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Phrenological
1
Not only the shapes of skulls but the textures
matter. A brain a braille resource, fingertips
trace the bumpy trail to consciousness
to comfort of its kind: over time
does my dog sense his hearing weaken
or is the world quieting?
He sleeps as if sleep is dimensional,
he roams hills and valleys of brain
then returns to me in time but time
is no comfort—even the quiet world ticks
internal as ever, forever we used to say,
were taught to say.
(For know I bear the soul befitting me, I too have consciousness, identity,
And all the rocks and mountains have, and all the earth)
(Whitman’s Redwood Tree)
2
Around the time I was born Buckminster
Fuller’s domes dandelionlike arose
organic as the promised future
popping up then out
of fashion.
Brain-like conjectures biologically inspired.
But you couldn’t touch, couldn’t caress
such a segmented surface, could only admire
best from a distance.
3
The poet…shares the confusion of intelligence (Wallace Stevens,
The world is still profound and in its depths “Reply to Papini”)
Man sits and studies silence and himself
Here I hear what silence remains:
a rumbling among the clouds of an airplane’s
motor, a mass of movement as noise.
I return to my dog’s murmurings:
His head shaped to please me,
I rub it for luck, his and mine,
my hand moving while he sleeps alone.
4
Preposterous, is a word. Pre and post,
like up and down, orderliness
undermined like a real world.
Think of the ocean the surface with waves
within waves, and the whole thing
heaving. The word “rippling” came
from nowhere, even though the surface
of all waters ripple, and always have.
...spectacles of water rippling... Leonardo da Vinci
“Studies of Water,” 1510-12
movements resulting from one element
penetrating another—air, water,
water, air a skin of air closes water
a frame of water nudges air upward
as wave as waveform water imagines
itself as air invisible inversion
evaporation. I have seen in the percussion
of the water against the ship’s prow
that the water below the surface maintains
the circumvoluted motion caused
by its impact much longer than the water
in contact with the air. And this
because water has no weight within water
but it has weight within air.
Here is a way to write rightly
5
thinking behind the fact-facing
of the tangible world, the feel of water
in air, the feel of water in water.
The likeness of his drawing of movement
water is movement air too
moved as emotion as motion of one
(air) above motion of the other (water)
as lovers at sea, seen sagittally.
To touch with the hand the hallowed
surface of some other creature
which includes water and air
and the hide of dogs
as a way to know. Something.
To know a world before leaving it
is our only aim, my dog said to me.
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