he looks with eyes of spy planes
he assembles hydrogen arms into normal-form games

he reads the cards scored with information
and speaks the probable outcomes of elections

young Baal began a paper chess machine
the residue from finite states of play

he becomes the liquefaction of those rules
learns it’s more than structure symbols want

his thinking labors over knots of entailment
spans terms that signs bind like lesions

struggling to imagine the scent of mint
he devils himself sleepless with opaque questions

what did there recognize in cloud faces
as telegraphed through thought the sky distorts?

these patterned shreds of spent thunderhead mime
the low entropy of his little grammar

Baal listens to grasp his own encoding
slurred through exact impairments of the brain

the cunning daemon fears his self diffuse
beneath what renders dark to him aware

Drunk in a flat off Nevsky Prospekt.
Telephone ignored — importunate knock at the door.
Escort of four KGB to the street,
their officer from the black ZiL’s backseat,
“Jonah Amitaievitch, a cosmonaut in Leningrad? No.”
Launched here from the cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
A minor prophet pitched in elliptic orbit
tumbles weightless, swallowed by the Soyuz capsule.
As vacuum tube filaments glow under glass
thoughts detonate down trains of coded visions.
These marvels elated there freely to witness
the atheist light of stars eons below
or tea, black bread, butter & honey.
Whom thrown it seems the choice decays.

Curry, off Oxford Circus, at 5PM —
     Aeneas, alone, ate for distraction
at loose ends of jetlag after
     the turbulent flight from O’Hare.
All night the hull had shuddered
     clearing reefs of cloud below.
He was abroad for another acquisition,
     another trip rehearsed by rote.
Tomorrow, he knew, would lose him
     in work’s familiar tallied tedium.
Tomorrow he would board the Underground
     for offices in Oliver’s Yard.
Tomorrow as the train leaves Euston
     the sibyl will shift register
somewhere keening in the compact car
     boils will pock her shins
her lamentations will reek of piss
     she will crowd the doors
offending forward as they slide open
     her complaint will spill out
absorbed into the thick human drift
     at Kings Cross St Pancras
unseen she will parabolize the sky
     tomorrow hides like false recollection

a lapse develops him the tape but
reveals the reels degaussed emptied of ghosts

he sorts through this tissue of noise
for accusative objects he could once recall

as the magnetic arrows of the tape
seethe out from their mound to forage

his perfect past a glacier’s gray retreat
looped back out of phase with itself

its low-decibel hiss resonates in throbbing waves
that mimic the present seen from behind

this present bends into an empty crease
where the next phoneme fails to arrive

there books helped him recover the echo
& filter on a model of speech

that crashed into twelve thousand darts roaming
the field her face turns in shadow

her face it blurs with gauzy silt
of words that used to comprehend her

their river spools through an oxbow bend
above a bird’s black wings smooth air

Judith unbuckles. She and her maid rise,
head toward the cockpit along the aisle.

The line’s founder they
say held Formiae’s walls
  and Marica’s shore where
      the River Liris swims —

broad dominion. Tomorrow leaves
will litter the grove,
  seaweed the beach, unless
      the crow — rain’s augur —

deceives. Gather dry wood
while you can. Tomorrow
  ease your genius with
      wine and suckling pig.

queens abandoned in combs quiet
journeyworkers have gone

that host raveled
out into spangling winter light

did they follow jitter-danced maps
down hymn paths

or fall faithless
notes winding on the winds?