The problem of the many, p.5
The Problem of the Many, page 5
the bold fruits of our own synthesis. Let’s spoil our royal supper.
Let’s spoil our supper twice and eat when we the king say eat.
A Habitation of Jackals, a Court for Ostriches
Very dark now I put a seed in my mouth but its texture and taste
are too unfamiliar! I spit this strange seed out. I do this over
and over, forty-five times before understanding I must
no longer think of myself as the same seed-eating creature
I have erstwhile known myself to be. The seeds of this enclave
have turned overnight, or else worsened so gradually
I only see it now—now and with disgust because they’ve
really overdone it. Taken it too far. I mean, it’s just silly.
These seeds are not the seeds my ancestors fought for!
Fought hard for. Very hard for. Bitterly hard for even after death.
They taste bitter. There’s a bitterness. And they’re softer
than a seed should be—too soft. I’d rather eat stones instead.
Stones that my ancestors would recognize as stones!
Stones that my ancestors walked on with dignity. Real dignity.
May very well have walked on. I can say with confidence
that this probably happened. Back when this was a great city,
things happened. That’s how it was. Now I’m no longer
that seed-eating creature. Now I eat stones. I eat the stones
of this zip code, and behold—they’re already making me stronger.
I am almost too strong. So strong I’m about to announce
the birth of a child. There it goes! A great stone-eating child just
leapt from my mouth. There’s more where that came from,
believe me. Not a problem. But that one came first and as first
it shall rule by my side. Till the sun bursts in on our kingdom.
Chemical Life
Often I’ll think back to the twenty-five caged fish
softly lowered into Snow Creek to assess the toxicity
of the waters that the unspeakable chemical company
released its wastes into over decades and how
all of them, all twenty-five, lost their equilibrium
more or less immediately, how three minutes later
blood billowed from their gills like naturalized fuchsia
loosened from a hedgerow four thousand miles away
and how, shortly after that, every one of them had finished
early with this life, as did the people of Alabama
who fished and swam and drank from the great
Choccolocco Creek the smaller Snow Creek fed
its bad chemistry into, on and on without any advisory
from the many who knew, the long processions
shuddering in time from church to gravesite silently
as cellophane across the lethal waters. So much life
destroyed by the elements thought to have given rise
to it in the first place as the energy and phosphorus
carried here on the backs of meteorites that landed
in pools of acids frothing at the bases of volcanoes
made available key enzymes required for what science
now calls chemical life, meaning the intermediary step
between inorganic rock and the earth’s first ever
spontaneously formed and truly living cell, which I
liken to a widened, ambitious, and unblinking eyeball.
First living cell, what have you to say for yourself
now? I see the dumbstruck circle of you spinning late
at night tonight on my monitor billions of years before
language and I head down to the nearby 24-hour bodega
for a cyan Powerade and I’m practically plowed over
by an ardent garbage truck, one in whose overcrowded
bin your double might be brewing even as it narrowly
whizzes me by—another stab at life, this time hewn
from the fudges, drizzles and perfumes of an unstoppable
crapulence. But here’s the thing: there was only
one chance for you to happen hereabouts and after
that, any new-formed organism rolling out of the murk
would fall prey to all the preexisting organisms
soon as it lurched into being. So you’re pretty much
a miracle, first living cell. But still my heart is heavy.
Don’t look at me, I can feel you say, it isn’t mere life
that’s the problem here so much as something neither
I nor my offspring ever predicted. We had big doings
planned for the planet till some random event knocked it in
a direction we never wanted and still can’t fathom.
We’re into birdsong as much as anyone, not so much
all this willful endangerment. But look at you there, up
all night on the trail of a void. Wade into the world
a little less deeply. Lie down in the shallows and let it stick
its infinite leech mouths to whatever ails you, because
as much as you want to fix what is, what is wants to fix
you more. Unload on it your carbon, your phosphorus.
Your bones’ calcium will be good for plant life, ditto
all that potassium. Not to mention your hydrogen, if it ever
escapes our atmosphere, might one day power a star.
