Terminator
by Knopf
Love, science, and politics collide in this sharp assessment of who we are now, in a generous selection of work by the award-winning poet.
The terminator--the line, perpendicular to the equator, that divides night from day--is the organizing concept for this collection, which examines a world where "pert, post-apocalyptic / entertainment trades have trod the pocked / planet raw." Kenney's division of light verse from darker poems serves to remind us that what makes us laugh is often dead serious, and what's most serious can be best understood through wordplay, an ironic eye, the cleaving and joining magically effected by metaphor. With grace and candor, Richard Kenney thumbs through our troubles like a precious but scratched collection of vinyl: "the nature of emotion's analog, while languages are digital." From "Siri, Why Do I Wear a Necktie?" to the eternal springing of love ("Magnetic swipe to the blinking lock / is me to you"), Kenney reminds us that art's the best weapon to maintain our wits in very challenging times.“Kenney’s work is as alive and thrilling and fully human as anything I’ve read. It’s the result of an extraordinarily curious mind and a world that is deeply felt—and it somehow includes us in that mind and in that experience. I read these poems and I see and think and (most astonishing of all) feel more acutely.” —Jason Whitmarsh, Poetry NorthwestRICHARD KENNEY is the author of four previous books of poetry: The Evolution of the Flightless Bird, Orrery, The Invention of the Zero, and The One-Strand River. His work has attracted recognitions, among them the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, a Lannan Literary Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations. He teaches at the University of Washington and lives with his family on the Olympic Peninsula.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.
The terminator--the line, perpendicular to the equator, that divides night from day--is the organizing concept for this collection, which examines a world where "pert, post-apocalyptic / entertainment trades have trod the pocked / planet raw." Kenney's division of light verse from darker poems serves to remind us that what makes us laugh is often dead serious, and what's most serious can be best understood through wordplay, an ironic eye, the cleaving and joining magically effected by metaphor. With grace and candor, Richard Kenney thumbs through our troubles like a precious but scratched collection of vinyl: "the nature of emotion's analog, while languages are digital." From "Siri, Why Do I Wear a Necktie?" to the eternal springing of love ("Magnetic swipe to the blinking lock / is me to you"), Kenney reminds us that art's the best weapon to maintain our wits in very challenging times.“Kenney’s work is as alive and thrilling and fully human as anything I’ve read. It’s the result of an extraordinarily curious mind and a world that is deeply felt—and it somehow includes us in that mind and in that experience. I read these poems and I see and think and (most astonishing of all) feel more acutely.” —Jason Whitmarsh, Poetry NorthwestRICHARD KENNEY is the author of four previous books of poetry: The Evolution of the Flightless Bird, Orrery, The Invention of the Zero, and The One-Strand River. His work has attracted recognitions, among them the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, a Lannan Literary Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations. He teaches at the University of Washington and lives with his family on the Olympic Peninsula.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.
PUBLISHER:
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
ISBN-10:
0525656634
ISBN-13:
9780525656630
BINDING:
Hardback
BOOK DIMENSIONS:
Dimensions: 6.1700(W) x Dimensions: 9.3300(H) x Dimensions: 1.0100(D)