Snow

    Is anybody flabbergasted anymore?
    Does anyone get the willies or the heebie-jeebies?
    Is anyone floored? Or saying "Great Caesar's ghost!"
    Does anyone have his socks knocked off six ways from Sunday?
    Language is ever being born, is struggling out
    of some cultural pupal case and drying its wings.
    Hey, I was there to witness when "shizzle" and "phat"
    undertook their initial flights. Of course, the law is
    language needs to die, to make room—like anyone.
    "Carbon footprint" yes and "carbon paper" no.
    "Phlebotomy." "Manufactory." "Ceinture."
    Good-bye. And names. Lavonda lately, Tayvon lately.
    But Fannie? Irving? There they are
    on my parents' stones, under a veiling snowfall.


    Lineage

    In Jewish tradition the rule seems to be that a name is not
    only powerful but singular: one soul per name. A newborn
    is never named for a living family member: the soul might
    have to choose between them.

    My wife is online, branching back in time
    through a US census genealogy site, a little
    like astronomy: the stars are dead and yet
    their light is examinable on Earth.

    At some point, the blood of the Cherokee
    enters the stream ... at another, one couple
    owned slaves ... a father and son were lynched
    by the KKK for holding anti-secessionist views ...
    Arvonia ... Ophra ... Zaphora ...
    haughty, drafty 16th century castle life....
    It may be that the infant Moses,
    swaddled in a basket in the bulrushes,
    simply appeared from out of nowhere, unconnected
    to a family tree ... well, not my wife!

    * * *

    And she enters "Goldbarth," but everything stops
    for me at my grandparents' generation. What
    a holocaust does.

    That night, I have a dream, a kind of postmodern dream:
    I dream I'm sleeping. My wife is sleeping.
    And as we sleep, her laptop keeps on doing its virtual
    retroprogressional business, branching back
    along the central river, back against the current
    of its tributaries, feathering, fractaling, back
    through the veins and the capillaries,
    the source, the bud, and I awake

    confused and enhanced and seminal,
    having the eyes of something
    just stumped out of the waters, learning to first breathe air.

    * * *

    A spaceman from the future (and when I speak with him later
    he specifies the future is 2515 AD) is windmill-armed
    in fisticuffs with a coonskin-capped and buckskin-fringed
    frontiersman straight from Booneville (who's no slouch
    at trading haymakers), and they seem to be determining
    who earns the right to accompany Miss Silver Spandex (later
    I'll learn she's a self-created superfemmefatale she calls
    Mysteria) to the costume ball; across the hall
    a World-War-IIesque Wonder Woman appears, and
    Captain Nanobot from the 22nd century, they join
    this popcult free-for-all—this achronological
    dice-and-resplice American shmooshed-up evernow.
    No wonder the laws of counterbalance require my wife
    establishing a history of sequential links.

    * * *

    Oh I know how corny it sounds, but
    there are mornings I wake and turn to see my wife
...