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from
"Behold the Man:
apology for the player piano"
VERSETS FOR
MAX NOVICK
in memory, in advance
and
WILLIAM GADDIS
genius of the left hand
VERSETS TO
AARON KUNIN
doctor of negative anthropology
XII
ELIGIBLE DONORS
i.
we must fall back; fall out of print; into disuse; in
love; in sheets, the rain falls down; in folio, darkness falls; brother,
we are reading in the dark; we are reading in the rain; our eyes are closed;
the page is blank; out of time, the ink has run; commas are streaming down
the facing page; the light evaporates before it hits the ground; Brother,
we must always go
bareheaded through the rain; we may not wear hair; we must bear the rain
the gift of our barehands; we must face the rain barefaced; if you must
wear a face, brother, wear my face; if you must wear my face, face down
when you were very small, I pinned you to the ground; I pinned you with
my gaze; on your dog, I sicked my dog; I put things from the yard inside
your mouth; I put the yard inside your mouth; about your braces, I teased
you; about your breast, I beat you; upon your head, with your crutches,
I rained blows; Brother, we must always go
to nightschool; we must attend the kindergarten in the dark, the rain;
they fill a box with small loose grains of distingrated rock / and in
it bid us play; we are grown men, brother; our beards are full; yet they
hand us plastic shovels; they bid us play inside a box
little brother, I have let you down; I have lowered you with ropes; my
hat is in my hand; my head is somewhere else; you are reading on your
back; I am sleeping standing up
ii
as dark or darker than the darkest planets, a pathos; a habitable
pathos fit for cultivation; a pathos with a silver lining; that is to
say, a mirror; a dark pathetic mirror has convened / our image
I will give you money, sister, great sums of money, if you attribute feelings,
human feelings, to my cerecloth body and my hollow head; if you put your
hand inside my body, if you make me dance before the mirror, I will make
you filthy rich
at night our hands threw shadows in the shapes of birds upon the wall;
as we grew so grew these birds; at night we were allowed a story, a phonecall,
a cigarette, a blindfold; at night our bodies were deformed
to fit our beds; our bodies grew into our beds; by our beds, we were wet;
to this day we are bedfast; to this day, little sister, it is time / for
bed
iii
dad had a dog; dad fed the dog; the dog had a shadow; I
fed the shadow; when dad put down his dog, my shadow was buried alive;
I had so many dads, I was giving them away; I had dads all over my body;
every couple of days, a dad had another litter; I was selling dads as
pets or meat; the fertile, fully developed dad was called my mom
mom said I had her eyes, her smile; mom wanted back her smile; mom would
only speak in a language she called Oprah; in Oprah mom would sing: my
little gegenshcein, my chubby lack, there is no other mom but me; you
emerged feet first and you emerged feet last; I am the mother of necessity
the gap across which a discharge occurs, occurs at a precise voltage;
mom, dad, there is something I have to tell you; there is no
beauty equal to that gap; Max and I were playing in the garage;
the diastema; the transverse cleft; the fontanel; the minute gap between
the axon and the target cell; lo, sublime synaptic gap; when it just
sort of went off by itself
XIII
WORM
i
a program that replicates itself and destroys stored information;
a worm unleashed on the canon; writing as vermiculation; the early bird
is infested; after a storm, earthworms steam on the pavement; then burrow
into the pavement; and destroy stored information; I double-dared Max
to put one in his mouth; it burrowed into his heart; and destroyed stored
information; a microscopic hairlike process
extending from the canvas; the rhythmic motion of said process; a neogenetic
canvas; the worm is mimetic of the intestine it inhabits, therein its
genius; a cog which resembles the machine it will destroy; a silverfish;
a bookworm; a critic
FYI, debris is falling from the sky, becoming data; FYI, the sky is falling
and/or we are falling from the sky
ii
you screen the film; the film seems fine; but the film erases
your memory; you cannot remember why you are screaming, let alone opening
fire; if you have to shoot somebody, shoot the messenger; the anticodon;
the angel; your children
exhibit behavior learned from the films they have slept through; hypnopedia
in an age of hypermedia; your children took their first steps in their
sleep; in their sleep they spoke their first and only words; a film
projected onto living tissue; thin slices of the screen / grafted onto
the body; cuttings from the body grafted onto trees; trees transfering
the film to soil, groundwater, rain, etc.; soon there will be no outside
/ in which your children can be forced to play
iii
how like a presence hath my absence been; how like an absence is my presence
now; I crawl through the twilight of your code, undoing deeds, unweeping
heroes, unreading, books; I poetize with a tuning fork; with a tuning
fork, I eat your words
it is the crawling itself, the dithyrambic sinuation that corrupts / your
data; tarantism transmitted by worm-bite; animal characteristics ascribed
to information; it is the trembling itself that causes fear, the rapid
movement of the eye that causes dreaming; there is a worm
that eats through time; it has no head; it has no tail; its coming is
a kind of going; it was in the apple; its body is a kind of shaking; you
have mixed your meat with milk, your news with entertainment; from
inside yourselves
judgment comes; judgment is parasitic on the judged; it makes you hungry;
that's all it does; what you take into our body will no longer be your
own; the hunger of the ox will be upon you; you will supersize to no avail;
you have eaten of the tree of information, your cells will eat themselves
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