Imaginary Number

    The mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed
    is not big and is not small.
    Big and small are

    comparative categories, and to what
    could the mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed
    be compared?

    Consciousness observes and is appeased.
    The soul scrambles across the screes.
    The soul,

    like the square root of minus 1,
    is an impossibility that has its uses.


    Rereading

    Remember that family who lived in a boat
    run aground and capsized
    by the creamy dunes where the plovers nest?
    Sea, sun, storm, and firmament
    kept their minds occupied.
    David Copperfield came and went,
    and their sympathy for him was such
    that they pitied him almost as much
    as he pitied himself. But their story
    is not like the easy one
    where you return to me and
    lift my scarred eyes to the sun
    and stroke my withered hand
    and marry me, distorted as I am.
    He was destined to dismantle their lives,
    David Copperfield, with his
    treacherous friend and insipid wives,
    his well-thought-out position
    on the Corn Laws and the constitution.
    They were stillness and
    he was all motion.
    They lived in a boat upside down on the strand,
    but he was of the kind who couldn't understand
    that land was not just land
    or ocean ocean.


    Trailing Clouds of Glory

    Even though I'm an immigrant,
    the angel with the flaming sword seems fine with me.
    He unhooks the velvet rope. He ushers me into the club.
    Some activity in the mosh pit, a banquet here, a panhandler there,
    a gray curtain drawn down over the infinitely curving lunette,
    Jupiter in its crescent phase, huge,
    a vista of a waterfall, with a rainbow in the spray,
    a few desultory orgies, a billboard
    of the snub-nosed electric car of the future—
    the inside is exactly the same as the outside,
    down to the m.c. in the yellow spats.
    So why the angel with the flaming sword
    bringing in the sheep and waving away the goats,
    and the men with the binoculars,
    elbows resting on the roll bars of jeeps,
    peering into the desert? There is a border,
    but it is not fixed, it wavers, it shimmies, it rises
    and plunges into the unimaginable seventh dimension
    before erupting in a field of Dakota corn. on the F train
    to Manhattan yesterday, I sat across
    from a family threesome Guatemalan by the look of them—
    delicate and archaic and Mayan—
    and obviously undocumented to the bone.
    They didn't seem anxious. The mother was
    laughing and squabbling with the daughter
    over a knockoff smart phone on which they were playing a
    video game together. The boy, maybe three,
    disdained their ruckus. I recognized the scowl on his face,
    the retrospective, maskless rage of inception.
    He looked just like my son when my son came out of his mother
    after thirty hours of labor—the head squashed,
    the lips swollen, the skin empurpled and hideous
    with blood and afterbirth. out of the inflamed tunnel
    and into the cold room of harsh sounds.
    He looked right at me with his bleared eyes.
    He had a voice like Richard Burton's.
    He had an impressive command of the major English texts.
    I will do such things, what they are yet I know not,
    but they shall be the terrors of the earth, he said.
    The child, he said, is father of the man.


    The Dream I Didn't Have

    I woke up on the stainless-steel autopsy table.
    My chest was weighted down.
    Bodily fluids stained my paper hospital gown.
    My life readings were stable,

    though. They were, in fact, decisive—
    one round number and one simple line.
    A cop gave the coroner a form to sign,
    but he lingered undecided over me,

    murmuring to himself,
    "That must have been a dream, or was it a vision?"
    I felt along my length his long riverine incision.
    Outside it was chicago—

    city of world-class museums,
    handsome architecture, marvelous elevated trains—
    rising from the plains
    by the impossibly flat lake.


    Memoir

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