Scale: Suite: section

The beginning of the opening section of a project I’ve been making notes on for ages.

Inside-out.
No muse
could illuminate
the chasm between
this sequence
and pandemic concurrence
—the latter,
lack-vomiting profusion,
a hard cast
of process,
the former more a thing
crying out (that’s
progress) to be let in,
made thought
again, the longing
for the impossible
without which not
a finger moves
—between poor BB’s
reedy voice (tape
running just too fast)
and leaving the kitchen
to absent oneself
from what must be
said, between
the presence
of Wahid in Nablus prison
and mine, to him.
Saying it all
petrifies becoming;
we’ll do without
the voice that bans
embrace without contact,
that supresses
the molehill’s excess
against Sierras
(the nothingness seen
in the sycamore
outshouting that nothing’s
lack),
the privacy of the molecular
against the rare light
seducing things
into display
and a short sentence with high contrast.
Dog poops out
small country.

Together a new kind of next? Qualities are problematic. A simple idea can be enlarged. Bulldozed grove. First let’s establish the facts. OK. Also Emilia (Marion), Lin (Beijing), Sam (Guantanamo), Abu Grahib. Invisible in Mercator. Does the ocular metaphor map? Scent of pineapple no longer fixes location. Fifty-foot pillbug still no problem. Millions of tiny shoes. Like wind to torn kites. Alps sighted. 1/3 sandwich. Scale of fission? Divided kingdom. A fourteen incher. The Malacca Strait. The taste buds. The sound judges. The Marshall Plans. Versus Central Park. Kitchen. Pacific Rim Job. Plates shift. A green eye comes into view. Against a uniform blue sky it catches glimpses of things swimming on the lens, standing in for the migrations of peoples through Greece, Egypt and Asia Minor between the seventh and second centuries B.C., circulations even sight can’t avoid, when we are scribes recording the meanings of colors or erotic comportments, or methodically forgetting everything with the aid of phrasebooks, extended privates and loud song.

Like the butcher in the capitol, thumb on all scales: “too obvious to be a smooth snake,” speaking of containment. “But what would the container be like?” (the contralto, incredulous). “One wants a machine to catch excess, feed it, let it go. Most of an idea can fit into some sentence, or set. Like the Pacific Ocean,
which ‘we’ west
coasters call
‘holistic.’ Still the skin’s
the organ least oft forgot
or remembered, where memory’s
act and not state. That’s like nothing
or pure possibility,
the figure
of the outline between. All the void separating planets can’t be miles (they live on surfaces, which explains the Little Grand Canyon). In order to really read the book she’d have to imagine a world without him in it, then forget that act. But that would have to include his dog (now deceased), his shoes, his investments in electronics, the social cohesions impossible without him—how many traces could the text tolerate without atrophy? Would the green of his iris need to be removed from the trees? Only another can be in a world like a gem in a box. Anything in this one is true and” deciduous. She puts on her glasses.