James Richardson - By the Numbers: Poems and Aphorisms

We hope you enjoy these poems. This e-book edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. Copper Canyon Press would like to thank Constellation Digital Services for their partnership in making this e-book possible. BBR 19232008 JER 19232008 I. Bit Parts Northwest Passage That faint line in the dark might be the shore of some heretofore unknown small hour. This fir-scent on the wind must be the forests of the unheardof month between July and August.

In Shakespeare In Shakespeare a lover turns into an ass as you would expect. Others confuse their consciences with ghosts and witches. Old men throw everything away when they panic and cant feel their lives. They pinch themselves, pierce themselves with twigs, cliffs, lightning, to dieyes, finallyin glad pain. You marry a woman youve never talked to, a woman you thought was a boy. Sixteen years go by as a curtain billows once, twice.

Your children are lost, they come back, you dont remember how. A love turns to a statue in a dress, the statue comes back to life. O god, its all so realistic I cant stand it. Whereat I weep and sing. Such a relief to burst from the theater into our cool, imaginary streets where we know whos who and whats what, and command with MetroCards our destinations. Where no one with a story struggling in him convulses as it eats its way out, and no one in an antiseptic corridor or in deserts or in downtown darkling plains staggers through an Act that just will not end, eyes burning with the burning of the dead. Special Victims Unit Actually Persephone loved his loving her, dark-browed, so serious: it proved something about her.

And for him, gloomy, overwhelmed with himself, her brightness was more beautiful than beauty and he basked in it. But when his turn came to shine back it seemed her feelings were a storm of flowers he could not gather, and the story gets ordinary: he is angry at his heart and hurts her. Demeter gets confused. Did a god steal her daughter, or has she been living all this time in Manhattan with her difficult husband, difficult job, difficult cat and visiting once a year? Her love for what is lost spreads so thinly over the planet its not love anymore but weather. She goes to the police: Benson and Stabler find her story dubious. More so when they learn she never had a daughter, though she was one, and that her vaunted power over harvests apparently doesnt extend to her wilting houseplants.

As for those Hellish threats on her machine? Phone records show that dark voice was her own. Actually she has bipolar Multiple Personality Disorder, solution to all plot dilemmas. Fair enough, since cop shows cant say what wed say: Life is a dream,and we are everyone we dream. When they come to get her, her hands are clawed in the chainlink of the playground. Hades, Demeter, Persephone form in her face of cloud. Shes watching, of course, two girls on swings, one going up while the other goes down. Subject, Verb, Object I is not ego, not the sum of your unique experiences, just, democratically, whoevers talking, a kind of motel room, yours till the end that is, of the sentence.

The language, actually, doesnt think Is important, stressing, even in grandiose utterance e.g., I came I saw I conquered the other syllables. Oh, its a technical problem, sure, the rhyme on oh-so-open lie, cry, I, harder to stitch tight than the ozone hole in the sky. But worst is its plodding insistence I, I, I somebody huffing uphill, face red as a Stop sign, scared by a doctor or some He She It surprised in the mirror. Emergency Measures I take Saturdays unpopulated trains, sitting at uncontagious distances, change at junctions of low body count, in off-hours, and on national holidays especially, shun stadia and other zones of efficient kill ratio, since there is no safety anymore in numbers. I wear the dull colors of nesting birds, invest modestly in diverse futures, views and moods undiscovered by tourists, buy nothing I cant carry or would need to sell, and since I must rest, maintain at several addresses hardened electronics and three months of water. And it is thus I favor this unspecific caf, choose the bitterest roast, and only the first sip of your story, sweet but so long, and poignantly limited by appointments neither can be late for, and why now I will swim through the crowd to the place it is flowing away from, my concerned look and Excuse me excuse me suggesting I am hurrying back for my umbrella or glasses or some thrilling truth they have all completely missed.

Metallurgy for Dummies Faint bronze of the air, a bell I cant quite hear. The sky they call gunmetal over gunmetal reservoir, the launch, aluminum, cutting to the center, waters bittered with the whisk of aluminum propellers (your gold drink stirred with a gold forefinger). * Faint tinnitus, where is it? Air silver with a trillion wireless calls, stop-quick stop-quick of sweep hands, crickets and downed lines, their sing of tension, that out-of-earshot too-bright CD sun, the heads of presidents sleet sleet in your jacket. * They were right, those alchemists. Anything tin-cold eye of salamander, a flys green shield and styli on your wrist, distinctly six anything might mutterings in the wet, two-packs-a-day brass of sax, bright tears pestled, or your hairs backlit (same as the rains) slender metals anything might flash out * Surely one sip, mused Midas, gin and silver, surely her fine engine tuned to a dial tone, surely her famous sway, gone Gold, gone Double Platinum, Rare Earth, gone Transuranic * Anything slow, slash-black and copper monarch settling, the shy keys glint and turn, sunny-cloudy brass-and-tarnish fruit paused at your lips, reflecting. * surely these vast reserves (Midas, that treasurer, surmised) I must address with a safecrackers listening touch. * surely these vast reserves (Midas, that treasurer, surmised) I must address with a safecrackers listening touch.

Ill be the anti-thief slipping certificates of silver, the slim faux-platinum yen of credit, palms flat, over and over into her skintight pockets. * Eyes, blank or deep, a lake gone bright dark bright (on thin ice giving way one: roll up the window two: when the car fills) the fatal-in-seconds keen cold of a mirror, the blank bright blank that any word might, any word might not. * No one my touch (that treasurer says) can bear and tell (apparently did not touch himself). * Wine so cold its nails, rings in the glass, poured, your ring and its click two-three, and click, the bar awash in digital and silver whispers of the disc, yes-no, yes yes, and This Just In: incredible metals the shifting of your silks imagines, unimagines, the thought-blue alloy of your lids, the pistol chill of your lips my lips might freeze to. Head-On Flashing vehicles, unurgent lounging tell you what its too late for. Dont rubberneck.