I.
The knowledge we gathered is no longer useful.
The system you understand shifts and makes no sense.
And this is the body you spent years getting used to.
Tomorrow, the light will not recognize it.
Light has no language for it.
Light has no language for what is smaller than a hairpin turn of a chromatin.
Light must be choked in order to name the smaller things.
My name could change.
We shall say what we shall say and call it knowledge
with this our native speech.
I learned this language to subsist and to compass between myself
and the unknown.
I should not have learned it.
I should have been a fish in a world of rising water, boring
in with immense color until it seems that it was never knowledge
that was gained from the set of things as they are, having been now
turned from by the world
and yet still a knowledge,
a trust that can’t be turned from,
trust in the thing that is an inhabitance of it
of the only thing I am standing on and not
just the dirt slitted with plant roots and leaf stains made up of mashed
chlorophyll pigments, drying up now, pregnant still with incidental light
and nothing to pass it on to
here in the stomach of the beast
punched open to the ceiling lights.
These aren’t our salad days.
(The thing that is understood becoming the thing that is loved.)
(The objective lens made from glass.)
(And the glass melting in due time.)
II.
And in the end, the body could believe in little.
It could believe that it needed the cud to make itself go on
and in the hours it took to digest that material.
(For the human: six to eight hours.)
It could believe that time was something not dependable,
that it expanded depending on how fast the body was traveling
and the time the world took was not the time
it was planning to take.
When I need more time, I freeze down the material I am working.
There in the cold, molecules take longer to reach their targets
and the enzymes, loaded, slower to release their fruit.
The rush of ions that are thoughts shimmer
on the edge of a hardened cusp, this is
movement close to light speed and time
slows. Imagine: a dream of glassy water
which does not quite ice so as to preserve the
membrane that would otherwise puncture,
like a pronunciation at the tip of the soft palate
while the world is loosening around with care.
But it can’t be complete. Something there
still ticks with the rest of the world, I think, and they
obey.
When I stand up,
it will take the heart nearly three beats to pump blood back to the brain.
At the window, watching one flower bloom for the entire afternoon.
The magnolia by the window takes five days to go from buds (hairy,
slightly engorged) to full flower. Blooming at a rate
thousands of breaths long. It is a matter of distribution. If you
added together the force of each kiss that brushed your forehead
and applied that within the space of a millisecond, a micro-
second, it would punch through your skull. They say that one can slow light down
by shining it through a heavy species of glass. It does not slow down at all.
Within glass, from atom to atom, as though from room to room
it moves with the same cold speed
shedding as it goes, as it must, until
presented to the open
for the next purchase
III.
Matter is ongoing in widening distances.
The yellowed grasses bunch on the edge of the road now creeping a little in between the asphalt chunks which themselves were planted on bedded earth on the older grass which is a newer species on this older continent
and the animal too
in ambiguous preparation: one foot
placed after the other.
If a body, having entered the earth, sinks tectonically and reaches the conditions of temperature not much more than needed to boil water, then it will become, as would other bodies having been carried down this far
purified into pitch, into carbon and hydrogen,
into black bitumen—
it is the same material used to make this road
this straight line bisecting a plane
by which stand low shrubby trees, or one tree
that has dropped fruit onto the tarmac, crushed or shattered, open,
the recent one whose imprint of cored water already dried up (dehydration also the first step for the formation of tar)
but the sweetness still there
on the asphalt
in the same way that the word bitumen seems to have blood in it
and the asphalt road that has both goes in one direction
towards the place
with the horizon and the sky
white with untarnished scope
with endings that no longer matter
a proof turned blank.
IV.
That which is given but cannot be called
one’s own: a piece of knowledge, like
a body of laws, like a body warmed,
warmed on a rock, under the sun. This
hand, for example, which knows how to grasp how to darken how to follow how to
release potassium ions which will stop the heart if
crushed for more than a few minutes. A part
of the body. They say that a body once swallowed the universe into its throat
in order to protect it. Is that where it is? How it seems, everything with the attempt
to be in understanding of it, seems like an attempt
to love the body that I wish
laughingly wish I could
sometimes put my hand into
just to learn of course.
It is right to remember the sun.
And I am still waiting to learn
how the body can remain closed after so much,
a revelation I will keep eyes open to evenly
the fact of it comprehended in the effort to love
but this is what I mean to tell you
that the universe is still there, behind
the throat
the secrets are all there,
pregnable because it can be seen under a light
microscope:
the body that is containing them,
the skin voluptuously holding it intact
and the darker nucleus where they are kept
dark enough and solid, it can be gripped
hold it
and make it give them up, those secrets
where is the button to press
to get the chromosomes to untangle
and open those parts with the art to put back time
that I imagine feels soft in my hand
that I will never know enough about
except when it has decided to
close, part that need not answer
V.
They have invented poems with algorithms.
They can now be done with objectivity.
They work by concatenating locally intelligible
phrases and improve by introducing a theme
known but not spoken of. That
is how they work.
There is a chance it won’t work.
They have a name for infrequent events: It was
worked out by examining the number of Prussians
who were kicked to death by their horses.
The man who discovered this had a name that means fish.
I pick up the first thing at hand at this table,
the first thing with words, it was a postcard
on which someone had written Thank you
Fish feel pain as I feel pain but fish do not hurt.
Their pain is written in the asymmetry of missing scales,
the operculum that covers the richly vascularized gills
lifted on one side and cannot go back down.
The fish feels terror, which is the response to fear
blanks fear into terror The mean and the variance
fearless fish lidless sleek are the same value.
The scar formation process is the same between
human and fish.
The scar is a result of the deposition of an aligned
matrix where the matrix had been random because
closure needs to be fast to stop the emergence
because the body fears the thing that had left
could go back in again
as though our words could turn around from the silent
passion of the motions of our searching
as though you could put Thank you back
The words are still appearing. They appear independently
on this still-called-a-page page, produced a word at a time
ahead of me. The letters look like the scales of a fish.
When I wake up I will have dreamed of a bunch
of flowers. Fish feel as lonely as I feel.