In the aftermath of calculus
your toast fell butter-side down.
Squirrels swarmed the lawns
in flight patterns. The hovercraft
helped the waves along. From
every corner there was perspective.
On the billboards the diamonds
were real, in the stores, only zirconia.
I cc’ ed you. I let you know.
Sat down to write the Black Ice Memo.
Dinner would be meager &
reminiscent of next week’ s lunch.
So what if I sat on the sectional?
As always I was beside myself.
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.
Lately, too much disturbed, you stay trailing in me
and I believe you. How could I not feel
you were misspent, there by books stacked clean on glass,
or outside the snow arriving as I am still arriving.
If the explanations amount to something, I will tell you.
It is enough, you say, that surfaces grow so distant.
Maybe you darken, already too much changed,
maybe in your house you would be content where
no incident emerges, but for smoke or glass or air,
such things held simply to be voiceless.
And if all those who meet or even
hear of you become witness to what you are —
a white country of blight beneath the last snows of
spring. Could we remain quiet on earth
and bear it, the war we make inside
what is — it’ s a long time to be here, to be still,
to feel the rot inside now — bone-scrap, char, sheets of stars
at the edge of a field where we are once again
taken from ourselves. Could we remain here,
witness to grief, one last bright dire call-and-reply,
Out of the rolling ocean the crowd came a drop gently to me,
Whispering, I love you, before long I die,
I have travell’ d a long way merely to look on you to touch you,
For I could not die till I once look’ d on you,
For I fear’ d I might afterward lose you.
Would you hear of an old-time sea-fight?
Would you learn who won by the light of the moon and stars?
List to the yarn, as my grandmother’ s father the sailor told it to me.
Our foe was no skulk in his ship I tell you, (said he,)
His was the surly English pluck, and there is no tougher or truer, and never was, and never will be;
Along the lower’ d eve he came horribly raking us.
We closed with him, the yards entangled, the cannon touch’ d,
My captain lash’ d fast with his own hands.
A march in the ranks hard-prest, and the road unknown,
A route through a heavy wood with muffled steps in the darkness,
Our army foil’ d with loss severe, and the sullen remnant retreating,
Till after midnight glimmer upon us the lights of a dim-lighted building,
We come to an open space in the woods, and halt by the dim-lighted building,
’ Tis a large old church at the crossing roads, now an impromptu hospital
Entering but for a minute I see a sight beyond all the pictures and poems ever made,
A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’ d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’ d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’ d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
Beat! beat! drums! — blow! bugles! blow!
Through the windows — through doors — burst like a ruthless force,
Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,
Into the school where the scholar is studying,
Leave not the bridegroom quiet — no happiness must he have now with his bride,
Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering his grain,
So fierce you whirr and pound you drums — so shrill you bugles blow.
