Operation Ranch Hand

My desktop is a photograph

of a Vietnamese river delta,

post-Agent Orange.

The landscape has been

meticulously defoliated.

It is barren.

In the grayscale image I see

a human brain, bisected.

Every tributary is a synapse.

I think of that water,

chemically contaminated,

nourishing nothing.

Behind my eyes,

there is a sterile numbness,

the birth of a headache.

No fresh thoughts come,

and I cannot write.

Where did the jungle go?

I close my eyes,

and pray for serotonin,

or rain.

Something/Nothing

I sense the threat of hope,

though I cannot see it.

It stalks somewhere,

just beyond the edges

of my peripheral vision,

like a jungle predator,

an ancient saber-toothed cat

that should be extinct,

that I know to be extinct,

that I must tell myself is extinct.

I am reduced to a programmed impulse,

to fight or flight,

to an adrenal quiver,

to a choice without options,

by the synaptic ghost

of an ancestor’s ancestor’s story

of the day he survived,

or, at least, the day he didn’t die

so that later he could be a feast

for a faster or luckier animal

or for a colonizing force

of typhoid bacteria,

or, hell, maybe cannibals.

My fear is not inside hope’s open mouth.

I do not dread the edges of its teeth,

but rather I am afraid

that it will leave me here,

undevoured,

in the company of

my routine anxieties

and practical doubts,

and I will look in the direction

where I imagined the phantom sat

and see instead a window screen

and hear instead the sputtering

of my overworked computer fan,

and be murdered by relief.

Weight/Wait

I do not want to write,

but there is something

in my mind,

like a benign,

but inoperable, tumor,

like a kidney stone

that will not pass;

there is something clotted there,

in some unseen, central place,

but it is not painful;

not in the way we think of pain

as as a violent, vibrant pulse,

as a force that promises change,

as it unmakes us.

This is a mass,

an immobile weight

that will not be moved

by pain or to pain,

that might only

be weathered away,

or be eroded by

some bored

but patient

stream,

maybe

(hopefully)

by these

lines.

Punctuated Equilibrium

“I can’t believe in evolution,” he tells me. “Not on a day like this.”

It’s hot, humid. I look up and the sky is grey, even though there are no clouds.

The air is speckled with itself. The atmosphere is made of pixels.

Existence is buffering.

“If the big bang was energy–—if it all started with heat,

nothing ever would have changed.

Heat is stagnant. Heat suffocates.”

He swallows. His mouth is dryer than the air.

“I think I’d rather believe in one cool day in Eden

than billions of years spinning,

on fire, from fire, towards fire.”

“The air is impenetrable. Time is impenetrable.

I see myself, four years ago, standing on the same spot, sweating.

But not as a memory, as a physical fact.

I haven’t moved. Time hasn’t moved.”

He has been alone for years, with the same job,

and no discernible prospects,

anticipating the rain.

And when it does rain–—and it will, christ, it will–—

he will not stand here, besides me,

with the rain washing the sweat from his face and say,

“I was wrong. Listen, I was wrong about it all.”

He’ll run for home, and whatever relief he feels

will be tempered by fear as he remembers

the news accounts of men struck by lightning

and how as a child he would hide

sometimes even for an hour or more

in the stairwell because he imagined it was

the only place the thunder could not reach him.

But there can only be so many storms in a year.

Spring has already been cautiously squandered,

with its long days of predatory potential

that we are lucky to have survived.

Summer is receding, thank god,

and fall is always gentle.

But winter fossilizes hope,

and you sit there, like a stone,

and you sit there, in the stone,

as the particles

of the universe

grow farther

and farther

apart.