mass is a beautiful way to say we gather
to shut down the system
so bicyclists can take over the streets
Critical mass
a way to say we gather
so that it matters
When the bicyclists take over the streets
and bring the city
to a standstill, Brad said that
is critical mass
I asked, “What happens when the city is shut down?”
He said, “Then we’ll dance.”
He liked a song about a drop of water. In this song, the drops came together to form a trickle, then a stream, a river, a body of water, the power of the water made us aware that we belonged to the earth, that we would protect her, and by the end of the song, the river was free.
THE MIDDEN
Blue stone quarries
stone of touch
stone marker or the stone left behind
shell middens and clay pipes and passenger pigeons dressed in blues
the stone that gazes heaven side up
the day which is red and pink corners
Burnish the blue stone & quarry the earth dynamite time
Perfection is time’s work or what makes bluestone blue or what makes a quartz crystal
Halo surrounds—core of labyrinth—glow departs from an ember
Opposing fire & fetching cool petals
quietly foxed or bat claw unhinged
cut from mussel shell or bone
buttons lie underground
Walking through coals into a city within the fire
entering the ember, encased in a protective suit
to bring out handfuls of what that world inside burning wood is like
Flame in the air, gas fields full of devil’s spit yellow eye of methane
When the flame is in the air and the night is eye & thigh high paper laid on an ember browns then flames
Walking inside the flame, or an ember of heated talk opening doors poured from the long-necked bucket or dug from a shallow seam
Standing in the doorway of an ember
the door is a passage that my friend leaves ajar
Walking through embers: a marriage with its pleasures of heat and light
and the pain of heat and light
stoking the fire inside
Oil pumps in a corn field
Satan’s fires
burn off the methane
Freestanding coal shack & packed trailer parks of burning coals overflow the double-wide with its cathedral ceilings, whirlpool tubs, and master suites
The landfill handed me a ball of paper, a washed-out small boulder of print. I cracked it open and read “Danny Kaye performing live.” And I thought, How long has he been dead?
Like the midden of books and papers stacked by the bed, make of it what you will. I put my rage on top to cultivate later, the midden of paper and print, headlines and ink, mixed pulp from long ago industrial and urban waste will topple and release a flood of ivory and soft grays and blacks
Dust tops the PC, dot matrix printer, and typewriter in a thrift shop
The Apple in the barn is boxy and hard
Cords long gone
Plastic phones turn a palm into light
The inside awash with take-out containers—driver’s seat cleared of—cigarette butts, newspapers, plastic forks, spoons, and knives ready to go
The captain’s logbook was inked heavy with stamps. I ask the long-dead captain, Is it like a wax cylinder or like tree rings or like grooves set in foil? Is it Thomas Edison’s talking machine or Bell’s telephone? Is it an echo chamber of the ocean or a talking drum?
There were the sounds that I couldn’t carve, the blood I couldn’t catch, dust fell, sprinkling itself over the glass cases of artifacts, over baleen piano keys, carved dice, combs, and mirrors. In his log book I silently entered how the whale’s eardrums are as large as a child’s head (how each is painted with a frisky portrait of a man and a woman.)
I carve an animal into the logbook, cutting through a hundred pages of sea notes, of sightings, of oil harvested and rendered. I cut through accounts of the sperm whale’s death throes, of harpooners who froze as they closed in on the chase. With my pen, I carve another animal into the book. A tooth out of a tusk. Baleen into corset stays. Press breasts and penises into bone, I make fine canes for gentlemen.
Underneath the childhood clothing, grade school valentines, and schoolbooks my mother stored in a trunk, what shows? An arm? Toe? I like to stick my feet out. What gives my presence away? A rumpled sheet under the blanket? A barely perceptible ripple.
Sitting perched on letters and newspapers, under the mattress, tables, and on chairs and inside shoe boxes
Bread box
Of the other books
Leaf press
Prayer-card holder
Toast tray
I store neatly pressed handkerchiefs and hand fans embossed with bible verses and funeral home ads inside an encyclopedia
Press a green spider into the book, cross-eyed and alive and already very flat
Press in a dream of living in the deep blue of space, like the planet earth. The earth, an eyeball of the galaxy
Press in deep blue space, a blue ball of light rotating through the black inky void around a larger system, a bigger star, a blue milky marble, moving.—Out of an ember cooling and firing again—gravity of milky puppy breath—milky marble home.
ANIMATIONS
Coloring the glass with pee or peering at a blue dense enough to be alive or to influence a human or inhuman action, the feather death crown is a spiral, and in automatic writing, the spirals grow smaller and smaller before any actual communication.
Spiral, a tornado wind in the pen and on the page
Pressed
