I Tethered

I open all the doors, flaying the car in its white line stall - it smells like it did many months ago, when I began working here.
So much of where and what I write has happened here.
How the geometry of the desolate office park has sunk into me → 
At first completely oppressive, mind the monkey flailing crashing in its cage. Then silent passage, most of a year in the parking lot, the eggshell bathroom, the water cooler. My mind palace begins to look like this office park, it’s a field a field. Feels like I’m in a field immersed in such banality, things become gorgeous in the parking lot. I lay in the backseat moving the sand dollar further and closer to my face, obscuring and revealing the line of sight. My hand looks incredibly old. I behave, am Gold. Earlier in the chair at the desk I believed I was having a stroke, I had 5 separate strange little feelings that didn’t correspond into any identifiable illness, so must be a stroke. I sleep easy in the back seat, with the roaring trucks. On the asphalt I am a soft shell-less creature rolling towards the glass door. Rolling. I imagine it as an arrow in my stomach - pushing from my spine out to my belly button. With the two doors open I dream of a gun, dream of I am perfect perfect perfect making an ugly face on the freeway home. Face like giant upturned bowl, reverse gravity pulling everything into an arc, mouth open like this shape  → 

In mathematics, logic, and probability, the upside-down U symbol represents the intersection of sets. It indicates the elements that two or more sets have in common. For example, if Set A and Set B are combined, A (upside down U) B represents only the overlapping elements. I listen to The Zoo and to something more profane, I look in the mirror across from my pillow and hope today I will be tethered. I drive to the spit, I drive with strangers, alone, with neighbors. I enter the lighthouse, I have always dreamed of entering the lighthouse. They have roped off the spiral stairs upward, can't stick my head in the heavy carved glass eye. I am upside down U in the wind and on the bright asphalt, I am I am. There is something cruel in this movement, something that is playing and knotting. Turning the fruit in my hand, turning turning the upside down U. I I I, I tethered. 

$$

Obituary for Iceberg B-15

Obituary for Iceberg b-15

The year I was born b15-A broke off and drifted away from Ross Island into Ross Sea
Heading north

Breaking into smaller pieces
Small knife shaped son, b-15k on the steady path further

Before reaching the ice tongue, b-15A got all stranded on a shallow seamount
Resting
Resuming
Northward

Breaking into the tip of the tongue
b-15A generated seismic signals, felt them out at the South Pole

The fishers saw smaller brothers, b-15p b-15m b-15n
Most icebergs do not last this far north

Speed of melt increased
Seen: South Georgia Island Antarctica South of Africa

Antarctic maps needed to be redrawn
Required a reassessment
A refusal

Penguin populations plummeted

The brothers encountered the end at the end of the world

Mariana Trench

Mariana Tench

arched and silent - down 

the brilliant column. 

HMS Courage found the floor, found 

the rip.

Out of the view port - are we landing on 

the soft sediment sea floor?

Or are we coming 

down on rocks.

A: I heard that Nero got to 9000

M: yeah but, the subs have got that long beat - they've seen it, 

the deep

A: it's strange to get down there and to see yourself across time 

M: along the perpendicular track, you mean? 

A: sure, along the perpendicular track 

M: what did it taste like on the abyssal plain?

A: like ham, deli ham 

Manifold

Each day ends up monumental. I lay in them as though in a mammoth footprint. On my back and shoulders something like Heavy. Like snow, though I wouldn't know about anything like that.

He stood over me, the yellow trees along the two-lane, barely cast a shadow.
There is a posture: the quilt on the bed, the white sheet, the delay. Where do the deer go in the rain? Where do the deer go in the rain?

The white flowers from the trees run ragged like styrofoam across the parking lot. I return to the day.

How does the dried dead snail cling to the curb like that. The corpse melted, melded, touched the concrete and understood that truth could be found in staying there, perpendicular to the sky and to the lot. The whole lot. In my shadow I see strands jump laterally like kite strings. 

Parabolas of movement - I saw a big pig, a black boar, on the side of the freeway. On the side of the fence where one must assume its death will be automized.

I've thought about what I would say if someone asked me what I was doing -

There is still a rhythm missing in most of it, though sometimes, I hit upon it and can hear it singing. 

I hold my head behind the ears to see what it might feel like for other hands - someone see what it feels like. I remove my coat and inspect the dander, run like styrofoam, like white flowers. I return to the room twice. The bed, the mirror, the deadened stain in the front room.

One fact about me is I like to sing in the car. 

People require silence now, no rotary chatter, no accent, no incident. 

The birds rest on the stones. The deer won't cross the fence line. He stood over me, hair the metal dish, wanting to see the deer and the clear free day.

Breg headstream

Breg headstream

You see:
the pennant flaps
yielding in the grey morning
Rabid against
the bugged frame

Not yet, 
the young chicken is thawed, raw
needing the week 

How it expands:
the change,
That Cunning change 

the snow caps turn quick
Will turn to tassels soon: 

In spring the Donau floods to get back to Volga in her drained basin. 

Suddenly the trees are blooming and it stinks like the The Valley. I can hear the angry cows where I’m crouched on the concrete ramp. Yesterday she pointed at one of the blooming trees and exclaimed how beautiful, I see her pointing in these as well. Every tree, small face, teeth, pointing. The cows groaning from over on the other hill sound much too close, that sound and that stink. At lunch I’ve considered stopping to see the calves, but always something else going on. A little ledge over which I never cross. A type of small daily precipice. 

Two flocks of starlings pass over head, sounding like metal birds. Small metal clanking, bolts turning in their sockets, little steel tabs. This is a false land, this swath here. The squat looming versus the flat green lumpy. I love you I love you touch typed back at the desk. I speak with my grandfather on the phone multiple times in the parking lot, my mother says “talk to him before he no longer recognizes you”. His hair is longer, I say I’ll see him in the summer, “deine ist viel länger, Sommer, ist das bald?” We are both much too entrenched in our age. 

I hear sirens over on the other hill, the green hill. So many sirens, the angry cows, the clean expanse. I expect the cows are on the road again, needing herding again. The medicine is dry. I tried to take it no water in the car. The lot out here is windy. I tried to understand it at a distance, with the sounds it made and the items passing hands. I didn’t learn anything. 

I dream about the man that owns this land, bought it for the mineral rights. He hung that banner from the lamp post that flaps like bleached ripped jesus in the fog and setting wind. The field is empty and green because one day he will need to dig. He will put an ad online and bring men to dig and fill into buckets. Who combed my opa’s hair? Who will comb mine? 

On the leftish hill stand three objects: two palms and a billboard. Big advertisement for hill for sale, the second green hill. No minerals there, just the two palms and the billboard. The palms throw two thin legs of shade down the near side of the hill. The grass doesn’t make sound, only the cars and beeping, metal clanging from the warehouse and the birds. The cows, also, when they’re close and angry, make sound. The first hill has a clump of oaks in one of it's folds, looks like it’s embarrassed. As though it’s shrugging away, the clump so embarrassing.

Nonce prayer

Nonce prayer 

A tree fell in the graveyard to lay 

among the resting. 

A man on his wharf, axing the ice

into the bay.  

A boat beat at the mooring to say, 

go on, let him run.

One day I will have a son

and I believe that is more important 

than boughs laid over the stones.