Read an Excerpt

Chapter I.

Anywhere

Not Paris

Our shimmer of days

sucked through the howling wall-clock’s

macerating blades—

Signs

Slung

like an ancient

baseball

across

long

space

past Ursa

Major

enter

invisible

the Cybele

Meteor

unwelcome

in the Milky

Way

or so

we’ll

wager

*

Look up, Alley Oop!—

pressure-flaking a flint core

in your unflown coop,

Deep Time, that egg-blown

old dark under the Dordogne—

there’s blood on your door:

Somethings in the sky—

something’s scratched your cornea—

blink. Don’t rub your eye.

*

Tell, Sibyl, huffing sulfur,

intuiting tomorrow,

your mind’s reticulum in shreds,

your vital signs a horror:

They’ve seized the Cybele Meteor.

They’re bringing it to Rome.

Is that a good idea?

Gaia grim in a black stone?

Anywhere Not Paris

1. Edges

About the time one starts to grow suspicious

of the world, to lose one’s faith in edges,

verges, borders, boundaries, that cusp

comes at which one’s own biology

begins to cross them with abandon. Bulge

and salient balancing retreat: here hair-

line and shrunk shank, there the more general her-

niations supervene: belly occludes belt;

dewlaps brim the buttoned collar.

*

Deeper pattern shatters. Ventricular

percussions stutteringly muff the rhythm

of a lifetime: lub-dub-dub: the world’s withering

fire. Grotesque foreign proteins trickle

though the blood-brain barrier. Not-You

enters the city in triumph, to clarions and cheers,

while You hammer the portcullis, howling. Does Nature

have edges? Tell me that, you smudge, you faint Venn

diagram whose membrane-lines have proven solvent

in the stream of things?

*

As words as vessels

fail to hold their little maelstroms, all selves

lose outline, so. Nouns leak; verbs leak worse,

and that’s the news. Our poor suppressor cells

don’t recognize us any more than What’s-Her-

Name, from whenever-it-was, fumbling words

with me on the street the other day. She, too,

shape-shifted like a blink of myth: Ishtar

Resartus in a paisley shawl; Apollo reappareled

in papyrus and bone—what a pair!

Say, Siri—Pythia—what’s flesh anyway but shadow-

garb a gone god’s doffed? If ours seemed a touch

déclassé, it’s only by unfair comparison

with what divinity was wearing in—I want to say Paris,

1972?—Good grief, she was a pretty

Muse!—

And who’s not shapelier today than soon,

a thousand years or so from now, redistributed

according to surfactant properties

of Time? Her name?— I want to say Beauty,

though it might have been Betty. The point is, even proper

nouns bleed out like all the rest of us.

*

Not the street, the bus. It was on the bus.

2. Taxa

To my friend the physicist, who still resembles

his yearbook picture, things seem simple.

Acknowledging her name, conceding her avian

properties, her moods, her modes, her raving

beauty, he’ll insist she is a mammal, and feel

the firmer settlement of saying something real.

I ask: are avian dinosaurs, qua birds,

reptiles? And then my friend and I have words.

3. Under the Oculus

Turn the mirror edgewise, time sideways,

so to speak. Here’s the waist

of the hourglass, our porthole oculus,

cervix of the future

which, like everything accelerated,

swells

and thins:

thus

memory shreds in the solar wind,

the quartz porthole, bleb on a blowpipe, spills,

the skull rises through the face

behind its mica visor, slung in the centrifuge—

no refuge:

lick the mirror like a glacier,

like aluminum in winter—

lick Antarctica, that’ll slow your bosons,

won’t it?

4. Unlikely,

we say, involuntarily invoking a Land of Unlikeness

where no echo augurs a far shore,

nothing accrues to a human cry.

The mirror like Loch Ness

coughs up its plesiosaur.

A decade ricochets by.

Hear the Doppler foghorn through the shaving glacier?

Check its edges, calving.

Having

read somewhere that certain sorts of humor

depend upon surprise, a sly

low-slung irruption of the unexpected, I—

oh, my!

That’s why the mirror gets so funny.

5. Don’t make me laugh,

we say, meaning something like, No.

About the time we stop stropping like barbers these blades

of nouns and verbs against the spinal cord,

the hard thought having once for all occurred

they’ll never prove keen enough to resect the clade

from the light-waves washing all this flotsam in—

About our lot: loss.

About the courage one might wish to summon,

about that sang-

froid, the saying-goodbye sans tears—

About the time (as I was saying)

one starts to grow suspicious of the lexicon,

to lose faith in defensible frontiers,

to sicken

somewhat before the calving berg

of the funhouse mirror (horribly

a liquid, as the pedant puts it), the glass bags

in and out, flimmering like a windy bubble:

Now here’s belt uncinched, subtending belly

now debouching

into neighboring space—

Feel that elevator-lurch-and-pause?—

And now Biology

like punched dough no more plump and jowly

bugles its retreat: cheeks scoop; thews

thin. The world’s fire withering.

And still a good deal left to lose.

