Cold
“Authority and authenticity are entirely on the side of Things, of production and consciousness of the thing produced. All the rest is vanity and confusion.”
Georges Bataille
Sun-faded graphic on the leftmost window of the hair salon: EVERYDAY BEAUTY IS NOW. At dawn I thought I would drive To the store and have plums; now, slowly, the images well up, Cars passing like the waves in a seashell, no paychecks still. Couple of envelopes. Sometimes the data congeals into a “real feeling,” The kind that can be spoken, and sometimes the tune is in my head But remains stubbornly devoid of content. This makes the tune Too heavy; it stays in one place for weeks. Sprouts tubers. If the Real, If Form are absences with heaviness, then Content is a filling That makes its container lighter, removes all fasteners, lets it zip freely About the informational plane. Where in our lunch-breaks and train-rides Is the Content? Is it extracted, like precious metals? Does it mean to make A gentle buzzing noise? Plows along Broadway, more laundry. Old man in line who says, “Everyone is so gracious to each other.” There these are, on the level of form… The content is an elusive Connective tissue. If it is there, it lacks a tune. Sometimes there is the tune Of somebody else’s poem, a threshold for the data points which accumulate Atop the axis of the morning— the tune is what makes them true. Bobby talks about tiny discrepancies in the movement of lasers Which indicate that an unimaginably huge event has happened Billions of light-years away, or some number like that. We eat halved tomatoes From a big ceramic bowl. The lasers built for these detections are housed in Miles-long tunnels, stretching through pine forests in Louisiana, placed weirdly Atop Italian farmland. There is no location that would better suit their construction, Since there is no place on earth that is closer to, or further from, the field Of equations and theorems. That dresser used to be hers, and now it is Adorned with paper flowers, orange blossoms and veronicas Connected by tissue-covered wires. Unimaginably huge events Continue happening everywhere, at all times. Don’t you think the Real Is a ceramic rooster at the window in your grandparents’ living room, Foregrounding the slow crystalline flakes? Don’t you think The poem is a miles-long tunnel through a mountain in Japan? Billions of light-years away, the poem emits its signal, ever so faintly, Through the parallax of content, mothering nothing, demanding no toll. Somewhere a neck cranes for a source of the sound, like Ingrid Bergman among the cactus paddles. Everything else is normal. Everyday beauty is now. Onscreen, the NBA player is asked what it will take For his team to keep their lead “during the second stanza.” Passing through allegorical situations, now, has scarcely been easier— Without shorthand, with an expensive handbag, plastered to both rhythm And image, their two poles. It is a perfectly good envelope. It is a plow. The angst of a post-Copernican world could have led us to worse places, After all— we could very well remain silent because nothing is true. This would be a different silence from that of the medieval painter In the old Soviet movie, though the tunes would sound very much the same. These are not "neutral observations." These are not "neutral Observations." Don’t you think the poem is an expensive handbag.