To find employment and the truth
I read the classifieds in tea leaves—
symbol seeking an equation
clothesline seeking washing
objectified stranger seeking life
I’ll try again tomorrow,
investigate the websites in the clouds,
where my skill
at staring into light and dark
might be less superfluous.
I remember when we lived
beneath creation
with our language suited
to the fatuous and fantastic.
When we never wondered
what our slide rules might not measure,
we saw our ambit through camerae obscurae,
pinpoints of the truth inverted.
I’m not quite comfortable with that fireplace, amor,
or the smoke from all the books you’re burning.
I was working through the Dewey Decimals,
I’d kept a little eight two one.
You told me everything defined is lost
by definition,
a soul’s reflection in a mirror.
I thought it best to undefine myself.
We need a chimenea.
I’ll remodel with the chainsaw.
The chainsaw roars, she says a little more
I cannot hear.
An arid future in a waterless world,
where all our understanding wavers
on a bridge to whiteness.
We are replicants in the land
of nothing new, and the westerlies,
hot and dry, are blowing away the children.
As they fall, we fall.
A small symbolic light above the planar world,
the curveless planetary horizon
and yapping dogs on the wind,
run I walk I queue I
grow tired, eyes close and flicker,
yet every photon tells a tale
of a restless luminous voyage.
After midnight I wander under
sodium doublet illumination
to the very end of the street.
It starts with fire and ends with rain,
zero is infinity
and my home
is filled with strangers,
yet their strangeness is not reciprocal.
zero
Everything’s unpointed,
worth the special introductory
price of free.
The scientist Irene in white
peered over her half-moons.
Let’s apply a little logic: if everything
is worthless, so is that idea.
Come with me to Improbable Park.
There’s something unfortunate about seven a.m.,
when the dreams of worlds that might have been
ascend into the vanishment.
~/~
As I traveled the Redfern Rail one night,
through tunnels that smelled of soot and ghosts of steam,
I chatted with a stranger. Her auburn hair was wound
with a golden asp, and she told me this:
Your mind’s your own, to do with as you will.
I saved mine for special occasions,
believed in pixels and maquillage,
bowed and chanted to great Osiris,
but I know better now.
Chalcedony, a distant and unfriendly planet,
orbits an old-fashioned chartreuse sun
in an unsociable spiral galaxy.
It’s a centimeter or two away from earth
on a standard map of the universe,
Mercator Projection.
In a café on the planet’s surface,
it’s Monday morning, neither late nor early,
and Manique, of humanoid appearance,
is sipping a humanoid coffee.
She’s putting on her armor just before the sun up,
with a snap of latches, and the buzz of her
electric screwdriver.
In the far field, stuttering unsteadiness,
in the near field, delicate slivers of glass.
~/~
He knows that he is not himself, someone else
inside authoritates the wine list
and whispers to the pillow:
a loquacious tropical parrot will emerge
and leave a chrysalis remainder.
Thought bubbles must be punctured gently,
deflated with a fine molecular needle.
-/-
She lets me do the shopping at the markets,
the hens are in my charge, I sweep the floors,
but I’m a prisoner in her house.
On the crooked kitchen shelving, potions bright,
alluring clues, magic herbs and condiments.
To prepare Bahian fish, she says.
Her eyes are jungle camouflage, her tidal laughter
breaks in waves when nothing is amusing,
mysteries are woven in her hair.
Tell me something true and real, she says—I
notice her fangs are
a little blunt—you can tell the cat
your dreams.
~ / ~
I came to planet Crypton years ago,
traveled in a sky-blue pod from Earth,
its vaporous madness left behind.
It looks a lot like Earth itself,
more crystalline than you’d expect
and everyone is strangers.
I pour a glass of water, try the hot and cold,
but it doesn’t make a difference, only steam today.
My hair’s dissolved as well, or perhaps
I just misplaced it long ago.
The fridge has flown out through the kitchen
window, appliances in
migratory flocks are traveling north,
and I’ve put my ice cream
in the oven, no need for any baking.
Sutherland birds
All Sutherland birds are flightless, the local
council recommends
tiny holes in fences for the poor
creatures to hop
through, and we are strangers lost
and roaming in a lonely place.
Riders within us direct our dreams,
we who imagine ourselves
untouched by the local weather,
and yet a storm is brewing
by the picture rail in the dining room
where the larks are pecking at the carpet,
and Docinha’s head is hidden inside
a fluffy philosophical cloud.
By night I long for vacuum,
yet gravity ties my bones and blood,
wires me to the world, an unbreakable nexus.
I’d prefer a lighter planet, uncored by an iron seed.
We think alike, adversaries and friends,
harmonies of disdain and love,
characters in chiaroscuro,
quotidian actors reading quadrophonic lines.
A thunderstorm’s approaching underground.
Along the shore, waves of sand
competing with the ocean,
from ancient graveyards ghosts will float
into the world, freed from roiling earth,
disinterred.
Lidia pays
no attention
to the weather forecast
and I prepare our breakfast:
spinach, pastry, thoughts of eggs,
peel a purple onion, layer after layer,
until just the memory of an onion’s left.
Through the window, washes
on a watercolor planet,
rainy autumn shades in spring, and
in the early evening, scattered photon showers
are forecast, a luminous return of light
from the shadow sun.
Indoors there are smaller mysteries,
trailing motes in negative space—
old-fashioned sunlight
leaving lamps and bulbs,
domesticities and peripherals,
drawn out between the curtains
to the shadow sun.