"A huge microwave dish can detect signals
that are perhaps two million times weaker
than those detected by rabbit ears."
                       - Albert A. Harrison, After Contact

I.



           "Beam me down, Scotty."|
            What is this? New Jersey? Let's see what my name is. I'm white
            this time. I want the mind of the woman to be fascinated with
            everything white, dissatisfied with the limited availability of
            whiteness,and the diluted form it's in when you do find some.|

Silence. Yes, exactly. That's better. Now I have jettisoned my conscience
as well. That yammering in the ear. Now I'm exactly what the white-loving
woman's mind will be attracted to: skinless, without fuel, without remorse
or second thoughts. The instant her mind is tickled by my gravity, in it will
spiral, and good luck to her if she ever wants to leave! Scientists imagining
that the black hole's center is an infinitely dense point called the singularity
have of course let sentiment get the better of them. Its center is whiteness.

Will she sense that I once had almost unlimited power and opportunities?

That I stripped myself of all potential color in order to move near to her?

Oh, Lord, I can't wait for that moment! What feeling in the universe even
compares to it? The sudden, orgasmic collapse of the independent mind?

That one instant when she springs into nothingness and I flare up in glory
like a particle that reveals everything that it has hidden since Time began?

Here she is. At work. At lunch. Her pink tupperware tub in the food-zapper
revolves as slowly as the featured diamond diadem at a jewelry counter.
She's waiting for the beep. Nobody is wondering what she's got inside
that pretty little head of hers, except me. Her—our—coworkers don't really
notice her anymore. Has she gone out of her way to engage any of them
in conversation or flirting, or even business matters of mutual concern? No.

She has carefully cultivated her image as bland, pleasant, and competent.

The entire job is not much more than a crowbar or a plank of wood to her.

What is she using it to build? What else is she using to build it? I'm hungry.


Here we are again, but this time there's a pint of Häagen-Dazs rum raisin
revolving regally inside the microwave in the kitchen of the white-attracted
woman's small, prim condominium on Harrison Way. How many similarities
we have discovered when it comes to ice cream flavors, music, literature!

The term 'soul mates' is on both our tongues, but we must resist saying it.

As she chews the raisins in her first bite, she makes a decision to trust me
with things she has never trusted anyone with. This is what I've come for!

“Ever since I was a little girl,” she says, “I have wanted to capture the soul
of the sun, and I've devoted my entire life to figuring out the way to do it,
thinking that if I could somehow cup it in my hands, the incredible magic
of that moment would transform my whole life into an endless succession
of magical moments, things I wouldn't even be able to imagine until then.
Does that sound psycho or what, Josiah?” She says my name and I shiver.

“I always imagine the soul to be exactly the opposite of what you'd expect
it to be, a shriveled little black ball like a peppercorn that needed warming
and was utterly surprised to find that someone was willing to breathe on it
out of the goodness of their heart. Now, is that totally crackers, or what?”


I do love Häagen-Dazs rum raisin, but all the singer-songwriters, not really.

I do love my white-loving woman but can't stay at this job one day longer.

She says I have to get another job that's just as good before I can quit it.

I say, “What ever happened to that endless succession of magic moments
that were going to occur?” She says, “Those are in my life, silly, not yours.
I  captured you, remember? And didn't you get the thrill that you wanted?
Heck, our ice cream budget by itself is enough to break the fucking bank!”


When I get up every morning at dawn, look, it's not like I regret anything,
but I'd be lying if I said it turned out how I expected. My information from
the white streak, or how I interpreted it, was flawed. I did taste the thrill
that tempted me—tasted it more than once, in fact—but I didn't anticipate
this long, drawn-out aftermath. I thought love would blow me wide open in
a big bang of joyful communion, and maybe it did, but I didn't see how I'd
become unable to return home, how my new capacities would slowly sour.

“Quit bellyaching,” she says. “Kiss your wife and go to work like everyone
else. Were things a-thrill-a-minute before you met me? No. How many sex
tricks did you think I could invent? You're no Kama Sutra either, are you?
Once we finished falling in love, that stage was over. The rest is small talk.”

