Mapping the Genome
Geneticist as driver, down the gene
codes in, let's say, a topless coupe
and you keep expecting bends,
real tyre-testers on tight
mountain passes, but instead it's dead
straight, highway as runway,
helix unravelled as vista,
as vanishing point. Keep your foot
down. This is a finite desert.
You move too fast to read it,
the order of the rocks, the cacti,
roadside weeds, a blur to you.
Every hour or so, you pass a shack
which passes for a motel here:
tidy faded rooms with TVs on
for company, the owner pacing out
his empty parking lot. And after
each motel you hit a sandstorm
thick as fog, but agony.
Somewhere out there are remnants
of our evolution, genes for how
to fly south, sense a storm,
hunt at night, how to harden
your flesh into hide or scales.
These are the miles of dead code.
Every desert has them.
You are on a mission to discover
why the human heart still slows
when divers break the surface,
why mermaids still swim in our dreams.
Nativity Scene in Bullet-Time
If this is a fracture across time and place,
where past and future hold each other’s gaze,
then should the world not call a moment’s halt,
not hang like a fly-cloud at head-height
when a downpour ends? Should it not let
fireworks burst, then hold their sculpted light?
Then we will see the glory of this wild,
this liberated city, where everyone is held
in green, red, gold of roman-candle arcs
and rocket seed-heads. We walk
among the rescued in their newly crowded bars.
A couple caught mid-kiss across
their table, waiter balanced on one foot
with eyes of steel and arms of plates.
A self-appointed prophet in a shirt and tie
gapes, fish-like, caught halfway through a lie.
I could lean and wet my fingertip
in stilled champagne, tilted on a singer’s lip.
You could grab a smoke ring from the ether
between punters and the pole dancer,
pocket it as proof, then we could take the air
beside the float-glass river,
where a busker rests her bow on a string,
and you ask what are all these flesh-ghosts thinking?
Far from a cheap trick, this city-wide hiatus,
the cost per minute is prohibitive.
We barely linger in this midnight space
before words rush back, before kiss meets kiss.
