Mezzanine
Page 1
Publisher’s Note
Rendering poetry in a digital format presents several challenges, just as its many forms continue to challenge the conventions of print. In print, however, a poem takes place within the static confines of a page, hewing as close as possible to the poet’s intent, whether it’s Walt Whitman’s lines stretching to the margin like Route 66, or Robert Creeley’s lines descending the page like a string tie. The printed poem has a physical shape, one defined by the negative space that surrounds it—a space that is crafted by the broken lines of the poem. The line, as vital a formal and critical component of the form of a poem as metaphor, creates rhythm, timing, proportion, drama, meaning, tension, and so on.
Reading poetry on a small device will not always deliver line breaks as the poet intended—with the pressure the horizontal line brings to a poem, rather than the completion of the grammatical unit. The line, intended as a formal and critical component of the form of the poem, has been corrupted by breaking it where it was not meant to break, interrupting a number of important elements of the poetic structure—rhythm, timing, proportion, drama, meaning, and so on. It’s a little like a tightrope walker running out of rope before reaching the other side.
There are limits to what can be done with long lines on digital screens. At some point, a line must break. If it has to break more than once or twice, it is no longer a poetic line, with the integrity that lineation demands. On smaller devices with enlarged type, a line break may not appear where its author intended, interrupting the unit of the line and its importance in the poem’s structure.
We attempt to accommodate long lines with a hanging indent—similar in fashion to the way Whitman’s lines were treated in books whose margins could not honor his discursive length. On your screen, a long line will break according to the space available, with the remainder of the line wrapping at an indent. This allows readers to retain control over the appearance of text on any device, while also indicating where the author intended the line to break.
This may not be a perfect solution, as some readers initially may be confused. We have to accept, however, that we are creating poetry e-books in a world that is imperfect for them—and we understand that to some degree the line may be compromised. Despite this, we’ve attempted to protect the integrity of the line, thus allowing readers of poetry to travel fully stocked with the poetry that needs to be with them.
—Dan Halpern, Publisher
Dedication
for my parents
+
for my sisters
Epigraph
The non-autonomous machines . . .
multiplied power through external operation
by human or animal muscle or by natural forces.
Autonomous machines
were internalized models of the ordered motions
of the celestial spheres.
The first were symbols of power.
The second, of order.
Both were fundamental to the new value system.
—CAROLYN MERCHANT, The Death of Nature
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Publisher’s Note
Dedication
Epigraph
+
I Looked on My Right Hand and Beheld
The Lotus on Marina Bay Speaks
Object at the Department Store Speaks
The Tamping Iron Speaks
The Levee Speaks
Silent Auction
The Cryptographer Speaks
On Atrazine
Stylized Facts
How We Programmed the Apocalypse
Silent Auction
+
Huttonian Theory of Earth
On Styrofoam
Triple Witching
War of the Currents
Generalized Method of Moments
Trial for the New Aubade
1st Trial for the New Aubade
2nd Trial for the New Aubade
Fragments from the Imagined Epic: The Song of Have Blue
+
The War Gone Wrong Room
Objectivity as Blanket
Silent Auction
Pawn Slip
The List
Proxy Means
Division Day
+
Fragments from the Imagined Epic: The Island of Stone Money
+
Difference Engine
Pernkopf Atlas (I)
Pernkopf Atlas (II)
Gesture Atlas
+
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Author
Permissions
Copyright
About the Publisher
I Looked on My Right Hand and Beheld
a hand made out of all that it touched—
fingers of syringes packed with soiled
polyester blankets nails cut from
a plastic bottle cap knuckles
shaped by rinds of other knuckles
and details layered in delicate ash—
ruddy, colorful, clothed. But the left,
flesh and gray, poured like the concrete
surrounding it and sanded at the edges
careful as geometry allows with
dried skin creeping through contours.
Naked hands. Beating knuckles on the ground
wondering will it crack the concrete finally
will it crumble under opposing forces—
material, economy as simple as concrete
is simple, simple to explain but difficult
to understand without explanation.
