the custodial cats of the fulcrum of memory + three

whether constipation is predicted

whenever memory does go deaf

it doesn't shout or squeak alarm―

if its silence doesn't roar aloud,

nothing need be missed, placid souls may persist.

 

no matter how out of sorts they may leave us,

our tangled times (out of joint or no)

our entangling times (our briars lattice-borne)

strangling times (clutters of the virtual, too)

say that they measure our bodies' clocks,

these clocked bodies, these timed bodies timed

to empirical curiosity, timed

to every surveilling device and screen

to learn whether memory more can speak aught

or whether knotted tongues prefigure alone

knotted bowels in tortured linear style

(I still await the colonoscopy app

and some cell phones lodged deep in some colons, too).

 

 

interventions of distance

 

this anonymous frustration of today

may soon have a name―may soon borrow its name

from a pondered page neither typeset nor read.

 

every expectation modest great and mean

will in moments grow distant: distance will hide

our expectations from us again, again.

 

once that dread has a name will dread then subside:

then will roads return to their actual lengths

which―to be human―must be measured in strides:

 

to accommodate the lengths of our new roads,

we soon can start to move our cities apart.

 

 

must read

 

nothing must be read

nothing can be written, too―

nothing must be said:

 

the stones say nothing

the stones do not see at night

by day they hear naught.

 

lapidary lives

and not sedentary graves

can guide our words now:

 

where everything lives

reservoirs and rivers dry―

peer now into dark

 

with slow eyes now peer

into the sorrow of what arrives

into the challenge of what dust yields.

 

 

the custodial cats of the fulcrum of memory

 

a pathetic place for memory to hide

for memory prompts to get parked each night's sleep:

a device, an external memory, pah!

 

do not count, then, on the quanta of your soul

to practice patience the day your mind gets swarmed,

your intents, sadly, those of someone's dead cat.

 

“the calendar of my future was in there!”

yes: all tomorrows belong to the dead cats,

their decisions relinquish one day per day.

 

(cats sometimes provoke imbalance [themselves poise]

to yield an outcome, enamored of their game.)