The Problem of the Many, page 2
should soon prefer the hazards of an underworld to those of this
and social media? I dropped a fossilized trilobite in the toilet
and it cracked in half. Millions of years of structural integrity
finished just like that. Without Persephone it all froze over.
No crops grew. It was almost the end of us but Zeus her father
pulled strings to get her back. This service won’t reactivate.
I have come to love catachresis because what’s wrong with it is
right: I light my heart with so much emptiness there’s room
here in the dark for everything. War-related violence in Libya
left 47 civilians dead this May: 38 men, three women, four boys,
and two little girls to dust returneth. One version of the myth
says Hecate leads Persephone to her mother with torches
at the end of winter. Mother with torches at the end of winter,
some days I just sit back and watch things tear each other
apart. It is winter on and off now through the end of spring.
Emotion is everything and nothing. Same is true for structure.
I said to my daughter on the phone: Be an honest person,
just be an honest person. Be honest, be honest, be honest.
Some days I can’t believe what it means to be alive some days.
Some days I think about tearing myself apart but not exactly
with pleasure. Some days I know the strongest feeling is grief
but I believe it must be love: it has to be, has to be, has to.
Some days I feel each cell in my body has its fingers crossed.
The Endless
I saw a yellow butterfly
flying
in my opinion
the wrong way, flying across
the sound
to Connecticut
I saw a cormorant
oily-looking
flying
close to the sea’s surface
precisely
as I floated on it on
my back in
the attitude of the crucifixion
minerals in my body
in
conversation with
the minerals of the sea
about the sun
how can I possibly
add
to what’s already been said
so well
by the ancients
and said with
an austerity I’ll never
know
it is an honor to take
a backseat to the ancients
who knew how
I was a fat white fish
dissolving
under the sold-out stadium sun
like a god
but like a god
I could live through anything.
Apologies from the Ground Up
The staircase hasn’t changed much through the centuries
I’d notice it, my own two eyes now breaking down the larger
vertical distance into many smaller distances I’ll conquer
almost absently: the riser, the tread, the measure of it long
hammered into the body the way it’s always been, even back
in the day when the builders of the tower Nimrod wanted
rising up into the heavens laid the first of the sunbaked bricks
down and rose. Here we are again I say but where exactly
nobody knows, that nowhere in particular humming between
one phoneme and a next, pulse jagged as airless Manhattan-
bound expresses on which I’ve worried years that my cohort
of passengers’ fat inner monologues might manage to lurch
up into audibility at once, a general rupture from the keeping
of thoughts to oneself—statistically improbable I know but
why quarrel with the dread of it. I never counted my own voice
among the chaos, admittedly. I just figured it would happen
not with but against me. A custom punishment for thinking
myself apart from all the others. But not apart from in the sense
above but away from. Although to stand in either way will
imply nobility, power, distinction. As for example if you step
back to consider a sixteenth-century depiction of the tower
under construction, you rapidly identify the isolated figure as
that of the king, his convulsive garment the red of an insect
smitten on a calf, the hint of laughter on his face, or humming
just under the plane of his face, indicative of what you have
come to recognize in others as the kind of pleasure, no more
or less so than in yourself, that can only persist through forcing
the world into its service as it dismantles whatever happens
to oppose it, including its own short-lived impulse to adapt
by absorbing what opposes into its fabric. It will refuse to do that.
It will exhaust its fuel or logic or even combust before it lets
itself evolve into some variation on what it used to be instead
of remaining forever what it is until it dies, even when its death
comes painfully and brings humiliation down upon its house.
In the abstract, on and off—as when hurrying past the wrought-
iron fence some pink flowering branches cantilever through
or if pushed too relentlessly into oneself in public—it’s hard
not to admire the resolve in that. But there are pictures in which
there is no king. The tower staggers into the cloudcover as if
inevitably, or naturally, as if the medium of earth were merely
manifesting its promise. Often the manner in which it does so
reflects the principles of advanced mathematics, but it’s unclear
whether the relationship between the two might be more
appropriately thought of as one of assistance or of guidance.
