Poemetria

Taxonomy

 

Visible Man

In painting the nude, begin with the bones, then add
muscles and then cover the body with flesh in such
a way as to leave the position of the muscles visible.
  — Leon Battista Alberti

​

The bones begin, the structure, here;
please note articulations: jaw,
the carpals, metacarpals, turn
of radius and ulna. Ah!
See now the architecture of
the vertebrae and disks, and how
they work for movement and support;
you see the flex and balance as I bow.

​

The muscles next, those of the face,
let's say: obicularis near
the eye will quickly close the lids
for sleep, a blink, the flinch from fear.
And tensor tarsi squeezes tears
from lacrimal canals, you see.
Depressor labii draws the lower
lip down and out, expressing irony.

​

And so the flesh: the tendons show
on the back of the hand beneath the skin
when I move fingers, typing this.
Observe the wrist and see within
the veins are visible and blue.
Elsewhere the dermis stretches, bends,
folds, calluses, extrudes the nails,
and covers softer tissues it defends.

​

But knowing this and seeing through,
as the masters do, you know the body,
anatomy, know it no more than that
the coroner examines: gaudy
display of pearly bones trussed up,
then swathed in muscles' scarlet sashes,
and laced all through with nerve and vein.

​

The nude reclines. Paint then. But you paint ashes.

​

(First published in Harp-Strings, Winter 2005)

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​

Taxonomy

Hold this page up to the light to check,
and classify it as invertebrate.
It’s flexible and spineless, kin to sponge,
or flatworm, yet, a thing indefinite.

​

It has no mouth that can be seen, nor senses.
The stroke or prick of pen, a cut or tear
provokes no motion, not a wince or ripple:
insensate, then, and fed by light or air.

​

One cannot tell the dorsal from the ventral;
its body’s thin and flat and terminates
in four right angles (few specimens will differ)
and, to the naked eye, each edge is straight.

​

Its coloring can vary, though this one,
like most, is an albino, which suggests
its kind spent eons sunk where darkness reigns,
and by forgetting light, the darkness dispossessed.

​

We’d have to make the thing, had nature not,
so well it bears the burden of our thoughts.

​

(First published in The New Formalist, 7.2 2006)

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​

The Flower and the Book

 

The library’s books are studied, tasted, learned;

but at times the poet must escape the narrow lines.

The garden, ordered, bright, with walks well-ferned,

grants her respite, with flowered herbs and vines.

 

Some petals of the lavender’s stacked blooms

are wrinkled, frayed; a bee seems unconcerned

while rummaging the dusty, fragrant rooms

for sips of syrup its ministry has earned.

 

Perhaps, she thinks, to some librarian

the garden’s walls encompass hues, perfumes

enough; though there are fewer leaves to scan,

they too are bound. Still other gardens, rooms

beyond … a buzz is heard among the sage:

time for return to honeycomb or page.

​

​

Mnemonic

 

The mind is like a monkey swinging from branch to branch through a forest.

— Thich Nhat Hanh

 

A memory is not a neuron, but

a pathway through a web of axons, steering

the impulse which contains the sound, the form.

A wild intensity and we're torn from time.

 

Beneath a wet, gray moon, a memory

is not a neuron but a monkey scuttling

through shadowy branches, a pathway through a web

of axons, steering and leaping from tree to tree.

Boughs bounce and vibrate; each bears the impulse which

contains the sound, the form, the weight and then

discharges with a wild intensity.

And we're torn from time: a snap as crisp as a spark.

 

Beneath a wet, gray moon, a monkey scuttles

through shadowy branches and leaps from tree to tree.

Boughs bounce and vibrate; each bears the weight and then

discharges with a snap as crisp as a spark.

​

​

Moths

 

Tonight, I dream of moths. My thoughts

are moths disturbed from their dark folds

to spasms of flight — not lilting swats

of butterfly, nor bee's stout blunder

among the musky marigolds,

and not the mad and looping knots

blue bottles make all summer under

the stinging sun.

                              The moths evade

the sunlit day, prefer mere spots

or spills of light, the corner, pleat,

and convolution, the serenade

to morning song and night's retreat.

 

Eventually the sun will rise.

I'll wake, recall a fluttering

beside my ear, and in my eyes,

the dust of some now shadowed wing.

​

​

Prayer for a New Year

 

The mollusk tongues

the shard with nacre;

each glaze smooths and rounds

the flaws of the last.