6. So, for the moment

never mind the Time Machine, that ever-cracking mirror,

syntax, cervix of the sandglass, oculus, our kind’s quartz

porthole blown like a soapy bubble flimmering through the

Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud, occluded at the terminator,

minatory as it is in mind, always, us tongue-stuck, indistinct

in a moon-calf wince windmilling backward—what an

image!—into origins or epitaphs, it’s life, still, though

thought stall,

and not the worst laugh ever laughed.

The Time Machine

1. The Pantheon

Watch, at the stoneless cope

of the open oculus, its keen kerf

slice Time. Acetylene sun—

ice moon—the strobe

accelerates. Earth’s verdure

winking in the onset:

instants!—seasons!—eons!—the snow-globe

spinning like a pitched ball back the coffered curvature,

all its flakes a flurry of unsettling—

*

Now wing-whirr of the four-foot dragonfly—

Pock-ploops the early asteroidal rain-drum din—

A blood-red placental moon drapes a third of the sky—

Whoops!—now lithosphere slips like pudding-skin—

Syntax enters the ape—the world splinters—

Enter invisible: the Cybele Meteor spins past Pluto—

*

Pilot-

less, queasy, we lisp Abort!

The time machine creaks to a halt.

Through its quartz porthole

the page stretches, endless, white as salt.

2. When Are We?

After tree ferns, their whispery soughing;

after predator-drone-sized darning-needle’s whizz.

After armored fish

dragged up clanking from the benthos.

After Amazon and Congo run confluent.

Certainly after our one moon tore off, dripping,

but well before aurochs

(great big aurochs bumping our cavewall,

oilcanning our cavewall,

denting it to get in!—

a flock of handprints pushing back—)

After also smilodon, dawn horse.

Well after that dead stegosaur

with its plates unstacked,

its veined tongue lolling,

dirt-stuck, breaded like schnitzel—

(note iridescence on the oily onyx shell

of the stag beetle staggering

up the medial valley

of the dead stegosaur’s lolling tongue—

*

Zoom out:

Iridescence streaks the lens

against a thick galactic talc.

As though as hoar

from a pane

the great corrugated thumbnail of God

scrapes a starless line

across the screeching empyrean—

*

3. The Meteor

Well, that was how it was. Maybe we dreamt it.

That was a ride. Time torn open like a hydrant.

That was sure hair unbound and lips apart,

lapels aflutter in the flume of the photon-torrent.

We stood looking up, and a bit of iron scratched the oculus,

and that was just our luck,

start to finish, we fishtailed, and treed,

and fell, and it didn’t kill us,

though the hands horrored up

and we hit the quartz screen,

and it starred.

Madsong

Origins suggest edges;

middles, too, as also ends;

the horsehide baseball just so sketches

an arc from hickory to fence

(whose little horse, just poodle-high,

once fled the sabertooth’s embrace)

but here the ball is said “to fly”

above the runner and the base,

the flaxen laces spinning, spun

like inks in the Book of Kells;

thus Africa was somewhere once,

the Arctic somewhere else—

as also, too, magnetic north

and also, too, Polaris,

and this and that and so and forth,

recalling me to Paris:

I meant appearances, I think,

like a scholar in a study—

The Keats Equation!—sing, sing,

since her name must have been Beauty.

II.

Science

Tuesday

Fragment

There’s nothing any-

where but guessing. [Frag. thirty-

four, Xenophanes.]

Conceptual Thinking

A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of “Hollo! thingumbob again!” ever flitted through its mind.

—william james

Re Names:

Finical,

perception

its pen-knife,

nerve-long

language

feels for an edge,

teasing out the rim

of a perimeter,

muttering

Hollo?— Polyp

to Apollo:

Bob’s your uncle,

Mr. James

Agnostic Gospels

Do I believe in Fahrenheit degrees?

Of course I do, they’re real enough, as, please

the little gods, also the little gods,

and big ones, too, but grudgingly, the odds

against them feeling somewhat longer. Muse,

too, who hardly ever calls. Also the news

from what used to be called Frontiers of Science. Science!

that mortgaged curator of psychic sins,

in this case Curiosity: what killed his

cat may serve his proudest faculties

the same, since Reason scums its petri dish,

endangered now, with every wilting wish.

But weren’t we speaking of belief? Schrödinger’s cat?

What’s reason got to do with that?

Reason May Not Mean to Be the Sophist

Slip the Problem from its sleeve. The vinyl’s

scratched. And that’s the problem, finally:

the nature of emotion’s analog,

while languages are digital. Too few long-

playing feelings, inkily remastered,

long survive by heart. This mystery

runs deep, requiring deeper magics. Look, we

say, by darksome sleight ventriloquy,

referring to a nerve potential triggered

by a pressure in the world, recurring

now in a lung, in a laugh, in a poem of Sappho’s.

Schrödinger’s Elephant

Once upon a time in Copenhagen

the blind men met to scratch the quantum noggin.

They hashed things out, agreeing to decree

that the wave function of the pachyderm

collapses into rope, or spear, or tree,

or fan, or wall, as senses will confirm,

but only when the moment’s brought to measure.

Till then, it’s all-and-none. It’s worse than Escher.

The key, you’ll note, is human observation.

