20100122-99 (torch)

Torches burn bright as flares of unquenchable breath. A torch is a Deleuzian organ without a body, a superego organ that cries out with a more obedient mouth.

20100121-30 (crane)

The crane is a slippery slope, the bird in the machine, the upward lift of downward man, who is always trying to climb above the sands of infinite judgement.

20091227-20 (helicopter)

Because flight is the opposite of falling, downward flight is a contradiction in terms. Images of annunciation are exceptions, but a helicopter (I will show you fear in a handful of steel) is unlikely to be bearing grace.

20090924-27 (spiral)

Spirals begin with a brief summer, after which they strike out towards their widening claim to autumnal wholeness and wintry self-mastery. This is how a thinning spiral survives its own disappearance.

20091201-92 (engine)

An engine is a mechanical aphorism, chunky, self-referential, reflexive, processing familiarity in order to arrive at the unknown.

(clock)

Clocks are supposed to run, the same way planes are supposed to fly. A stopped clock, wound down, broken, incinerated, wounds time so profoundly, your continuing heartbeat sounds arrogant.

20091201-79 (lightbulb)

An electron dance in grey wind rolls down the street, spinning like a taxi. The filament princess throws up wiry arms and prays for circumlocution.

20091201-12 (staircase)

A staircase leads you to a landscape like the one it left behind. The very air resents this eternal return, and conspires to blow like sand into the eyes of the ascendant.javascript:void(0);

20091201-69 (dancer)

The body against ice, the body against snow, shutters out its tentacled arms and legs, searching wildly for tripod stability. We are lunar landers, still on earth

20091107-39 (Leonardo)

Once it was possible to know everything. My envy of Leonardo is so profound it comes out as hatred.

20091105-5 (bonsai)

Every time I see a Bonsai tree, I want to give it is freedom. Looking at a Bonsai'd tree is to feel you are looking at a real tree located at a great distance from you. Bonsai is about longing, not fulfillment. Every Bonsai beckons, but you can never go where it points.

20091026-179 (tree)

I think that I shall never see--with apologies to Joyce Kilmer and his poem "Trees" from 1914--a thing as windy as a tree. Trees are rooted to the spot ("A tree whose hungry mouth is prest," Kilmer continues, rather oddly, "Against the earth's sweet flowing breast") where we are doomed to endless perambulation. And they merely bend (like airplane wings), where we break.

20091105-14 (city)

The sunset blows back against the city until its heavy beauty curls like a bookpage in the rain. Everything doubles in the thickening light. The porous city is only weakly illuminated by the Lamp of Memory.

20091105-16 (bird)

Like abandoned children, we live as perpetual newcomers to order. A list is a closed circle, a barricaded museum where everything in the world is rumoured to exist, but where nothing can be found. I think I'm coming down with Dr. Derrida's Archive Fever.

20141017-53 (track)

The city makes tracks. They suture up rents in the wilderness, transforming the lifegiving tears and gashes of the past into the soft, easy chord you hear out the train window as the needle-drawn hydro lines lift and fall through the glassy sampler landscape.

20090917-51 (water)

There is late water in the city, water too weak to cleanse. It has a short, firework life in fountains, and then rests stoically in pools and ponds until moths and butterflies ladle it all away in the sun. They say the human body is 98% water. It's so easy to drown in yourself.

20091020-53 (tabletop)

The air is like wool. It rests on the tabletop city like a stack of felt on a grand piano. Shadows like shark fins carve the buildings into parings of grey light. My hands on the keyboard are so grimy it looks as if I'm wearing gloves.

20090924-50 (match)

Matches grow like mushrooms in the damp patches of the city. Excused from sunlight, they develop swelling, sulphurous heads that, when struck, will light their way to the iron strictures of full illumination (James Cowan, in his A Mapmaker's Dream, 1996, tells of a certain people, enemies of Genghis Khan, who lived underground because they could not bear the noise of the sun's rising).

20090909-90 (camera)

My camera takes pictures by itself. It is taller than any of its subjects (like a king) and steadfastly gazes down upon them. When I step up on tiptoe to turn its film-advancing crank, it releases a grind of music.

20091020-50 (paperclip)

This paperclip-trombone blows a rasping, focusless music into the sandpaper ballroom where my wife and I stand in a cocktail, pondering the mysteries of extension. A scintillating tautology from Henri Bergson shoulders its way manfully into my mind: "Living forms," wrote Bergson in Creative Evolution (1911), "are, by their very definition, forms that are able to live."

20090924-8 (cup)

The teacup goes flying like a coffin, lifting through rusty valleys of air, buoyed up by a stack of tender farewells as thick as taxes. Why do we care where it goes as long as it gets there? (for Gerald Ferguson).

20090917-111 (flower)

Here's a balm of flower, solitary in the city, face-up in the soapy, lavender light. Its petals are like buttocks, its throat a swallow of tears (its leaves were swinging doors, but we're past them now).

