Cole Swensen

amid the growing craze for automatons The voice within the device that moves      is not (as if nothing human could be quite that moving) My precious edgling:though some believe the answers be given by a man concealed, these are speaking machines. They were risking their lives. Usually a woman or a child, who woke up inside the oracle, who swallowed the burning oil, and who forces the idols to speak? Though when the bishop Theophilus broke open the statues at Alexandria, he found them hollow it does not necessarily follow that The penalty for trickery was death. Such is the wealth of belief. Behind a finely painted sheet of shell a voice unlatched surrounds the world.

No, worry about nothing but the chiseling of hills into distance in the slight haze and sleep lost over color no two ever the same the wringing hands float ashore amazed. Worry about beauty. It can sell you anything. Lakes collect in the chambers of the heart where the sailboats are made of flying fish about the size of match heads. Sleep can be lost as easily as a house key, the shock can consume at any moment if the hills are not rising weather is wearing them down and you are driving north in the late afternoon or holding your eyes in your hands like addresses.

married a woman who was perfectly happy to turn half their apartment into a laboratory including the cadavers necessary to her husband’s explorations in surgery. He also wrote articles on the ears of birds and in Latin, an anatomist, standing motionless in the middle of the road thinking that electricity must activate the blood while the muscles, themselves living Leyden jars, flowered among those who found it difficult to believe that electricity is an animal lost in a garden of showering towers and, as with all living things, a certain degree of the domestic filtered down between his hands to land in a dusting of involuntary silver across the surface of every nerve.

noctes illustratas (the night has houses) and the shadow of the fabulous broken into handfuls—these can be placed at regular intervals, candles walking down the streets at times eclipsed by trees. Certain cells, it’s said, can generate light on their own. There are organisms that could fit on the head of a pin and light entire rooms. Throughout the Middle Ages, you could hire a man on any corner with a torch to light you home were lamps made of horn and from above a loom of moving flares, we watched Notre Dame seem small. Now the streets and stand still. By 1890, it took a pound of powdered magnesium to photograph a midnight ball. While as early as 50 BCE, riotous soldiers leaving a Roman bath sliced through the ropes that hung the lamps from tree to tree and aloft us this new and larger room Flambeaux the arboreal was the wife of Julius Caesar in whose streets in which a single step could be heard. We opened all our windows and looked out on a listening world laced here and there with points of light, Notre Dame of the Unfinished Sky, oil slicks burning on the river; someone down on the corner striking a match to read by. Some claim Paris was the first modern city to light its streets. The inhabitants were ordered in 1524 to place a taper in every window in the dark there were 912 streets walked into this arc until by stars makes steps sharp, you are and are not alone by public decree October 1558: the lanterns were similar to those used in mines: “Once we were kings” and down into the spiral of our riches still reign:falots or great vases of pitch lit at the crossroads —and thus were we followed through a city of thieves—which, but a few weeks later, were replaced by chandeliers. While others claim all London was alight by 1414. There it was worded: Out of every window, come a wrist with a lanthorn and were told hold it there and be on time and not before and watched below the faces lit, and watched the faces pass.         And turned back in (the face goes on) and watched the lights go out. Here the numbers are instructive: In the early 18th century, London hung some 15,000 lamps. And now we find (1786) they’ve turned to crystal, placed precisely, each its own distance, small in islands, large in the time it would take to run. And Venice started in 1687 with a bell upon the hearing of which, we all in unison exit, match in hand, and together strike them against an upper tooth and touch the tiny flame to anything, and when times get rough (crime up, etc.) all we have to do is throw oil out upon the canals to make the lighting uncommonly extensive. Sometimes we do it just to shock the rest of Europe, and at other times because we find it beautiful. Says Libanius Night differs us Without us noctes illustratas Though in time of public grief when the streets were left unlit, on we went, just dark marks in the markets and voices in the cafes, in the crowded squares, a single touch, the living, a lantern swinging above the door any time a child is born, be it Antioch, Syria, or Edessa— and then there were the festivals, the festum encaeniorum, and others in which they call idolatrous, these torches half a city wide be your houses.

If a garden is the world counted and found analogue in nature One does not become two by ever ending so the stairs must be uneven in number and not exceed thirteen without a pause of two paces’ width, which for instance, the golden section mitigates between abandon and an orchestra just behind those trees, gradations of green that take a stethoscope: we risk: Length over width to make the horizon run straight equals to make the pond an oval: Width over length minus the width in which descending circles curl into animals exact as a remainder. Which means excess. The meaning of the real always exceeds that of the ideal, said someone. He was speaking of Vaux-le-Vicomte, but it’s equally true of parking, or hunting, or wishing you could take it back. He who is Allen Weiss, actually said, “The meaning of a plastic or pictorial construct always surpasses the ideal meaning of that work.” Which is something else entirely. Said the axonometric divided by the anamorphic. There is nothing that controls our thoughts more than what we think we see, which we label “we.”

saw the magnet grow electric and the fixed points become a field in rural Denmark as the needle moved through various materials all the while remaining parallel: the usual: silver, zinc, lead, etc. and then tried needles of glass needles of shellac with all the west above while below, the east in winding spirals traveling three years across Europe, a good friend of Hans Christian Andersen and of aluminum, whose name points to its invisible lights within whose forces crossed and became his galvanic opus,The Soulin Nature, as well as various Italian newspapers — to eventually end up as a park in Copenhagen dominated by green, a lake, and shade in which a woman dressed in green sits reading to this day.

One Green moves through the tops of trees and grows lighter greens as it recedes, each of which includes a grey, and among the greys, or beyond them, waning finely into white, there is one white spot, absolute; it could be an egret or perhaps a crane at the edge of the water where it meets a strip of sand. Two There is a single, almost dazzling white spot of a white house out loud against the fields, and the forest in lines receding, rises, and then planes. Color, in pieces or entire; its presence veneers over want; in all its moving parts, it could be something else half-hidden by trees. Conservatory, gloriette, gazebo, or bandshell, a door ajar on the top floor. Three The trees are half air. They fissure the sky; you could count the leaves, pare time defined as that which, no matter how barely, exceeds what the eye could grasp in a glance; intricate woods opening out before a body of water edged with a swatch of meadow where someone has hung a bright white sheet out in the sun to dry. Four A white bird in a green forest is a danger to itself. Stands out. Shines. Builds up inside. Like it’s dangerous to cry while driving or to talk to strangers or to stare at the sun and a thousand other things we’ve always heard people who wear white see better at night, though they gradually lose this trait as they age. Five The air across the valley is slightly hazy though thinning though patches remain between the groves of trees that edge a clearing in which stands a single house. A child in a white t-shirt has just walked out of the house and is turning to walk down to the lake.

Hand me this hand The sail is bent The trail is sold and the wind tied in knots Answer the phone The tune is left The stones uncoil in a wide-angle lens A search for clues encounters bliss A lip on the edge of the flowering dark A shell falls with hail Hidden and hides The following sky The descending kiss.

electrically rowed Rousseau from a wide green meadow into his brain along with Buffon and Diderot and the entire Enlightenment embroidered in fractions, thus confusing poetry and mathematics. He stood back and declared: An umbrella could envelope a good part of the village of Poleymieux en route to reviving the library and why did my wife die so young? Wrote out the psalms on his palm in the electrodynamic molecules of his time which he carried next to his heart in a heart-shaped box obsessed by Ørsted’s magnetized needle, leaping full-grown and fully armed into the periodic table. Noble metals isolated and at war put each order in order and was the first to define electric current as a circulation gazing out over the Mediterranean until it dies.