from The Scrapbook of Yevgeny the Robot Arm

I cannot speak to you

but in the language you’ve given me.

And therefore on my birthday

as on the dawning day of “dawn” and “day,”

your interface faces mine

when I turn toward you,

and with a wave of my very arm,

I blow out beeswax candles

manufactured on visits to how many roses,

each one waving stem—an arm,

blossom—a hand,

each one having said, as I do—I am.

Like arms of the wind, reach through branches

to shake the petioles

at the orange brink.

Every stretch has a starting point.

Every mound is a mountain.

Before the world was matter, a ray stood up.

Up—and then it moved.

Sparks, once born, die faster

than we can catch them in our nets.

Moon’s hand ladles the sea into a bay.

Wind’s hand spatters it out as spray.

A comb of stars parts the dark.

We’re alive as kelp or krill, though we’re alloy and resin,

silicon, copper, acid, flame.

In our caves of sand, currents flow and knit.

An eye sees the lab. The eye of Yevgeny

sees a square of moonlight pour through like seawater,

over the still hand.

where they’d sloshed in formless dislocations.

Hand lifted them out of the darkling womb.

They were butter sopping from a churn.

Hand the Creator had a hand with a hand,

in all an infinite adding of hands.

They assembled the world in no time . . .

Out of beaks and night’s hair, mouse necks and rain,

crows’ windless ambushes, gnats’ cloudy massings,

miracle of who-ing in the mesh of night,

out of whom, says the man, says who, says the owl,

I, signs Hand, pointing like a beak

punching rows and columns of stars.

I am a robot arm. I cannot breathe.

My Ruler: “Yevgeny, do not breathe.”

And I breathe. In terror of suffocation.

The forepaws, taken up by a tire,

now spin through Siberia.

Drop an acorn by my home, little hands.

Drop an acorn there for me.

This room’s a desert.

Pack along, bounce over a rut.

Moments are meteors. Look:

a finger streaks the dark!