Asymptotic Freedom in Quantum Chromodynamics

In particular, at low temperatures neither quarks
nor gluons can exist in isolation. This peculiarity
of QCD – that the basic entities of the theory cannot
be isolated – is called confinement. It is, as you
might imagine, one main reason the theory took
so long to find. -Frank Wilczek

Where are you when I am at fault’s edge,
walking a one-way avenue
as sun alloys a cast aluminum noon?

A couple at the pannier’s points me
to brown bread around cheddar, a slice of white onion
and wetter mustard mashed with horse radish.
Without question, grackles hassle hawk,
who has found an emerald owl’s nest
between firs on the road to Bend.

Odin Falls are posed this moment
of Mercury on the Libra/Scorpio border.
Moon smears a run uphill
to transit a high kitchen table,
measuring hedgerow by headstone
on a path cut across the lap of the tor:
I want that road in my dreams.

I’ll be both visiting and leaving,
consoling and grieving as faces rive.
I’d know if I were undertaking
or keeping ground for the dead.
I’d wait for the ice of age by doctors’ time –
forty, maybe fifty years, until blood and semen
soak the Oort, deep in Pluto’s wealth.

When darkness and light are finally both alike
and the livid blood reminds to let learning go –
whatever comforter covers and suffers
to muffle the melt dropping in steps:
this hot shower, this tea, this time
of any tenebrous break, seem final, too.

A point of swallow parts for scarlet hummingbird
as rain falls in lilac and falls
in the thorn field at the dell floor.
Coyote wakes me and I’m wanting
an alley through winter’s green.

Dream of Zero Shoe Tar

In feng shui garden,
watering can
and wan ou dung in hand,
I prod and coo:

“Grow children! Mow the lawn
and pick up your bootstraps!”

They sigh a small wind
shooting into perfume shops.

Above my head,
the mad mountain man
paints me into the ground.

Feeding

This is the nut:
Moon ballooning over the crest
west of the canal,
a free electron for the electorate.
Morning goes down to power lines
and out to sea.

This, the meat:
salogok under foot, locking knees;
wind baffling my parka –
stone in hand, turning to hop…

The shell, then,
is where fire steams and earth flies,
a monstrous thing in the stomach
but the empty crown creates
this heart-splash, that foot-fall.

What makes me hungry?
Lying down, I see your face
in the tattoo of your name.
I sleep in the switch-back
of your voice.

Genoscape

A healing brain gestes trine endocrine,
brazes these holovolts, duff and grain.

To leave a town’s a hard kick,
biking into overfield wind.
The moon’s road-hidden roots
lien on ease to sprint
some wholly simple ripple.

Hic et nunc, no prophecy but memory:
A lure’s flight path;
a tongue-dug tooth of cormorant song
on the scale of heaven’s lute.

In the symptoms at onset
of this season’s fever,
muscles ravel slow around
ears bound to a burst
and absent wavecast…

In one heard heartbeat
are twined helices maying.

three rounds each, a gong for the lesser gods. attention, please, there will be grief now, from the loss of my love. this loss and those losses that came before and the loss we propose when we begin

again. listen to the precision of my pain, you keepers and providers of my life, give end to the texture of a straining i can no longer carry.

i've tried the breast pocket, the valise, the pallet loader and now it is time to put it down - into the sea; into the great home; gods, take it back.

as far as i see along the terrible sites of these guns, i will need this pain again. take it now, that i may find it among the circling rains, along the broad side of the wind. my love leaving has given me more than i have ever had. my heart, unbroken, goes to sea. attention, please, gods - there will now be unending grief, the endless loss of my love.

On Winter Coming

The clouds make this the safest Saturday so far this fall.
I’m wrapped up in a blue sweatshirt, and the chill’s just there,
a skin’s distance: in all my hair, where my nerves end,
I’m aware of some uncertain bristling and almost shiver –
green breaks up in the tree leaves and gold takes over
in the hunger for sunlight from a blood-let scarlet sunset.

These days require years of kaleidoscopic concentration,
and I mean seeing through colored fragments floating in oil,
spinning slowly new combinations before a piece of mirror:
More vitamin C; my boots; a breath of bay mist;
one night, no dreams; and another nothing but
waking in doubt, in sweat, in my double bed.

