Dialectic
Thesis
In the morning my head fills with numbers and light. I find a bouquet of ghosts on the doorstep. A call, certainly, a command, to spend my day trolloping through meadows, prairies, pastures of plenty, whichever I can get to quickest. My mind, still tingling, athletic, from a night of hard dreaming, mistakes a swarm of bees for a pot of honey, and I eat them in by the spoonful. On a slab of gray rock my body swells and bursts, a slick of opalescent pus, and the sun drinks me in as if it had risen singly for this nourishment. But some persistent particle of my being, some globule of consciousness not yet boiled beyond the capability of action, cries out against complete evaporation, against succumbing so willessly to the king's bright, beautiful, and good, surely, but terrible, nonetheless, reign. So I jump up and recompose, lesser, lighter, and surprisingly more nimble. I leap from the rock back into the pasture. I leap across the backs of cows, cows so focused in their ruminations they hardly notice, chunks of cows that look like they were carved right out of the black earth they're sitting on, cows so heavy with milk they must see the world only in shades of thick, liquid white, cows so still I can't be sure they didn't sprout as they stand the night before, giant mushrooms, a vast mycelium connecting them by the hooves. I leap and leap. My head but a honeycomb now. All the green deconstructs to yellow and blue. Yellow to a thorn in the hive, a splinter in my throat. Blue to a bruise on the sun, a bowl of clouds. Just as I'm about to leap the thirty feet from the last cow to clear the fence and land, shining, on the median of the interstate, a snake strikes from the grass and bites my heel. A viper, perhaps, although they're not native to this region. The fever spreads like a song. Tinny and cloying. I yell for an ambulance, and soon, somehow, it appears: a siren, a white steed. I yell to the paramedics: viper! anti-venom! They shake their bulbous heads like dumb children, so sorely unprepared for this emergency. I yell for a horse, a syringe, and a centrifuge. But none of my demands are rewarded. I must seem alien to them, wavering in and out of the realm of vision, talking on fast-forward. In a last-ditch effort to go out with a bang, I pull the sky off God's face. A bang indeed, a big bang of zeroes, and I count them like this: 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, O what a day for mathematics, for infinity!
Antithesis
In the evening my head fills with dark and letters. The Book of It All must be written, but I have just twelve waning hours before history turns around and eats itself alive (or so I'm told). For the sake of efficiency, I only write down the first letter of each word. It's all there, I assure you. Every single phrase ever uttered: kobk (kill or be killed), tbontb (to be or not to be), uddup (until death do us part), ouat (once upon a time), tsonitm (the smell of napalm in the morning), e (etcetera). The scrolls surround my bed, spill into the hallway, down the stairs. An ocean of language, each letter just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. A is for apple, apartheid. Yhtrtrs (you have the right to remain silent). B is for biochemistry, borderlands. Oeaiiih (on earth as it is in heaven). C is for coelacanth, cabernet. Teho (to each his own). D is for daguerreotype, doppelganger. Gtg (go team go). E is for ectoplasm, emotion. Faea (forever and ever amen). Stop now, before your heart breaks from the weight of it. Stop, before you are bored by the endless repetitions, the arbitrary permutations. Before you anger at this inadequate lump of brain-fodder, this mealy-mouthed attempt at song. For that's how it all started, you know. A little bird did sing: tweedledee, tweedledee. And the ape did ape: twee is me, twee is me. And on from there, once never being enough for Homo sapiens sapiens, he said it more, he said it louder, he said it different, he said it ieww (in every which way) fbow (for better or worse) tteote (to the ends of the earth) asoasf (and so on and so forth). And what to do now but shuffle and shift, collage and switch. I wrap myself in a scroll of medieval weaponry. I hang a scroll of botanical classifications from the chandelier. I chuck a scroll of socio-economic statistics out the window. I hide a scroll of tantric positions under my pillow. Rip a scroll of algebraic functions right down the middle. I spread Appendix XXXI out on the floor and tap-dance across the Translations of All Words in The Book of It All into All World Languages. 1-2-3-4 (English: blue, Samoan: lanumoana) 5-6-7-8 (English: tongue, Tsalagi: ga-nu-ga tsu-lo-tso-tsi) 1-2-3-4 (English: war, Zulu: impi) 5-6-7-8 (English: honeybee, Latin: Apis mellifera) 1-2-3-4 (English: water, Indonesian: air) 5-6-7-8 (English: translation, German: Übersetzung) 1-2-3-4 (English: sleep, Basque: lo). Lo, lo, how I would love to lo. But look at this mess I've made of It All: not a single letter untorn, the dawn fast approaching, nothing to offer but paper and sweat. I take out Plan B: a wire and a candle. Brand each letter into my flesh. A between my eyebrows. Z on the bottom of my left foot. I point and grunt at the bed. If you want a story, you'll have to skin me. If you want a reason, you'll have to kiss my scars.
Synthesis
Nothing is coming together. Bit by bit. I take the ox eye off the windowsill. I roll the half-built perpetual motion machine out of the barn and onto the curb. I do not once think of a perfect crystal at absolute zero. In Boulder, Colorado, at the Time and Frequency Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a cesium fountain atomic clock broadcasts a radio signal for every single second of every day. I hang an empty picture frame on the wall. A glass of water would be nice. Contentment: to fill whatever shape the edges take, to form to whatever holds you.
Annalynn Hammond's poems have appeared in Diagram, Tarpaulin Sky, Spork, Word for/Word, Can we have our
ball back?, Shampoo, Aught, Failbetter, The Glut,
Dicey Brown, 42opus, Runes, Slipstream, Gargoyle, and elsewhere. She received the 2005 Literal Latte Poetry Award and the 2004 Marc Penka Poetry Award. She lives in Wisconsin.
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