my sleeping throat
and camped there just to prove
its point, and when I woke
up I feared I’d never
save myself or even under-
stand what from without a little
alteration, meaning I
myself must somehow be
the wolf, and all the rest
must just be television.
Item. Only in the ion-
rich atmosphere around
a waterfall too immense
to be nostalgic did I feel
what I now know to be
“the feel of not to feel it.”
Item. Actually I’m doing
much better now, maybe
a little, what’s the word,
soporose, I guess, I think
maybe I just needed to
work it through and now
in its wake I feel a little
what was it again, a little
soporose, that’s right,
that captures it in a way
no other word could ever
even hope to, I suppose,
I just feel soporose, so
soporose tonight, uniquely
soporose. You think
I should be concerned?
FUN FOR THE SHUT-IN
Demonstrate to yourself a resistance to feeling
unqualified despair by attempting something like
perfect despair embellished with hand gestures.
Redefine demonstration to include such movement as
an eye’s orbit around the room; the pull of red
through drinking straws or the teeth of a comb;
random winces, twitches, tics; the winding of clocks
and tearing of pages; the neck hair’s response
to uninvited sound, light, and the scent of oranges
where none in fact exist. Admit to yourself you lost
your absolute last goldfish, this one in a fashion
that looked more or less like relaxing, at least as you
have come to think it. There is an aspect of blue
seen only twice before: deep underwater, and now.
Take notice of the slow, practically imperceptible
changes always underway around or inside you like
tooth decay, apostasy, the accumulation of dust,
debt, the dead, and what the dead are preparing to say
if offered a seat at the table. Place the cold paperweight
toadlike on your forehead; hold inhumanly still.
Everyone comes close to growing their own avocado.
Everyone has a mind to plant it where they want to.
If you have power over breakfast, invest every burst
back into yourself to double the power at half the cost.
Messages from under the floorboards demand bed rest.
That handful of dried beans stitched into the sanctity
of twin paper plates makes the sound of never leaving
even brighter than before. Try amplifying the playback
from the rattle at hand to drown out any stubborn
thoughts to the contrary, the collapse of a country,
Steely Dan and the thunder of a hundred icebergs calving.
Offer the dead a seat at the table. Now take it away:
just pull it out from under them. Hypnosis is like deep
focus with a sleeper hold on self-critique. Attempt levitation
as a measure of your apology. Let’s put it this way:
you don’t want to be their bitch, but you don’t want to
piss them off much, either. Ask them what they’re having.
Listen with patience to their long elaborate talk.
Soon one of the dead will conduct an infinitely slow
white envelope across the unlit tabletop, a human sigh
through a wall of exhaust. The letter itself will be left
unsigned, but you’d recognize that handwriting anywhere.
CHIVAS REGAL
Right around here is where I start getting lost
in all the excitement of my right-hand glass
steadfast clinking down the long amble back
to the sofa where we sink in amber through the night.
Ghost messages in vibraphone, another double
neat, my head’s mussed up but it’s the only
source of heat and we crank it ever higher, aware
that even if we’ve cleared the air between us
ten thousand times before—you worry I worry
myself too much, I worry there isn’t enough
you to last—whenever we do, we finish with a cup
of kindness down the hatch, with our selves
dissolving in short-lived blasts of old Aberdeen.
Here is a blindness to counter the clockwork
losses and a present too lived-in to cherish.
(Three Parliaments stubbed in a red glass plate
three longswords driven in a pictured heart in rain.)
Here is a liberty deep-kissing torpor, the lamp-
dust drifting in Sanskrit on my arm, my black-
bound notebook fallen hand to floor where
the bare foot is senseless to the serpent beneath it.
(Its glint eye watches me advance to the waters
and return converted to something tired, and poorer.)
In a less developed time, I would draw dragons
up from underground and score into their hide
the total histories of wind, but all there is at hand
tonight is troubled air, and upon this I inflict
what little marks I can before I lose again to sleep.
HIS EXCUSE
In the middle of your
speech I was over-
taken by the thought
that on an incline
north of here, the pine
in whose broad trunk
I will be buried was
toppled by a bobolink.