Separately, none of this is sensible, and that’s the point:
I glance at the constant watch face, a black obsidian
that gives back my eyes glassed over with the fear of freezing,
and I’m numbed enough by that fear to watch this memory
like a movie yellow and deliberately disappear.
It’s got me; it’s got you; a street set with storefronts
and marquee lights stressing our own mannequins.

What apology can I make? To be in your way, or part of it,
(another lovely dusk sky, another roadside flower stand,)
these screaming ruby dahlias are all I’ve ever wanted –
I’ll wade onto a baldly dramatic stage of your plans
and you’ll open me up again with your bare hands.

Painting and Death

I’m killing my friends.
I’ve been yellowing their teeth,
graying their hair, washing
their veins to white and purple.
I pervert the cells
of liver and lung; colon and skin;
create ocean wrecks;
airplane disasters;
I root the senses in dementia.

Fast or slow – the quarrel is pointless:
If I can kill them, they live
and help me wear away that life.

Like a battery dying
and panicking about that,
it’s not real when my selves simply slough:
I’d rather kill them
and draw pictures of the night,
where light deepens the dusk,
snow dust glows in the opening woods,
becoming a picture of a waterfall,
fully chaotic.

Behind that veil is a table
and on it,
breakfast.

But it is late in the day
when I wake, stunned,
creaking from death-sleep.
I stretch or eat or not:
the routines have disappeared.
Breath goes in or out.
Sometimes, there are two squirrels
running the trees, chattering.
I sit, write letters for myself to you.

Odd, this life, killing,
and odd, as well, to die,
but maybe I’ll not be so stunned, then.

My Name is Hello

Hanging with the badly-clad
I catch, like moonlight, looks
from doom-filled people.
Work-bound, burrowing muddy air
between room window and windshield,
swearing by a lost
pair of glasses, a digital watch,
at a pace to miss rainbows
but see forsythia, white dogwood.

You won’t crawl near enough
for fear of what else
will flower and flee
this one more lousy weekend.
I use the clouds
to see you in another body,
tree, or stone or someone
behaving like tree or stone.

Jump to a sudden thud
somewhere close
and lock the door –
you think to sleep
but hell, you want
some news, a messenger
or monster coming for you.

Practice Talking

I’m still learning how
to talk.
It’s been years now.
Some of my memories go by,
mean cars
passing the entrance ramp
to the expressway,
where part of me
is trying desperately
to merge.
The desperate part.

Somewhere along the line,
at some point,
my brain
wants to make
an example out of me.
My brain is looking
for a scapegoat.

In a research
and development laboratory
upstate New York,
scientists are practicing
firing synthetics
to thirteen-thousand degrees
fahrenheit.
They want to turn garbage
into plasma.

Where I live,
town officials sent helicopters
to patrol the town borders.
They wanted to keep out
alien garbage trucks.
This was during a dumping moratorium
in a neighboring town.
The mounds were so full
people were paid
to identify the geographical
origins of the trash there.

I don’t know how
those South American birds
stand it.
I mean, the termites
erect giant mounds of excrement,
letting off cubic meters
of methane gas.
It’s just so… offensive.

My brain is looking
for a scapegoat.
At some point,
my brain wants to make
an example out of me.

Well, it was a dream,
I was in a diner,
and it was very dark,
and I had died during dinner.
Drown.
And since I was most
familiar with myself,
I had to lead
the dredging expedition.

Later, at the hospital,
the nurses were friends
I haven’t seen
in years,
and they kept coming up to me,
and they were saying,
“Hello,”
and they were asking,
“How are you?”
sort of professionally.

“Hey, listen…
we said we’d call
if we were coming over…
we weren’t coming over,
so we didn’t call…”

In the dream
I’m holding
your wallet in one hand
and the phone
in the other,
and I hear it ring,
and I hear you say,
“Hello,”
and I say,
“I’ve got your wallet.
I’m mailing it back to you.”

You’ll sit and listen,
so why am I telling
you this?
What am I
telling you?
Just what am I
recycling here?

My brain
is looking
for a scapegoat.

My brain
wants to make
an example out of me.

