This Season

(another from the '04-'05 "diary." I like putting this up--it's absolutely not "the latest thing.")

1
Writing simply in order to forget
that trick facts play, becoming arguments
but things here aren’t hidden, but marked
“hidden,” or “marked”—to give you the idea
“Ladder” or “latter”: to imagine alternative situations
of lack, a microscopy of what there is
in the name, “unknown person, 24 years old”

PRESENTE—the body and the self are distinct
in being tuned differently, or timed
as in Chekhov the crisis sits for months w/o collapse
in a way impossible today

by which I mean today, any day
you can’t remember
or see coming
through the window
of prediction
whose mirror, deferral, seems the mark
of humanity (its asset, its doom)

In the present we’re called upon as animals
—which lack doom and “the present”
—as do Afghani dead, still
uncited by “either side”
(quotes embrace with embittered
practicality)


2
before the telephone
was the nightmare
of the disembodied voice

which seemed, if anything, possessed

of excessive physicality

featuring Jennifer Something dash Something
a crack in nothing

well, I’ve rarely been so insulted
by a withdrawing figure

or by a fried chicken
I never chose

(I didn’t mean to say, “a candidate”)


3
Storms in Indonesia
produce helplessness elsewhere
as a sign of privilege—

the inability to help
versus the inability to help
oneself

At this point there’s a high contrast
with just about everything

which is desirable but blinding
or binding
on a poetic sense, or any other sense

(acutely hearing a tension in the room
or the intuition that a pinch on another smarts

until the equilibrium is restored
by Maxwell’s Demon, famous in bowler hat
or by the miracle of distraction

when it comes but once
unlike the dump truck, repiling
the tumbledown

this season