August 22 2009

I bought a new desktop with a flat screen. The flat screen is a black mirror that is staring back at me, like a pool of oil or of negative space, making you think negative space is what you have when you subtract all of nature—landscape, flora and fauna and men and women and their dwellings and their interiors, nature recombinant , or artifice. Or the negative space, or the space void of light, millions of particles of light, like the signs held in Pyongyang stadiums composing the face of the great leader as he stands with his father on Mt. Paektu. But just as the stands of that stadium can be silent in the time between festivities, so is the screen when dark, almost as dark as that vacant interlunar cave in which stares Samson in Gaza, eyeless.

It wasn’t an Achilles heel so much as a swollen toe that brought me low, so that I could neither walk nor run, nor barely stand, just soak in the bath or bind a truss around my foot. You must be as old as I am said a gym club member I’d crossed in the supermarket, either on his way there, which he praised for its Jacuzzi, or on his way back from the same place. Once there, he circles between the strength machines and the men‘s room, day after day. This infirmity stops me from making a similar path, so do the hours of the day, so does time, to which there are limits, as many limits as a box has sides. We’re bound to cross one another again, if not in this place, than in another.
Moisture in the atmosphere clings to the skin and so conducts heat. The spirit congeals and cools in the body. Various jellies with various degrees of hardness. Indian metaphysics devised a way for the metempsychosed self to escape the humid and entangled world; moisture entangles the self in a weather it never wanted. Spiritual planes, metaphysical tiers, skies populated with after-lives and over souls and thrones and archons, orreries and post-lunar spheres are means of turning consciousness away from the humidity of the body. Space is the ultimate clean and cool environment, a vacuum filled with colorless and intangible forms, Emerson’s transparent eyeball of detached and bodiless omniscience, narrator of the beginning and end.

Wild

The land that you neglect to trim away,
sumacs and spiny weeds, grows back.
The class, if you don’t shout stop! I say!
Return to chatter and laws of the strongest,
the bully, the gang-leader, form a tribe
to steal candy from the weaker children,
carrying coats and wearing colors of the strong.
Children ushered into tribes by bullies
in the weeds engulfing lawns, cracking curbs open,
breaking into gas stations, then Seven-Elevens,
handguns concealed: a world gone to seed.
Pack now before the neighborhood turns, to brush,
then forest, when the sidewalks crack open,
offering sink-holes, maelstroms, to drop in.
The children who refused to listen are feral,
blaming you for what the world’s become.
Among the weeds and lots they rampage.
Or wait in weeds, with knives and maces
and rusty shanks culled from bedsprings,
no longer schoolchildren. The weeds are wild,
are woods again. You recollect the first sumac
shoots on the lawn, the first back-talk.