The Radiance of a Thousand Suns
When on the orange chair to the left of my daughter I sat
with a laptop to watch for a third time the video
comparing Earth’s dimensions to those of other planets
and upward to the stars, starting out of courtesy
or something like it with the moon, then followed by
Mercury, moonlike, only slightly larger, and dented over
comparably with craters from having been struck
all its life without atmosphere by asteroids and comets,
then Mars with its redness, no more than a topcoat
of fine ferric dust, then off to Venus, Earth’s sparkling
toxic twin, I said there’s no getting used to this,
meaning the leap next to Neptune, Saturn, Jupiter,
horrid symphonic music escalating as our sun scrolls
proudly into view, more than 100 times the width of Earth,
but now Sirius, now Pollux, now Arcturus and Antares,
the sun dropping from memory like a penny to the floor
of a carousel in Singapore, now Betelgeuse perched
on the right shoulder of Orion: a falcon into which
two quadrillion Earths could fit, and then at last a star
against whose vastness Earth is no more than a pinprick
to the skin of the orange split like an atom between us
at home with a terror we inhabit in absentia, like a hurricane
on purpose, an enormity we absorb without knowing
it firsthand but from a 4-min video we click to play again.
All the Shrimp I Can Eat
They are swimming away from me at the speed of light
They are telling me this is their preferred way to die
The conversion en masse into a single stream of brightness
Not the tenebrous slog through my digestive process
I say that’s only one part of a complex corporate sacrifice
They say fair enough but it’s the part we’d like to emphasize
Then take off, all you shrimp, you only call to mind how often
To live has felt like the long, drawn-out migration
Through the body of a god, one who elects to eat each of us
If not out of hunger, then boredom, or in an act of love impervious
To human reasoning (very possibly it’s all three at once)
And our birth is when he swallows, and his acids are events
That break us down, and after he’s extracted from
Our bodily existence what he needs, the gritty residuum
At bottom is what we call the soul, and this he then exerts
Through his infinite wisdom, grinds into a powder, and snorts.
Golden
Everything will be fine, to paraphrase the anchoress, and everything
will be golden, like a crock
of manuka honey or handpicked Bartlett pear, or like the calf
Aaron made out of earrings for the Israelites
who wanted a little something to sink their worship into, having
already waited long enough already
for Moses to return from the top of Mount Sinai. There he carried on
with the godhead in the form of a nonstop
burning bush Rastafarians equate with cannabis, which probably
would have come in handy as the Lord’s
nerves frayed overhead like gray cotton candy, having freed His people
from bondage only to watch as they broke at least one
if not three of His commandments—which, to be fair, hadn’t yet been
presented to them as such, so
there’s that . . . Regardless, Moses had to scramble to talk
Yahweh down from wanting to slaughter each and every calf-
lover among them and just start over, saying what would posterity
think of Him to hear
He had delivered the chosen out of bondage only to kill them in the desert
over a little craft project, although with no one left standing
to speak of, God’s motives would likely go unknown. Knowability
is felt by many to lie
at the heart of the imbroglio, as humans like to worship
mostly what they can know, or at least feast eyes on, and without
Moses, the Israelites lost focus, or lacked insight, or else just got
swept up. In the end, He Who Is
recalculated, deciding he could make his point with a sacrifice
of a mere 3,000, or the year-round population of Wellfleet, Mass.,
birthplace of America’s transatlantic wireless, and off whose banky shore
Capt. Sam Bellamy, pirate, went down with
the Whydah, a slave ship until he captured it in 1717, its hold
said to be carrying five tons of indigo, silver, gold dust, and gold.
Lunch in a Town Named After a Company Slowly Poisoning Its Residents
I saw a cow once on a hilltop casually stretch her neck
to face behind herself so that her hind leg might scratch
between her eyes with her hoof. I can’t emphasize enough
how casually she pulled this off, while obviously I was
gobsmacked, having never seen a cow do that before
and having never given thought to whether it was possible.
Well, it’s possible. Things slid back to normal after that
despite life’s electric charge, which I don’t let get the better of me.
Sometimes I feel like something might be underway,
but I just wait it out: hands on the table, eyes on the wall.
Meanwhile, it’s safe to say the cow is long since gone.
Not on account of what I saw, but because I saw it long ago.
A cow’s life expectancy is only fifteen years or so.
Me, I’m right here: red beans on yellow rice, a slightly
brown avocado. The day started off in clouds and the clouds
don’t always part. To ask too much of life would spoil it.
After Callimachus
These Telchines are called by some writers charmers and enchanters, who besprinkle animals and plants, with a view to destroy them, with the water of the Styx, mingled with sulphur. Others on the contrary say, that they were persons who excelled in certain mechanical arts. . . .
