The Artificial Infinite
like a room with an open window, we
were haunted:
neither exit nor entrance,
fully: so the ghosts crossed our thresholds:
they have all gone out, they have all gone in:
the little houses leaning into the field of grass, the water
tower levitating into the sky, the roadside drill
that digs in the grit:
shock of the human
machine
continuously beating but irregularly: so absence
fills with expectation, overfills: and the thing is
king:
The Idol and the Icon
no telling what lies on the other side:
the X and its door:
the wayfarer arrives at the throne
at the end of the world
to find that the throne is a cardboard sign
scrawled in black marker:
(I thirst):
no one, nowhere: no “look no further”:
though the boy
waves his bottle over his head, walks the highway
shirtless on the shoulder, the last
of his water beading against clear
empty plastic, and visible
from the car as we drove by. In the worst
heat of the day.
In the desert not far from the border.
So, the X
and its exits, the many passages since. So to have gone further
out of the way—to have not been so sensible—
so that the walker,
watched sometimes, secretly, from the givenness, the order,
of conditions that now still make their
appearances known
—and utmost—wouldn’t be alone: here is water
left on the roadside
with the carrion,
and the cars that cross leftward, inex
-tricable from the broken line: