Dispositif

An absurdly earnest scholar

Is trying to define the life

Of a human with a career

Trajectory a thousand years

Or so ago, roping phrases

Around key terms—apparatus,

Body, not a biography,

Biology, economy,

Ethics, politics, aesthetics—

Seeming, unironically,

To have defined a kind of life,

A peculiar occupation,

In terms of the course catalog

Of a full university.

Can you imagine words in air

Embodied as only themselves,

Wandering through a human scene

On a medieval quay somewhere?

No human ever lived like that,

As someone else’s description

Come to life, enchanted Golem,

But also there’s hard truth in it—

The absurdly earnest scholar

Is working with mere documents,

And there’s a certain honesty

In trying to conjure from there,

Even if the apparatus

That results is only body

As graphy, not biography.

The Golem of words never stirs.

On Purpose

You can be mistaken. That’s allowable,
Necessary even, acknowledged among
The fiercest partisans of getting things done,

The ones who intend changes in direction,
Who intend to direct them. But be careful
About being overwhelmed with how you can

Be infinite, inwardly, and trivial
In the heaving sea. You have to get this right—
Which is it? The night only accumulates

Its endlessly vast repertoire of being
All its waves of force bursting and contracting
In patterns inevitable or random

But without actually wanting anything.
Or it is exactly that upheaval but
Purposeful, an entity that wants something.

Or it is exactly that upheaval but
Dotted and pocketed about with purpose,
Intention being some but not all of it.

Even with the lamp on you notice moonlight
Coming at you from the ground where it landed.
Somewhere out there, a once romantic partner

Lies curled around a fresh wound of rejection.
Purpose has to be something. People feel it.
How much of everything is it? Get it right.

Contract

Couldn’t we have an agreement?
You can compose pieces of text
You never to show to anyone,

While everyone acknowledges
That you’re the writer of these texts,
An impressive and worthwhile task,

Without ever having to read
Or to like them, or know about
Their contents. Good job all around—

There’s the writer, so impressive,
We don’t have to look into it.
The writer doesn’t need readers,

Not even those readers who write.
The writer just writes every night.

Bespoke or Not

The individual lives—
Comfortable, terrible—
Tilt like little tailor’s pins

On the broad swaths of cloth cut
To create the costumery
Of historical events.

No, but this is wrong. The pins
Would also have to cut cloth,
Be cloth, even be tailors,

So the analogy fails.
And yet, as with small neurons
Crowded in corners of brains,

The individual lives
Seem stuck in, not cutting, thoughts.

You Have to Promise You Won’t Tell

People talk less in real life,
Less in both senses, less words
And less significant words.

It’s mostly repetitive
Small talk, little sentences
That need winnowing for weight.

When entered in evidence
As messages, recordings,
It’s obvious how talk works,

And watch the prosecutors
Feel for the hinge, the small thing
That carries the legal weight.

The rest is next to nothing,
And where the law’s not involved,
Even less. Still we converse

In our mealy-mouthed, mostly
Polite, inconsequential
Way, low-key interactions

That somehow are related
To the dense, febrile friction
Of talk found in our fictions.

That Kind of Poem

In one wing of a nursing home

In a bright suburb, a woman

Calls hoarsely, over and over,

I need to be changed! Misery

Has many little intervals.

You can remember an evening

In the cancer ward when the pain

Rose in you like bilge in the hull

Of a suddenly gouged sailboat.

In no time at all, you gave up

On call buttons and simply thrashed

About in the bed, hollering

Over and over about pain,

Yelling into the air for help

Until help came. You didn’t drown,

But it was days before you were

Fully articulate again.

Language, in those circumstances,

What is it, exactly? It’s more

Than a pure scream—it messages—

I need to be changed, I’m in pain—

But it’s so carved down to its soul.

It’s rigid info, the SOS,

And it has an internal space

You can feel when you’re inside it,

As if you’ve burrowed inside it,

Are burrowing by your screaming,

And you’re not thinking about words.

You’re screaming in hopes screaming works.

There’s no name for that kind of poem.

No One Could Accomplish This

Waves go on wavering. Right now
The window washed some time ago
Reveals the streaks left by the brush

Where morning sunlight washes through,
Light that is nothing but the world
And signifying nothing new.

It’s an enormous collective
Monster of coordination
Perfected over centuries,

Which led to this transparent glass,
A mass-manufactured window
No one animal could produce.

A world goes into a window
In the side of a small building.

The Necessary Mystery

Somewhere in the gut
Of Leviathan

Or in the snarled roots
Of the forest tree,

There’s a living cell
You’d never notice

Busily taking
Necessary notes

On what going’s on
As it takes its notes.

And what makes these notes
So necessary?

Not a living soul
Knows in the monster,

In the vast system
Of woods, in the cell.