This distinction is a matter of no small concern to me, actually,
because much as I don’t want anyone’s help, I don’t want anyone
telling me what to do about ten times more, and if what it all
comes down to is that, there’s a far better than average chance
I’ll just end up devising some potentially disastrous third option
on the fly as I wait in line. Elsewhere we find teams of builders
at work among the tower’s open spaces with no one figure leaping
forward as king or even foreman, a phenomenon whose effects
include not only the gratification of our fondness for images
of protodemocracy, but also the stimulation of our need to fill
whatever we perceive to be an emptiness, which in this instance
means electing ourselves into the very position of authority
we had been happy to find vacant. I myself would be happy
leaving every position vacant as an antique prairie across which
bison once roamed democratically, each denizen of the herd
voting for what direction it wanted to take off in with a nudge
of its quarter-ton head, but someone around here has to start
taking responsibility, and I don’t see any hands going up. So here goes.
Sorry. It was me. I built the Tower of Babel. What can I say?
It seemed like a good idea at the time. And a fairly obvious take-
off on what we were already doing, architecture-wise. All I did
was change the scale. I maintained the workers’ enthusiasm
with rustic beer and talk of history. Plus the specter of the great
flood still freaked the people out every heavy rainfall, so it felt
like good civic planning, too—but apparently the whole project
violated the so-called natural order of things. I’m still a little shaky
with the language in the aftermath, but my gut says that’s just
some dressed-up way of admitting I was really onto something.
Unlimited Soup and Salad
A little goes a long way when it comes to reality
and the question of whether we can know it directly
rather than just through the gauze of our experience
(not that it makes that much of a difference
when you’re right in the thick of it, as when performing
a bank heist, or competitive mummery among
family and friends, in which case your trust that
the world is as it appears is more or less inviolate
if unself-reflecting, the way a honeybee trusts nectar
inhabits the petunia, or that her venom sac or
gland or whatever it is will continue pumping its venom
long after the stinger anchors in the forearm
of the intruder—often merely an innocent passerby—
having ripped off the hindmost furze of her body
evisceratingly, which is to say along with much of her
abdomen and digestive tract, plus whatever
else happens to come with, a kind of surrendering
as means of attack, which reads tragically wrong-
headed in retrospect, although it does lend a vividness
to the question of to whom the bee’s business
end belongs now—the one from whose person it
juts or her whose torn foreparts lie on the granite
pavement lifelessly from having implanted it there)—
but when appetizers alone can fill you up, why bother
gambling on the main course, it will only distract
you from what you have come to rely on as fact
relies on its verifiability—in silence and so totally
you could almost weep for it, the way they do in Italy
at the end of an opera, an era, or even the idea of
anything familiar dying: a tradition, a truth; an olive
tree fallen to fungus whose narrow leaves made with
wind a conversation we had found to be rejuvenative
to listen to; whose fruit and oil expressed therefrom
we couldn’t get enough of; whose shade could reform;
and whose earliest ancestor Athena’s constant hand
did unveil in Attica as the greatest gift to humankind.
Diet Mountain Dew
I have built my ship of death
and when a wind kicks up
I’ll cut it loose to do its thing
across an unnamed lake of you,
a firefly sent pulsing through
the nonstop estivation of
the verses of our South, who in
its larval phase would feast
on bitter worms and snails, who
emerges from its mud chamber
our planet’s most efficient
luminescence, who turns
chemical energy into radiant
energy shedding very little heat,
so will I sail the compass of
you pleased with my cold light.
I have built my ship of death
aglow in sturdy chemicals
and powered up at night like
American Express: I’m all
customer service only minus
the customer, no service to speak
of other than death, you will
know my logo by its absence
and slogan from the past
ad for the sugared style of you
on TV in my youth, it goes
like this: “When my thirst
is at its worst . . .” and then I
let it trail off into the unsayable
or is it just unsaid because
my mouth is full of you again.
A green like no other green
in the dale, indelicate green or
green indecent, surpassing
the fern and sprout and April’s
optimistic leaflet some stop
to admire in nature, they take
photographs noncognizant
of other vehicles, you are too
green for pasture, you are
my green oncoming vehicle,
usurper of green, assassin
to the grasshopper and its plan,
I put me in your path which is
the path a planet takes when it
means to destroy another I think
you know I’m okay with that.
