Marking · time · in · multiples · of · eight

Q: What would you call a waterfall if it went up? (grashupfer )

A: It is a fact little known in our plodding Newtonian zoetrope that gravity can pull things apart as well as push them together. And that is why our galaxy is speeding away from all its siblings at a rate that would stun the bravest bawds of the sensuous infinite. (Note to the writer of my epitaph: please include the phrase "bawd of the sensuous infinite.") There may be other reasons that galaxies desire the absence of their kin but who am I to guess at the blood rivalries of interstellar space?

There is another secret gravity that lives apart from the tendency of dropped objects to fall.

I considered the terminologies of physics, Latinate roots and Greek particles. I wondered about "aquarise," "aquascent," "neranabasis," "mirabiledictu." I dismissed them as clumsy and, worse, pretentious. I discarded the folksy and the zany--"upspout," "sweet emesis," "skipfreak," "invisible whale." I made lists and studied etymological charts. I consulted grimoires and websites detailing the top 100 baby names of 2008. I decided against "Ella" and "Brayden," MacKenzie" and "Jayden." All these I struck from the record. I knew, at once, at last, to call it by its right name, though the right name was not a word. We call a waterfall that goes up by the sound and the texture of an indrawn breath held to breaking. Inhale til your lungs reach the apogee of expansion and stay there. You will find you can hear yourself screaming it aloud, though not a sound thrums across your larynx. Say it with me once: ____________!

I am come from the future to tell you all about how the past turns out to be different from what we expect. The future, too, will probably be different from what you expect but that is as it should be. There is no excuse for a past that bursts its buttons, changes shapes, gets up off the slab at the autopsy and tangos! There is no excuse, except that I love you, little quasar, whoever you are or were or will be when you read this broken whirligig that spins in the invisible wind of the memory of things to come. Yes, I have learned to love you, little quasar. Forgive me that.

Mayday! The quickness and the quickening. I wish Craig Arnold would come back. I wish, subjunctively, your band were named Cognitive Dissonance and you would hurry up and record your first album. Vite, now, friends. Vite vite.

Taylor versus Bousquet, the future of academia, round 432.8.

I like this Mark Wallace poem. I think it has inspired me to a collaborative experiment with you, gentle reader. Let's make something beautiful together. Write me with a question or a conundrum and I will write you an answer. Factitious and fictional inquiries encouraged. Because, ducklings, because why? Because:

THIS 
IS 
AS 
SIMPLE 
AS 
IT 
SEEMS 
BUT 
NOT 
AS 
IT 
GETS 

When you fall asleep at noon and the silk monkey and Snufkin and the hobgoblin and his panther come to you in your dream, all you want is to rush to J. in Prague with a dish full of plums and tell her about it.

If you want a giant nosegay of opinions about the current state of poetry reviewing,  one such bouquet is up--in pieces, at least--in the first issue of MAYDAY. (Disclaimer: I am one of the contributors.) As usual, in reading the other responses to the prompt--many from people who are NAMES (at least to me)--I am abashed and admiring at once. I believe now that my worst problem is not--as I once feared--a lack of intellectual rigor but a mail suit of archness that seems to grow right out of my skin. It's like I've just noticed I have scales and can you get dermabrasion for that and all? It's as if I can only be serious, and I am dead serious almost always, with my eyebrows raised. ("Serious" doesn't mean "humorless." Really! Look at that giddy souffle with a pellet of lead for a heart!)

I used to worry a lot about being all style and no substance. My thinking on that's changed a bit--style is substance or can be if you're of a certain cast of mind (I am). But if style and rhetoric are, on some level the same thing, your style had damn well better be deft enough and strong enough to merit the identity. And suddenly, suddenly, I am feeling as clumsy and weak and, well, belated as a baby dinosaur. Will there be better lexicons when we grow up?

What course of treatment do they recommend for an allergy to sincerity? Or maybe it's not so much sincerity as sentiment that gives me the hives. It hurts, almost, to give an opinion unqualified by some some attestation as to the partial, subjective and highly idiosyncratic nature of opinion itself. But, of course, I have this baffling gravity about my own opinions, even when I tell you (and I will!) for god's sake, don't take this stuff seriously! I want you to value what I say and, at the same time, to see the idiocy inherent in that judgment. It isn't just, it just is.

That old ankylosaurus always was kind of a loner anyway...
But ankylosaurus, know'st ye not that thou and I am one?

No, listen--listen, please. Find me the local trephinist! File a neat hole in the top of my skull so the brain beneath can see stars. O, but what if it is not enough? If we've written everything already, then the Lethe is wearing off, fill another atomizer, quick! We need some new material.

No, listen--listen, please. Saw the top off my head--with poetry if you can't find a precision instrument--let me clip the brain from the case and wash it in a special basin so the gray matter shines like the wing of a bat at dawn. The transcendental horizon wakes up and blinks its long lid. We planned for a silver sun. Sew me up with your stitch n' bitch so the rims of my ears are more or less aligned and I can hear two voices talking at once. It rushes in. The down on the fern, the heavy lunches, the tongue we used to speak--orphaned at the door we loved and locked. Don't call for the key. Listen--listen, please. Or no--get me the lockpicks and hurry.

You called me arch. You called me fussy. You called me a cad and an ontological bully. You called me at three a.m. to plant illicit zinnias on a median outside a police station. You called for your working gloves and a fife and drum. I felt you were my calling. You called me fair and then you called me fairest...

Jacques and I were drinking tea with butter and salt. He brought it to the park in a rawhide flask and we took turns warming our gullets and our palms. The tea passed from hand to hand like a small warm animal. Jacques was not going back to Tibet. He liked Baltimore. He liked the Charm City Roller Girls, particularly Felonious Punk of the Junkyard Dolls. Jacques had two subjects, roller derby and Lewisian metaphysics. He still does. Also, he knew your name... 

I was a young gentleman about town. My hair had gone white prematurely. I bound it in a snowy queue, artlessly tied with a gray velvet ribbon so that the large, riotous curls would not detract from my "speaking eyes." I had just ended my affair with a young barrister who desired me to have a court wig made for him from my locks as an early birthday present and a proof of my affections. I left his flat the next day and thereafter the country, unshorn, having carved the appropriate quotation from Samson Agonistes into the table with the ebony swordcane I had received upon reaching my majority.

We met in Baltimore, thea mea, I in my customary habit (slim charcoal suit and wingtips--a waistcoat the color of claret), you in an ill-fitting frock, mermaid-hued, shod with clumsy brown workboots. Your face was a darkling poem. You had no hair. I longed to solve the cinnabar puzzles of your ears! Large copper headphones hid them from view. You were listening to a podcast about sustainable rooftop gardening and clutching the rail of the escalator with desperation. I inquired after your health with some concern. Perhaps you were experiencing vertigo? You could not hear me, of course. I mimed "vertigo" with one arm. You thought I meant "genetically modified watercress." You turned from me with disdain. We rode to the third floor in silence. I watched your neck twist almost imperceptibly starboard. Even standing on level ground, you were taller than I. My copy of Wittgenstein's letters fell from my nerveless fingers. You whipped around at the thud and stared at the book on the tiles as if it had been the author of your discontents revealed to you at last...