 

Amen.

​

​

​

No More Sex Than Mathematics

​

Triskaidekaphilia

The numbers stir us, though we think them cold.
There's 7: magic, lucky, favorite
when there's a need to multiply something-fold.
The biblical usage accounts for it.

My sister likes 4; she's not sure why. And 3
is popular, for things, both good and bad,
come in 3's, or at least no one notes the contrary.
A friend feels 8, the age he lost his dad.

For me, 9: digits of its multiples,
like 18 or 63, add back to 9.
And there's thirteen: a fear for the irrational,
bad luck. But I love the shiver down the spine
when clocks strike thirteen, and sonnets go missing a line.

​

(First published in Neo-Victorian/Cochlea, Fall/Winter 2003)

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​

Ellipses

Given a line and a point not on it, at most one parallel to the given line
can be drawn through the point.
  — Playfair's axiom

​

Through the blind’s slats, the austere light
skims on white curve with an ink arc:
on her hot cheek an untamed curl
like a wild punctuation mark,
an oblique riddle from dreams formed,
or some snake glyph that uncoils thought.

On the bed’s plane, every point’s plot
is defined, known; all the rays grid
at the right angles upon silk space.
But the waves ripple to bright flesh,
into domes, arches, a face
where the lines roulette, involve, loop.

Therefore, proof figured on this sheet:
parallel lines at last must meet.

​

​

The Better Angles

 

The figure’s face provides a postulate:

ellipse of lips and radii of eyes,

the gradients and givens, greater than

or less, the logical locus for our focus.

 

A parallel proof waits: survey the space

as curves concentric, sines, parabolas

and arcs that mark the oval amplitude,

two-body problems prove transcendent pi.

 

Assert an axiom: the apex rules

the angles, warps mouth vertices, acute

and right reflex, the tangent tangible

where axis, edge and ray applied rule reason.

 

Then calculate, conclude, and plot the point

amid the waves, concave, convex, to kiss.

​

​

The Halting Problem

 

Given a description of an arbitrary computer program, decide

whether the program finishes running or continues to run forever.

 

“The universe, let’s say,” I think,

with neurons winking on and off

a little faster than those stars --

or are those jars of fireflies?

I can’t decide. My thoughts, the lights

go off in flights that leave me here.

They should and shall go, rhythmic loops

I catch and – oops! – an empty hand.

The dawn obscures night’s preset suite

with subroutines of day; the program

still runs, unfinished, incomplete.

​

​

No More Sex Than Mathematics

Art should have no more sex than mathematics.
  — Maxime Du Camp

​

So art should have no more sex than mathematics?
And how much sex is that? I have to wonder,
despite my history with some quadratics.

​

It’s sophistry that’d shame the pre-socratics,
with prudish premise math can have no thunder,
to say art should have no more sex than mathematics.

​

Because we don’t wheeze like a room of asthmatics,
it doesn’t mean we’re not heart struck by a stunner
or intrigued by some elusive quadratics.

​

For sex is less about technique or acrobatics
than love: more of wooing, less of plunder.
Yet, art should have no more sex than mathematics?

​

Yes, there are passions and blissful ecstatics,
and tangy beauties in irrational numbers:
plain delights in one plus one, seductions in quadratics.

​

Each sphere has its monks and mashers, fools and fanatics;
there’s desire in all our thoughts, or just under.
Art should have no less sex than mathematics.
It's rated x (and squared!) in those quadratics.

​

(First published in Tucumcari Review, January/February 2001)

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​

From Einstein’s Bench

​

Rondine at Least Partially Responsible for Increasing Entropy

If you remember every word in this book, your memory will have recorded about two million pieces of information: the order in your brain will have increased by about two million units. However […] you will have converted at least a thousand calories of ordered energy […] into disordered energy in the form of heat […]. This will increase the disorder of the universe by about twenty million million million million units.
    – Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

​

Unravel galaxies and slow earth's spin
a bit to breathe these words into the air.
An atom wanes, decays without a flare
within some precious piece of porcelain
just blocks away from here. The fabrics thin
with every tangled mystery we dare
     unravel.

To make a thing, to form a thought, to win
a moment's order, chaos fumes from our skin.
What price a poem, then? I might despair
the cosmic cost, or that my coat's threadbare.
But I'll wind this tight, while I, it's origin,
     unravel.

