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Recording Over (for Brian Kim Stefans)
I might bask for a moment in the departed
and what's left, when gone for a moment, and gone for good. The quick traces left in the falling wake; the bedded pause, light up and fade of lexical access throws off false positives, for when subjects "recalled" 40 percent of the critical lures that had not, in fact, been presented, it was due to their being activated, or primed, by others related semantically, with rates of false recall at 55 percent. The genuine intrusive memories of the first group and the pseudomemories of the second group are both experienced as involuntary, vivid, and emotionally evocative. That is, genuine memories and pseudomemories of trauma feel the same, but one is historically accurate and the other is not. Carried the crates into the back, under the extended eaves, each slat let in a broad channel of air to cool the flies gently drawn across the table, slowly spreading as if tiny air postulators spinning in toward the moon, a pile of moons-I mean the fruit, fired in idealized shapes. There are structures in the mind beyond emotion, which is very hard to fake, beyond delight. You are beaming beyond eros and the actual stuff, mohair and camel hair, that singed lamb smell, ephedrine dried, clearing space for another dream of 4-story houses individually altered and augmented, arranged to individual tastes that foster passionate and loving elective affinites via equitable proprietary shares exchangable transnationally and governed by 12-member rotating boards who focus on common local interests and have the option, as now, of DVD players at Target for $44.97. I said I would read "Stare into the Common Joy" if I did this, and here, peering through the poor circles of an invented scrip, $5 co-payment. Filed down to cart height, sticking to the stamp, bursting into code, feeling for the lamp, I cast aspersions toward complete kinesis, but still lay prone to mastoid insult, salinous and sodden. The air makes clear the lost tenting space; aestheticised passing out astonished little helps, the fairest things vanished into unclose smiling air, rotting bosc. Into every vacuum seethes someone willing to make tiny, horrendous orders, the flow itself blotted lightly, only, when un- coagged, to thicken again at the first sign of movement, as if to exhaust itself had been a posture, an exceptional position it does not occupy, as with the installation of the 'interim' governments. Karzai, the interim Prime Minister of Afghanistan (which is not an American colony), with whom I have been compared physically at work as people have tried to come to terms with a decision made for them as citizens, was a top adviser to the El Segundo, California-based UNOCAL Corporation, which had been negotiating with the Taliban to construct a natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan through western Afghanistan to Pakistan, where I haven't been and can't go though relatively free. Tosses thoughts like incarnate tennis balls, pompeiian ash come to life, rushing up too much too easily. Porters walking tragic, shiny buttress flies, mirrors under buses, papers under flies, We trade speeches as the B61 blows by on Bedford. I stick the speakers on either side of the mic and cover the mass with a towel, losing the pans.
This poem appears in the
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