Lids of a Droid Baryon, image by Daniel Y. Harris
Excerpts
from Advice
to Fire
Mobius
2: Appeal to Sound
in
what key do the dead sing?
What says a muffled sun, hoarse
moon, choked earth? How does
a panda lament? Is need soprano
or alto? Are spinning galaxies
silent and beetles mum in sleep?
Ban street static, car crash,
door creak, chair scrape
and thwack of fist on bone
in favor of grass blade’s
sigh, snow leopard’s purr,
hum of acorn finding root,
love’s birth cry, runes wrested
from whole stone, swallow choir’s
encores, ant army’s drum taps
and oak’s oratorios. Shower
us with wind’s whole tones,
arias of ibis, clouds’ chansons
and
let the hungry ear demand
Mobius
3: Caprice
imagination
blossoms in us to assure that
ether-cooled incubators atop
polished ceramic
tables spawn rows of mini-dervishes
rich
in anti-ego, oxygen, humor and silk
who one-toe
down sponge-lined stairs to buffed
zebrawood
floors (the shine, the shine!) and
drink smoothies
of Faro grain, unicorn milk, ginger
root and clover,
ensuring that the brain -- finite
billions of synapse
leaps and nerve highways -- expands
to mind while
sensory data play hopscotch with
heart to birth
multi-selves seeking consensus that
the moon
is an orbiting crème brulee, the
Milky Way an iris
bud near an overhanging path of
stars, a paper sheet
an airplane awaiting a
12-year-old’s folds, love a helium
balloon floated by Cinderella’s
unborn second child,
friendship a pact signed in rose
oil, and life’s sojourn
a Friday hike skyward toward
Persian-speaking tulips
and
dream states where we make sure that
Mobius
13: After
earthmen
– combat-fresh, tes-
tosterone-rich -- attack the sun
that,
falling, scorches Utah’s rim,
Ohio’s
shoreline and the heart of
Atlantis.
Women (alert to burn marks while
keening alarm and GPS coordinates)
carry fire shards in baskets
to deep caves.
Children -- free, gifted,
innovative
multitaskers -- skip merrily along
Mercury’s rings, poking holes
through which they tumble toward
Milky Way’s galactic ridge and its
interstellar vessels of rock and
chemi-
cals. Animals -- fox, sloth,
unicorn
and calf -- stay still and steady
as lighthouses, rooted as trees,
undiverted by fear or abstraction,
securing
mates and warmth when
Mobius
14: News From a Warzone
earth
desiccates, a smoking bollard
as trees spindle, rivers plug,
stones rivulate,
oceans twist, clouds spike, bugs
form
battalions and crustaceans build
cities
of horn. Feather-shorn birds scag
west
then back, beaks dripping orange
wax
while, clammed in this room where
mind meets
fire I drink foamed spider milk and
hallucinate
the voice hitting lowest of raspy
blood-notes.
Bipeds carcinogate, fingers
clawing,
eyes leaking as feet go retro to
webbing
then break -- the sound like the
snapping
wishbone all those Thanksgivings
ago,
remember? (That aromatic fern bank, those oak
leaves falling.) Below my window
organs trail
from trellises where late the rose
buds clung.
As the moon’s face hardens,
suspended like a hanged
innocent,
promise me you’ll report that
—David Beckman