Fripp and Enzo

There are unbelievable fields of lifted graphic on the Singapore servers. And knowing that none is original, the endless variety loses its calculus: there is plainly an end to stolen goods. Enzo has considered this and other thefts, and weighed their payoff per down payment. The larger, gun-toting contrivances are a contradiction to Enzo. It seems to Enzo that a robbery that really hauled big would be easier on his mica-like soul than would, say, a connive, or a fraud.

This is how romance grows between Enzo’s toes: an XTC song, teasing with history but denying the real background. Oh, another smell of past crash pads. Enzo uses Google to fetch information about old girlfriends from data bases that don’t exist, or were closed to memory by a freak death. Homer is there in Google, but not Enzo, or his old friends. And standing on another summer corner with twenty-five others in the misting diesel fuel, Enzo knows that you really cannot be alone in a crowd.

Enzo looks at all of them and recognizes none. No help that they are all strangers, he is not interested in their existential status. They are in the full regalia of hot weather displays today, and Enzo loosens his tie. This is risky – Enzo has also rolled up the sleeves of his yellow shirt. He is not wearing the jacket for this green summer suit, and he would feel half dressed at an opening if one came up suddenly.

He is thinking about how there are some people from his personal mythology that may be real. That he may contact them if he could find them. That he may be amplified, in a Frippertronic way, if he could find those living ripples in the urbi et orbi. And then a man passes, much shorter than Enzo, in a light green summer suit, with the jacket on, in a yellow dress shirt, in ox blood wing tips; this man passes walking faster than Enzo would in this humidity. A dream image, a double, a thief of Enzo.

It is as though he had been grabbed, as though Giant Smelly Man had sat next to him on the R train. Worse than this, worse than dropping fifteen bucks, worse than losing the whole wallet. Enzo is slammed back into his body, into the pinched toes and blood pressure which he swears he can feel. In all the shameful plotting to get more stuff, he had never thought he could rob his own soul. As a rule, Enzo puts himself first among the base, a weird megalomania without the satisfaction of supremacy, and now there is evidence of power.

And this is how the briar grows among the rose bushes; how Enzo has practiced bonsai in his dream life. Alone, he doesn’t know if he is awake or asleep, and walks sometimes somnolently through his work days, and that habit has paid off as a dream image of Enzo walking past. Suspiciously, he looks back to see if there are shiny chips falling away as his soul disintegrates. Enzo is a little freer today, hemmed in on all sides by over-heated New Yorkers, twisted permanently into the romance he imagines from his youth, hauled away by a ghost. Enzo feels his feet and legs walking in the blue sky.

quick chaomance

the new moon died in town today
over the veteran’s pillar,
folks walked right into traffic
like priors wading in mist.

they’ll set the clocks back tonight,
so I’ve time enough to sleep:
I want to watch this maple shed gold
and bare nerve to the sky.

there will be freezing rain tomorrow,
and all the sorcerers of this warm autumn
haven’t the magic to stay it.

While I'm Flying

The earth is endless dirt
hung like burrs on the sun’s hide,
but quick in vast air bubble,
orb massing ocean out of orbit
and informing chlorophyll –
we each breathe our brevity
by green plumping blue.

Our ancestors forge one line
straight through the cargo door.
my feet step out
and I’m an element unloosed.

At silent heights, things approach:
tidbit of salt;
nectar from light clear to clover;
dew off a buckling black drogue ‘chute
seems to loop, then pirouette on.

Aground, a tug from the soil.
Fire in its eloquent grass under snow
clouds water out of coiled wood –
they are the sun, darkness inside-out,
like the trees are blood from bone.

The commotion in my sleeves
points me belly-down
and within that,
rock heft temerity is primed
for the ogling hole of the mind,

how there is the sigh,
how the whoosh, of its flannel patches,
cranium its delight:
I plunge through jaggedly-sewn me
gripping gravity.

An exhalation is lapping stars
clean again, a rhythm like
a child with a mixing bowl,
beating the seas senseless.

Sun Conjuncts Sunday

I rub my scarred cornea,
brush a bread-specked platen down,
then mow the whole visual field:
Map and pen get swept across dust
edged out by routine place-setting
and dispatches about local property.

Folks bristle at the carve of a corridor
already lined with rimed pine tines
and wraiths bricking against the boulevard.
A hand there smooths blueprints,
pivoting burnisher in smallest parry
to flick at the nits of drying glue.