​

​

The Space-Time Placemat

 

The glass of iced tea sweats,

and leaves a ring of water

upon the mat: a circle.

 

I feel that sudden tilt

at the window of tall buildings,

the fear of heights and falling.

 

I feel dimensions slide:

the 3D tumbler, the mat

a 2D plane, the circle.

 

I hold the table’s edge

to steady myself against

the chance that any time

 

a slice of dimension 5,

or 12 or 17

will leave its sudden sign

 

upon our 4-D mat:

a sphere, a cube, a part

of vaster things beyond.

​

​

Physics

How can we know the dancer from the dance?
  — W.B. Yeats

​

While I am kissing her, a thought, or...

​

rather a chemical reaction of
unknown origin interrupts my id,
and suddenly I realize I'm in love
with deoxyribonucleic acid.

​

You know, DNA, those spiral punch card
templates for weaving flesh, the master code
that determines your shape, whether you are
tall or short, balanced or pigeon-toed.

​

I look at her and think about her lips,
the abstract beauty of her supple throat,
the unique, alluring curve of her hips:
all limited by some genetic asymptote.

​

And I, including that irritating thought,
am nothing more than the sum of those sums,
the result of the world's input rewrought
by those double-helix rules-of-thumb.

​

So there we are, hormones airborne or smeared
into each other's flesh with every kiss,
neurotransmitters leaping across shear
synapse gaps, the component parts of bliss

​

encoded into chemical signals
or potential leaping electric flashes.
We fade into electrochemical
chain reactions: simple dots and dashes.

​

And then by some odd association,
some chemical link, I think of Yeats
and wonder if science sees deeper than vision
and if perhaps even prophecy dates.

​

Remembering Yeats' line, I add a suffix:

How can we know the dancer from the dance?
The dance from biology? chemistry? physics?

Distance

Down fiber-optic cables go my thoughts
to her who waits for love in bolts of light
translated back to words, but how can watts
transmit the signal strength of love tonight?

The words I say must make her understand;
I strive with words so insubstantial they
may file along a single glassy strand.
I doubt that there is much they can convey.

We are reduced to voice and ear, two parts
out of a whole where thoughts are still no more
than signals; kisses, eyes and beating hearts
just an intricate kind of semaphore.

And so we learn the rules of our existence:
love is a matter of degrees of distance.

​

(First published in Tucumcari Review, September 2000)

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​

Thermodynamics

after and for J.S.

Heat, a quantity which functions to animate, derives from an internal fire located in the left ventricle.
  — Hippocrates

​

When you have gone to work, I have time to think about that place
in the desert, just east of Yuma, where the dunes shift
like restless sleepers, the small avalanches of sand whispering
thunder, like waves heard from a distance. Last summer,
we camped there next to a rock formation you said looked
like a broken femur protruding from the thigh of the earth.

​

I watch educational shows in the afternoon and feel
like a junior college student warmed by the thought
of earning credit for watching television.
Yesterday, a bearded, 70’s refugee scientist lectured
about the conservation of energy, that energy
can be neither created or destroyed, but only changed in form.

​

Even in summer, the air in the desert at night is cold;
the air, lacking moisture, cannot hold the day’s warmth, and the sands
give up their stored heat within the first hour after twilight.
We huddled together in a blanket, unwilling to let a fire
obscure the perfect span of stars, the visible frost-like patina
of the Milky Way, the crisp, glacial features of the quarter moon.
Your body did not warm me as I shivered, cold as the sand.

​

Today, the science program ran a montage of machines,
all gears and pistons, and animated diagrams,
while a voice-over spoke about entropy, when energy
is dispersed, lost to friction or other inefficiencies, as heat.

​

As the night achieved its maximum dark, a fragrance
like happiness descended on us. With flashlights,
we found the source, a night-blooming cereus, which flowers
one night only, closing forever before morning.
Its perfume spread into the sharp air, fainter and fainter,
as it thinned into the atmosphere, into space.
We made a small fire then and slept in the warmth of the flower.

​

I remember waking up, my body cold, unable
even to shiver, beside the ashes of the fire.
The sun, just risen, no more than cool orange light
revealing there was no more fuel for the fire.

​

​

Renunciation

The solemnities of three a.m. surround
celestial maps as your tired fingers trace,
not constellations, nor the myths once wound
by the ancients like strings interlaced
into cat's cradle archetypes that bound
the sky to what we knew: a bird, a face,
a bear, a hunter. No, your fingers have found
the hollows, as though in relief, of empty space.

