NHM

As I walk through the hall of minerals and gemstones,
I find inspiration in the naturally formed;
the pink prisms of rhodochrosite,
the blue and opaque pale green cliff of azurite and malachite, bonded together.

Uninspired human craft uninspires;
Uninspired nature inspires to the highest degree of art;
White marble from a mountain carved into larger-than-life Zeus,
And the miniscule, chalky white blades of gypsum rectangled together;
They are the same.

As I bend over a crystal ball, my chest tightens.
The rock is quartz; the sphere, perfect.
My eyes strain to look through it, to penetrate the light on the surface
And make sense of the black inside.
But I cannot look through to three dimensions.
I can only look at the two-dimensional image on the surface,
At the three hundred and sixty degree mini Cinerama screen that bends concavely.
I hover over, wanting to be immured in the center.

The crystal would be a marble for a giant to play with,
Or a hole,
Except it has a heavy weight and reflects the world.
It reflects and turns upside down not what is behind me, like a spoon would, but what is in front of me,
What I would see if I could look through the ball.

The minerals do not struggle with creation as humans do with art;
The minerals form through inertia, molecules reacting to each other, sliding and connecting over the millenia,
A never-ending work that continues even when human hands find them, carve them out, and put them under glass display cases;
Thin strands of a spider’s thread bridge the red peaks of a monazite.

The symmetrical epitaxy of silver rutile on blue hematite,
The mystery of a ball of quartz,
Are what we seek to achieve;
Or triphylite: LiFePO4.






The abbreviated shorthand makes the minerals a part of the big table;
The equation gets at the underlying structure and leaves the wonder leftover.

Manifesto

I am already telling you the story. Her name is Estuve and she drives around in an old converted mail truck. She knocks on people’s doors and says, “I was wondering if I could interest you in publishing your manifesto. I have a portable print shop,” and she points to the truck. The two most common reactions she gets are: “No, no, no. It’s not ready yet” and “How did you know about my manifesto?” Her responses to these are: “Oh, I’m sure it’s more ready than you think it is. Let me have a look at it. I’m an expert” and “I don’t mean to put you down in any way at all, but everybody has a manifesto, a memoir, a story. Everybody has one, but everyone’s is different. Everyone is different, and everybody has a story.” Then she enters the house or apartment or trailer or tree and collects all the various scraps of paper, electronic files, and scrolls. She locks herself in the back of her truck and types, scans, scratches, smells, stretches, rubs, and cracks until the manifesto is whole. She saves it to her hard drive, makes four hard copies—two for the owner, two for her archives—drops off the owner’s copies in the mail slot and drives off to the next house.

Land of Stripes Farewell

If you need to recognize where this comes from, it is not so complicated as all that. It comes from the same place that everyone has inside.
I rolled my armchair into the center of the room and sat, drunk on words. I rubbed my eyes, thought, What was it exactly that you were trying to turn off? Your tickle-response? Me? Because I cannot be turned off, no matter how hard you try. Not a switch, nothing is on-off, no binaries exist. Magnets, sure, repulsion, sure. Explosions, sure. Trembling knees. Now I am in the calm place. I have brought you here with me. Here we are, in this lower, green, mellow place. Here we can shake hands, but I am telling you, behind my calm expression there is passion. I don’t know what you can see. But I will shake your hand, I will grip your palm because in my mind we have come to an agreement. We agree that this was a fluke, that whatever brought us together (us) was simply acting out of some primal brain error that takes us to the exact person and place we should avoid, that we are adults who fully perceive this brain flaw of ours and will refrain from talking to each other because it will just remind us of what we did, and what we did was recognize something in each other, some tiny pink zebra that we both wanted to poke and prod. It was really not so bad, what we did, but there is no reason to talk about it. So I will shake your hand and put you on this raft on this nice green river. But don’t think I am going to turn the lights off, that I will stop moving once it is dark. There are all sorts of movements you cannot perceive from the raft, and you don’t know where the river is going. It is going to bend a lot. You will feel like you are going in circles. The current will be pleasant, the water smooth, so there is no reason to worry. I will stand here at the banks, trimming plants and cleaning cobwebs, taking care not to step on any minnows. The river will take you to the land of stripes, where you can exist between the colors, roll into their borders, make out a desk, an iguana, a night club of the abstract shapes. Don’t worry, I cannot reach you there.