Human?— How in heaven’s name?—

The answer’s

mathematical as all Creation,

involving Probability and Chance. . . .

Laypeople simply can’t—look, no offense,

but try now not to think of elephants.

Science Tuesday

The first human-chimpanzee chimera,

christened Pan sapiens, was born today

at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston.

The Hubble’s Very Wide Spool camera

regained partial function of its data

module, and is now on track for the Sirius starburst.

Dr. 32B, chief of research at Merck,

again replied, “No comment.” “Ever,” he added,

to op-ed columns suggesting he’s hostile to the Press.

The Sentient Rover, assembled in America

from Chinese parts, parked since Saturday

in a no-load zone on Mars, appears depressed.

Spokesmen for the Generation Meerkat

Energy Corp. assured critics that the shudder is soldered,

stressing again that “containment vessel” is at best

a metaphor. The starburst—a miracle!

The drug had side effects. The Rover broke. The “baby satyr,”

Pan sapiens, died at his surrogate mother’s breast.

He was hard to look at, she is reported to have said.

Pan sapiens 2

The first human-chimpanzee chimera

looked searchingly into the shaving mirror.

His hairline—was it?—yes, it was advancing.

Another blow, albeit only glancing.

For, having clever fingers (who’d forced fire?)

he’d simply boost the amps in his blow dryer.

Later, glaciers shrank from their moraines.

Seas rose above the knees of fishing cranes.

Venice, once resembling Tycho’s Mars

now swamped like Venus, where the brontosaurs

rent heaven with hoarse hoots in praise of gods

who lent such swanny necks to sauropods.

And if you can’t believe a noon so strange,

consult your own defunct nouns, for a change.

The Blank Slate

Concerning Common Ancestors, in verse:

Might chimpanzees once raised by bonobos

reach deep into your trousers and propose

engagements polymorphous and perverse?

Who knows.

Or would (here note initial terms reversed)

a bonobo by chimpanzees once nursed

and raised to adolescence come to blows,

or worse?

The question is an old one, cast in fable—

the oldest one, maybe, rephrased by Abel,

marking Cain, the line forever cursed—

though what an ape’ll

say to that (in ASL, of course,

if non-recursive, and a touch terse)

may not refer to the matter of the Apple,

or Ancestors

at all. Or Babel.

And never mind what it means to say “refers.”

Pan sapiens 3

I am Pan sapiens. I don’t speak well,

and so I write. Some say I look like hell.

I think that’s hard. I think I look like you.

Pan in, however—never mind the view:

You’ve seen it all your life, the diorama

stinking with the crowd of us, from Rama-

pithecus to poor Neanderthal,

who’s lost his lisp at last, and, standing tall

peers like any fool into my eyes

where once upon a time, a wild surmise—

Now, dip your quill into the pupils’ ink:

it isn’t how we look. What is it? Think.

The Arcturan Vivisectionist Explains

This specimen’s common name is Mirroreye.

Observe (retractor, please) just here—a rare

non-adaptive anomaly in the so-called “third

lid”—common enough, of course, in lizards, birds,

sharks, et al., all perfectly unremarkable, save

that the nictitating membrane is silvered

inside, enabling these creatures to see themselves

reflected everywhere: in wood-grain, in moon, in clouds,

in others of their kind, even; also imparting an odd,

not uncrabwise aspect to their gait, backing hell-bent,

headlong, as it were, into what’s already happened.

Horcrux: A Romantic Landscape

—as scored for crumhorn by edward lear

You need some genes for jumping,

but none for not jumping too high,

since that information is stored on location,

between the earth and sky.

Our ancestors hadn’t to worry

about too many sweets before lunch.

What protected their livers? The veldt could deliver

just so many berries per bunch.

Memory is a secretion

externally fertilized, so,

that a landscape revisited still may elicit

a shiver from ancient snow.

Some writers have interesting minds;

most don’t. Yet by poem or novel

they somehow find thoughts the way tubers in plots

may surface, when stirred with a shovel.

The brain thinks it does all the thinking,

but likely it doesn’t, at that:

too much information is stored on location.

It couldn’t be done from a vat.

As birds need genes for flying

but none for returning to ground,

and the human mind is not born blind

to the conditions of its surround,

if the world’s a bouquet of answers

to the questions the senses pose,

its lies of omission would be the conditions

that Heaven only knows.

Forget what you can’t imagine,

the edge of the measure of man:

since what’s unfurled as the sum of the world

must be what you can.

And that’s not terrible news.

It means we are some place.

That’s some reassurance. Where it leaves the Arcturans?—

But Lunch is served. Say grace.

Brains in a Vat

Step inside, please, spake the elevator,

hissing, reminiscent of Lord Vader

also in its little shudder. Later,

lobbed, too, through the black hole labeled Vela

X-1, judging by an indicator

blinking upward through the blank abyss

between the tenth and millionth floors, the Muse

of Relativity would disabuse

me of my geocentrism, for this

was Einstein’s gravitational caboose,

and I was in a thought experiment.

Or was one, which is what I might have meant.

Still, the simplest things seem paramount:

That elevator talked, and I can count.