Saturday, May 23, 2009

Schematic



Inside the machine is another machine which refers to the machine enclosing it. So he touches her hand, and the image of a child emerges.


*


The steel ratchet in the wind: she felt it against her corneas, pressing precisely into the metric eye sockets, turning, tightening.


*


The elevator kept trembling: the mechanism out of key: but the riders held their eyes fixed on the dial, the reassuring arbitrary numbers.


*


Under the hood where gear meshes integer, in the hamster wheel of the heart, a singularity appears, an homunculus, a social security number.


*


Wreckage washed ashore, fragments of fuselage and cowling, seat-backs, oxygen masks, and hermit crabs remade themselves of metal and bone.


*


A rat in the dark attic at midnight, bolt-cutter teeth incising insulation. Black wire, red wire. A spark. The pianist's hands stop playing.


*


The train enters the tunnel, great piston breaches the oily cylinder, clockwork tide is driven to foam on the rocks, and the marriage is over.

3 comments:

  1. Good stuff. I love "the marriage is over" as the closing line. It makes the whole thing pack a more intense emotional punch despite all the mechanical, thinky imagery. Though the mechanical stuff is compelling on its own. I'll be mulling over those hermit crabs for awhile.

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  2. Mulled hermit crabs are pretty tasty.

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  3. These are lovely.

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