rel="nofollow" href="#u29b48ae7-a7f9-55f4-9007-cf9d636ef92e">REMOTE SENSING
27 SPECULATION ON THE WEIGHT OF YESTERDAY
29 ARS POETICA
30 SPECULATION ON THE ABSENT GOD
33 INTELLIGENCE
34 AT THE END OF THE LAST GLACIAL PERIOD
35 HIGH PASTURE
37 VESPERS
40 ANOTHER TIME
41 SPECULATION ON INVISIBILITY
42 SPECULATION ON CAUSE AND EFFECT
45 STASIS IN MOTION or THE SHOWER SCENE IN DOUGLAS GORDON’S 24 HOUR PSYCHO LASTS A HALF HOUR
46 ANEMOGRAPH
48 THE FRICTION BETWEEN A STRING AND BOW CALLS FORTH A PLAINTIVE HYMN
49 STUDY FOR THE FALL OF THE REBEL ANGELS
50 SPECULATION ON THE AFTERLIFE
51 ANOTHER SPECULATION ON THE AFTERLIFE
AUGURY
Inside the camera obscura,
a cloud,
Or the image of a cloud, grows darker.
The past warps, curls back round to touch the present.
Is it the spit and clay on the blind man’s eyes
Or the little spell of words that returns sight?
Look, they said.
So I looked. But I saw nothing.
A book of moths. A book of sand.
A book of stones unstitched from the wolf’s belly.
Shot through with light,
a book of blank pages.
The solution embodies yet keeps hidden
All dissolved within it,
keeps the hermetic
Hemmed in, the secret secret a bit longer.
The Geiger counter’s tick-tick like an old clock’s.
Foreign voices on the shortwave, static
Like a mother’s shush,
like crushed salt through a sieve.
The past waits unmoved:
a rusted wrecking ball
In a vacant lot: a scoured erratic
Set down by a glacier—out of place, useless.
A book of nuance that resists closure.
Book of Desire.
Book of the Vertigo of Desire.
Book in which the whole is latent in the partial.
Rooks roost in the quarry cliffs; goldfinches
Flit and dart. Water long concealed in shadowed cisterns
Takes on a ferrous edge.
Look, they said.
SPECULATION ON SUFFERING
On a Babylonian bas-relief,
An antelope fawn’s
Forelegs collapse;
Neck taut, it swings
Its head back
As a lion latches
Onto its hindquarters.
How stable a moment
Of suffering: