I incorporate gneiss and coal and
long-threaded moss
and fruits and grass and
esculent roots, a gravity dam
550 feet high on this
the continent’s steepest
river machine, with 13 other dams, a system
of locks and
ladders for commerce, continuance
of species, twin cooling towers
of a data center
for the world’s most powerful
search engine,
installed where a lost
indigenous Babel once converged
in that universal language—trade, night-spearing
of salmon by torchlight
lost (men’s faces aflash
in archives), expressionist
petroglyphs eerily
contemporary, photographed by
professors before
the big sink, I incorporate
with irrigation ditches, thousands of gridded miles
of piping, hoses, scaffolding for sprinklers,
insecticide banners
over alfalfa terraces greenshining to the edge
of the glacier-cut gorge,
and on the ridges:
white windmills, futurist
crosses, revivalist
architecture of potato magnates, societies
for the preservation of automatic, semiautomatic,
Gun Hill, Gun River, without judgment—
that sucked candy—I incorporate
the leaden
groundwater under
firing range and echoing
factory, the capful of phosphates,
Chicago River run backward
to Mississippi, algae clotting
the Gulf’s left ventricle, plumes of oil filmed
by unmanned cameras designed to sustain
unearthly pressure, ingenious inhibitors
of serotonin reuptake
present from sewage in measurable amounts
in the Great Lakes,
and calm
as the not-I appears, I incorporate
the not-I,
the talkers
in headsets talking to no one present,
Bach and baseball and
tobacco stocks ticking, the screen-lit
lotuseating faces staring,
clicking—disgust me, and I incorporate them
with the disappearing
bees, defense drones
undetectable except by ordnance flowering
skull, sternum, uterus, I am born
at many removes
from Thoreau, who paused to notice
the thickness of surface ice,
and, tormented
by his still form in the hut doorway,
sun on skin, outside time, I incorporate it and it binds
the mettle in my blood,
the compound sinking
to my feet—impossibly heavy, I drive them
into mountains topped with blinking
towers, zigurrated by
logging roads, in motley
of clear-cuts and
necklaced with triple-stranded cables whose buzzing
sounds like rain, and up there
walking the ancient
Cascade Volcanic Arc, I incorporate
the green company of grunts
on leave in sunburned skulls, who go
silent posing
on a high promontory—premonitions
of Hindu Kush—they frighten me
with politeness
on the trail, acne, and large vulnerable ears,
I could clap their shoulders, clasp them, pretend
to spar as with my brothers,
but I am helpless to keep them
for their families’ sake
from disappearing
into the photograph’s digital veil, can only
incorporate them as I must
these actors charging the hill
on a screen in a window
I walk under later, many rooms are lit this way,
the allegory literalized, and I am outside
in another cave
of streetlights flicking on under cameras,
I pass through these and incorporate their recordings of me
into that Gordian nerve-net
of me not recorded, firing
charges down too many
forks to be
reliably
modeled, the loops
of its feedback with external
stimuli so intricately in-nested, a representation
of them would curve its outer ring
through the Oort,
and I must go farther,
into imagined futures, incorporate
cornstalks 12 feet high with black leaves modified
by photosynthetic silicates for 90% efficiency of capture
and acorn-sized kernels,
they are beautiful if not yet
realized, and I am afraid
of them, utterly, as I was in Chicago homesick
for Trask and Kilchis, Siletz and Nestucca, and found,
at the Eastern end of Pratt Street where it abuts the Lake,
frozen corpses of
Chinook Salmon
washed up like grotesques out of my memory—
transplants are everywhere, translations of
translations, no place embodies itself, all
overlap, and so I
incorporate them, unifying
them in one brand,
Brandon, meaning
from a flaming hill
as claimed by a bookmark given me when young—
I place it in the book of grass
and the book catches fire and illuminates
the undersides of clouds,
an advertisement like the orange GE
glowing on a building in Midtown
seen by the lovers
naked in infinite
regress of two walls of hotel-room mirrors,
and, full disclosure: it was I positioned against her
in the mirrors’ smallest frame
feeling I lived in invisible abstract cornucopia diminishment
of frame within frame where
only images propagate—invincible-distant
as the acronym halos guarding Mannahatta’s skyline—
corporations are all.
Resist or acquiesce, I incorporate
their paltry specializations into this brand
whose acronym is every star in the night sky,
and in the day sky too,
for though it is invisible, it is nevertheless
present, totalizing, undemocratic
as every corporation aspires to be,
and, reader far hence,
face lit by a little held charge, a little water’s motion,
a million-stranded rope of sand,
all of my swindling and evasion is for our certain merger,
for I am corrupt as every other,
and you must absorb my assets
as I have absorbed this
broadcast image
from Stalin’s Ukrainian famine—the infant automaton
in the street still nursing on
its starved dead mother.
Swallow me and go.
I do not wait for you I am in you already.
There is commerce between us.