8/29/01

A few CDs in the mail, an Atlas with three-dimensional mapping and virtual joystick control
by which the user can barrel through valleys with their mountains of enhanced scale,
their blue wire-frames iridiscent before the heavens, simple negative space.

After enumerating the ethnicity, customs, and languages
of populations clustered by deltas and tributaries,
a narrator rattles off statistics between the mouth of the Rhine
and the Black Sea -- Rotterdam to Sevastopol.

So many things about which to be voyeuristic –
a fat cop napping in his cruiser at a barren crossroads,
a young hulk with zaftig sweetheart locked beneath an apple-tree in a meadow, barely perspiring in the fall, branches aweigh
with apples that appear as healthy as human organs,
a teenager probing rivers of rage moving toward his boss in the food service industry
before the bedroom mirror, a pistol with cartridge – nowhere to go.

If I could fly closer, I could leap with grasshoppers
instead of dance with the daffodils.
If closer, I would be free of windows I must navigate on the screen
and free of the physical windows of my house,
and of the software that presents me with topographical models
around which I can twirl without restraint,
as if there were as many eyes as limitless visual models
implicit in the algorithms. If closer,
I could resort to prose, not verse, and as in a buffet
a customer can build his own salad, people could create from my prose
verse, breaking lines of text like honeycomb, arranging words at will.

If I could fly closer than the navigational model allows me,
I could fly directly through a single cell of the honeycomb of words, empty or dripping with honey.

Geese home in the opposite direction in which my virtual instrument points.