Michael Ives

Thinghood

In a far corner of the garage a garden hose, a wheelbarrow, and a thirty year-old jug of Ortho weed killer listen in rapt attention as an ancient Briggs and Stratton two-stroke holds forth with bawdy tales about the bad old days. Its nemesis, a gleaming new Tesla, scrolls condescendingly through a non-aggression pact in its CPU to determine whether it’s obligated to extend diplomatic recognition to such Neanderthals. The hours pass. Two or three units of kibble in a forgotten bag of cat food are dislodged in the general subsidence. One can just see through the tinted window titmice pirouetting at a feeder above the mock orange, as they unwittingly aggravate a modesty of trowels and Smithsonians lying in a heap on the sill.

Our natural attitude toward these items draws us closer to their enigma, because we live the solution to the mystery they pose. Their dense palaver among themselves, always muted, always deferential to the use value we suddenly and without warning impose on them, makes an ardor of their stillness. They speak without speaking, love us with a pure absence of emotion, bare their souls by resisting our wish to see in them anything other than the mindlessness of brute matter turned to effect. They spend their affection for us in the form of a mirage of unswerving utility. They let us be people, so that when we aren’t looking, they can natter and gossip and preen.

The Fulfillment

We were totally book to a mega-faunal paradigm, but intel cored too deep on the re-melt. Frontal cortex for the last million years writhing in attachment disorders, and all Steph can talk about is overhearing Morgan call her etiquette an absurd form of social origami, while another parking lot drops into the ocean. Here can never be the Eden, which is perpetually displaced by a here, vanishing in phases, in a slow peel of diminishing light, as seen by the weird boy from school who knows on exactly what day of the year the snake moon will rise. Now don’t do some complicated line-drawing of what I just said. Deep down, everyone wants to own the candy without having to do the work of automatic thinking, which involves driving segmented vocalizations through a mind-picture. Let the search for an alternate source of the Danube begin in the stomach contents of a bog corpse. The expression on his face will remind you that you’ve already hit on the thing you’ve been looking for your whole life, but its acknowledgement took the form of a perfect silence, like the polished walnut lid of the hi-fi console in its slow descent on self-closing hinges, the moment of contact so gentle as not to have occurred.

A Morning After                                                                               

In a birch forest / several hundred thousand years / before church bells / predate the first dealership locator / phantom pulses roiling the medium of our knowing / we called it “knowing” the knowing / what else were we going to call such a pulse / in such a medium / when the corpse in the tar bed made a data point / the soft advantage a gull form / wanting so badly to live as long as marble / not knowing a frail shoot bears the treasure / all sensuous particulars of those caviar nights / that we burned our dead, for instance / obelisk at the core of our year / like a beam / in this age of metals / within weeks found ourselves here / under the 100 teats in a row / of the heaven-dog (see figure 148) / our hind-edge missing / helical rising of Sirius a secret stellar throat / cultivate the grain / the grain waits for the harvest / ignore the grain / it shall shatter on its own / of seed falling to the earth / in a hundred years / or a million / Bell Beaker Culture / unearthed among shards / Splash of Tonic Culture / coming to a close on a ‘62 Chris-Craft / such grain as was crushed / ground, sieved / packed into my skull with natron / but I come back to describe to you the mute invisibles / increments of time / talking one another / into a state of arousal / called “flow” / or stimulus response / that wild swan of the body / hammered into airy thinness.

The Night Before

A secret music hazards to speak out of vent panels / along the sides of weird aliases / it secretes / with any talk of shuttering / the propulsion laboratory / at the edge of its congressional district / there occurs a Word / fire and weight of authority everywhere / totally other-directed badlands / of man-boob risk assessment triage ballet / nobody looking / nobody aging / lifeways purring like slot parlors / in the soul-occulting earth system / fire ploughs turn over the bones in the wind / crystallized to a heat trash / and the forest of Judas burned over / there appeared language / then standardized weaponry / mouth and anus at opposite ends of the body / bits of world at the edge of the meat / upper limbs free to shape that chaos / into swan or happy meal / no matter / a hostess will always be with you / shortly / while tradesmen are forced toward the first cities / like blind faith into a document shredder / and from the zed of nous / wisdom bursts fully formed / noospheres flowering in a meadow of perfect emptiness / where everything happens at once / tells me we ought not desert religion quite yet / tie it to a post maybe / pummel it with stones and books / with stone books / with stones that were once books.

Richie Hofmann