Resolution (02-03?)

They don’t understand each other, the shopkeeper,
the schoolboy. Apples and oranges, can they mix?
Some like one better than the other, that’s a fact.
Do you want to explore the space between two things?
That’s not so far from seeing between rings,
all the rocks and debris shining when struck by the sun.

They build these big machines by which to do this
that go bang. The rings are wobbly and concentered.
But what did you expect, to be on your seat awhile.
Let others do the talking. A photograph of space,
such weak resolution. That’s stuck between
two things that both go bang. You can buy
all the fireworks you want just over the border,
you just can’t buy them here. This is not,
in any case, the place for you. That place

shines when struck by the sun -- debris alright --
but it shines like the rim of a glass, a glass harp,
a wine glass, its pitch tuned by water.
That’s your place (think about it): among debris.
If you can catch the right angle, it’s beautiful
although grainy, although the resolution isn’t right,
but wavy, and the rings are scalloped and braided
by intervening bodies uneven in themselves,
pocked moons, deformed like dust the size of fleas.
They come across as blips upon a radar screen.
All that information coming off bodies like a scent,
the white noise on the short wave: it’s information.
And they want to catch someone with it,
so it’s been withheld from the public.

Who can taste the rim of a wine glass
when it’s struck by the sun (its resolution
high contrast, so you can see the rings around the planet)
and the rings that strike out from the storm-tossed planet,
from the eyes around which streams of ammonia rejoin
they know. They test the clouds in the wind tunnels.
All I know flows from the evidence of my eyes
but they don’t tell me something I can use . . .

Upper turbulence shreds the clouds before they shape themselves.
The stairs you’d like to walk have more holes in them
than working parts, the illuminated engines fail,
forged from the elements they should discharge.
I don’t have words for what goes on,
so often documented, ad infinitum.
What kind of conscience throws them all about,
the rings around a discarded can as slippery-shiny as around Saturn.
Thus mutability changes into what is no longer useful.
I discard this can of worms into the sky.
They photograph the bumps and braids of the surface.
The radio waves by which the images come to us
are themselves too wavy to be seen with any concretion.