Letters from Colorado

May 2007

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One day I’m going to open up
The window wider than the summer sky
And a bottle of whiskey, the horizon and I
Are going to meet up at the top of Pike’s Peak,
Sort things out between God and Man
And the postmaster-general of Eastern Cheyenne.
He’s been troubled by visions
Of the dead letter office
Consumed in fire, and the letters are coffins,
But he doesn't understand what he came here for,
And he doesn't understand what it means.
He doesn't understand what he came here for,
But the mountain burns red in his dreams.

One day I’m going to send you
A letter written entirely in Arabic,
Asking for mercy, and the sweetly acerbic
Way that you used to hold your head
When you didn’t know better
Than to laugh when the world exploded.
When the pipes in the walls all suddenly corroded
We were left drinking nothing
But red, red wine, dark as the water,
And I called you the Devil’s adopted daughter,
And you said
You had nothing to fear from the offer.

But you’re not really going to read that,
I’m not really going to send it,
But you’ll hear through three lanes of full-throttle roar
Or I’ll carve it in big block letters on the door
With a highway flare.

One day I’m going to wake up
In a cold sweat with a knife in my pocket
And I’ll jam it straight into an electrical socket
And wait for the tide to come in
To a studio apartment on the 31st floor,
Open the window and let it all pour
Out in a column of sweet, glittering light.

St. George in East St. Louis

May 2007

St. Goerge and the Dragon return, as do experimental stanza shapes. I feel like I am ripping off Craig Finn rather often, but he does narrative really well, and narrative is underused these days, from what I can tell.

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This is stupid. I'm going back downstairs
But I'll sell you the vapor trail. In the will
it all goes back to the children of Abraham.
Maria, Maria, don't ask me for mercy
we left it all back at the well.
And then Judas showed up in the Basement
playing rapid and ragged arpeggios.
Romeo's locked in the bathroom;
he's shaking and screaming.
Don't ask me for water, either.

We can't none of us go to the reservoir now that it's dark.
They buried the bodies and planted a tree, they call it a public park.
St. George is still out on the corner, with a lance and a rubber hose,
while the Dragon is down in the Basement stealing his clothes.

He says he works in the fashion industry.
He says after a night of industrial fashion
you'll never go naked again, but don't ask
how often you'll shower.

Last night he was back on the corner again
with a blue silk tie and a ball-point pen
selling hand-drawn maps to the Land of the Dead.
His first words are always “you never know when…”
but Judas still says he believes in a higher power.

Hey Romeo! How ‘bout a trip to the reservoir?
St. George and the Dragon are putting on a one-man show
with spray paint and scissors and magic tricks.

Hey Judas! Where you goin'
with that gun in your hand?
It sure doesn't match your lipstick.

This Scene is Amphibious

April 2007

A poem is really just a joke without a punchline.

So somewhere in the mountainous districts near Kyoto,
This jet-lagged bluegrass shows up, and sociologists descend
Like a swarm of tweed locusts and notebooks, and first
They speak to the old monk at the top of the mountain,
Who taught Shinto to the Buddha,
Who taught Nirvana to God,
The summary of all monks and all summits,
Who greets them by offering from his fireplace
A hot coal, and bids them deliver to the vendor
Of bamboo hats at the foot of the mountain, who
Once cheated the monk by broad application of maxim,
“Change comes from within.”

The sociologists, who consider arson beneath them,
A matter for anthropologists, press on in an attempt
To dissect the heart of the matter, and discuss with assembled
Musicians, coopers, potters, and the makers of copper wire
(As all the new bands are electric)
The extent of the flourishing scene,
With a digression into authenticity of late Meiji ceramics,
But the scene is amphibious, a loose conglomeration
Of shorebirds, sherpas, and fiddler crabs,
A narrow-winged long division between ribbons
Of rushing sand and sharp fragments of feral pine
Beaten together on a stone ridge with a steel string.