A green like no other green
resplending in production since
1940 when brothers Barney
and Ally Hartman cooked it up
in Tennessee qua private
mixer named after moonshine,
its formula then revised by
Bill Bridgforth of the Tri-City
Beverage Corp. in 1958, year
Linwood Burton, chemically
inclined entrepreneur and ship
cleaning-service owner, sold
his formula for a relatively safe
maritime solvent to Procter
& Gamble of Ohio who went on
to market it under the name
of Mr. Clean, whose green
approaches yours then at the
last second swerves into
a joke yellow plays on green
to make blue jealous till it
blows up in its face but I can’t
not love the smell of it, citrus
reimagined by an extra-
terrestrial lizard which is to say
inhuman in the way you say
inhuman to me, a compliment
unraveled in the drawl: “Hey
you, over there, you look
so unaccustomed to temporality
I would’ve sworn you were
inhuman,” and time for it after
time I fall, further evidence
of my humanity: I am at heart
no less susceptible to rot
than the felt hat on the head
of the rifle-toting barefoot
hillbilly, your mascot until he
disappeared in 1969. Instinct
says he must have shot his
self in the woods in the mouth
one sunrise when a frost
was at hand and the apples
fell thick and he was way
too awake when he did so not to
think there would be another
waiting like a can of you in
the 12-pack in my refrigerator.
I have built my ship of death
and enough already, every
toxic sip of you preparing for
the journey to bloviation:
I leave to return and return
to depart again the stronger
for a satisfaction being bound
to no port has afforded me.
I have built my ship of death
so that even when I crawl
back down into the hold of it
alive as what unnaturalness
in you can keep me, it’s only
to emerge from the other
end of it intact, and perfectly
prepared to be your grasshopper.
Solvitur Ambulando
After the impossibility of the movement
of any object through time was raised in light
of the fact that, in time’s smallest unit,
no motion can take place (which is to say,
that any given object in it is at rest, or
if it isn’t, then the unit isn’t actually
the smallest, because it can still be divided
further, specifically: into a time when the object
was in one place, and then the time
just after, when it’s in another, and insofar as
any length of time is composed of a finite
number of such smallest units
during which, by definition, no motion
can take place, it follows that no motion
can take place in any aggregate of these
units either—which is to say, the flying arrow
is motionless, a paradox one might
be inclined to dismiss with other oddnesses
that don’t immediately fit our sense
of what is real, or what it profits us to take
seriously, especially in the face of what
we have to face), the need to commit to a new
kind of take on what it means to be
composed, and of how the properties
of the collective won’t by necessity reflect those
of its constituents, paradoxically
arose—the way no atom in my brain tonight
feels on its own capable of wanting to walk out into
the street to see the stars, but together,
they still want to, and it feels miraculous.
Fascination
Raleigh filled his cargo hold with sassafras to carry it
from the New World to England hoping it cured syphilis,
which it didn’t, but its fragrance was just heavenly
enough to make you think a miracle wasn’t completely
out of the question. Elizabeth herself looked out across the blue
hypnosis of Ocean, saw infection in the form of 132
Spanish vessels and prohibited the setting sail of any
one of England’s own, having awakened to a military
need for many hulls; for masts that tower; for wind-
loud fabrics but bettered with use; for decks seasoned
by the tread of subjects—their finer, British aspects, reserve
and so forth. Meanwhile, John White, governor of
Roanoke, rich in sassafras but otherwise an inauspicious
choice for the crown’s toehold in the Americas, is
back in town for emergency supplies and aid, but given
Elizabeth’s “stay of shipping,” won’t be allowed to return
to Roanoke for years. Two long years White pounds his pewter
tankard down, having abandoned wife and daughter
to an end without an author, his tankard cylindrical,
lidded with an acorn thumbpiece, and filled with ale
whose froth spatters on the tabletops in meaningful patterns
he can’t yet discern: first the arrowhead of Hatteras,
then a crescent of the Armada, then at last a mitten or
one- or three-lobed leaf of sassafras, frequent thickener
of stews for the Choctaw, who still dry its foliage and grind
it into a powder high in mucilage, which is found