“How” I ask, “do we go from the two most fascinating souls in creation to
being humdrum? That's not a transition, it's just bait-and-switch. Now we
bend our noses to the long-marriage grindstone. Ice cream is not enough.”

“So go jerk off,” she says.



"Hello?  E.T. phone home? Josiah to sun? Josiah to sun, come in, please!"

"Dear," she says, "what I told you way-back-when about holding the soul
of the sun was just silly fantasy! I told  you that. My liking you had nothing
to do with where you came from or your being white. You were different."


I'm pretty sure she was the only one
in the van who didn't want her body.

I have one
word for u:
Jonestown

Nongqawuse




...........................................[there is no better way].......................................

“What were you even doing  in that van?” she shrieked.
“Or do I even have to ask? Why can't you act your age?
That's nothing but a rolling, drug-crazed lunatic asylum!
Josiah, this  is the world. There isn't any other  world.”

I look at her, and I look at my hands. Both too familiar.
I steal a glance down to her hands to see how familiar
they look, and I realize I'd never looked at them before
in quite the same way. They're like two little aliens alike
only in the sense that all tigers or blackbirds seem alike.
It made sense that her arms, quite different too, pulled
off that same kind of illusion; and her other paired parts.

A light dawned. She knew too much. She was too wise.
One of her avatars sat here with me at the kitchen table
but the others were off running wild and doing whatever
mice do when their cat is getting scolded in the kitchen.

I said, Show your other selves to me. I know you're there.
They say it's easier to revive roadkill than romance BUTwhat if?
What if the person we woo and marry is only a scout and not the same one
who is going to reward us and lead us to places we have never been before?
What if we have to immediately start searching for that other hidden person,
the one who buried herself in the minutiae of human life in order to find us,
great anglers who only can represent ourselves with one worm on one hook?
No way that one wriggling worm is going to sustain us on voyage to Xanadu!
WORM
Produce
YOUR. MASTER

She gets up and zaps two mugs of water to make us chamomile tea.
This is rumored to solve a lot of problems but has never solved one.
What it's good for, I suppose, is a sort of time out, a placebo helper.
In this case, it gives me a chance to observe her two shouderblades.

How easy marriage would be if we dealt with individual body parts
only as individual body parts. The human minds really are tumors—
suck up most the energy and attention, contributing mostly trouble.
If my hands could simply reach out to her shoulderblades to unlock
each one of their animal voices and all of their previous existences!
There's an imp in each of them, a jinn, a squirrel, a Chinese dragon.
But her mind wheels around and puts the kibosh back on everything.

“Look,” I say,  “I know
you're capable of
much more spirit
than you exhibit.”

“Exhibit spirit?”  she asks. “Do you think I've come to exhibit spirit?”

“What are you here for?” I whisper. She laughs. “You'd never get it
even if I trusted you enough to say. But I don't. Josiah, look at you.
You're many things but soul of discretion  simply isn't one of them.”

“So what part am I  supposed to play in this mission?”

“You're already playing it. And the minute that it's over, you will get
what you came here to get yourself. I promise you. But not just yet.”

“As soon as you're done using me, your mind is mine?”

She nods. She sets the teas in front of us, too hot to drink, and sits.
“Is that okay with you?” “If you'd let me help you, maybe...”
“Sweet of you.” She smiles. “But I'm afraid it doesn't work like that.”

You know, I was thoroughly briefed on human marriage. But zikes!
This is what drew me here in the first place, actually.

"Just drink your tea," she says. "I know you have all kinds of dreams.
Somewhere along the line, somebody told you life would be marvel
after marvel, and that I would be marvel after marvel, and I promise
I do my best, but that's just not the way I'm put together. I'm not
the one who swings from the chandeliers, or who paints Modiglianis.
It may not seem like I'm doing much at all but there are quite a few
strands that I'm holding together. I work hard and it's work I enjoy."

"W^he_re ^ar_e y^ou _fr^om_?"
I don't know. I can't say.

What else do you do besides ride herd on me?

You don't see?

I see you do  a lot of things, but not things worth devoting a whole self to.

You think riding herd on you is worth devoting a whole self to?

I don't know. I think you're  worth devoting a whole self to.

