By the Numbers Read online

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  BBR 1923–2008

  JER 1923–2008

  Contents

  Title Page

  Note to Reader

  Dedication

  I. Bit Parts

  Northwest Passage

  In Shakespeare

  Special Victims Unit

  Subject, Verb, Object

  Emergency Measures

  Metallurgy for Dummies

  Head-On

  Iron Age

  Classic Bar Scenes I. Apollo at Happy Hour

  II. Ovidian Deposition

  III. Pygmalion among the Young

  IV. Twilight of a God

  V. Orpheus at Last Call

  VI. Apollo in Age

  Zeus: A Press Conference

  State-Sponsored

  Echo

  Bit Parts

  The God Who

  II. Vectors 3.0: Even More Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays

  III. By the Numbers

  By the Numbers

  Birds in Rain

  Are We Alone? or Physics You Can Do at Home

  Prokaryotes

  The Stars in Order Of

  Origin of Language

  Songs for Senility

  Room Temperature

  IV. Small Hours

  Shore Town, Winter

  Tableau

  Postmortem Georgic

  Night Lights (1977– )

  Blackout

  The Rich Man Sotto Voce

  To a Tea

  Slice of Life

  Who Has Seen the Wind

  Red, Green, Blue

  Star

  Reading Light

  Roads Not Taken

  Roads Taken

  End of Summer

  Notes

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Special Thanks

  I. Bit Parts

  Northwest Passage

  That faint line in the dark

  might be the shore

  of some heretofore unknown

  small hour.

  This fir-scent on the wind

  must be the forests

  of the unheardof month

  between July and August.

  In Shakespeare

  In Shakespeare a lover turns into an ass

  as you would expect. Others confuse

  their consciences with ghosts and witches.

  Old men throw everything away

  when they panic and can’t feel their lives.

  They pinch themselves, pierce themselves with twigs,

  cliffs, lightning, to die—yes, finally—in glad pain.

  You marry a woman you’ve never talked to,

  a woman you thought was a boy.

  Sixteen years go by as a curtain billows

  once, twice. Your children are lost,

  they come back, you don’t remember how.

  A love turns to a statue in a dress, the statue

  comes back to life. O god, it’s all so realistic

  I can’t stand it. Whereat I weep and sing.

  Such a relief to burst from the theater

  into our cool, imaginary streets

  where we know who’s who and what’s what,

  and command with MetroCards our destinations.

  Where no one with a story struggling in him

  convulses as it eats its way out,

  and no one in an antiseptic corridor

  or in deserts or in downtown darkling plains

  staggers through an Act that just will not end,

  eyes burning with the burning of the dead.

  Special Victims Unit

  Actually Persephone loved his loving her,

  dark-browed, so serious: it proved something about her.

  And for him, gloomy, overwhelmed with himself,

  her brightness was more beautiful than beauty

  and he basked in it. But when his turn came to shine back

  it seemed her feelings were a storm of flowers

  he could not gather, and the story gets ordinary:

  he is angry at his heart and hurts her.

  Demeter gets confused. Did a god steal her daughter,

  or has she been living all this time in Manhattan

  with her difficult husband, difficult job, difficult cat

  and visiting once a year? Her love for what is lost

  spreads so thinly over the planet

  it’s not love anymore but weather. She goes to the police:

  Benson and Stabler find her story dubious.

  More so when they learn she never had a daughter,

  though she was one, and that her vaunted power over harvests

  apparently doesn’t extend to her wilting houseplants.

  As for those Hellish threats on her machine?

  Phone records show that dark voice was her own.

  Actually she has bipolar Multiple Personality Disorder,

  solution to all plot dilemmas. Fair enough,

  since cop shows can’t say what we’d say: Life is a dream,

  and we are everyone we dream.

  When they come to get her,

  her hands are clawed in the chainlink of the playground.

  Hades, Demeter, Persephone form in her face of cloud.

  She’s watching, of course, two girls on swings,

  one going up while the other goes down.

  Subject, Verb, Object

  I is not ego, not the sum

  of your unique experiences,

  just, democratically,

  whoever’s talking,

  a kind of motel room,

  yours till the end—

  that is, of the sentence.

  The language, actually,

  doesn’t think I’s important,

  stressing, even in

  grandiose utterance—

  e.g., I came

  I saw I conquered—

  the other syllables.

  Oh, it’s a technical problem,

  sure, the rhyme

  on oh-so-open

  lie, cry, I,

  harder to stitch tight

  than the ozone

  hole in the sky.

  But worst is its plodding insistence—

  I, I, I—

  somebody huffing uphill,

  face red as a Stop sign,

  scared by a doctor

  or some He She It

  surprised in the mirror.

  Emergency Measures

  I take Saturday’s unpopulated trains,

  sitting at uncontagious distances,

  change at junctions of low body count, in off-hours,

>   and on national holidays especially, shun stadia

  and other zones of efficient kill ratio,

  since there is no safety anymore in numbers.

  I wear the dull colors of nesting birds,

  invest modestly in diverse futures,

  views and moods undiscovered by tourists,

  buy nothing I can’t carry or would need to sell,

  and since I must rest, maintain at several addresses

  hardened electronics and three months of water.

  And it is thus I favor this unspecific café,

  choose the bitterest roast, and only the first sip

  of your story, sweet but so long, and poignantly limited

  by appointments neither can be late for, and why now

  I will swim through the crowd to the place it is flowing away from,

  my concerned look and Excuse me excuse me suggesting

  I am hurrying back for my umbrella or glasses

  or some thrilling truth they have all completely missed.

