Status Updates From Contradictions in the Design

From "Meditation of a Foot Soldier Nearing Medusa's Sculpture Garden"

If I am never
to move again, let me never
take for granted
how I've been granted
this permanence, this patience
to stand forever -- a stone
in this small corner of history --
among this statuary, able
to outlast birds, winged
horses, and their riders.

Who wouldn't scan the landscape for an exit route,
as he, without sleep, kept pointing and naming,
pointing and naming, each time hoping
that this was the last one?
But there is no end, he discovered.
Not even when he named the trails of ants
that latticed themselves over and under
the iron fence posts, or the worm
in the fruit, or the thing that crawled toward him,
on its belly, anonymous and kind.

From "Elegy in which I'm Unable to Travel Faster than the Speed of Sound"

If someone
would have said, Please, or Help,
those words would have made it to the other side
of the room, or through the door, before
the feeling -- inside your clenched fist --
of your fingernails
drawing blood from your palm
registered in your brain. But I don't remember
anyone saying anything like that.
I don't remember anyone speaking.

Sometimes I go outside, and the dark is so prodigious--
the way it remedies everything by covering everything.

I like thinking of how my friend stares
down this same darkness
as if it will offer the index to some temporal secret.

What we're looking for are miracles.

Out there--
there could be nothing.

Or there could be antlers and hooves.
Lumbering mysteries.
They plod across the quiet fields.

From "Nothing Gets Through to You, Jackass"

But they've got nothing on this jackass.
They had to try to be that stupid.
Me? I am working my hardest, every single day,
to act like a normal person.

But I slam a door when I mean
to say I love you.
I back my car into another
when I'm trying to move forward.

From "The Gallery of Small Innovations" (52)

If he listens hard enough,
he thinks he hears it: a sound so far off,
it's impossible to distinguish: the
murmur of friends gathered at the end
of a hallway, the splash of a single frog
into a pond surrounded by night,
or a quiver of bees so thick
around a tree that the tree can't be seen.

I remember my dad - decades ago - wrestling
a river bank with a fishing pole, how he struggled
with a shadow that thrashed beneath the surface
and he could never wrench it closer. The hooked
mouth chose to remain submerged and violent
below the reeds and river moss. Whatever
question I can't ask now is like that,
but I suspect it wants to know how the world
is different today, even though it's just one person smaller

From "The Raising of Lazarus"

In fact, if Caravaggio hadn't titled this The Raising
of Lazarus, I'd have no reason to think I was witness
to the impossible. Yet here I am, like those painted
into the crowd, watching the body for a flicker of life.
The flare of a lung. A tremble in the lips.
Here's the power of saying something, of suggestion

From "Deliver Us"

On the farm, night comes for the cattle,
like a postman over the ridge. He's dressed in blue
with a satchel slung from his shoulder.

Then night approaches the pigs.
He is a nurse in the infirmary
with a needle of mercy.

Then night comes for the lamb.
His eyes shine like the shears.
Look how dark it gets out here.
There is no lamb.

One letter tumbles
after another and if you get them right,
you can say: Astonishment. Put it together
a little differently and you have the Insanest Moth.
Even that moth contains its own cosmos of chance
and possibility. Consider the black witch moth.
There are parts of Mexico where it's believed to be
the harbinger of death. But it lands
on your door in Texas or the Bahamas,
you might win the lottery

From "Astronomer's Locate a New Planet"

Because it is so dense, scientists calculate the carbon must be crystalline, so a large part of this strange world will effectively be diamond. -Reuters 2011

Like the universe's largest engagement ring, it twirls
and sparkles its way through to infinity.
The citizens of the new world know about luxury.
They can live for a thousand years.
Their hearts are little clocks.

From "I'll forgive John Keats, But Not You" (38)

There was this artist boy trying to impress this artist girl
by telling her about someone from his past.
I called her "Monet," he said, even though her name wasn't Monet.
Because she was like an impressionist painting: beautiful
from a distance but blotchy
and fucked-up looking when you get this close.

From "The Discipline Monkey" (28):

This is how the Greeks must have felt / the day Mount Olympus became just another mountain. / So much stone under so much sky and no one left / to throw sparks from above.

From "Contradictions in the Design" (28)

Here is the planet where Beethoven was deaf,
where Walt Whitman was fired for his poems.
The designer of the Eiffel Tower was afraid of heights,
and the guillotine was given the name of a man
who opposed the death penalty. And none of this
makes sense; none of it is reasonable. But this is how
the blueprint gets approved. A collection of scraggly lines

From "The Skull of an Unidentified Dinosaur" (21)

I imagine the man who wired these
dinosaur bones must have imagined
his vision was real, must have pictured
it alive. Covered in flesh, the imagined life
can also be terrifying -- able to cleave you
open with the swipe of a claw
or devour you in seconds.
But as it is now, having never existed
after tricking you into believing,
it eats at you more slowly

From "Possum Drop" (19)

Everyone knows who will win this contest,
but in the rarest of games, the clamor of the crowd
becomes so intense, the lion startles,
backs away, too scared to attack.
Can you see it?
The captive with a stone in his hand: terrified.
The muscled predator, all claw and fang: terrified.
Do you recognize the story yet? Always, that fear
in the circle. Always, that crowd: poised and ready.

From "The Minotaurs" (12)

In my apartment, I stare at the ceiling. The people upstairs / laugh like the drinkers of vodka, crash like bowling pins, / trains that have forgotten the meaning of their tracks. / They don't sound angry, only loud. / Just two people singing and stomping and shoving / over the bookcases night after night.

From "The Millihelen"

In the story that launches a thousand ships, beauty
is a destination, something to crash toward.
In the story that launch is only one, there is no destination.
Beauty was there, among the wharves, with her
simple scarves at the beginning.

From "Replica of The Thinker (1)

He only wants to think dignified thoughts,
important thoughts, thoughts that will imprint
like an artist's signature on the memory of mankind.
But it's difficult, because when he thinks,
his head is filled with iron and bronze,
not neurons and God.
I, too, feel like that.