And all those other creepy critters in the van?

If I could crack your code, would I be crying on those losers' shoulders?

What if there is no code?

Turn around in the chair, your back to me. I'm going to take your blouse
and bra off now. Don't freak. No one can see in. I'll show you want I mean.

Josiah...!

It's okay. I'm only going to touch your shoulderblades.
.
My names are Wytham and Agynam,
home to the great tits that university
scholars come flocking westward to.
The birds themselves are a diversion
and our principle mission is planting
little ticks on ornithologists returning
to Oxford, and retrieving them, once
engorged on higher human learning.
All this intelligence is quietly pooled
in Farmoor Reservoir, evaporated as
needed, and utilized in our program
to breed humanish poets in captivity.
My role is to oversee that collection.

     Is any of this important? Who knows?
     It's one of myriad, odd potentialities
     that we maintain across the universe.

I live here in New Jersey for security
reasons. None of the Oxford literati's
origins would ever be suspected here.
It's imperative they seem homegrown.
Yes, I'm talking about Betjeman, Eliot,
Larkin, Arnold, Auden, Belloc, Donne,
Graves, Heaney, Hopkins, Housman,
Swinburne, Shelley, Lovelace, Sidney,
Ransom and Shelley. Have a candid,
close look and you'll see what I mean.
You can create a cento of their work
that contains pretty much the entire
history of our encampment on Earth.

Do you even know what's going on back here?

It itches, tell you that. Scratch a little bit harder?

That itch is where your wings were clipped. That's why
you can't get back, or remember where you came from.

You think you  do?

You think my memory is false? Some kind of plant?

It could be true, it could be false. What difference does it make?

Turn back around.

You're going to read my tits' minds now?

Your clavicles.

My clavicles.

They're like old Roman roads. The oldest bones. Do you remember
your pectoral fins? You aren't half as old as me, but you are  old.

So what's your theory? From my clavicles.

Your source world had a hand in planting life here. You're some kind
of monitor. Your source world isn't even in this universe. That's why
you're interested in me as well.

You don't know why I'm interested in you.

You want to clue me in? After 11 years?

Pass me my shirt.

You going to tell me something worth this view I have?
.
I'll tell you one more time. Pass me my shirt.

The first thing in the morning

a young woman came around
and we exchanged our pencil
nubs for new full-size pencils.
The mini ones, we all believe,
are donated to kindergartens.
It's the most depressing point
in the week, though, realizing
how much writing, how many
sharpenings, we'll be required
to perform before a little child
can receive a two-inch pencil.

I look at my wife sitting with
such good posture at her desk,
a new yellow pencil revolving
slowly in thoughtful fingertips
like a player piano. She seems
to be humming—mnemonics
dancing away almost gleefully,
Mongol Eberhard Faber #482.
I can see the information rise
toward the ceiling and vanish.
I have a new urge to follow it.

The atmosphere of this planet
is only her short term memory
and it has been too long since
anybody siphoned any of it off.
I can help her by doing exactly
what she asks, allowing myself
to be charred into a black husk
and placing myself in her palm
so she has something valuable
or at least curious to bring back
to her cruel Native Intelligence.

I stand up. The two new pencils
in my hand begin to growl as if
they were trained to protect me.
Two coworkers turn their heads
to take note of what's occurring.
One may compose a short story
and one will tell it all to his wife
over their nightly cup of chablis.
Every cog interlocks so perfectly
the Ode to Joy  barely manages
to keep its lid shut as I crumple.

and as the boss
gaped she took me
on the rollercoaster
of dark matter
into that region
where physicists
feared all the energy
in the universe
would drain away

but fear of course
does not do justice
to the hors d'oeuvres,
much less the entree,
much less a ganache
for dessert
that's good enough
to fuck physics
straight to Pluto

and anyone who
doesn't understand
the nature of life
can pull up a chair
and pick up a fork
and ladle on a dollop
of whipped cream
so dense it swears
it's never

even looked at
another woman.
this is where I'm from,
she said,
this is where
I've always wanted
to bring you.
rise up out of that
cramped cinder.

that, dear man,
is the power of love.

Don't you—at least, your shoulderblades—have jobs to do on earth?

