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To my mother, who has loved literature all her life, and who turned ninety-one the year I finished this book, I dedicate it.
I use white-black life gain and self-burn, green-black discard rush, and blue-green buildup creature crush.
Overheard in conversation
I love Method, extremely.
Clenard the Grammarian, in a dialogue by Matthew Prior
Contents
Title Page
Note to Reader
Identical Multiples
Fastener
Webcam the World
Dodo’s Caca
Hackers Can Sidejack Cookies
A Blind
Far Niente
Postcocious
Recurrent Dream
Agape
Study Under Fire
On Purpose Laid
Granny’s Song
About the Head
Unto High Heaven
I Cannot Clear My Eyes
Philosopher Orders Crispy Pork
Thous by the Thousands
Ill-Made Almighty
And the Greatest of These
For Want of Better Words
Space Bar
Myrrha to the Source
With the Moon
The Song of Skeptomai Lou
Missing Meaning
Good Old God
Half Border and Half Lab
Domestique
Glass House
From the Tower
Man in the Street
Mary’s Reminder
Creature Crush
Nocebo
Dark View
Tree Farm
Which Is Given for You
The River Overflows the Rift
The Gift
Not to Be Dwelled On
Practice Practice Practice
Both Sides Snipe at the Holy Ghost
No Sex for Priests
Boondocks
Nothing Is Too Small
Moving Walkway
Thanks for That Last Heartthrob
Leaf-Litter on Rock Face
Who Needs It
Mourner’s Kaddish
The Microscope
Medium as Meteorologist
An Underworldliness
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Copyright, Credits and Feedback Link
Donor page
Identical Multiples
Inside the zygote
something’s simmering.
It’s boiling up and boiling over
until suddenly a second one
splits off. Now there’s a calm
accumulation until one of those two
gets its own upbubbling baby-making urge
and percolates itself into a rift. So that makes three
pursuing their apparently peace-loving
self-abutting industries... And all night long
the dreamer’s implicated, doubled over, doubled up
as mixer/muller of the parts#8212;hormonal cauldron where a lot
of mental matter too is stirred. Eventually a being will conceive
(in stalls of staves, in calques of cramp, in knuckleheads and thrall—
god help us all) the stems of words.
Fastener
One as is as another as.
One with is with another with;
one against’s against all others and one of
of all the ofs on earth feels chosen. So the man
can’t help his fastening on many
(since the likes of him like
look-alikes)... When the star-shower crosses
the carnival sky, then the blues of the crowd
try to glisten, to match it; and the two
who work late in the butcher-house touch,
reaching just the same moment
for glue and for hatchet.
Webcam the World
Get all of it. Set up the shots
at every angle; run them online
24-7. Get beautiful stuff (like
scenery and greenery and style)
and get the ugliness (like cruelty
and quackery and rue). There’s nothing
unastonishing—but get that, too. We have
to save it all, now that we can, and while.
Do close-ups with electron microscopes
and vaster pans with planetcams.
It may be getting close
to our last chance —
how many
millipedes or elephants are left?
How many minutes for mind-blinded men?
Use every lens you can#8212;get Dubliners
in fisticuffs, the last Beijinger with
an abacus, the boy in Addis Ababa who feeds
the starving dog. And don’t forget the cows
in neck-irons, when barns begin
to burn. The rollickers at clubs,
the frolickers at forage#8212;take it all,
the space you need: it’s curved. Let
mileage be footage, let years be light. Get
goggles for the hermitage, and shades for whorage.
Don’t be boggled by totality: we’re here to save the world
without exception. It will serve
as its own storage.
Dodo’s Caca
It, too, is fossilized.
In time it has become
as valuable as he.
(In time, that is, there is
no waste#8212;or all is waste,
to put it more depressingly.
Ah well, that takes the onus off
the opus. Lulled or gulled or
numbskulled, we
need not be suffered fools if all
is time’s tomfoolery.)
The dream is by the drainage pipe.
The cheek is by the jowl.
All flesh to the inquiring eye,
the scavenging scatologist
gets the scoop from the shed.
But journalists (fair-weather friends!)
have been there first: the shed is full
of scoops befouled.
The present’s sent
before its time. If time
has depth, you’ve got to dig
eternity — #8212;one, two! One, two! We’re
on our way — #8212;each boy abed, each girl aglee,
each nobody aloft agrees we’ll mark our meaning,
make our mark, the moment that the nowadays are done.
That’s soon enough. That’s presently. So shovel, little shovel-bird.
How far off co
uld that be?
Hackers Can Sidejack Cookies
a collage-homage to Guy L. Steele and Eric S. Raymond
A beige toaster is a maggotbox.
A bit bucket is a data sink.
Farkled is a synonym for hosed.
Flamage is a weenie problem.
A berserker wizard gets no score for treasure.
In MUDS one acknowledges
a bonk with an oif.
(There is a cosmic bonk/oif balance.)
Ooblick is play sludge.
A buttonhook is a hunchback.
Logic bombs can get inside
back doors. There were published bang paths
ten hops long. Designs succumbing
to creeping featuritis
are banana problems.
(“I know how to spell banana,
but I don’t know when to stop.”)