FANTASIES OF MANAGEMENT
When we tell ourselves
that so many bells
have rung beyond
our understanding,
what we really mean
is that so many ring
counter to the way
we wish to understand them.
When I think back
long ago, almost back
to that barbaric time,
what I want is to lie
down in a mile-wide
bafflement of grasses
until there is nothing
left of me but willingness
to go through it all
again, because unless
a donut box of dollars
falls down from the
sky I lie beneath admiring,
it can’t be avoided—
only this time, when they talk
as if I have a choice
in the matter, a way to say
no and live, I’ll ask
if they wouldn’t mind kindly
doing me the favor
of repeating that please
because I couldn’t quite make out
whatever they just said
through all that privilege.
THE CLOUD CORPORATION
1
The clouds part revealing a mythology of clouds
assembled in light of earliest birds, an originary
text over water over time, and that without which
the clouds part revealing an apology for clouds
implicit in the air where the clouds had been
recently witnessed rehearsing departure, a heartfelt phrase
in the push of the airborne drops and crystals
over water over time—how being made to think
oneself an obstruction between the observer
and the object or objects under surveillance or even
desired—or if I am felt to be beside the point
&n
bsp; then I have wanted that, but to block a path is like
not being immaterial enough, or being too much
when all they want from you now is your station
cleared of its personal effects please and vanish—
not that they’d ever just come out and say it when
all that darting around of the eyes, all that shaky
camouflage of paper could only portend the beginning of the
end of your tenure at this organization, and remember
a capacity to draw meaning out of such seeming
accidence landed one here to begin with, didn’t it.
2
The clouds part revealing an anatomy of clouds
viewed from the midst of human speculation, a business
project undertaken in a bid to acquire and retain
control of the formation and movement of clouds.
As late afternoons I have witnessed the distant
towers borrow luster from a bourbon sun, in-box
empty, surround sound on, all my money made
in lieu of conversation—where conversation indicates
the presence of desire in the parties to embark on
exchange of spirit, hours forzando with heartfelt phrase—
made metaphor for it, the face on the clock tower
bright as a meteor, as if a torch were held against
likelihood to illuminate the time so I could watch
the calm silent progress of its hands from the luxury
appointments of my office suite, the tumult below
or behind me out of mind, had not my whole attention
been riveted by the human figure stood upon
the tower’s topmost pinnacle, himself surveying
the clouds of the future parting in antiquity, a figure
not to be mistaken, tranquilly pacing a platform
with authority: the chief executive officer of clouds.
3
The clouds part revealing blueprints of the clouds
built in glass-front factories carved into cliff-faces
which, prior to the factories’ recent construction,
provided dorms for clans of hamadryas baboons,
a species revered in ancient Egypt as attendants
of Thoth, god of wisdom, science, and measurement.
Fans conveying clouds through aluminum ducts
can be heard from up to a mile away, depending on
air temperature, humidity, the absence or presence
of any competing sound, its origin and its character.
It is no more impossible to grasp the baboon’s
full significance in Egyptian religious symbolism
than it is to determine why clouds we manufacture
provoke in an audience more positive, lasting
response than do comparable clouds occurring in nature.
Even those who consider natural clouds products
of conscious manufacture seem to prefer that a merely
human mind lie behind the products they admire.
This development may be a form of self-exalting
or else another adaptation in order that we find
the hum of machinery comforting through darkness.
4
The clouds part revealing there’s no place left to sit
myself down except for a single wingback chair
backed into a corner to face the window in which
the clouds part revealing the insouciance of clouds
cavorting over the backs of the people in the field
who cut the ripened barley, who gather it in sheaves,
who beat grain from the sheaves with wooden flails,
who shake it loose from the scaly husk around it,
who throw the now threshed grain up into the gently
palm-fanned air whose steady current carries off
the chaff as the grain falls to the floor, who collect
the grain from the floor painstakingly to grind it
into flour, who bake the flour into loaves the priest will offer
in the sanctuary, its walls washed white like milk.
To perform it repeatedly, to perform it each time
as if the first, to walk the dim corridor believing that
the conference it leads to might change everything,
to adhere to a possibility of reward, of betterment,
of moving above, with effort, the condition into which
one has been born, to whom do I owe the pleasure
of the hum to which I have been listening too long.