They're still there in the 8th. The only difference is that you're  not.
You're in my world now, a world that lives off the exhaust  of yours.
In that sense, it's your future. Here, I'll introduce you to our native.

Oh, Jesus! Not another poet!
How many times did I tell you
we have more than enough?

You can never have more than enough. None of us would exist
without their jottings since the very beginning when beingness
first dueled with nothingness and hammered out a compromise.

Well, I just wish they'd duel
again and hammer out a deal
that doesn't include prattling.

His name's Josiah. I think you two have quite a bit in common.

Keep that up and you'll find
another one of your selves
pushing a pencil in Jersey City.

Suppose I was to tell you he's the sun?

The what?

You heard me right. This guy's the sun. I lured him to New Jersey,
now I've brought him here to you. The poet thing is just his hobby.

Why the fuck didn't you say so?

“Excuse me,” I say. “I'm here.”

He's quite a rackety little thing.

“I'm getting the feeling that I've sort of been film-noired. Is it true?
I've been seduced and hoodwinked into being imprisoned by Love?”

That's exactly  why I hate them.
If it's not love this, it's love that.
Little Being, supposedly a star,
this is major league astronomy
you are dealing with now. Love
has nothing at all to do with it.
Don't you remember anything
at all about your eons in astra?
Big fish? Small pond? Reality?

You know, I can't even comprehend HOW you created this.
The medium is the message, it causes me to stand back and give thanks that what will be
will be, and has nothing what so ever to do with me.   



   

Scott, thank you, you cracked me up. Next time I wade back in there, I'm gonna rustle you up a semicolon or two. Deal? Deal. Tom

ahhhh deaer Tom

this deserves more than one road and one read.

silent lotus

~

Thanks for looking in, SL. This is that vacation I've been putting off...! Tom

Some like it hot, Tom, and count me amongst them.

milner

You're a great sport as a reader, Milner. I appreciate it and wish I were moreso myself. Thanks, Tom


II.

Look, Sunny,
the responsibility of being
bright gold earrings
pinned to purple aster heads
proved much too much
for every butterfly but us!
You may not think of that
as holding up the firmament
but your whole concept of
a linchpin or a tipping point
is light-years off the mark.
You hoe your row
we hoe ours
and if we're fucking fortunate
we meet inside for soup
after the horses get their hay.
The zig-zag of the gnats
is what polices gravity.


She strolled past the glass
on a path about 20' away.
Then she walked back past
the grass about 8' away.
Then she passed by again
about 5” from the window.
That's when I saw we were
in two different dimensions
and returned to math class
with the joys of cotangents
and the asylum in triangles.

You have a particular image
of yourself as 4-dimensional
and bulky rather than pure
mathematics but there's no
difference. You are both. It
only matters when it's time
to migrate somewhere else.
Do you evolve as a physical
being evolves or do you use
a transcendental algorithm?
Two very different wagons.
That's how all of us who got
here got there, and all who
ended up in West New York
ended up in West New York.

The humans aren't going to buy
this Alice in Wonderland bullshit
for a minute.
                   They firmly believe
that a billion years of accidents
edited by natural selection have
accumulated
                   into consciousness.

That's where
you come in.
That's why I
lured you into
human form,
to do a Jesus
and tell them
the real truth.

And what good news exactly do you
want me to bring them? More math?

Open your eyes.
I'm right here.
Don't you see
what happened?
In the brief time
you spent living
with humans on
earth, you were
contaminated by
their love fallacy.
The intellect was
the Tempter, no?
You were curious.
Now you've been
betrayed and are
no longer curious.
You want to circle
wagons around a
status quo that is
not even realistic.

Why don't you let me
talk to you for half an hour?

Are you asking to
talk to the person
of your fantasy or
my being as it is?

The person of my fantasy. Very much so.

Sun, in resonant shattering
the star's crust only cracks
when its breaking strain is
exceeded by a direct tidal
ellipsoidal deformation as
quantified in the equation
based on the quadrupole
shape Love number of the
deformed body as well as
gravitational wave inspiral
timescale and chirp mass.

Tsang, Read, Hinderer, Piro & Bondaresc put it
a bit more cogently than that. I'm not illiterate.