20090722-75 (car)

I bought a slick wedge of new car, and the first month it shrank to half its former size. During the second month, it shrank by ten times that amount. At the end of the third month, I drove it through the eye of a needle and left it there.

20090309-1 (zero)

Citizens in a queue, nothing (King Lear) will come of nothing--in cypherous procession. We are all vowels. Consonants have to be specially ordered.

20090217-21 (line)

The grassy coordinates of the city, grids and sighs. "A sinking pilot will fling out all things," says Carlyle. But one grasps at straws.

20090924-16 (leaf)

Two wan leaves--O the Sweethearts!!--enchanting one another with their capillary-fed narcissisms, touching, sharing a single straw.

20081108-82 (room)

A woman meets her crystal paramour in a shelterless, conical room, carefully pumped with moonless air.

20090704-38 (speaker)

A large fissure of sound has opened over the city. It is the butcher to the city's meat, a sharpened, syntactic trombone to the rasp of which the citizens dance their donations.

20090907-24 (LP)

Here are the liver spots of culture, pustules of old time. These are the holes in the black, toxic cheese that ol' Bull Burroughs used to think of as nourishment. Sure, they're still around.

20090923-8 (rhythm)

Before the city took me, I thought of wisdom as a state, a laborious attainment. Now, I see it as a rhythm.

20090923-4 (spiral)

"Is anything the matter?" "Well, just that our freedoms have come too suddenly: from leg-trap to train-track to phone cord to the smirking, reptilian coilings of circuitry."

20090819-50 (infinity)

A skidding infinity (benumbing round), a broken and leaky endlessness. Why do we ask of life more than our minds can give us? "Once more I slip my chains" (Matthew Arnold).

20090217-11 (up)

Digital reptiles on city streets--erectile, boneless--piped up from baskets of nothing, trying to find the sky in your eyes.

20081008-7 (water)

And always at my back I hear the city's vortex rushing near. Now I begin my ascent into the maelstrom.

20090302-31 (curtain)

Curtains calm us down. A curtain falls like sunset. It offers tenderness and mourning. "I must forget myself to have access to the other" (Emmanuel Levinas).

20090511-14 (morning)

This morning a dragonfly landed on a page of my open book, white-hot in the sun. I looked at it for so long it took the place of my own name, this translucent beating thing with its bleached humming in the air, this dragonfly-shaped space in the world.

20090812-31 (powerbook)

Ah, the graduating ceremony of the individual into the universal! It takes place one shard at a time, in slivers of porous space. It has to happen, and you have to let it.

20081223-74 (flower)

My dear Fulvia: As you are already well aware, I live entirely by the produce of my brains, and for a long time to come all idea of writing is out of the question. I hope you do not mind.

20090907-14 (lake)

You take the cup of the lake to your lips and drain it to its silence. After which draught, you can float back to the city on your small measure of water.

20081223-73 (eye)

The eye is a tunnel, a jelly of perpetual possibility through which you gaze as if into a crystal ball. I look, blankly like a lizard, but where do my duties begin?

20090819-54 (bird)

I try to dream up birds as balm, as salve against the grit of the moment. I get as far as their beaks, at which time they are scoured away by the wiry wind.

20090203-25 (clock)

Countdown city hours take care of themselves. It's the wanton, elusive minutes that turn and prick like needles. Every clock is a first a protest and then a defeat.

20090309-51 (wheel)

This is the unshelf of the servant city, the sifting wheel of civic organization, which is made up of speed-blurred octaves spinning roughly against a larger, sandpaper language. These are the weary rings of urban karma

20090704-24 (glasses)

I dropped my glasses in the city. They spent an eternity looking up. What once I was, no longer I'm. Nor will a second chance come (Pushkin/Nabokov).

20090203-20 (flag)

Fluttering flags are an extrapolation of the heart's leaping up in pride and gladness. Flags that drape or lie still are swimmers drowning.

20090302-49 (window)

Our buildings, mute as dentures. Our desire was for ladders to paradise, but the rungs and braces, piers and strappings, have grown spongy. If you climb, you fall.

20090416-31 (closed)

"...But the play of light and shadow, which is all a superior mind can see in the incoherence of the universe, is nonetheless, for me, the only spectacle in which a civilized man can interest himself without shame." Ling to A.D. in Andre Malraux, The Temptation of the West (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), p, 20.

20090409-26 (building)

Cities slip sideways in the disapproval of winds, beneath the hauteur of clouds. Buildings are falling all the time into their own coarse-grained streets--most often during unremarkable applications of twilight

20090814-73 (hold)

This is the only known photograph of the angle that infoms the city. It is made of shaved and blackened bone, and is held twelve meters above the ground in a cradle of compacted soot.

20090814-69 (touch)

City trees touch in the granular air high above the streets. Up there, away from the rumble, the old arboreal courtesies prevail.