Morning is a few mugsful of dance:
I samba slow to the cat mewling;
turn an amusing Peabody at the crossword puzzle;
spin into a buttered bagel polka
like waltzing Mount Hood, ibex-kneed.

MIRROR POEM SEVEN

In the tree
One branch sways
Over dry leaves,

One branch over that,
Then twigs.

I do not arrive,
Going and returning –

I walk downhill
And onto the bay
Breaking the mirror.

Swans hiss:
Ten-thousand shards,
Ten-thousand selves.

Elegy for One's Self

You did not embarrass me with
the apricot corsage, bottle of
wordless complicity.
How much you spent for dinner
and your screams at night
I know won’t suffice.

The litho posters
are stuck to photographs; odd
haircuts and teeth
in a head no longer yours.

Who helped to cart
the rental truck,
the weather
you are. And you left
without the Egyptian
pipe cutting tools,
school papers and spools of wire and thread.

You never did this side of the bridge,
this after that island was home.
There are double yellow
traffic lights and
where there was only snow,
for a moment I am climbing an oak,
there you are,
tree.

Terracinth: Getting Balance Off Balance

Muck smells at first thaw –
as last year’s dying finally does,
fields push flowers into air.

Birds have ground to a halt in this low sky,
the graphite lake brittle below.
Rowboats don’t line up for long.
drifting foam beside its fabric yellows.

Walking the house wall round
I’m beside myself and giddy,
perhaps grasping
the two of this questioning thumb:

In our leaf shape, we space out;
expecting dreams, hands fill up;
the leaves fall away
and slowly buried, a tree.

So far, in these dimensions,
I’ve cornered distance once.
Now, down an empty road,
I can feel the edge of sight in my feet,
hear space recede between atoms.

Knee deep, I’m lumbering to the door.
There’s no point to a current calendar,
picturesque and at eye level:
Seasons are full of moon,
rocking forward and back on spokes.

Two Dreams that Distort Daytime

It will be, after all, hours before I get to sleep;
me and my repetitive behavior, pacing this room.
I’m here often, arms in the grain of wood panels,
these legs becoming russet twill rugs.
Cold morning floor tiles at the north end are not,
well, obvious, but sensible certainly,
the way I know I’m waking alone as thoughts stagger in,
holding onto each other in a renewed effort to stand
and speak between clenched teeth.

Sometimes it’s harder deciding which lamp to light,
or whether to raise the blind over the window,
than pulling out a pair of pants, socks, shoes
when my body becomes re-inhabited. But where do I appear?
Who says hello, holding me steady with closed eyes?

Somewhere, you sweep your kitchen, and in the air
a pale scent of the soap I use, like a smile
at your wall hangings, settles along the furniture.
There’s a telephone ringing, cars seem to pull up
at the sidewalk, one after another, and a shuffling dog
snuffles at the door. Any of these may bring me:
patina of a person outside his immediate life,
dancing on a thin line of afternoon sunlight.
Yet what is beautiful is exactly what’s terrible
about this view across the bay, the deep distance.

You must remember to tell me –
those stars, purposeful and entirely out of reach:
are they painted nearer than I might believe?
Even there, if I were to pray to them
and reach my soul out for the haste of touch,
would that precious searing of light simply smear,
and lose its perfect perspective of depth
with all the other distorted joys of dimension?

Then who would I turn to? Who, after the last song,
is delighted enough to leave the dancehall, walk through one gate
along a familiar cinder path and knock at this welcoming door?
There are some things in the autumn air which I cannot seek out,
which must choose to fly down with sudden streaks of oak leaf
to pierce my chest and, quaking, wake me again and again.

My Country’s Like That Other Myth

Down the street, Hope makes her legs work, a scary sight, enough
Sway to question, “How long has she been out?”

Meaning out of her house of disease, and tremor, and infection.
Amazing the oldest buildings she lives by have the most craft in the carvings, the most

Care, like once the workers in Philadelphia sat and thought up a republic and spent years fashioning fantastic architecture.

Hope doesn’t have that kind of time, can’t get thirty of her friends together, pestilence and greed, say, to layout a foundation and brick in the pattern of a publican’s. She can’t

Sit and chisel the necessary gargoyles, spin fifty white newels, trim the keystone, fit it, take it out and place it again, make another and fit that keystone, pull it out in frustration,

Go home for a long meal and a walk to the forge for another peen, return two days later and chip out the right, fitting arch stone.