​

You start, awakened from what was not sleep
with fragments of a dream: an orchestra,
a raised baton, bows poised about to sweep
across strings, a serene pendant uvula
readied for an aria, a cold mouthpiece
kissed by warm lips, the flowing algebra
on a page of score, fingers resting on keys.

But the orchestra is silent and will not play.
In the hollow of a violin the air
vibrates, molecules spin and ricochet
in silent music that is everywhere.

​

Your thoughts recede and cease in smooth contraction,
renouncing fears and errors; the said, unsaid;
the consciousness of matter, chance and action.
You rise and walk the darkened hall to bed.

​

​

All is One and One is All, My Ass

To finish all of it, I’d have to do
three and one quarter things each hour, unless
I did two things at once; then I’d get through
at one and ten-sixteenths per, but square the stress.

Overworked? Bewildered? Sure, for now,
yet even the world, with time. will cease its spinning.
But then I heard a voice: “Hey, dude. Oh, wow,
to work it out, go back to the beginning.”

​

So I rode a passing tachyon straight back
before the old Big Bang. We all were there,
packed like sardines, sardines that got sucked smack
into a black hole, squashed to point-like where.
I heard a familiar voice, stupid and slack:
“Dude, open a window, I need some air.”

​

​

Sijo: From Einstein’s Bench

The Willows Inn, Palm Springs, California

 

The sun sets

behind granite

San Jacintos;

Palm Springs shadows.

 

On a bench

perched in foothills,

stilling my thoughts,

I watch night spread.

 

Einstein sat,

in the 30s, here.

The two constants:

light and time.

​

​

Happy Belated Everything

 

My love, someplace, a non-proverbial tree –

perhaps dry phloem thickened with age,

or beetles boring bark to core,

or drenching rains and whipping winds;

in agonizing increments

or startling instant hammer strike –

falls.

 

Imagine you, if you don’t mind,

observing: good binoculars,

the smell of its real leather straps,

and if this is a forest, the tang

of loam, leaf litter shush and crackle.

You raise the glasses: there, the tree

falls.

 

Let’s pull the slide of time right here:

for drama, the tree is half-way down.

The photons, waves of arrows, paint

the snapping limbs; some ricochet

and dart, in time, into your eye

as our plucked instant’s slicing shutter

falls.

 

And though the lenses seem to send you

to the very spot, you’re just as distant.

Then the sound, eventually, arrives:

the tree’s complaints in moans and crackles,

the snap of branches, that conclusive growl

as bole and bough, and every twig and leaf

falls.

 

On the horizon of events, our news rides,

first, on light, and, far behind, other wavefronts

bring the clangor of lumber, the aroma

of wet wood and sap, the rumble

in soil that ascends through knees and spine,

and the sudden sympathetic shiver

falls.

 

Thus the angle of a brow, the faintest of smiles,

the rhythmic thrum of a string of words,

the back of a finger along a cheek, a kiss,

are postcards the other gets sometime later.

And so, my love, out there in another time,

turn off the light, and we will watch as darkness

falls.

​

​

2 AM

It’s 2 am and one of those nights
it feels good to stay up
for no reason you can say.

​

The house and the neighbors
are quiet as your thoughts,
except for the lightheaded hum
of nothing.

​

So I turn on the radio,
switch to AM,
and as I’m tuning I linger
in the places between the stations,
the empty static.

​

And then a 50s song comes on,
sadder and deeper for playing
against the ultimate bass
of that langorous hush
that asks for silence forever.

​

And when she comes to mind,
she’s like that song,
the sound of the cosmic background,
there,

and all of it seems like something caught
by some lonely radio telescope
on some desert night
getting a stray broadcast
across the light years
from some now dead star.

​

And though it’s October,
it feels like a summer night.

 

​

Delight in Uncertainty

a la Robert Herrick

I think it is safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics.
  — Richard Feynman

​

For all that is is but a wave,
or seems to, now and then, behave;
but then there is that solid bit
that acts as a particulate.

​

I do not know, but I believe
when Julia pulls upon her sleeve
when lost for words, or can’t decide,
or begged to tell some point of pride.
The fabric stretches like warm dough,
but just before she lets it go,
it hardens into opaque glass,
yet ghosts right through her demitasse.

