The Skin of Meaning. Keith Flynn
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band and lower
their fierce, unyielding beaks.
This is the path to creation,
the dark dive, the arrow
of the mind that screams
for oblivion, even as the
handle in your hands turns
into a crossbow that cannot
find its tricky target among
the endless surprises of sand
and water and hungry stalks
of untrammeled grass. First
thing to go are the eyes and
then the distance shimmies
and one imagines whole towns
sawed apart by the tornado’s
tip, as the finger of God
touched down and the white
ball becomes an iris, a star,
a twinkle in the drain that
might guide this sparkle
of luck, this forty foot
birdie putt, this clown mouth
hoping to regain its
clumsy, clueless tooth,
laughing its black one-liners
as the dimpled orb lips
round its warm pocket
and winnows happily out.
CONTEXT
With great risk comes greater risk
and to live in the inquiry is to abandon
the safe proximity of childish expectation.
Be careful, my father says, at every parting,
as if he remembered the lesson of Cicero,
though he does not, whose head was separated
from its body politic and raised on a pike,
after a lady, not a lover, stuck a pin
through his tongue with a sign that foretold
the editorial. Enough of his eloquence, the
message read, and one would have to possess
the brain of a chickpea not to get its point.
Context is a faith that cuts both ways,
a perfectly fitted gown, and the greatest gift,
even among the gods, is the suave, authentic
remnant of silent knowing, the arched eyebrow,
the well-placed wink, bereft of seductive
diffidence, beaten clean of detached ambivalence,
robust with plenty in reserve, dense with sly
experience, and remarkably, all in—
NOSTALGIA AS ENTROPY
If, before the Bang, there was nothing, and if all energy since then
is expended in the manner best suited to return the world to that state,
then all seemingly random permutations of energy dispersal must be
attempts to accelerate the return to chaos. —David Mamet
The entire universe, the size of a marble,
exploded and is still expanding,
water moving from high energy to low,
seeks the bottom, and every being follows it.
Lincoln believed that all nations must shed
their energy, and that wealth accrued from
slavery would be dispersed through war,
downstream from the dreams of the Constitution.
True human nature is dissipation, the release
of stored light into chaos. The good old bad
old days are always in the past, blockading Cuba,
or bombing Nagasaki, humans joined at the neck
with machines. The rule book of diffusion directs
us to make treaties with the Native Americans,
because to live like Falstaff requires tremendous
amounts of fuel. Entropy never sneezes, does not
like magic or crocodiles or penicillin, hiccups only
if the planets stop orbiting around their Sun.
We want our designs to articulate a meaning
beyond function. We want to own an experience
we have not felt, just as Foucault wanted to turn
his life into a work of art. We embrace the guilt,
and arrange our chips in a manner that will affect
the outcome of the football game. We accept
the superstition’s fetish and believe by eating
the organic apple, and stacking the plastic bottles,
we will hold back the erosion of the glaciers.
We tell ourselves we’re doing our part and keep
our fair practice good coffee karma intact.
The Starbucks logo features a double-tailed
mermaid that is swimming in neither direction.
The enlightened consumer is in pursuit of happiness,
hedonism disguised as spiritual freedom, paradise
purchased one cup of coffee at a time, like a bird
repeatedly attacking its reflection on the window.
Not the thing itself, but the representation.
Coca-Cola was a tonic, but Coke is iconic,
a brand inseparable from our cultural experience,
like a print taken from a finger, lingering less.
Let’s forget, for a second, the syrupy effervescence,
or the grand imitations, Pepsi, Pepper, Pibb.
Just as we do not practice the pronouncement
of our neighbor’s names; we know them by their Prius.
Our language is alive and cannot designate reality,
but becomes a beacon, or signal, of our relation,
ghost isotopes that build a memory from the alphabet
and provide a trail for the sale, like the mystery
of Coke, the more you drink, the more you want.
Some stars catching our worried gaze have
already ceased to exist, so far away only their light
is left, disappearing in the cold static space.
Those quiet mornings alone, or in fading twilight,
when the mind wanders backward on its tracks,
cirrus clouds thinning on the scarred horizon,
dolphins plowing together in the near surf,
or