A man does alpha
exercises on his wolves
Tall as deer
glacial eyes
The fences crackle
On this mountain he grows
marijuana and wolves
Like everyone else up here you say
he is mere receiver
for satellites you pick like shells
from the night sky’s shores
to listen down the long winding futures
You only mention him
because in this exercise he has created
he is alpha
If we could arrive where we are I think
the grid of twine fastened to stakes and
the vines’ crazing would clarify
afternoon’s aslant
like a damper pedal slowly lifted.
But strung from end to end of the valley below us
the cables’ dominants buzz—
power without face, mere
force without difficulty
We stare only
at two lights, you say: fire and screens
You touch and touch a screen
Smell of ash in the stove it is morning
We wake on a firebreak road
no fire climbs to
You touch
the fine hairs of the apricots
where cold sunlight touches
They are a little beyond even
where sunlight touches
Go ahead call out to them you say
They will not let you in
The workmen cut down the daffodils
lighting the doorway of your shack
Inconsolable, you left your love back there
to tell me another woman
wants to fly you to Trieste, Odessa, anywhere
perhaps one day pay for your cryonics
But for years you’ve disciplined your love’s
art; without you
she might have babies, write
about babies, mere
human babies.
A dog has followed us three days
to this promontory; you let it lick your hand,
compassionate only
to those forbidden
from remaking the world in their image.
Camera batteries in dust
high above Silicon Valley
it’s all captured
it won’t get away
I pick up a fragment of clay, ancient-
seeming, mechanically
stamped: “Bio …”
We’ll escape you think
the wedding of life and death
just as the last amphorae are emptied
You are writing a novel
about a man on a mountain
who suspects everyone below is dead
He engineers children
with his DNA, instructs them
to long to resurrect him someday …
I go off alone,
unable, even, to find my way back
to that sunrise grotto
where a cat flicks a mosquito from its ear
in my journal.