All the new thinking is making its way
to the old formal structures. All the old
formalities are of little use. They fail
to fit the new abundance. Where in this
world can one disappear? Poverty abounds,
corralled together by fiber optics. A horde
of the human depraved, visited nightly. In
Sri Lanka they dig sixteen hours a day for
rubies. In China they delve into the earth
and pull out black carbon, million year old
refuse. In the Mexican desert they wait for
ships to come ashore brimming with coca
leaves, or they harvest emerald green forests
of marijuana, or they cut off the heads of
those who do and throw them onto dance
floors in the name of God. If we stop dancing
or smoking dope or fucking our young girlfriends
without condoms because it feels better, then
some concealed evil triumphs. A man who glimpses
coruscant water under an azure sky and is not
shaken is no longer youthful. Verse is worth
something only if it is digressive, stilted, mimetic.
So a moment has a thousand lives, all of them
dying and transitory. A man sees an old lover
washing laundry. He remembers playing in
downy piles as a boy. He thinks he should say
something insouciant to her to show he has
moved on with his life. His heart pounds because
parts of him live in the past. The sunlight feels
denser. He once got drunk and fucked her
in the dark on top of a washing machine and
could not finish and she cried because she had
gained weight. It is this crying girl he regrets,
the self terrors he could not assuage. His sister
lives in China and they talk via webcam and she
tells him of peasants dying in vain, though it
is their deaths that power her computer. She tells
him that he should be less passive, there is a
whole world that needs saving. What is left in
the wake of transcendence? An overdue cable
bill. Breakfast to eat. Laundry to be turned over,
then put away. It is these gaps where we know
each other, and where love finds its shapes. We
search inside these crevices for something
diaphanous, amorphous and shapeless, like trying
to recall a dream the next afternoon. Stories matter
because they’re internally forged, entirely, all the
moving particulars of the world bowed to our
will. So two lovers encounter each other outside
a Laundromat and she sees that he is a good man,
is well adjusted and successful in the kind of ways
that will annoy her, make her spiteful. And the
poor, frazzled stations of the universe retreat,
lost once again in a wave of social tics and mores.
You find them in your anniversary gift, or the soft
lucent glow on your wife’s cheek while you sit in
the Beijing airport, drinking whiskey, or the joint
you smoke with your old time friends. Men seek
the order of grids and the comfort of corporeal
dialects. These less complicated desires dispersed
in the teeming. Our soluble urges, like the sugar
water Hari Krishna’s drink. The primitive needs,
ineffable and numinous, a pellucid swath through
the modern periphrasis. It is a communion of flower
petals, scattered by the wind. Littered abscised and
dying along street gutters and sidewalks and damp
grass. Like confetti left from a little party. Or the fine
resplendent dyes of a shaman man with his ancient,
taut and weathered hands that have blessed baby’s
foreheads and carried men and women into whatever
realm waits. He chants and sings, limns passed down.
But all form originates somewhere. The initial,
desperate formulations. All structures at one time
intuition. Men in caves scrawling figures and
men in cold, dark winter taverns singing lilting
myths. Forget, endure. We will forget you. The
poverty endures. Hiding in a cave, the old rhythms,
flickering through the waste of a thousand years.