The Problem of the Many, page 4
translated to Heracles, meaning its sanctuary harbored none other
than a deified form of Alexander’s half brother, making it even more
incensing to be turned away, and brewing up all that next-level
ferocity in him like a battery as he storms Tyre: thick stone walls
fortifying the island, at many points as high as the Colosseum,
having withstood, centuries earlier, Nebuchadnezzar’s stranglehold
on the mainland, were long thought impregnable, but now prove
not so, with stones the size of home appliances knocked loose
toppling into the sea, shocking bats and octopi out of hiding places,
sounding as architecture sounds when unwanted blunt force visits it:
the thundering heard widely, and then a painful, less audible part
felt mostly in the bones of Tyrians, many of whom had suspected
all along that Alexander’s brassy request to visit the old temple
had more to do with sizing up the island’s battlements or performing
a show of clattery dominance than with authentic worshipfulnes
sin the first place, not that anything could ever get in the way of
Alexander when he wanted what he wanted, and he did, and it was
Egypt, actually, before circling back to Darius in Persia, but strategy
said Tyre, a crucial Persian stronghold ever since Cyrus took it,
had to be secured, or Alexander would always be looking back
over his shoulder anticipating Persian ships. And so with his troops
he filled the half mile between the mainland and the island with
boulders, cast-off broken boats and a mix of beach debris; branches
of local sycamore, dark-leaved, covered in many tiny tasteless figs,
and maritime pine, whose clusters keep dunes from encroaching
on arable soil; and also cartloads of rubble, statuary and irrelevant
furniture from fallen parts of the mainland, on top of which the king
constructed a causeway wide enough for his many war machines
and topped with two siege towers at the end of it, making the attack
on Tyre, city Ezekiel had prophesied would sink into “a place
to spread fishnets,” more or less straightforward, albeit with a long
and labor-intensive setup whose material effects are still felt today:
heavy sedimentation has thickened the causeway over time into
a permanent attachment broad as the island itself, and haunted by
all the above, not to mention the 6,000 Tyrian soldiers lost in battle,
30,000 women and children sold into slavery, and 2,000 soldiers
crucified along the shore, asphyxiating in agony for days, invisibly
exchanging air particles with the same Greeks and Macedonians
who pinned them down, who hammered iron through their feet
and wrists, who roped them onto crosses, many of the same wood
used for the causeway, and who now lift them up against the sky
Tyros walked under one morning astonished by the unknown purple
leaking from her dog’s mouth. From another vantage, everything
on Earth is proceeding normally. Power is shifting; power shifts.
Matter recombines. Already predatory birds are congregating
noisily around the dead and dying like asteroids in the Kuiper belt.
Wild dogs wait to see what falls. Hyenas keep watch sideways
from the dunes, their ugliness to many humans of no consequence
to their success as a species. Microbes always win. To be human
is to be born blind to more than we can see, but also made of it:
pasts amass like tiny quagga mussels all along our intakes, pumps
and distribution systems unmysteriously, determining the flow of
sense, feeling, thought. To open oneself to more will take more
effort than architecture, or as much, but in reverse: a dismantling
into expanse, definitionless, unexploitable, which is to say as enemy
of the state, just as Diogenes was: a life without property, a life
without loss, no residence but a large clay wine jar near the temple
of the great mother goddess Cybele, burrowed as the hermit crab
named for him burrows, all molecules of him borrowed, but no more
or less with him than Alexander, which isn’t enough to exchange
one for the other, although legend says the king, after meeting
the philosopher in Cranium, said if he hadn’t been born Alexander,
he would want to be Diogenes, not that we should mistake this for
a measure of humility, or of any enduring principle, as he was young
when he said it, and yet to achieve what many remember him as
great for, because despite displays of largesse and a lifelong love of
the poetry of Homer, Alexander was no Diogenes. He was a monster.
Arrows from the Sun
I had laid out my entrails on the blank of day
much as the founder of a city makes a sacrifice
on the altar he builds for the purpose of appeasing
the all-seeing god, god who watches over
the endless world endlessly, or did for a time:
a pile of animals dressed with slender ribbons,
long sheaves of barley or suchlike grain, figures
carved from local wood or bone. It isn’t important
what he offers, only that before he can set it
all ablaze, an eagle with wings like oak rowboats
in violence swoops down to grab the choicest
portions of the sacrifice, carries them off in bright
gold talons, releases them in the blue of the distance
and flies away. The founder of the city squints
watching closely, taking note of where they land,
and, setting out to reclaim what the eagle took
in time finds everything is neatly arranged
on another altar, built by the ancients, in an alcove
enclosed by obelisks, their red granite covered
over in marks no one could ever make any sense of.
