Terminal Switching
Excerpt from Preface
“In what follows we shall be questioning concerning technology.
Questioning builds a way. We would be advised, therefore, above all to pay
heed to the way, and not fix our attention on isolated sentences and topics.”
— Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology”
Within the pages that follow, I have attempted to “build a way.” The way requires a means and that means is poetry which uses as its metaphors, the vehicle and passenger …who seldom seems to contemplate anything but arrival. The passenger, as opposed to the traveler, does not pay attention to the technology that carries him, and this is the danger, this non-questioning, giddy trust
3 Poems
The City of Joy
For Annie Formwalt
You are going somewhere
on a train. All of sad life is laughing.
But you are like an anxious child.
Apart from the ceaseless fidgeting miles,
nothing but yourself, specter of unbelief,
Time shuffles forward so slowly you are inclined to grieve
for what it lacks: no planes to draw the gaze,
not even the cracks of the interstate.
You are the traveler
who still tastes the lips of a lover left
behind. To pass the time,
you look and look for something:
A small rock glints under a street sign.
A boxcar sits on a railway siding.
A truck disembarks into steel-leaf sprigs.
A scattered stand of twigs surround a glinting tower.
How many hours, hours
hours
half hypnotized by the clickety-clack
and the thumping
that sounds so much like the heart?
Oh, what does it matter if you never get there?
Why should you care?
All this sweet company is laughing
with their eyes squeezed tight.
We are rolling in infinity,
and Annie is singing
with wild ecstasy.
Wherever it may be,
the city of Joy will show in the distance.
Trans
The closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the ways into the
saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become. For
questioning is the piety of thought.
—The Question Concerning Technology, Martin Heidegger,
Billy Brazille was killed
fishing on a trestle listening to the radio with earphones
in his ear the clickety-clack a thing of the past
for the most part
revelation came
at the last moment
of supreme danger
his frenzied run and fall the engine
pulling fourteen flat cars ordered
directed toward furthering something else
toward driving on the maximum yield at the minimum
expense
Billy
set free
started on his way
into complete arrival
approaching the brink of possibility
an angel
perpetually raising that light that widens
he stretches his caved wings
a bright thought thinking of us
so fast the angels
like stars mirror stillness
mystery
concealed always concealing itself
sometimes wielding a flaming sword
flashing back and forth
lest we come too close to God
for even God can lose
all that is exalted and holy the mysteriousness
of his distance in the light of causality
one flat car follows another
A boy stares out the window at the world
we pass in this Greyhound bus
his hands laid
flat against glass
I am with him watching
grains of Dura leak from sacks
pass into the stream where people fish
on top of railroad tracks
A little farther
I notice the peelskin train shining forth hope
the fishers see
it coming
and get off the tracks in time.
Reading the Bestiary
The Panther only has babies once. The reason for this is obvious, because,
when three cubs have struck root in the mother’s womb and begin to wax
with the strength of birth, they become impatient of the delays of time. So
they tear the infant-burdened womb in which they are, as being an obstacle to
delivery.
The panther’s torso is thick,
pregnant I would say,
its body: a trace of thin,
elegant lines.
Its cabriole legs
terminate in drake feet
like the legs on a Queen
Anne Chair.
The tip of its tail
looks like a swirl
of acanthus
at the top of a Corinthian
capital.
The black woman was
like a panther:
excessively beautiful.
After two days
of traveling by car
to Michigan
we’d stopped
at a mechanic’s shop
that smelled of innertubes.
I followed her to the ladies room
and found the door ajar.
She removed her shoes
under a bare light bulb
that cast her shadow
against the blue wall.
I was only eleven.
I watched her hands
as she unzipped her pants
there in the doorway
and smoothed
a caesarean scar.
My heart,
a triangular rock,
battered my chest.
The air whistled
between my teeth.
My mouth became a scoop
I was pulled up off my feet,
dropped into a world without air
until pain slipped into my own
belly and tightened there
the way it did
sometimes in church.
Now, when I see
anything beautiful
I hurt.
 | ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
