Next came the tall words, formed out of old growth forests. Animals ran through them like the horse in the zoetrope (it is this primordial memory we revive in moviehouses), and unlike their predecessors, they could be splintered and worked. Our ancestors drew themselves up to their full height in reply. In fact, this was the first reply, and from that moment language followed.

The epoch of tall words lasted for many centuries, and it is this epoch whose dying light we see in the Odyssey and Iliad, the stories of Gilgamesh, the Egyptian hieroglyphics, and it is their memory that inspired pyramids and ziggurats, colossuses and lighthouses, and even the legend of the Tower of Babel.

Nonetheless they were soon superseded by the round words, which hinted at worlds and systems of worth. Beads of sweat, city walls, echoes in the cyclorama all bear the congruent hallmark of these words, left to us only in the shape of coins.

One such coin was held aloft, and the obverse design bidden to slough off. Thus the new words, the hot words, were called into being. In the heat, anything that could be said was put through regimens of purification, boiling off and burning off consonants, deceits, and tongues. What tall words remained turned to shafts of light, the round words to equations, and the broad words were brought to void. It was a time of crucibles, sintering, and strife. Perhaps you remember.

Now our era is an era of quick, where words fly too fast to be heard. They lack shape, color, heft, and sense. They are known only by their wakes, their incoherent overpressures, and quick words disambiguate and disarticulate simultaneously. In their presence, everything looks as it would from a hundred angles and a hundred moments all at once, and everyone dies and comes back to life thousands of times a day. Only the moment of solitude can outrun them. And it does. And it does. And it does.

In length, a wedding ring is a tube, a wormhole entreaty, beginning in the germ layer and buried along the shoulder, meandering among mountains, until lost in the glare. The road crew rests, dressed in bright orange and tar, where the windpipe is bared for inspection. To them, it is an unearthed brickbat, archeological ordnance, but for duty, ripe for the haul.

Unamused as we are, we inoculate. And innovate, and we scatter like darkness before drapes drawn back, or beneath the lifted stone. Because, you see, the mantles we tuck up to the notch, and the liquid wimples, are no lesson. Are no excreta. Are no phantasmagoria of foreboding for your ungulate life.

They are raiment.

With the scrip so issued, a last breath is drawn. So discharged, the sounding begins.

As the sounding of whales after the squid.
As a torpedo knifing through Lethe.
As radio silence.
As lemma promises wormholes offer.

And the blackout never lifts. Declarations stretch into heat lightning, to murmurs, the length to the unmanned port. It's done. The conical shield never needs to expire.

In Manhattan, stairwells are bridges. You can ascend and descend with one hand always on the wall. You may. You can watch your shoes the whole way down, canvas shoes, if you will, in pink and green.

Each month means a higher floor and a narrower tower. By year's end we face each other across the circular inner railing, on a reverse crow's nest with hardly a place to stand. The wind speaks between us, and the planes, in long orbits.

Were there tape or cards to punch, I would punch them, slip them into boxes of saltines. Were there cartridges to load, were there turntables, to splice the conduits with a monophonic earphone might make the broadcast. Instead there's a tapping that announces some kind of labor or a push toward survival. I will wrap it with meaning made of brown paper, and make a packet for hiding in the drawer.

The antenna is sharp, and surely is piercing. Piercing—it will be my hand, or it will be yours.

—for Miranda Gaw

There is no way to win.

I have laid the dividers upon your life, marked the bearing and range. I am the dividers, am the swing of their dance. I know what happens next. I have seen enough.

The spectacle of the oracular tongue, the divinatory flack, lies as offal in the cellophane wrap, inked and sullen. Buy it and nights may begin. Comfort may be brought, but remember, only from your own puppetry, the thick, meaty ventriloquism of hope.

Seven past
twelve. The silence I hear

still is not hers.

II

Dilligent mows riverbanks
three times fortnightly. In
cases that move her to mow

in the evening, the bright
mud, a shining cradle-cap,
smells to her of a memory

of torrents, torrents
and flooding--

flooding whose greenstick
currents snapped,
whose freshwater urgency chilled
like darkcore. Even still,

she leaves here bearing
the mottlings and pinpricks left
on her hard (and soft) palate

by desolate, unmarked
weeks of inhaling runoff

and silt. She waits a bit, kills
the motor, adds some oil--lights a cig.

III

Whenever she comes to have
mown in the morning, Dilligent

makes time to linger
and watch. Her slate Zippo
tingles, stowed

in her dark locket,

as twenty-two million
gray-green blades
commence a vegetative labor--
to collect the morning

freshness, her stillness,
and the light
of the culminating
sun. Collected and

crushed, like petals
beneath pestles,
they thicken, thicken,
thicken the leaves. The

baby grass
bristles in
precisely.

Then she lets herself breathe
in deeply, as the daybreak

dew reprises itself
on her dark, bare, muscled
back. At noon, the sun

stops.

IV

Twelve times out
of seven hundred, I know,
she even must mow
at midnight. The myrmidon

riverbanks will hear
her approach, and will have hidden,
hidden themselves with leaves.

Far away, the sorrowing
cottonwoods will low
with--and long for--the wind. Fish
silhouettes will leap and gulp
at the breath-laden air--yet

still she'll push.

V

She told me why, once, why,
why she will
push
that ramshackle mower
back and across
three times over--the fields

at stony standstill, the moon
glowering--and still I know

she will. She will.

Barely roused,
one midnight, I
heard her
say it, as I watched
her knot her
hair in braids. "Look,"

said Dilligent, dark

eyes roiling, "wool's warm
plenty, and this coat
fits snug. At night,

the grass may stand
still, but
the clouds lean close.
The chill's

in the air but my blood
beats hot, deep
in the lungs. You're soft

and don't understand--" she kissed
me then (tasting

of
cloves) "--but if

I stay late
enough the drizzle
may come." Come kiss me

again, my Megan.

VI

Still, come those violent
midnights, I'll miss her:
I'll finger my opposite
locket, soon to dream
of cottonwoods deluged, deluged
by shadows and salt--

soon to imagine I see
her, a woman with inlays
of granite, squinting, barely
smiling, meeting the mist

and the moistness, giving
her face, sun-
worn, for the droplets
to kiss.

With James Cihlar, Adam Clay, Bronwen Tate, and Elizabeth Workman.

Curated by M.C. Hyland

Reading sponsored by Los Angeles Review.