I had laid out my entrails on the blank of day
to know what would become of me, the way a voice
in sleep now speaks from the altar, the one true
voice of the all-seeing god, god who watches over
everything alive, to say the sacrifice is accepted,
and the city, built on rock, will last as long as time
itself, a citadel of wealth and learning, its many streets
radiating from a central temple, and on its altar
lie my entrails, punctuated in arrows from the sun
as if a crown for the pain it takes to place them there.
Smartwater
Terrors take hold on him as waters. —Job 27:20
Few of days and full of troubles, with all my body
I suspect this beverage, whose cleverness I think
must be to document where it’s been, is, and probably
where it’s going, its tiny sensors made to spelunk
the interior it refreshes, sparkling as they worm
a path through the systems of me—beginning, I guess, with
the digestive, then via osmosis up from the digestive
and into the circulatory, on with its reconnaissance till decorum
says we change the subject, which we do, because
change is the only constant, and I’m just following
suit: particles, planets, thoughts; but if I ever confuse
my self to pieces, it’s only to pull myself back together in time to sing
on the platform, or as I micturate, the intelligence unit
in me taking leave: so long, it’s been real, don’t mention it.
By Night with Torch and Spear
That fire at the mouth of the flare stack rising
more than three hundred feet above the refinery
contorts as it feeds on the invisible current
of methane produced by the oil’s distillation
process like a monster, the nonstop spasm of it
lumbering upwards into the dark Newark
night like a sack made of orange parachute fabric
an awkward number of gorillas get it on in.
I would worship it. The motion, the heat, the unapologetic
knack of the element to yank the appliance
plug from its outlet, filling the big blue business
suite of my head with nothing but its own
wordlessness and light. Not now, not knowing
what I can’t unknow, but back on the grasslands
before we ever came to harness it I would bow
down among the seething life of that primitive
interior and worship the fire taking one bright
liberty after another. Done listening to fellow
passengers tweaking the fine points. Done rubbing
the dead end of thinking like a spent torch
against the cave’s painted walls to make it burn
better. As the train slows down as the track
curves around the body of water the fire reflects in,
it is a form of worship. What is it in me that
hasn’t yet been killed with reason, habit, through
long atrophy or copied so beyond its master
it parses like the last will and testament of a moth-
eaten cardigan? It dumps its nice adrenaline
into my system nights I hear the crisp steps of deer
on fallen leaves and stop or when looking up
beneath baroque snow or when I lean over the
banister along the border of a turquoise waterfall.
All good and well. But the endless hyperactive
plumage exploding from this toxic aviary, this sun
of industry descended from the lightning strike,
obscures its diabolism with a Vegas brightness
so that what there is to fear in it instead excites
me up a biochemical peak from the far side of which
my own voice, grizzled with a wisdom unknown
to me in waking life, reminds me of the conjuror
who grew distraught because he sensed the forces
he had stirred up with his art would not be
mastered by it. It rattles tomorrow’s paperwork
where it hangs from the branches of the ancient
timber trees. It messes with my reception, whereas
I do not wish my reception to be messed with.
It tells me to be careful with my worship—that if this,
too, is a resource, then they have ways to tap it.
Cursum Perficio
Humankind is wrong
says Socrates
about the swans
and why they sing
so beautifully
at the end of life.
It isn’t because of
fear, he says, but joy:
they can sense
they will soon be
buried in the golden
arms of the god.
Pliny says it isn’t
true that swans sing
at death at all,
it’s just a myth or
misperception,
although he does
observe with an air
of certitude in
his brief account
that the swan, if
made to starve, will
eat another swan.
For a long time
my cheek imagined
how the ceiling
felt against it:
cold of an otherwise
untouched plaster,
the falling away
of ancient limitation.
We’ve come now
to our senses, settling
for the proximate
feeling of a wall.
