.
Inside the braincase, it’ s I
Want that fills every blank. And then the hand
Reaches for the pleasure
The plastic snake offers. Someone says, Yes,
It will all be fine in some future soon.
Definitely. I’ ve conjured a body
In the chair before me. Be yourself, I tell it.
Here memory makes you
Unchangeable: that shirt, those summer pants.
That beautiful face.
That tragic beautiful mind.
That mind’ s ravenous mouth
A personal lens: glass bending rays
That gave one that day’ s news
Saying each and every day,
Just remember you are standing
On a planet that’ s evolving.
How beautiful, she thought, what distance does
For water, the view from above or afar.
In last night’ s dream, they were back again
At the beginning. She was a child
And he was a child.
A plane lit down and left her there.
Cold whitening the white sky whiter.
Then a scalpel cut her open for all the world
To be a sea.
My sister died. He raped me. They beat me. I fell
to the floor. I didn’ t. I knew children,
their smallness. Her corpse. My fingernails.
The softness of my belly, how it could
double over. It was puckered, like children,
ugly when they cry. My sister died
and was revived. Her brain burst
into blood. Father was driving. He fell
asleep. They beat me. I didn’ t flinch. I did.
It was the only dance I knew.
It was the kathak. My ankles sang
with 100 bells. The stranger
raped me on the fitted sheet.
Passing through huddled and ugly walls,
By doorways where women haggard
Looked from their hunger-deep eyes,
Haunted with shadows of hunger-hands,
Out from the huddled and ugly walls,
I came sudden, at the city's edge,
On a blue burst of lake,
Long lake waves breaking under the sun
On a spray-flung curve of shore;
And a fluttering storm of gulls,
Masses of great gray wings
And flying white bellies
Veering and wheeling free in the open.
There will be a rusty gun on the wall, sweetheart,
The rifle grooves curling with flakes of rust.
A spider will make a silver string nest in the
darkest, warmest corner of it.
The trigger and the range-finder, they too will be rusty.
And no hands will polish the gun, and it will hang on the wall.
Forefingers and thumbs will point casually toward it.
It will be spoken among half-forgotten, whished-to-be-forgotten things.
They will tell the spider: Go on, you're doing good work.
