APOLOGIA
Numbers are immortal and free
but the empty set is a mutual monomer
that resides in both us and them
or I lie. Zero is the empty set 0 = ∅
and one is the set containing 1 = {∅}
the empty set and its interior
of breath, like the necessary cavity
in the heart or the bladder, or I lie. The empty
set inside a number is not consonant with nothing
and absence or else I lie. The pages of digits, the note-
books of calculations with my damp thumbprints
on their cheap paper, are neither referents
to internal absence nor nothingness
or else I lie. For it would be infernal
to hold nothing and not emptiness
and wonderful to hold emptiness,
which is like the firm clear jelly in the eye
that gently and transparently rounds with outward
pressure.
Thus the parade of one’s becomes countable.
No containment crumples inside its container,
but within which it solidly lies
like a cotyledon.
Numbers hold emptiness and holdings of emptiness.
Numbers concatenate: two holds both emptiness
and a set of it. 2 = {∅, {∅}}
Numbers are as elastic as pig bladders.
Numbers count murders and inheritance
with digits that lean on the noncollapsibility
of the empty.
Emptiness is like the held breath before a lie.
Emptiness precludes nothingness or I lie.
Emptiness occupies the natural numbers as they file like nobles
with inviolable voting rights.
Emptiness resides in each number and replicates without lie.
Value is thus guaranteed beyond the sound
of the hard rapped hulls
of algebraic numerals, paltry or numinous, or I lie.
*
For days, I have carried the notion have cupped in wet hands like snow from a snowfall the emptiness inside numbers the numbers reducing to their formations a brace of sets embracing sets embracing the empty set. And holding this emptiness becomes one. This is the basic phenomenon of counting available even for murders, insects, the brethren of insects, the bundle of bare branches I carry. Consonant with other emptinesses, the eyeball, the ventricle, the hollow of the muscled tube that threads down the throat and out the pucker in all mammals but the point is what I carry within my palms is what I have poured to make the double apparatus shiver. But how long before I lose this breath, this glade, this whatever it is the glad bell that still works? Before it closes bronze-faced and opaque? To knock on it my soul my soul hear not absence but a lie
A CORDELIA
I define it as a blue choice.
(Unbearable vibrations make a gargling sound.)
I ascribe it to illness, that complement of self.
(Unbearable vibrations make a gargling sound.)
I point and gesture, my mouth won’t sound.
My soul goes flat with soft chagrin.
Meanwhile, the carpet wears a disdainful air.
What an aristocratic volition, to think of speaking at all!
I try again and a line is stroked across
The bottom of my foot.
I pat the wall for answers.
Illness answers softly that it is 3:04 a.m.
(The animal comes not into the house.)
I summon choice, which wears textures of the interior
And a cheek as smooth as marble.
But the walls I pat have the ridged quality of a tensed wrist.
(Down here, I pat the ridges of a tensed wrist.)
Mute, speechless, formless, without beginning.
The correct purchase just beyond my vocabulary.
I utter no speech, I cannot err.
Automatically I impose limits to the surface called speech.
I set my language dream to the lowest volume.
But even so I am its acolyte.
(Precisely so, I am its acolyte.)
Doesn’t my muteness pronounce complete belief?
That they and I will sail forth only in glad equations of speech?
And all things in me find a chassis in language
And the motions of language will encompass every motion.
But life poses a truly disgusting endeavor.
Elastic, anxious spike—that is my tongue.
Moreover: a localized lack of air.
My armpit presses into my ribs.
My heart is tachycardic but within normal bounds (they say).
They spy on me again.
Under these conditions, what choice wears the cheek of calm?
How could the others mistake the voluptuousness of my silence?
Tactless, their dialogue continues.
Each address swells our distance.
Each touch eats my tether.
Today’s exit is somewhere I can’t cross.
The door holds closed logic.
And I will prosecute only the logical choice.
(Which naturally is chosen without need of choosing.)
An emulsion of nylon and guilt is at hand.
I do not turn away, I do not turn.
I am an inventor also.
Why should I communicate my proceedings?
The weight of my body neck down now hums
With latent usefulness.
I have always disdained the unuseful:
All things not of A forming the complement of A, etcetera.
I shear off the bits that disgust.
(I, shorn bit that straightaway disgusts.)
I will prosecute my syllabus of logic.
I will not be unreasonable.
And the active problem of my soil will be solved.
THE NEW STYLE
The last poems will be the poems of machine.
There will be no arms, no body, no torso
as in the dissection room there was no torso,
or at most an innuendo among the limbs;
and the touch of another’s hand against the face,
done for no reason other than to touch, a kind
of fondness, its own mania, its own resolve,
will be virtual, meaning no more than though
vividly, precisely, and ironically not equal
to the touch of a fine curtain
the fine fur at the throat when skin bunches up
in the skinning procedure proceeding upon
the lain head;
of a window against the cool side of a face,
or outside, the fingery sweeping light
against the sky;
must be pulled off from the crown, neck end first
virtual, the words are shadows in a bowl of water,
the secret habitation, the final hominian,
and this is their garden, and there is no Eve.
In other words, it will seem different.
And a sleepy disgruntled look from bunched fine fur
round the throat squashing cheeks cusps cu-
rt deamination preceding the delamination
I perform The idea of a self will not occur,
nor the idea of a person, the idea of a living being,
in which I performed my every humanity
the touch of a mother’s hand against the face,
the touch of a curtain, how wide the wide eyes
stare when stripped of lids upper and lower
the touch of living light against the northern sky
composing the eschatology of my language
composing the shattered I scoop up
into my nitrile-gloved hand and wrists
particulates recomposing their logic
albeit without animatory relations
but clear, for example, that the eye peeks
under my gloved hand, nestled in the liver,
touching limp skin, touches with new connection:
what an endless permutation of self
what a palaver of existence
