Easter Eggs
If our world is a simulation
made by a higher order of
being, what did they embed
for their own entertainment?
Sinkholes, axolotls, dreams,
that Turkey is Peru in Portuguese.
Sometimes there’s a secret room—
my daughter is one, I think.
She is infinitely regressive.
Every night she says I love
you even more until
I stop saying it back.
The idea that we
are not our own
is as old as words
allow us to think it.
Pixelated light on
the river at night
must be the makers’
bad anachronism.
Theory of Anything
They found a burning
bush in an acceptable
desert, only it’s not
a tree but a cave that
glows when the sun
is low. Your eyes do
conceive you, delivered
people—we are chained
down in the mouth,
inside-out flames
just as promised, a land
is made in our likeness.
A man has stars in his
knees and oxen hitched
to the earth’s axis, which
is how we turn—where
there’s an axis
there’s an origin
of zero coordinates, but
not the same as nothing.
Geometry is wanting.
Autoclave
From the middle-
distant medical
complex, billows
of bodies regain
the air the empty
rooms surrender.
If created in another’s
image, our essence is
an optical effect—
the brain a key
to words for what
it reflects. Christ’s
sake, Kate, you’re
all a cloud might
think you look like
from this height:
a cataract of common
wealth’s golden dome,
the whole of human
history achieves me.
Thingking
Most things consist
of how you see them
(a bone-shaped bone
is usually a humerus).
Flying by the seat of the sound,
these minutes within windows—
nameless trees, eponymous sky—
how everything transpires today.
Three times I lay one down.
Three times a puff comes up
from the hole and it slides
to the floor, its dusting of
paper thrones. Bad subject,
I am laughing in an iron lung.
Leibniz is said to have dropped
the “t” from his name because
he didn’t believe in time
to believe in time to save
something: these weeds,
dumped mattress, bloody ticking.
The Rest
Time is a line with
different extremities
but “late” means both
going and gone. You
don’t pack an elegy
with abstractions, say,
“generous,” while some
specifics it’s best to omit
from the epitaph—
“Always ordered
the chicken sandwich.”
Events don’t happen
in time, they make it,
as language is made
of how we mean it.
(I mean the opposite.)
I’m left with this
fistful of fletchings,
the point to which
we never got.
—for Craig Watson
Looker
If we are here to witness
the world, what happens
when we see what we
are not designed to?
Cells divide on slides,
a river slithers from
an airplane window,
a girl applies mascara
to the camera. I saw
a sunfish once, thick
pad of fucked-up flesh,
floating—what good
does this ugliness?
Alien form of being
what it was. I have been
threaded with a scope,
am clear in there. Out here,
my golden fleece fades into
the side of the hide
that holds the meat.
Man Alive
What we see is not
the object: frescoes
peel away from plaster,
pigment falls and holy
raiment wanders off
like a wraith returned
to the artist’s intention.
Ben-Hur is there to watch
the crucifixion, but dead
can mean completely, as
in reckoned, set or right—
perfection is a sort of life.
Even chickens after the rain
take all the color of light.