Two Poems

A Tube of Mirrors

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I.
And now I’m going to run
like the ink of a mythology
that’s passed through all the hands

of Kumbh Mela. Who knew
a single grain of vellum
could record so many fingertips

and palms – all lines and oil.
I’m trying to capture the meaning
of a century. The automobile

and plane promised far needn’t be so far.
Louis Lumiere, why your preemptive
move to disprove this proposition?

Reaching into time and past it, you
projected the thought of eyes and bone –
far is always far and further still. Even

as each frame is captured, each disappears
into a reel that can only be understood
when it is cut, frame by constituent frame,

from itself. As if truth could be autopsied,
reappropriated into a different time – indeed,
into a different truth schema.

II.
Wild dog wild, we see and say only
                                        and in that moment
                                        and in that moment
                                        and in that moment

and we find ourselves turning. The kaleidoscope
rejects the idea of permutation
and all is rendered a falling gray and grayer still

as the mixing spoon
in god’s eye catches us
in the mirror,
eyes like over-stitched baseballs.

Our cells rid us of themselves. Flake
by aging flake, we are dissipated: So many
let-go hands, so much ink run gray.

[More living now than dead]

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More living now than dead—an easier dig
out of the hole. Some claim it’s the living
that’s hard. Boy D proposed a new order:
per 2 new lives, 1 death and his, the first.

Afterwards, funeral songs: a chapel
in which his newly unpregnant sister played
Clair de Lune before les fleurs des morts
while the other sister, also newly emptied, sat with
each—her own and her sister’s, all babies wailing. In Salt
Lake City, the West is more wicked than wild. It’s
where you bury your dead. The heads roll
down out of the Oquirrhs to shrivel at the polluting Kennecott—
the mines turn a hole into quarry.

His sisters and the babies, we query stone now—
did it feel good? Buying a gun, refusing to play uncle.

Still the living.
Still the living outnumber the dead.