As plates in our deep crust skid past
one another. One might wonder who
thinks to pour a building of mostly
liquid. Such is the logic of conviction
we are told before the terms are defined.
Dysfunction of episodic memory.
Episode of memory of dysfunction.
Hands that are not our hands.
And so convinced are we of
our own demise we devise it.
The Lotus on Marina Bay Speaks
I am master of the evening lightshow.
Come 8 o’clock, sun gone,
The people belong to me & my
electric arsenal.
They quit their shiny surfaces & sharp objects.
Take off their pointing typing fingers,
abandon their minute-made stances
until tomorrow.
For now it is time to watch lightforms dance
color across glass & marinawater.
Watch them gather, nod to greet each other,
newly deferent.
Here the black-iris bulb blinks from a lightboat,
sashays into a beam of seagreen, soon to be engulfed
by that sandstorm of lightflecks—henna-orange &
desert-clay red.
Sometimes I pretend they understand
my show. That my captivating demonstration
might demonstrate something. To them.
Inside them.
But that is not the case. Not my place. After all
they stuffed the ARTSCIENCEMUSEUM into
my pistil. My petalfingers are padded with
glass skylights.
Yesterday I heard the small man in black
hissing into his handheld device. He wants
to make a deal. Wants to sell the Marina Bay
Sands Hotel.
If the deal goes through they will appoint
a CREATIVEDIRECTOR. What does this deal
mean for me. The towers gleam
behind me.
I am master of the evening lightshow.
Come 8 o’clock, sun gone,
the people belonged to m
e & my
electric arsenal.
Object at the Department Store Speaks
Listen, take me with you. You have so many things to look at.
I want you to see where your black gashes for eyes reach
for depth. I have these ruby eyes. I can see edges.
Edges are shadowy, maybe have rings. I know the meaning
of an instant because I saw someone die in one—
I was debrided from contused flesh. I see the planet in your belly.
It is dense with instants. The planet in my belly is painted green.
I do not much like this mezzanine. My fourteen-karat
peers are formless. Spineless too. Look at them slump
there. They have gems for eyes but cannot make meaning
as I do. The architecture of the eye is complex—
I can draw diagrams and walk you by lighted buildings
to help you understand your black gashes better.
So take me home. Do it. Slip me into your pinkish hand
in the dressing room, buy kohl from the ground floor
to thwart suspicion. Walk out with your clavicles pointed
at the guards behind you like flesh encrusted handguns.
No matter that you stole me from a department store.
We are all stolen. What is possessing. Who was
our clientele during the last great recession.
The Tamping Iron Speaks
. . . the powder exploded, carrying an iron instrument through his head an inch and a fourth in circumference, and three feet and eight inches in length . . .
—The Boston Post, SEPTEMBER 21, 1848
Here is business enough for you.
Business is a practice, it is.
Of railroad tracks and the train.
Of boxcar slats. Of that which
is always approaching—
can you see my explosion?
Can you see my ungentle
approach? From the blacksmith’s
smithy I pack and tamp to blast
black powder into the blast hole
and become myself. Unlike a person.
I know what a person is. I was once
damp with one. See my glia stain,
my inscription. For a short moment
I had an eye on this flat face. I could
believe. Now I am flat. Am a face.
Cannot break this glass case, cannot
set blast—light fuse—
will angle—at which I enter
bedrock.
