The Delicate Sprigs of Love
He is sitting next to her.
The firmness of her thigh is pressed against his.
There is no light between them.
He listens so heavily
into the heartbeat of her that he hears the murmuring
of aspens on the hillside.
He tells her this.
How could he sit next to her if he didn’t
tell her this?
She is beautiful
in the manner in which there is so much beauty
it almost cancels itself.
I can lie down
in the golden shape of your shadow, he says,
and no longer question myself.
She wonders
if they were just prisoners of the freedom
that brought them there.
Or if to love him
would mean waiting for promises, lying awake,
in the draft of crossing stars.
They kiss
and though he is still alone in the fear that no one will ever kiss him
he is sitting next to her.
The Nervous
There are more nerves between the hand and the brain than between any two
points — dashboard and signal tower, red candle and cello string, earthworm and
solemn hymn. Messages have been spread between the nodes since chemists began
to stain the chromosomes blue. At that point if you weren’t dreaming in code, then
heaven help your culture and its uniform blah, its fake tact, and its genius for playing
hunter-gatherer. In fact, if you are still one of those genuine communist bachelors
with a spin rating of –1/2, go ahead and soak those delphinium seeds in your gout
medication. See the impulse flowering within a bust of Beethoven. Feel the feedback
loop in dogthink. They will skip their feedings if only to sing to their master’s hand
like they are indifferent to their stupid feudal array . . . every damned dog cracking
wise about its status. How indispensable their entanglements. Bring on the knot
theorists to model how the double helix must unwind. Bring on the hardwired
neurons that fashioned bear femurs into flutes. Now even the robots are watching
videos and pondering themselves as mosquitos. Would they know they have a head?
And hands? The thumbs and fingers riff an intricate signal between the brainstem
and a field of hemp, between bonfire and bloodhound, between radio and noodle
soup. Isn’t it finally time for the nervous to abandon realism?