​

Or when we walk through city lights,
and every view and din excites,
I’ll turn and see her sweet curls race
to break like surf upon her face.
But when she notes the stars’ cold fire,
her hair will glow like molten wire,
and when I speak my adoration,
it’s candent, crystalled radiation.

​

And most, when Julia wears some mist
of threads, a scrim with knots, a twist,
and moves like maelstroms through a room,
a swaying serpent of perfume.
The silken coils will kiss and clasp
some curve of flesh, but fail to grasp,
for she is stone, then smoke, a dance,
a breath, a humid heat, a chance.

​

There’s where, and how things move about:
to know one sure, the price is doubt.
But I, for I love Julia free,
delight in my uncertainty.

​

​

Rock Forever

 

And when the groove is dead and gone,

yeah, you know that love survives,

so we can rock forever on.

– Rod Temperton, “Rock with You” (first performed by Michael Jackson)

 

What’s dense and sharp will ride the groove

and vibrate voices of the dead

into the air, evoke first love

and summer dreams, but not forever.

A sound, a mood, a thought survives

as scrapings of a crystal rock.

 

The shadows etched or daubed on rock

in caves speak time. We trace each groove

and shape and feel some truth survives,

connect ourselves to those long dead,

look back and think we grasp forever,

believe such art can save our love.

 

Worldwide, the monuments to love,

and pride and such are carved in rock

and raised: a challenge to forever.

Yet windborn grains will scratch a groove

in granite; more grains than all the dead

erode the peaks. The dust survives

 

to grind what’s left. So what survives?

That mote that pricks our eye is love

worn down: the tear not for the dead

but our own ache of loss as we rock

in bed and wear another groove

into our brow. But not forever.

 

For what begins must end. Forever?

Life blooms, and for a time survives.

The songs will play until that groove

winds to the final loop; our love

flips to Side B, a call to rock

against each other, forget the dead.

 

For they are here, we are the dead.

As long as we are, that’s forever,

and not beyond. We sculpt the rock

to please ourselves. What remains survives

because we found the shape of our love,

inscribed and scored, so we can groove.

 

Some stars that ride the groove of night are dead,

my love. Their light as near enough forever

survives and shines upon our spinning rock.

​

​

Points of Reference

​

Circle of Least Confusion

 

Real lenses do not focus light rays perfectly.

At best focus, a point looks like a spot rather than a point.

The smallest spot a lens can produce is known as the circle of least confusion.

 

I push my glasses down a bit

to better read the morning paper.

I’ve left my reading glasses, God

knows where, and even those need some

positioning for best results.

 

Yet the optometrist’s baroque machine

inspired confidence precise,

fine measurements were being made,

although the longer that the game

of “which is better” went around,

the more the doubt became quite clear.

 

It’s fuzzy, approximate focus

all round, our scopes and lenses flawed,

and even when the picture’s sharp —

is that the moon? or speck of pollen?

or some amoeba on the prowl?

 

No focus absolute, I read

the news at breakfast, book of haiku

at lunch, or just today at Arby’s,

a fair translation of the Tao.

I move the lenses back and forth,

and focus, focus, faintly hoping

to shrink my circle of confusion.

​

​

The Window Looks Out

 

Or, rather, I look through the pane.

 

And more, I see, if specified,

between the scene and me (my brain):

the mass of air on either side,

a medium we minimize;

the lenses of my glasses and eyes;

the vitreous and retina;

and those coaxial optic nerves.

And if this poem’s cinema

of spooling word and image serves,

the reader, you, will see the scene,

through air and lenses, gels, and screen.

 

But anyway, beyond the window’s glass,

I saw a sidewalk frame the garden’s grass.

​

​

A Meditation on Detachment Occasioned

by Somewhat Improper Thoughts

 

A decent quantum of space ahead, she walks,

and absently my eyes, and some dim zone

of my mind not fixed on thoughts of work, are warming

themselves, I realize, upon the image

of her Aphrodite-grade ass, snug in black —

executive function jolts awake, halts

the dream mid-stream.

 

                                        It’s all illusion, I

remind myself, review the stark, cool facts.

The cells of her trim body are outnumbered,

at ten to one, by microbes: architecture,

no matter how refined, is rented space.

 

Her too, too solid atoms float and bond

or lattice fine as lace, yet hollow too:

the particles within but one ten-trillionths

of the volume. See! an airy phantom floats

ahead of me: the sidewalk, trees mere shadows.

