We used to have an empire of things, but now we have only subjects, ourselves, people that overflow horizons and misplace. The landslide plays hide-and-go-seek with creation. Elevated land that shrugs its shoulders to relax in rhythmic division of a puzzle fragment body. Watching a play, organized around a prop. Sentiments circulate in theater seats. An empty script of silence and iteration. The elongated stride of geology makes mayflies of our manufacture. Rock piles pose naked problems in a chemistry set solution –– the negation of substance. We imagine the development of goods, extracting ore from the thick blossoms of nature and crafting architecture out of a dream. But the actors never forget to speak our lines, audience echoing a marble hall of affect, a prop maintains the ceiling, vital and useless. What is a tragedy without a pistol or a sword? Hamlet beneath a boulder or Oedipus in quicksand. Desire takes the disguise of an object. A profound thunder answers the agent’s cry as items function with gravity, everything rolls downhill. The individual is crushed to atoms in history. How to look at things with candles and lanterns, how to appreciate the decay of incandescence, and how to see clearly the beauty of darkness. Strange history consists of objects moving around, and the invention of experimental boundaries to contain everything that could be an angel. Paraphrase and trade, modes of relative exchange in the humility of a sublime and oceanic land. Metamorphosis under the skin, ripening fruit. Theater walls in geometry of imagined places. Everyone leaves their programs behind. Each person wonders what the other think of the play. We contain one another as the mountain stumbles with meaning. Narrative cannot drown out things. How to look, how to forget, how to feel and be.
Photograph of poem draftPhotograph of poem draft