ARCHEOLOGY OF DESIRE

Time Dilation Experiments

[32] Time Dilation Experiments Thomas Ashcroft Site Santa Fe, 2/98 I don’t like it when people come and go, Particularly when it’s snowing. I dreamed my house cat was a yak With thick black fur and hard hooves. Asleep, I’ll do anything to keep sleeping, Dream I’ve left you, that the dead return. Later on, I drip black ink on my tongue A homeopathic remedy for grief. I see my mother and father now walking very slowly Walking away from me among Anasazi ruins. What about those days when the typewriter Prints words in a circle, A serpent swallowing its tail A dragon warhead carved on the prow A stitch in the fiber of time Saves nitrogen, bonded in roots to soil. The unmade bed, a miniature love district, You ask if we should Make love one more time Before you go The problem is—how would I know If you were truly going Leaving me to play a jukebox That records the cries of stars? Maybe we’ve sat together at this table forever In the Miss Time Shift Diner in Worcester, Massachusetts Am I 14, or 44, tracing the checked oilcloth Red and white squares with one finger? [33] Time shifts like a white girl singing blues With a microphone, an electric bass All through my whole life I heard high tide singing back-up. Everything is bent the way the wind is going, Grasses in gypsum sand, Sandhill crane in a violet light, Legs drawn up like landing gear. Sandhill crane like a pattern on silk Ten thousand cranes folded from paper Origami cranes at Hiroshima, The atom bomb in Oppenheimer’s lap A Studebaker in a violet light. As a child, in that wing of the museum I wandered among enormous Buddhas That is when I heard the sea in my ear As if my body had become a shell, That is when I heard the middens of the Algonquins Sink beneath the asphalt of Manhattan. Grey sandhill cranes landing on water An illusion of sunset, when water becomes sky, The Very Large Array in a violet light Listening to the universe shift away from us. I need a radio telescope the size of Manhattan, A violet shift means things are coming back To the center of an expanding universe. Sandhill cranes in sunset pink as shrimp Orange as three oranges in a pale green bowl Red as departure on the next train Why have I forbidden myself the color blue. Cuneiform, stars pressed into wet clay of the sky, A cache of tablets Archeologists hoped Were the poetry of Babylon [34] Instead were exclusively Bookkeeping, court records, accounts of boundary lines. Come over and eat sunspots with me Or two eggs fried sunny side up All day, I pop time like vitamins Zinc and calcium for arthritis Swallowing the past whole Horse pills that stick in my throat. What we believe will cure: Ginger ale my mother always provided With a bendable straw For scarlet fever Yellow mumps, red measles, Blue chicken pox, Vitamin C for an acid overdose. I always thought all of us were dying Only at different rates. I don’t believe that any more Considering that dead you are never Overdrawn at the bank Parked illegally Tempted to shoplift Mainlining coffee Inappropriately dressed Popping aspirin But instead with pennies on each eye With a locket made of human hair With lavender to purify. People who live in glass houses Shouldn’t throw themselves around. Blue landing strip for vowels City on the moon Blue taste of cigarette smoke Blue taste of Manhattan City in the interior of the planet [35] At the speed of light All words become vowels Nouns become verbs Prepositions Become infinitives Blue as the lovers’ moan Broken into ooh and aah I’ve always distrusted the letter Y Sometimes a vowel, sometimes not But you, in the end, must come to me Blue antidote, blue remedy For whatever ails this color wheel. ...