 

And what fine antidote to love of flesh

and matter that it’s less than five percent

of things; the universe is mostly dark

energy and matter, and all of this,

the girl and I, the concrete walk, streets, cities,

continents, the earth are but a scab

of foam upon a wave, rising for now,

within an endless, unfathomable sea.

 

I hold this cosmic mind a breath or ten,

then this or that, the curtain falls again.

​

​

Of Bodies Perishable

 

We are too weak to bear the motions [of our frames],

enduring them not even for one single day.

     — Hermes Trismegistus

 

The ring of smoke exhaled into the summer night

lives upon the stillness of the air

and will not endure a draft,

the wake of some body moving past,

the absent sigh.

 

Our atoms racked upon the table

assume a fitful symmetry,

but await the break,

the cosmic ray, careening car,

the sudden clot

that will scatter them.

 

And though the tepid night soothes,

you feel the sudden chill,

your limbs frozen

as you contemplate absolute zero

and feel the smallest twitch

will shatter you.

​

​

Lady Cancellata

 

Mirrors multiply the scene until

the ballroom seems the universe,

diamond-like, a labyrinth for light

where all that is is in reverse.

 

Dancers feint, revolve, finesse a turn

upon parquet of night and day.

Prisms in the chandeliers refract

the rays to join the roundelay.

 

Waltzes waver through the perfumed air,

musicians thrum the atmosphere,

voices climb the scales while others fall,

and then she’s there; they disappear.

 

Glimmers ghost along her snowy throat,

the rose she holds rejects the red,

while grasping tendrils of her hair

devour each beam that haloes round her head.

 

We perceive by indirection, light

and sound reflect and interfere;

wave will cancel wave, and rhythm, rhythm,

we sway along the humming here.

 

I await the wave to mirror me,

a stillness shared in agitation,

antiparticles that meet again,

immaculate the cancellation.

​

​

The Cloud Chamber

You can say the human heart is only make-believe....
  — Billy Joel, “Don’t Ask Me Why”

​

The human heart
is not the least
of our fabrications:
there’s soul, and love, democracy and god,
our every hope,
our morals, too,
and all our explanations.
And we believe: the plain, the vague, the odd.

​

The ricochet
of cause/effect,
of bodies at rest or motion,
are truth, perhaps, the raw and naked act.
The cutting blade,
the cancer cell,
or what we call the ocean,
are steel or flesh, sublime and brutal fact.

​

The particles
careen and arc,
so some divine a fate
with theories grand or wavering planchette.
We make our lives
a bubble chamber,
and the photographic plate
is read as if it were the alphabet.

​

​

Empty Gestures

 

Philosophers and physicists will give

divergent answers, splitting hairs or atoms,

reality forgotten: daubs and smears

of paleolithic art in some cave lost

to tectonic twitch, or floods, or glacial ice.

 

Existence and significance confuse

each other, us, our fingers wet with ochre

to mark the surfaces, our mouths blow sprays

of bone black through a bird’s ulna,

or wire and fiber optic filaments.

 

Imagine that Lascaux was never found,

or someone posts a video clip, “Tree Falls

in Forest” and it gets no likes, no views.

Does it exist? It is important? Will

six billion views exnihilate, exalt?

 

My empty skull will be a fine cavern to paint.

​

 

Points of Reference

A poem is a map that should lead me to some orgasmic discovery.

— Brandy Burrows

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1. Magnetic North

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In the last two centuries, magnetic north
has meandered 700 miles or so.
Molten nickel-iron churning at the core
generates a field which tilts and bends,
but on such scale of time and space its flicker
is unnoticed; the onset of a shudder
outlives us, so all seems steady and still.
The compass needle points, points north, points us.

2. The Wandering Nerve

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We've documented through our research that women who have

complete transection -- interruption of the spinal cord -- can experience orgasms.

— Dr. Beverly Whipple

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The vagus (Latin for “wandering”) splits off
from the other cranial nerves, and travels
down the neck to innervate the larynx,
the heart, digestive system, kidneys, bladder,
winding its last filaments into portions
of the reproductive system.
                                              We think
of the spinal cord as the one conduit
of our body’s movement, sensation, control:
a hierarchical system of branchings.
But there are overlapping networks, webs
tenuous and fine, unmapped threads, fibers
through which faint impulses shiver and spread.

3. The Piri Reis Map

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Some believe the 16th century
Book of Navigation charts the coast
of Antarctica, which lies beneath
a mile of glacial ice.