—Geographica, Strabo
Tartarus’s footless offspring who spray fans of glyphosate
mixed with Styx water over farmland regularly,
technicians of os agrotóxicos for cash, I am weaponless
against you, plus preoccupied by a to-do list longer than
an epic—what you’ve done to my popcorn, my popcorn
does to me, bowl after bowl of it as I take the documentary
about you in in fits between dark washes and a trip
to the True Value for drywall mud to repair the divot
the doorknob to the bathroom door put in the drywall.
Be that as it may, I will think ill of you
with every other step
and curse the way you worm
even into the baguette, which in Paris you can buy
from vendors on the Pont Neuf
ridiculous with butter and the ham on it
sliced thin, but piled up thick—
I’m halfway there, I hesitate, I click
on the petition aimed against you as I reach
out inwardly for France’s
national sandwich, with somewhere
over a billion managed every year although
it keeps losing ground
to the hamburger annually. Maybe when you’re done
devising ways to make me sick, neurodegenerative
disorders and the like, but before
Zeus’s thunderbolts lock in, you can
shed some light on that, if not the following:
at what point do you suspect a versified address
to you begins to take the place
of legitimate action? Stevens says poetry
is escapism in “a non-pejorative sense,” a break from the
swelter of the real such that when we return to it
we’ll be the better equipped to suffer its ongoing
indignity, poke back a little, tinker with the motor
till it doesn’t rattle so displeasingly on the long drive out
to the “open countryside”
Nietzsche says we enjoy so much because it pays us
no attention, by which I think he means
it has no designs on us, i.e., since the landscape lacks
what we identify as sense, we don’t feel ourselves
falling under the spell of its perception—
we aren’t objectified by it, but instead exist within it purely
as perceiving subject.
Here the wolf god Apollo
says don’t take his word for it, go outside
and see for yourself
how the landscape relates
or doesn’t relate to you.
Let what happens in the poem
be what the poem
makes happen, or at least
what wouldn’t have happened if the poem
had not been.
Let it then
be a record not only
of its own becoming, but of another
change it brought about.
In this way it might be felt
the poem isn’t as much an escape
from reality, but a portal back into it.
One night I will walk out under a sky so clear
I’ll forget you are everywhere. The stars will baffle me
with numbers as they arc
in all directions down
to the horizon as they must have when Callimachus
wrote that he preferred
the “delicate wings” of the cicada
and their music to the crasser
braying of “the long-eared ass,” reference not only
to his well-known disavowal of the epic form
in favor of brevity, but also
to Tithonus, “carried off,”
Sappho says, “to the earth’s end”
by his consort Eos, or rose-armed Dawn,
who asked Zeus to grant her lover
immortality, forgetting to request eternal youth.
In time Tithonus withered down
into the first cicada, which in fact
produces its distinctive sound
not by rubbing delicate wings together, as Callimachus
appears to have thought, but by rapidly
buckling a ribbed complex
of membranes in its exoskeleton called timbals,
homonymic with the tall, single-headed
drums of Brazil, redoubtable
exporter of sugar, coffee, orange juice, beef, poultry,
and soybeans
manipulated to withstand the complete
havoc glyphosate inflicts on every other
plant alive that isn’t likewise genetically modified
and patented, including corn, but also canola,
alfalfa, and cotton—even glyphosate-resistant
wheat has somehow found its way
into a field in Oregon—crops no longer
the inheritance of all but the property of the titanic
corporation you now serve, an empire
blowing everywhere the wind you make carries it.
For a purpose I hope to grow clearer in the future
tomorrow I’ll consume
a Fritos Taco Grande BeltBuster
at the Dairy Queen down the road from where I am.
It’s been revealed to me all week on a sign.
I’ve photographed
this sign on my phone but still can’t find
any description of what it might mean
on the internet tonight, but my guess is
it’s a sandwich, likely a burger. I’ll undertake this plan
maybe midafternoon, and with whatever
nonchalance I can
muster on what’s shaping up to be
another Texas scorcher. But no matter
what it is, this sandwich, this burger, I know
you’ll have a hand in it, especially
if corn is present, and there’s cause
to believe it must be. I think I must
feel one way to contend with the demonic, and that’s
what you are, is to invite it
in, take its properties on in order to know
how better to defeat it. I think I’ve
been here before. I can just feel it. I can just taste
the waste you will lay to me
bite after bite in the hot vinyl booth
of right where you want me, calling you
by name: Spellcaster. Fingers.
The Great One. Rodeo. Touchdown. Wolf.
