designed
to fail to appeal
to all the scientists of sadness
standing with compasses ready
in the dawn spliced with bone-
yellow twilight on Earth
and nowhere else.
And yet what Earth was this not quite
ailleurs,
this not-quite-possible-to-lure-
into-the-possible, and yet
the only
fleur
de sel
to curl at night into
a Delhi, a Los Angeles, a Mengcheng
cluttered with sleepers, and yet, for want
of a latterday Chuang Tzu dreaming
a butterfly wingbeat, the wind was lost:
for want of a wind, the cycle was lost:
for want of a cycle, the pattern was lost:
for want of a pattern, the system was lost:
for want of a system, Nietzsche wept?
For a horse beaten in a Turin street.
And when will you be here?
Not until â THETRILLIONTHCONFIGVRATION
OFFORTYNINEROMANLETTERS â
is the trillionth configuration
of forty-nine Roman letters
picked from a bottomless hat
dâailleur
at random?
Throwing letters like rice,
salt, petals, confetti
of dire why-not-hope
the trillionth isotope appears
before his doom in human
time. Someoneâs singing,
languagelessly, in the next room.
A man built a watch.
His children were quiet.
A man built a chain reaction.
The quiet
blown open: gate to the room
of his
thousand suns,
our father
lost in a continued fraction
burst at once into the sky,
staring into the inverse white
square of light in the sound
as it opens: he paces
toward counterfeit dawn
on the coiled path that, if drawn
from theâroom, extends
to the end of the desertâwound,
will empty him of a visceral fact.
Thousand
white
suns
sands
in a grain of sight
approaching blind
at the rim of the blown-
away night. He returns
to the house of impossible work
to abandon. One
can abandon in
the desert least
resistance to Supplice,
she
white
doves-me-not
petals collecting
against the door
in a windy eddy.
Harbor hidden in the heat
beneath a desiccated wing.
White wing of the wÃthdrawn claim
that thereâs an unquestioning
guardian for any human
in whom something more than
humanity hides. A ship arrives
with crates marked MEDICINE , MEAT ,
FLOUR for the starving city.
City at war with authenticity.
Battered-smooth bits
of an old wrecked question drift
in with the tide. What flour is this
that so resembles ash?
On a still day, on a fallow hill
of understanding, he
had crouched, like at a campfire,
blowing on a sign
that had lost its simplicity,
like a fire in stasis,
fire-shape at t = x gone
motionless, but then
the static fire itself caught
fire; the second-order shape,
too, froze, and then,
along its cursive edges, caught.
Recursive stack
of sticks.
One x 1000 ends to one
day on Earth, still the null
cone narrows to one
postmeridian drop of dark rum
on Suppliceâs lipâor a 14-penny nail
in a piece of old wharf
in the hearth. As the piece
burns from the bottom,
the nail, point first,
appears, in an hour, falls
into an abstract
Alexandriaâor
a point at the end of a tract
on the anatomies of elsewheres.
A man came down from the mountain
after five years without Internet
into a crowd around a public monitor
on which a far-off civil war equally
addressed their delight in violence
and sense of compassionate decency. Supplice
was in the crowd, but not exactly of it.
Iâm the herald,
said the crazyman,
of the bridge
to a far-future peace,
to the crowd, but the war
was too loud, and Supplice smiled
at the man, so back he went
up the mountain in his temporal
cortex and onto a lightning-
shaped bridge and kept waiting.
How near now to asymptote zero
hope that once, in a remnant wilderness,
kneeling in loam to turn over
a stone, he might read
a missive in the markings,
more than insentient
pseudo-hexagonal patterns
of calcites, arágonite flowers of iron,
instructions for never dying,
stone book of the cryptic proof
of providence, instead of
this stubborn staring and turning
and turning the patterns
Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Martin A. Lee, Bruce Shlain