                                  The scale is wrong,
and certain charted features match the basins
of the Falkland islands and its strait.

And yet, with some adjustments, faded lines
correspond with digital displays
of radar surveys made from space that pierce
the blue-white pall to intimately trace
the naked contours of the continent.

4. Night, in the Forest

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On a cloudy night, in a forest far
from cities, there is an absolute dark.
For hunger or thirst or some other need,
you must travel. You feel along a tree trunk,
push fingers into the moist bristle of moss.
It grows thicker, higher on one side, and
hardly at all on the other: the north and south.
You walk a few minutes, then run a hand
down another trunk, eyes closed to concentrate,
to check your direction.
                                       You wipe the sweat
from your face with a hand already moist
with the dewy musk of moss and earth.
For a second, you feel about to remember
something from childhood, or a past lover,
or a dream, but there’s nothing but the feeling.
Eyes wide open to the darkness, you move on.

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Imagination’s Laws

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Topia

(On M.C. Escher’s “Tetrahedral Planetoid”)

 

How fine to visit that small world,

to stroll a lakeside avenue.

How fast, the town so tightly curled,

the close horizons drop from view.

Imagination’s laws must be

as strict and strange as gravity.

 

The walks all seem to slope uphill

while distant buildings lean away,

so steps seem slow, but I could round

the world a dozen times a day.

 

I would explore the catacombs

within the little planet’s core;

the center’s where the up is down,

what was the ceiling is the floor.

 

I cannot think the thousand ways

my life would change in such a place;

those thousand ways are why I think

it’s floating somewhere out in space.

Imagination’s laws must be

as strict and strange as gravity.

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The Light, the Fly, the Stone

 

A fly collides with the museum light

it danced a minute with while I observe.

How long in fly time? What percentage slice

on fly-life pie chart wasted in futile buzz

against hot incandescence? Now it’s blind

and dazed, it loops and settles on cool marble:

The Winged Victory of Samothrace.

The crowd is milling round the pedestal,

and flares from cell phone screens rise as if to hail

some conquest lost in time the statue’s arm,

though missing now, once joyously expressed.

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Laws of Conservation

 

Magic Realism Bot‏ @MagicRealismBot

A guilt-stricken poet keeps an unusual possession in a locked box: A clockwork lobster.

 

Beneath his desk, inside the locked steel box,

it shifts and scuttles, scratches, then is silent:

a minute, ten, an hour, maybe two.

 

He never knows the period of pause,

or motion: how long it will rattle, click.

One week, he charted it, but found no pattern.

 

The thing’s creator boasted it would run

as long as earth rotated and revolved,

such motions moved small weights and wound its springs.

 

A thing of beauty, he recalls, of tin

and copper, beaten thin, inlays of nacre,

the delicate swimmerets like frayed wire.

 

Like a pair of ragged claws, his hands clack out

a line about celestial mechanics.

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The Light in Florence

 

Magic Realism Bot‏ @MagicRealismBot

A movie producer is concentrating on a ray of light in Florence.

 

The actors quit two weeks ago; the star

a week before. Director number two

imbibed too much Chianti, crashed her car.

The crew is gone. The writer’s sure to sue.

The studio lost faith; investor groups

redeem completion bonds. The journalists

interrogate the ones who’ll talk, chase scoops.

A name is added to all those blacklists.

 

The camera rolls: cathedral, west doors, day.

A ray of light descends, strikes bronze, archives

contact, streams out into the lens: a play

he documents alone. It all survives.

Imagining, he sees the screen the night

the film premieres. It’s light, just light, all light.

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What the Scintilla?

 

The sentence makes reference scintillate: it creates a hovering in things.

         from “Seeking a Sentence” by Pierre Alferi (tr. by Joseph Simas)

 

When struck by waves, a blue-hot photon, say,

or alpha particle, the target flashes —

like that? Sense floats as the sentence slams away

as if reindeer under Santa’s lashes.

 

Perhaps it’s just a twinkling, light from stars

refracted in the turbulent night air,

the sudden delta of some millibars

and once straight lucid beams blur, flicker, flare;

 

or then the aura at the dazed eye’s edge

before the migraine blooms (there is a kind

of dizzy hover there, till brain meets sledge);

 

or dots on a grid illusion, percept designed.

Where, then, should the poet sink the dredge:

in things, or things between, or just the mind?

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