Breathing Room
Instruments of music and surgery,
Statues of birds and kings,
Chapters illuminated by gaslight:
Visual features differentiated in space, not time.
I’m reading a book about monkeys and their languages. Did you know
With their innumerable dialects, most comprehend
Each other no better than you and I?
When a tongue functions as a contour seen as boundary.
The difference between centrality and infinity.
Because of internal contradictions of love
I believe in a host of unlikely divinities.
A scene shifts from dream-room to living
Room. Living room to cubist painting.
In simple isometric
Rectangles.
The balance of immutable force.
A surface is a translation of a three-dimensional image.
Some parts must be excluded. Distance
Between a window and its view
On the vertical axis.
This is where we enter the room—living, breathing.
The room we inhabit
Has the appearance of being trustworthy. We believe
Its space will not dissolve
Like the hotel lobby in which we’re waiting.
Familiar landscape
Mother’s womb—forgotten, then remembered viscerally
As though we had been there only last Sunday. Reading
From the Book of Genesis.
Unlike the moon seen through reflection,
The moon in the womb is an umbilical connection
To a web, network of our past lives,
And deflected moonlight stretches across the lake.
Putty nosed monkeys string together utterances.
The principal locus of repulsion and attraction. One’s death
Firmly anchored
In the present.
To step on a isolate shadow,
A shadow pierced by a knife,
Or buried with a corpse.
One does not sleep at night / delusory state /
One does not enter a village that’s near a road.
The devil is a kidnapper with a flair for the dramatic.
The devil will snuff out she who reveals her heart-line.
My revolver was removed from a drawer
By a corporal spirit with no interior perception.
Airy construction or
Paper as material on which music moves.
Cellophane thunder, lightning bolt.
Cello broke dawn.
April 1920, Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein met:
Compression of heat core increases luminosity
When two shapes of varying densities collide.
In medieval cosmology, idols are the rupture between mind and nature,
Thinking and being, a mirror eclipsed by variation in space,
How one experiences separation from the body
When he is in the process of leaving it,
No longer recognizing the out-of-date monkey suit.
As though the body is a jug filled to the brim with water
When the sky cries
Raining cats and dogs
The whole comprised of oscillating parts
In varying states of coming and going.
1931 Einstein asked Freud if peace is possible.
Considering: Attraction and repulsion
Love and its opposite
The 32 winds that motivate man
And an inwardly-turned death instinct.
This Sunday, 27 lights were extinguished in Iraq
While I was reading a book on Diana monkeys.
Freud concluded that the impulse toward cultural development
Is compelled to elevate us into pacifists.
As though time were linear and entropy didn’t accelerate
At the speed of evolution.
Look up! No clouds—
Bodies floating among us, toward us,
Never the same moment twice
& each new lake
Occupies non-Euclidean space.
I will take my book and go for a boat ride
In an ever-expanding, multidirectional body of water.