The First Light of a Quantum Plenum

I

The sun paints the obsidian blade, a green

quarreling with liver . . . the Olmec

cross on the hillside

like a pink-black bird over a plague city.

One in twelve Jesuits missing fingers

on the gloved hand,

digits fitfully sawed off

with tiny white shells

by North American savages . . . more sums

over histories, a predictability of sun

not trusting the pus-and-gauze of empire.

Mexico City and Montreal shake . . .

II

The madness starts here saying

time was once just another dimension

of space, stilled and nearly solid, then

provoked again into movement: splitting

burly cathodes, silled and projective. The lamp

of privilege that gets to ask the question.

Albert, do you still

love the one glove of entanglement? What are

the ten biggest banks in Argentina.

He doesn’t refuse the confusion of little

red sleigh bells in the passing big hair

of the very small woman walking out of water

in a graying Berlin.

The madness starts here with the patent

on an active unspeakable

refrain . . . a turquoise piano

filled with ice cubes. Gin in their shoes. Again.

Not Germany, but a geology

past redemption, it was

literally bound to happen to us,

the infinite condition of rigor

in a breeze, in that stand of trees!

(The Planck satellite blinking off in some

quick inflation, a fairy tale now

in the burning frontier ramparts, a failed

ramshackle mathematics calling

Taxi, taxi-loon . . .

This arab winter selling matches in the streets.

III

Love, the question is about burnt meat and potatoes.

An ethical meal of bone. In the smaller quotations

of bone.

Naked, she pushes

aside the fried potatoes and jam.

Someone in television arguing that the beauty

of a woman’s breasts is classical.

Just perfect nonsense rising into trees

beyond my balcony. A reminder

of the kite up in the big linden.

My cat’s been dead now for two weeks.

IV

That ragged kite is my right bivouac,

a paper hinge of existence

lodged in the darker branches.

The cat watched it like colored

strangely-dimensional pages

turning toward the sullen ferry

bobbing out on a nearly frozen lake

with folds of fading water, lots

of blood in the sputum.

Our sun

an undiscovered sunken riverboat

of margarine.

It’s a simple matter

of how much importance

you’ll assign to a discreet molecule

that has never met you. And

that wouldn’t ever want to . . .

This silence is for Shelley. His wife’s

chin was thought to be blunt

but classical. I miss

them both like a toothbrush.

Or pair of sandals.

V

It’s like those ignorant Italian fishermen

plunging their long sharpened poles

deep into the beach sand

hoping to find the hastily buried corpse

of the drowned Shelley. The widow

protesting . . .

Suddenly a much different sound,

not more da-woush,

but something modern, a wet sand,

skin, thigh-bone! Birds screaming up and off

the pinking cliffs. Our government

weaponizing viruses. . . . miles

of open trenches

from the hedgerows to the sumptuous sea.