THE AETHERS


To now begin to be
as air in life apart from

and to have blown it.
This diluvean form’s

spilled silt, this any valley
interface interwove

in the comment thread.
The new mysticism

is sometimes saying
nothing, seeing no one

for days. To loiter
lonely like the cloud

and think how many
daffodils are kept there.

In the air, in big data
the messenger is king.

The pink-throated finch
flits from fixture

to tree to sing to whom
I can’t quite see its avatar.

But he hears everything.
The public world

of the voice infiltrates
even the smallest

spaces, resounds
in the utter failure

of analytical thinking.
Will be will be broken

when we forget
contrapuntal warbles

from the green-leaved
screen-thatched

eye-blue sky. The way
song carries particles

of light if there is light
and there is a surplus.

It’s no use now
to separate

the private domain
from the public sector

echo chamber for the human
microphone—drop.

My phone swoops me
out of the flowers

and into the weeds;
I wish for the soil

of information, for
the air-carried verb

to wish, to get
my hands dirty.

The inbox is chaos
and craves my attention

like a vortex eats Greek sailors.
From it, worlds are born

then thrown into the bin.
Ideas and order: O and o.

We’re doomed. I read.
Pessimism is the night-side

of thought, a melodrama
of the futility of the brain.

What if, what and, where by
do we live? In the middle of.

To work, to free
to drive so close

to so many souls
all horizon, syntax

two kinds of blue.
The piercing hypnotic

wide-open California blue
and the deep collective

nomadic blue that called
Odysseus from everything

he knew into everything
he would come to know.