Drowning in Sound
Plunged, the surround
robed like a neoprene sidestroke,
ear in.
Close your eyes, their imprimatur
too much. The walls fill with color.
Boat motors rise in their roars
like the hinds of whales
out of the depths of time,
wrong closet. You will be saved
by silence. Tuesdays were the best,
says someone in Amharic,
nostalgic in the midst of a storm
in which he can't do anything
except talk talk talk.
Waves cymbal at the glub
in your ears, the wind changes
its outfit, scanty and teasing,
so metal – you dog you –
the sides of the boat
slick, no one on deck,
rescue too near the ear:
now trombones. Both ears. Some real
angel person unavailable, some bad
lesson in sound, or drowned.
What Counts and What Doesn't
“The anthropological machine...that depends upon...the distinction between bios (or political
“form of life”) and zoe (or “bare life”) – Giorgio Agamben, biopolitician.
nature has no need whatsoever to value us
forget the v.v.
Haraway deploys the term “fingery eyes” to describe a human looking at
a moss-covered stump that resembles a dog
the animal stares back such reflection
killing fish/harvesting fish
you not being a fish yourself, how can you know its pleasures (pains)
patches of scales floating on the surface of the water (a tell-tale sign
of the presence of herring) sometimes look like ash
to us
the inversion: that cattle are treated like people
insults the memory of the dead or not
this radical alienation of the self
mitigates
the author’s tendency toward ventriloquism or the well-intentioned objectification
necessary
when one tries to “speak for nature” or let nature speak
through oneself as an author
the uncanny presence
of polar bears, stuffed, standing in the study
You Can't Not Talk About Waves
Little machines of stay and go.
Up and over, the atoms pound you and your board
into place, while the crest orbits
to match the column of water below.
Oh, yeah – there's hurricanes when
waves Peter Pan the surface to elsewhere. But mostly not.
Every language sees their undulance
and repetition, and postulates, trough
by trough, a position forward.
Enter sailors, fishermen, Noah,
women who keep
the lights: ask them about the waves,
about the ragged dark that overwhelms their boats
or the giant jellyfish dangling its transparency to and fro
bobbing genitals
with burning
whips.
A wave in a vacuum – electromagnetic – must run into something to be known.
What do you call that noise? A sound wave.
Swells: waves unaffected by local winds
but from somewhere else
or from
a long time ago.
He sure was swell.
Go ahead, throw up.
The waves aren't done with you,
they're in your pulse, the shore is beaten.
The moon/sun causes our oceans to bulge: that's a tide a/k/a wave.
WWII WAVES. A moon
near Saturn
called Titan, its wind-driven waves on hydrocarbon seas.