Before you reconfigure,
mount a scratch monkey.
A dogcow makes
a moof. An aliasing bug
can smash the stack.
Who wrote these tunes,
these runes you need
black art to parse?
Don’t think it’s only
genius (flaming), humor (dry),
a briefcase of cerebral dust.
A hat’s a shark fin, and the tilde’s dash
is swung: the daughter of the programmer
has got her period. It’s all about wetware at last,
and wetware lives in meatspace.
A Blind
A blind of green
cedar, the branches cut just
at the changing of bands
(wood for wind, frond for trill,
logistics for lizard, scale for scale—
because the lineages
love Linnaeus, he’s the
rex’s lex), which leaves ourselves
an eyehole for the world,
after the weaving of one
over other and other
on one. Once it’s built
it’s a blind
sort of date. It’s a nest with a mind
for a critter inside. And its charms
have a punch. And its hunches
have arms.
I saw it clearly then
at seven, in a Woolworth’s floral aisle,
an aisle of plastic greenery, the moment that
the momentary struck me. There I stood
stock-still and swore
I’d never let it
leave my mind, I’d
nail it once and for all.
I grasped what I was
in the clutches of#8212;a species
of unkindness, beating
at the brow. From then on,
then would have to be
forever known as now.
Far Niente
Nothing is beyond our ken
And Everything is spurious.
Anything is close at hand
But we want Something—fast
And furious. Just to the stone men
Near the end of the fever
Takes the most curious
Almost forever. Nothing is farther
Again: Nothing is nearer
The truth. No one woke from the first—
We were wholly immersed—
Then we burst into Youth.
Postcocious
Bubbling over at a glimpse
of yellow truck, singing out at every
dog or lollipop—a drop
of hat will do—hell, waking up
induces peals of laughter! They’re abuzz
with businesses and glee. It’s clear
to them what living’s for.
It isn’t clear to me.
For me each item’s a line item,
each occasion an occasion for redress,
reclaiming, recompense, or rue. Given
time’s best gift, I’m always
scheming to return it.
As for the language
of the love of life—
when did my soul unlearn it?
Recurrent Dream
Go, go, go, the daughter muttered
as the man (slo-mo) threw his plate at the wall
and the woman and children beside her
froze. She thought (and wrongly, as it all
turned out), I’ll never grow
so furious at my
first mate.
No, no, no, the captain
(mom’s new husband, feeling
hungry) admonished the daughter
when below the decks she turned
from the galley toward the head.
(For every impropriety she learned
new nouns. Much didn’t match:
the stern, for example, so inviting,
and the bow so angry.)
Living rooms rolled by all night, and each one spilled
some golden cargo. Streets could not be told
from boundlessness, though now and then
their ends were nailed with metal letters.
Night would go on welling,
that was clear, until it got to flow, when
gently down the stream she’d aim
to row, row, row.
Agape
I could fly like a god—
went from zero to forty
and seven to five.
I could shift for myself,
michelining my time
round the workblocks and off-days.
Took a shine to my chassis and
took it uptown, where I saw in a highlight
the wreck it appeared—there it stopped
in a storefront, the shade of its shape
gave me pause—how it gaped—and then lo
from the O of its brain
stepped the creature itself—
just a day-numbered ape
with a clue it was clay.
Study Under Fire
On one side only, even in the fog
The color seems conferred
By some sunset-nostalgic
Spray-paint specialist.
The color seems applied
On one side only, like
A love. Directional affection, from
The sun’s southwest. With a quick
Reflexive tremor all will soon
Come down to air and bare bone —
Clean of vanity and veil. Meanwhile,
Believing that the tree gives rise
To all this fire, we feel
Excited in its zone, conceive
The shines to be requited, and begin
To love a little nature of our own.
On Purpose Laid
Bitten hind- and forequarters by Jove
I beat a blind retreat from love.
But he’s there, too. I’ve seen his gray-
blue fingerprints on every
wrinkle of the brain. That’s why I grew
so skeptic of a heavenly escape.
You build a craft, you have
to man it. (Juno cannot help me:
jealous of all animals that ever
got off on a planet.)
Granny’s Song
If the fact itself were not
at odds with most of my hopes
for human life, I’d want
to know why sex was always best
when I stood to lose the most.
Why make its charms so devilishly
proximal to risk?
The patterns ought to favor
children’s best protection—not
one parent hardened and one hurt;
one predator, one weak. But nurturance
appeared to have no part
in our old fastest appetites—our grappling hooks
and eye-meats. Well, a mortally afflicted tree
will scatter seed. That’s nature’s way
of furthering its kind. In my own
sixties (here where issue’s not the issue—
an embryo implant, and let me tell you
I am not that nuts)—here newly
sixtified, I say, I’d settle for
a kindness: tender looks not
tenterhooks; a cuddle,
not a cattle-prod. Dear god,
you made me pull away from every
club and strut and hoe. Don’t now
on my account, sweet chariot,
swing so damn low.
About the Head
In the old days it was all
phrenologists and mentalists,
feelers for speed bumps.
Several rubbers later there was lunch,
and the diamonded mind
and the spaded heart
were equally sedated,
and the club,
the club in whose name
so much was done, the club that could trace
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