  Metallurgy for Dummies

  Faint bronze of the air,

  a bell I can’t quite hear.

  The sky they call gunmetal

  over gunmetal reservoir,

  the launch, aluminum,

  cutting to the center,

  waters bittered with the whisk

  of aluminum propellers

  (your gold drink stirred

  with a gold forefinger).

  *

  Faint tinnitus,

  where is it?

  Air silver with a trillion

  wireless calls,

  stop-quick stop-quick

  of sweep hands,

  crickets and downed lines,

  their sing of tension,

  that out-of-earshot

  too-bright CD sun,

  the heads of presidents

  sleet sleet in your jacket.

  *

  They were right,

  those alchemists.

  Anything—

  tin-cold

  eye of salamander,

  a fly’s

  green shield and styli

  on your wrist,

  distinctly six—

  anything might—

  mutterings in the wet,

  two-packs-a-day

  brass of sax, bright

  tears pestled,

  or your hair’s backlit

  (same as the rain’s)

  slender metals—

  anything might flash out…

  *

  Surely one sip,

  mused Midas,

  gin and silver,

  surely her fine engine tuned

  to a dial tone,

  surely her famous sway,

  gone Gold, gone Double Platinum,

  Rare Earth, gone Transuranic…

  *

  Anything slow,

  slash-black and copper

  monarch settling,

  the shy key’s glint and turn,

  sunny-cloudy

  brass-and-tarnish fruit

  paused at your lips, reflecting.

  Any velocity,

  water under the bridge

  my leap

  like dropped change rings on,

  or seen from a train

  chicory’s blue

  extrusion to a wire of blur,

  the train itself

  (of thought)

  on its track and track and track,

  your soft, incredible metals.

  *

  …surely these vast reserves

  (Midas, that treasurer, surmised)

  I must address

  with a safecracker’s

  listening touch.

  I’ll be the anti-thief

  slipping certificates of silver,

  the slim faux-platinum

  yen of credit,

  palms flat,

  over and over into her skintight pockets.

  *

  Eyes, blank or deep,

  a lake

  gone bright dark bright

  (on thin ice giving way—

  one: roll up the window

  two: when the car fills…)

  the fatal-in-seconds

  keen cold of a mirror,

  the blank bright blank

  that any word might,

  any word might not.

  *

  No one my touch

  (that treasurer says)

  can bear and tell

  (apparently did not touch himself).

  *

  Wine so cold it’s nails,

  rings in the glass, poured,

  your ring and its click

  two-three, and click,

  the bar awash

  in digital and silver

  whispers of the disc,

  yes-no, yes

  yes,

  and This

  Just In:

  incredible metals

  the shifting of your silks

  imagines, unimagines,

  the thought-blue

  alloy of your lids,

  the pistol

  chill of your lips

  my lips might freeze to.

  Head-On

  Flashing vehicles, unurgent lounging

  tell you what it’s too late for.

  Don’t rubberneck.

  Don’t look down the front of death’s dress.

  Don’t say that white oblong on a gurney

  looks like a bobsled, looks like room service.

  Don’t say it looks like a man,

  all bright days jarred from his brain

  like droplets from a branch.

  Iron Age

  Lest he could not make out my name tag,

  I signed that I was a god, and would eat.

  He brought me, as was meet, utensils,

  but served, Lycaon, pans of scorn: sauté

  of which of the human muscles I won’t say.

  No problem. Nothing I had not imagined

  as vividly as its happening. Whereas a man

  concocts strange sauces for his cruelty

  that he may forget what meat he feasts on:

  thinner and thinner his wife, his pale subjects,

  his guests, ghost-thin, and at last,

  in anesthetic dark, painlessly he tooths

  the sweet flesh from the bones of his own hand.

  All this I knew, without what you call horror,

  but since he meant to horrify, I chose anger,

  and thereafter, it is true, he was a wolf.

  All one to me were his turns and swervings,

  confession, lies, indifference, remorse.

  Say that I showed him heavily how I saw him

  from above: no wanderer but a map, unmoving.

  Though a man thinks he can hide in changes.

  Classic Bar Scenes

  I. Apollo at Happy Hour

  Shoulders and faint sheen

  of lotion, torsion,

  loose dress sliding

  over flanks of glass,

  silks so utterly watery

  splashing, as you click along the shine,

  on left shin right shin, but alas

  the chase is a tired

  and tiring metaphor:

  let’s sit. It is

  your Beauty that is omnipotent,

  and I the god its constant

  victim, automatic

  as the keyboard you reach over

  accidentally typing with a breast

  aaaaiiiiyyyyesssss,

  as the copier you press

  with a page and another page

  that lights again and again your face.

  Hear my song:

  I will walk out of the 14th floor

  and into your ear like a wireless call.

  II. Ovidian Deposition

  The bull or swan,

  face rippling as it changes,

  speaks, and for a long, long moment,

  you can’t tell luck fro
m disaster.

  He recited his exploits and cutting-edge features,

  all the arts and countries he was lord of.

  He was wasted, I think. He walked on the table.

  He said his voltage was so out of control.

  He said, Relax, what you’re feeling is

  the great experiences are generic:

  when they happen to you they do not happen to you.

  To take the god was to lose the man.

  To take the man was to die of the god.

  Either might turn me into stone.

  I got up For a refill

  from the Heliconian well,

  and texted from the parking structure

  Hadda go…

  III. Pygmalion among the Young