5
The clouds part revealing the advocates of clouds,
believers in people, ideas and things, the workers
of the united fields of clouds, supporters of the wars
to keep clouds safe, the devotees of heartfelt phrase
and belief you can change with water over time.
It is the habit of a settled population to give ear to
whatever is desirable will come to pass, a caressing
confidence—but one unfortunately not borne out
by human experience, for most things people desire
have been desired ardently for thousands of years
and observe—they are no closer to realization today
than in Ramses’ time. Nor is there cause to believe
they will lose their coyness on some near tomorrow.
Attempts to speed them on have been undertaken
from the beginning; plans to force them overnight
are in copious, antagonistic operation today, and yet
they have thoroughly eluded us, and chances are
they will continue to elude us until the clouds part
in a flash of autonomous, ardent, local brainwork—
but when the clouds start to knit back together again,
we’ll dismiss the event as a glitch in transmission.
6
The clouds part revealing a congregation of bodies
united into one immaterial body, a fictive person
around whom the air is blurred with money, force
from which much harm will come, to whom my welfare
matters nothing. I sense without turning the light
from their wings, their eyes; they preen themselves
on the fire escape, the windowsill, their pink feet
vulnerable—a mistake to think of them that way.
If I turn around, the room might not be full of wings
capable of acting, in many respects, as a single being,
which is to say that I myself may be the source of
what I sense, but am no less powerless to change it.
Always around me, on my body, in my mouth, I fear them
and their love of money, everything I do without
thinking to help them make it. And if I am felt to be
beside the point, I have wanted that, to live apart
from what depends on killing me a little bit to keep
itself alive, and yet not happily, with all its needs
and comforts met, but fattened so far past that point
I am engrossed, and if I picture myself outside of it
it isn’t me anymore, but a parasite cast out, inviable.
7
The clouds part revealing the distinction between
words without meaning and meaning without words,
a phenomenon of nature, the westbound field
of low air pressure developing over water over time
and warm, saturated air on the sea surface rising
steadily replaced by cold air from above, the cycle
repeating, the warm moving upward into massive
thunderclouds, the cold descending into the eye
around which bands of thunderclouds spiral, counter-
clockwise, often in the hundreds, the atmospheric
pressure dropping even further, making winds
an incomprehensible volume of rain—I remember
the trick of thinking through infinity, a crowd of eyes
against an asphalt wall, my vision of it scrolling
left as the crowd thinned out to a spatter and then
just black until I fall asleep and then just black again,
past marketing, past focus groups, past human
resources, past management, past personal effects,
their insignificance evident in the eye of the dream
and through much of the debriefing I wake into next.
2
THE NIGHT SHIP
Roll back the stone from the sepulcher’s mouth!
I sense disturbance deep within, as if some sorcery
had shocked the occupant’s hand alive again, back
to compose a document in calligraphy so dragonish
that a single misstep made it necessary to stop
right then and there and tear the botched draft up,
begin again and stop, tear up again and scatter
a squall of paper lozenges atop the architecture
that the mind designs around it, assembling a city
somewhat resembling the seaport of your birth,
that blinking arrangement of towers and signage
you now wander underneath, drawn by the spell
of the sea’s one scent, by the bell of the night ship
that cleaves through the mist on its path to the pier.
Surrender to that vision and the labor apprehensible
as you take to the streets from the refuge of a chair
so emphatically comfortable even Lazarus himself
would have chosen to remain unrisen from its velvet,
baffling the messiah, His many onlookers awkwardly
muttering to themselves, downcast till a sudden
dust devil spirals in from the dunes—a perfect excuse
to duck back indoors. (Sand spangles their eyes;
the little airborne stones impinge upon such faces
as only Sorrow’s pencil would ever dare to sketch,
and even then, it wouldn’t be a cakewalk, you realize.
The dust devil at sea would recall a waterspout.)
You fear that you have been demanded into being
only to be dropped on the wintry streets of this
imagination rashly, left easy prey for the dockside
phantoms, unwatched and unawaited, and I know
what you mean, almost exactly. This cardboard city
The Cloud Corporation Page 2