Up the road, Hope is loathing the tone of high noon, the turn in mid stride that interrupts her pledge. The quality care and feeding still go to despair and strife, to terror and typhus.

And the republic gets back-burnered, time borrowed from, oh, food, basically. And the pursuit of the contents of Hope’s tremendous home. The love it would take to put the

Finish to this peak is more terrible than any in history, real or imagined or hoped.

Alan's froth

There is a housing bubble in the country and the realtors that make money off of high housing prices say there is not a bubble. The banks that are not making a lot of money off of the interest rates are afraid there might be a bubble, but they won’t bridle because six percent is six percent, and if the mortgages default there is real property attached. There is a lot more than money invested here.

A very small percent of the realtors are actually making sales in a tight housing market. Prices only go up when there is short supply. So there are a lot of realty people dreaming. And of course, housing ownership is a classic dream, which realtors and banks exploit for profit by allowing people to enter mortgage contracts they are unable to reasonably fulfill. And after that, dreaming of getting twice what you paid for a house would be a dream indeed!

And yes the banking corporations are dreaming that the numbers of the national averages will be convincing enough to the people and corporations in very populous areas that they won’t notice the local bubbles, Alan’s froth. Because in real estate investment, where the asset is as fixed as fixed can be, bubbles are only local, but the effect of the dream is national.

And there goes the American dream, sometimes awake and sometimes asleep, but always kept to the edges of awareness. Do not be fooled, do not be foolish, and always work hard… But don’t forget your dreams. Take a look, and sometimes you may not even really want what you dream about, not nightmares necessarily, but all the odd distortions of the sublimely unfocused mind can be truly ridiculous. And the way this focus works is that even the waking, practical mind is distorted when operating.

Is there any connection among the bank employees, the school taxes, the assessors, the commission rates, the resale value, reseller, and buyer? To view that there is not is either to dream or to reason tortuously.

Enzo outside of Deer Park

Enzo lopes down the streets and avenues, especially looking at the restaurants and delis, for future reference. Which he knows is amusing, in a way, his memory doesn’t work that like that. Nor does his evaluator: white linens with stemmed glassware are attractive, wood worked panel in the background is attractive. Enzo likes the turn of the century turn of the door step stone outside, and likes what it says about the chef’s abilities. He will recall all of this except the address.

If Enzo feels left out of something, there is the cosmos that is Manhattan to consider. So much to be excluded from! And so sumptuous a carte! The city, despite the past mayoral and cultural purges, is pornographic in its availability. Each bistro is a darkening passage to other, more exciting life. He could wear so many new watches, stride confidently in moss green huraches to the cool marble lobby of this and that condo.

And in the heating linen of a today’s work clothes, Enzo knows that it is flat dissatisfaction that brings him to this pitch of frustration. He’s lost himself in that fun house of windows that confuse. Each outlook is so like another in its desirability, and Enzo is so desperate in his craving for the new, he slams headlong into another clear panel of perspective. But what harm, to want the black leather purse with gold for his wife, to want to select the raciest, most red remote controlled cars for his children? Enzo also knows that it is not the objects, but the matrix of capability that is missing. The one that can buy a new watch and huraches can afford a house here and there, too. That one can move smoothly across the marble atria into metro-fusion cafes and dine without thought of tomorrow, a lily of an urbane and fashionable field.

Like so many of the New York stories which need the telling of need where there is no need, Enzo’s petty wrestling with desire would seem inconsequential if there were not an entire religion founded on his very dilemma. Enzo knows this, and knows too his self awareness is very nearly meaningless. There are others in Manhattan worse off in innumerable ways, this is plain. Yet, how can his empathy develop when he cannot clearly perceive that the endless fantasy built around him is unattainable? What does he care if others lack when he lacks so profoundly? This mind which Enzo assumes he owns holds desires that he knows are undesirable.

Enzo wants a hotdog with sautéed onions, and Enzo wants water. He wants to walk quickly and see the green median between the faces of the Park Avenue canyon. To watch again as the architectural ages meet in the sky and watch the surprise take place, which never fails, in Enzo’s mind. Enzo wonders today, if there is too much room in that mind.