You who’ve heard nothing of noise and twist
grotesque bottle cap hairpieces into bookbag pins and knowing
that it’s all worthwhile to cast the feathered edges of your feet
like some bizarre velociraptor holds a talon in plaster
repose as David does before the bronze is poured anything can happen.
And I would have left the scribble, too,
on the edges of your notepad stamped
United Nations before God and after all
the janitors have left for home, the penguins
for their permafrost and nunneries with feathered
feet that cup an egg like god was watching,
but didn’t know, or didn’t care
since after all the march to Calvary was his idea.
And nor were twisted skeletons preserved
in rock for nearly half of time with hand and foot carved out
of marble by the great flood that filled up basements.
But when Noah set the sump pump
up he saved maybe two of every animal that would have died,
and he saw that it was good to keep mildew off his stamp collection.
It’s really just in passing now we fill up notepads with the ways
that Swiss ambassadors’ arms fell on the table
in numbers that seemed incalculable at times
when fingers were so stubby.
But I’ve recovered some of them, the bones
that made up legs to many-feathered hands. For knowing
what we know now from passing over
medical journals, it’s almost inconceivable to think of a disease
with symptoms scientists would just ignore,
or of quantities they wouldn’t think to measure.
And yet, beneath entire atmospheres and
whole assembly rooms, there lies the very basement
we’d forgotten full of bric-a-brac and unused words
for things we knew before the bronze was poured
and all our oddities of hair and bone were so
repeated we forgot the way we used to gawk
at arms that led to hands that led to god and other things
that may have watched but didn’t know
or didn’t care what we had done with their creation.
Let it be known to the modern reader, who has all,
or almost all, that he requires,
the road flairs, cork screws, and historical context
given in appendix c; the footnotes, and brief chronology
that prefaces the preferred edition,
that he is not alone in reading
into this the things he cannot help,
but is joined by other women, also,
who may have felt the same
or more intensely about some things.
Let such a reader as has passed unscathed before
the eyes of god capitalize
on unremarkable differences to the title page.
It’s impossible to answer why the author feared
that he was only gonads to attach,
as the males of certain primal fishes do.
chair, August 2016
Primarily there were rocks,
the silicates: quartz, (we’ll list them),
feldspars – orthoclase packed
in pegmatite made up a vast expanse,
trace elements: copper, nickel,
twisted knobs of gold in hematite.
Obviously, there was water.
For example, observe the canyons,
large salt deposits, clear evidence
of glacial scour, puddingstone.
Scurrying over it, arthropods
turkeys, ammonites, everything
that crawls and swims, the inland
seas teaming with jellyfish
obtuse things with pulsing notochords,
angry primates filled with ecstasy.
Beneath them concrete slabs, long bridges,
chewing gum. The wheels that crush things
churning, monuments on hill tops,
a single tractor trailer sitting idle
thrummed like a cicada once.
In other words, the stage was set for us
to pin up maps around the living room.
Banner graphic source: A photograph taken in November 2014 by Darby Thompson, of a sculptural installation by Joseph Kosurt titled "Ni apparence ni illusion", located in the basement of the Louvre Museum in Paris, France. Permission for use granted by the photographer.
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