The Levee Speaks
With my hands but it was with the wire
The way a train on a cantilever truss bridge switches tracks for distance
from the freeway but the switch rails are loose and it hurtles
into the river below
The wire was white but the wire was red
Or a drawbridge lifting to let a barge pass beneath
to find the barge is too large
and knew it
With my car I drove her from the Winn-Dixie from
Winn-Dixie to the levee under the bridge
of a time he was in his car
looking for her
The way an aisle at the Winn-Dixie
the aisle at the Winn-Dixie never ends
Red yes red
Or skin slowly scraped away to reveal an innermost exhaustion
which would rather walk skinless
than not at all
With the red wire and the filaments braided clockwise inside
The way the war doctor would rather amputate the arm
than ligate the artery
The wire but the wire
a phased yaw mark of a massive
contraption the caprice and fullness of whose movement and body
recedes unperceived
Encyclopædia Britannica and its list of great inventions
(profound effects on human life) lists
the polygraph
With wind’s change in course a traffic cone tips off the bridge follows the river
miles downstream miles from intention
The way wire sways from a telephone pole
by the levee after a storm
not wanting
to hurt anyone with the wind
The wire I wrapped it twice
twisted counterclockwise
into fiber inside it
Silent Auction
Yes I helped decree it.
In the white-walled
room of before with
strangers + veils.
Don’t think I don’t think
about it daily. Up here
fumigating my oriel
according to the Newer
Ordering. I feel exactly
how we got here. We
thought. Then we did
as we thought. Then
answered + when we
answered how we did
as we thought
what was was
no one could afford
the self-inducing
covenant. You’d be
surprised what little
we, the slighter figures
there among the rest,
could do in the room,
strobing like sightlines
in the jetbridge.
Now we’ll never see
the men who appraise us
through the one-way
mirrors. Forevermore is
bidding. Every time
I enter the hall, leaving
my liquid assets pooling
in the center of my
oriel, I feel less prepared
for the day—+ no
I won’t know it’s coming—
when they quit me here
entirely + pooling
in the trespasses of my
last remaining asset.
The Cryptographer Speaks
And there is no panic.
It doesn’t fit in. The cracks
of the sidewalk are filled when
concrete is poured. Fill
them with nail clippings.
Extra product. That
is how excessive we can be.
And resourceful, masters
of manufacture. Now do you know
what dust is? The chime
that signals entry into
the convenience store.
It shadows knowledge
of the system. It is testimony.
Anyone can rub it out
with his sleeve. Knowing
or unknowing. The vaultish
powder is a diagram. It is
a torquetum. It is divined
for patent secrets. I can hear
you speak when I twist my key—
your destination must
precede your map.
On Atrazine
I.
“Well I drank it,” says the scientist
when they ask him what he has
done with the contaminated
water. “There is less in the lab’s
cesspool than you have us
suck in past our teeth.”
II.
Underneath the dying broadleaf
between rows of cornstalks
an African dwarf frog
twists his drying-out tongue
shakes a webbed foot
in the direction of his pond
behind the cornfield—
cannot move, that
amphibian ambivalence
mocked by the oocytes
now in his testes, splitting
into ovum. José María
bends down, tender hand
passing cracked boot to scoop
the thirsty vertebrate onto
the cushion of his palm.
Walks as if on a tightrope
through the stalks to the pond
to deliver him.
III.
Point-oh-one parts per
&nb
sp; billion castrates the frog
twenty-four thousand
parts per billion
and José María will sleep
in the field—
Stylized Facts
Now I can’t
get past the mezzanine,
never know who’s waiting
for me downstairs
by the revolving door
covered in shields or crosses
like the blood drive. Will this
be the year they finally succeed
in harvesting these last
self-organs, I ask, as they
tell me it’s for a cause?
As if I’m not the swollen one
smiling on their pamphlets.
Don’t bother with this logic
of sameness as you eye me
like the platter at Labor Lunch.
I used to envy the trees
wearing mists as veils,
modest trunks exploding into
thousands of muscle-bound
legs soon as they reach
the soil. Now even trees
seem docile and susceptible.
So too for the quasi-
goddesses with half-lives
shorter than a hair’s.
When we still had hair
and partners my partner
shaving said hair said
we should be made of light.
While every morning I
wake hoping to uncover
some slab of my body
hollowed out and encased
in steel. Everyone’s entitled
to her own magic bullet
theory of self. There’s
the get-to-know-you
game we play no longer
for we lost get-to and know-you.
If you had to press further into
the future in what county what
province would you elect
what version of what self?
A half-frozen field late