Wasted
One thing I look forward to in an afterlife is
a detailed spreadsheet of all the dollars I’ve let drop
without notice to the doorstep in disarray as I yank
my house keys out of my pocket in the dark
at workweek’s end, bent as I become on nothing
more than doubling down on the bed once I make it
through the door, too numb in the head to know anymore
much of what’s happening down where my feet are
other than the planet underneath them still spins—
turning days into years, making worm meal of my body
as I walk with a printout of my life’s lost money
into the haze and down to where the water is, sort of
tearful at first to look over times and the sadness doled out
in foolish amounts, which do, as they say, add up, but
it means nothing here, meant nothing all along: I see
life clearly for once, and am just as over it as I ever was.
Shame
It was the sound of your coworker laughter, of the ice
irrepressible in tilted vanilla lattes, of your ease at being
thrown through the world we never chose to inhabit together
fellow passengers whose whatness made me detrain
two full stops prematurely and walk the rest of the way
despite the city heat, a hurt foot, your big proud sun—
I couldn’t be in it a minute longer, I needed to disentangle
myself from the sandwich of you: Hamptons tan lines,
long bright teeth, the freakish intimacy of a loudening
failure to regard the separateness you made me reinforce:
nothing on your blotter left unexpressed, a powerfully
ripe cheese, a pounding wave, you pushed me and I went
and will forever as a darkened platform welcomed me—
I told myself what I felt was shame, shame at my inability
to be right with it, to let the people live, to let them take
senseless pleasure saying I can’t believe how much you get
my special way with animals; is it just me or is it infected;
how do I keep myself from becoming what others want only
to destroy: I said I felt shame, but shame was just the withered
fruit of what I felt, and on the other side of the orchard
swelled relief, restoration, a stronger volume of my own
oxygen at liberty among the trees, a sharpening as of many
pencils in the cup on the desk in my dark office, or of one
in particular—the sharpest, round high fruit on a windblown
branch only I can reach: I twist it off, I polish it, I take a bite
the point of which is the pure cold music I alone can make
and you never hear, like the sound of the pencil as I dull
the point a little, looping it over the paper, taking it all down.
Nebuchadnezzar
We won’t get back the hours we mismanaged on all fours
what many years we did the horse, then quivered bull, or drank
chemical lycanthropy: the punishment of a god, his rivalry
by the book, compelling us to chew the grass and otherwise
be beastly in our appearance, but never in one thought
that scratched its point across the vinyls of our meditative
practice in those days, as now, we were always on the scent of
possibility: whether you can love, for example, a human
being in the abstract but still find it difficult to stomach
in the particulars, such as speech, or its behaviors, so often
off in the moral sense, which despite some ardors of the past
and spasmodic form we still keep fucking working on.
That’s what makes a king. Thunderclaps are buttercups
from where we’re listening, the cobalt blue of glaze on over
twenty thousand bricks an average fleck in Ishtar’s eye.
The same is true for time. You can stretch it or compress it
but you can’t get it back: the god of it wraps the present
constantly in butcher paper, hands it to custodians who walk
into the walk-in but never out. The dented-up door opens only
in recollections. We found a cave in our exile and we sat
in it like a linnet in its nest, resting for a time that stretched
into an impulse to forage for radish tops, wild carrot, distanter
herbages conquered in a sequence ideal for the absorption
of such nutrients as folic acid, niacin, potassium, and lycopene.
That’s what makes a king. Careful diet, frequent cardio,
waterbreaks, putting yourself first and feeling good about it
especially at the workplace, where everyone waits for you
to crap out anyway; knowing when to say no, or no thank you—
now that the sunrise and sunset points have migrated south
we’re working on ourself tonight. Wash the sheep’s mouth out
with juniper, cut into its side and slide the jiggly liver loose
and onto a platter to read: all the divots and the swollen spots
not the outline of the city as it is, but as it might be, double-
ringed in walls twenty-five feet thick to protect our coworkers’
particulars as they fall away as they power down as they sleep
in interchangeable but smartly furnished domiciles of clay.
That’s what a king makes. Don’t tell your dreams to anyone
who won’t take your meat. They’ll worm them into curses
genetically perfected to attack you in the throne room softly
at first, then graduating up into the big booming voice that spoke
down to us from a cloud at a point when Rome was just
disorganized mud huts. We built canals. We built the above-
mentioned walls and covered them in bulls, lions, dragons.
Traditionally it’s thought we built the famous hanging gardens
but some recent archaeological trends suggest we didn’t.
Let’s just say we did. Let’s just say a hidden god who wants
endlessly to be praised has no place telling us to be modest.
Look at all the lollipops that jangle from the rooftops as if