Forgiveness of Sins

May 2007

I did a lot of experimenting with scene-setting this quarter.

I approach with tourniquets of phrase.
This is the last angle of autumn
when the setting sun will cast its
full red light on the cathedral floor
through the stained-glass cape of St. Martin.

I have not been in a church
with even one other
for many years.

Red as a rosary, reading,
in this place that belongs to neither of us,
the air currents, you rise
and prepare to take wing.

In the rafters there is a nest of owls.
Night will bring them down
on the church mice.

This vault is a dry gulf.
Fragile I want starves in the aisle
I love pools around columns
I dreamt of clings to a caesura,
shocked to be spoken, hanging in space.

I believe the architect designed
the wide south doors,
which you fling open, facing the sea
with only this moment in mind:

Flight.

Come back when the moon is bright and the past is deaf,
when autumn’s light is singed into the stone.
Come banging on oak, calling
“Sanctuary! Sanctuary!”

Branch Prediction

April 2007

A poem about the theory and practice of computer science? I’m glad you asked. I have no excuse other than I had just watched Blade Runner, and somehow it worked.

“I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’”
– Alan Turing

Branches are the bane of modern computing.
Choice is the chief obstacle: the machine plays twenty
Moves ahead. The straight-line future is easy,
But there’s a fork in the works (pardon the expression).
Proceed therefore down the likely path. If not,
It never was. Modern computing is impossible
Without branching.

This sentence is false.
This sentence cannot be proven true.
This sentence has no truth value.
This sentence is a Turing test.

I’ll show you 36 blades of grass and you’ll tell me
Which one was planted by hand.
I’ll show you 300 acres of open desert and you’ll tell me
Where a camel passed three weeks ago.
I’ll show you 4,000 faces –

The computer can identify your face. The computer
Can identify the face of Thomas Jefferson.
It can be identified as “face.”
Also, if held just right, the black and white panels of a soccer ball.

(If you hold anything just right…)

I’ll show you the orbit of Jupiter, pi to 600 digits, and you’ll
Tell me the position of 63 moons, and the time of planet rise
Above far-flung, ice-wrapped Ganymede.

There’s a cluster of perhaps 200 cells involved
In all mathematical thinking in the human brain.
It takes over 2 million to do jumping jacks.

I’ll show you the Devil in a grain of sand,
Jerusalem etched in fine wire.

This sentence is a loaded gun pointed at the internet.
(If you hold it just right)
This poem is a linear-time factorization algorithm.
(No, it’s not.)
This poem is linear. (So far.)

This poem is actually two poems, the second of which will be given to you upon its completion by the world’s first poetry-reading, poetry-writing artificial intelligence (with thirty-two processors given over to metonymy alone.) This machine will have a detailed technical designation, but its programmers will refer to it as “Ralph Waldo Electron.”

This poem had better pass the Turing test.

Alaskan Midnight

April 2007

Holy elevated diction Batman! I was reading a lot of Yeats and also Dracula. And it all went sort of Lovecraft-y on me.

Quick fire dreams in the whirlwind unspoken
The healing word and the black blade broken
In the eye of God and the eye of God remains
On drifting sparks and surging spires of air.

Dreamless the sleep of the deathless dark in
Shapeless fire and leaping void that
Restless stalks through gaps in coiled space
And strange the trails that prowl the stepless waste.

All teeth and eyes behind the night watching
The edge of the firelight, the edge of unlocking
The world where the world is the edge of the maelstrom,
A silk sheet strapped to the wind.

Pandora your toys are wide oceans and untracked stars.
Come open your earthen box, reading the scars
In the permafrost, sleep where they slept
And chase where the chill is deepest.

Why not the blue fringe of the sea should open,
Disgorge the tomb or nameless token
Of a place half-made in tongue half-spoken?
So earth flings up her curtain flames.

And fears what scratches the walls at night
And shuns strange fangs that shun the light.