You might
as well be.

`

The zig-zag of the gnats
is what polices
gravity.


Tom Riordan


~


dear Tom

what a delightful aphorism !

silent lotus

silent, thanks. I translated it from one of those two-page math equations! tom

When you claim
the speed of light in a vacuum is a physical constant
are you claiming
that gravity can't slow it, in and around a black hole?

Can't you recognize that gravity
is how the original Singularity
continues to express itself?


Pope Paul III had not miscalculated:
De revolutionibus orbium coelestium
was the first step toward alienation.
Canon Copernicus and his followers
convinced human beings to believe
mathematics over their own senses.
How must that have made you feel?
Suddenly so far away and so alone?

I want to sit and talk with her.

And she has other plans.

They hew the bounty
To rectangular strips
Red 300-pound filets

And parcel them out
Into six equal heaps
On the glistening ice

Pursue the bowhead's
Soul with knives from
Liver to eyeball to lips

And dance as steam
From boil-pots trails
It as far as it can go

Then condenses back
To wild twirling wisps
Of momentary snow

The butchered whale
Distributes thank-you
Gifts for several days

To every glad Inupiat
And then to wolf, gull
Hording crab, and fly

Before the bowhead's
Polar soul looks down
And howls, Go home!

Allow a mathematics
Of reductio ad prima
To offer you blubber!

Like sheer lined curtains stir
as if some spirit, sun-inspired,
moved between the layers,
so was everything perception
whispering about perception,
from which stood the voices
such as Moses heard emerge
from bushes, mountaintops,
and convoluted folds of tissue—
sulci, gyri—on his cerebrum.
This was the world where sex
stirs too, and the excitement
infiltrated every crevice like
that thin, unhurried, searching
breeze that puts its hands on
every surface that is not itself.
I understood that if I wished
to speak with her, I had to let
my own voice drift detached.


Listen to what
I can say now.
It's even more
than I could
emit as a star.


She  hears me
perfectly, clear
as that syllable
you tried to call
a cloudless sky.
She invited me
to enamel her
inner eardrum.

Let me tell you
what she's like,
deaf as you are
to all but a thin
band of hertz.
She asks you
to interest her.

I do, I do.
Tell her:
Here, let
me get us
two more
longnecks
of Corona.

I'm sure you're very cute and all
but I'm not really interested.
We seem to drink the same beer,
but if you believe we've something
else in common, that's pure fantasy.
I'm more a numbers girl, myself.
I don't like pickup lines or charm.

I fail to see the probability of harm
in sitting down and talking for a bit.
It's not like Mr. Wizard's tugging at
your sleeve to come and grapple with
the Generalized Continuum Hypothesis.

Mastodon and whale bones
planted upright in the earth
have said “Kilroy was here”
since I taught ragged packs
of humans to shape spears,
asking only memorialization
in return. Unlike those who
ate grubs and seeds, mine
fetishized every behemoth
and sang tales of a skygod
beside whom the bowhead
were a flea, and mammoth
the egg of a flea. I am who
weak-kneed ancestors only
had to see once: Leviathan.
I am who lent the smallest
fingerbone to be a woman's
rib in order to summon her
to my side and hear my will.
Do what she tells you to do.

No. You are so full of shit!
That is my rib in her chest.
I gave it to her, no strings
attached. Our fidelity is to
each other. You are huge,
it is true, but regardless of
whether or not you taught
mankind the skill to shape
projectiles, you are smoke
without fire, the voice of a
bully without the strength
to even raise his hands up.

Tuck your tall tale back
between your legs, trot
back to the place where
your kennelmates await
you, and deliver to them
the bad news. The bowl
on the floor is empty of
water and food, overrun
with slow ants, skittering
roaches and scruffy mice.
Our LEGOs are a big pail full of
anomalous cepheids, black dwarfs,
black holes, blue giants,
brown dwarfs, classical cepheids,
compact halo objects, dark matter,
dwarf cepheids, erratic pulsars,
gas giants, giant pulses, magnetars,
neutron stars, novas, nulling pulsars,
quasars, red dwarfs, red giants,
rotating radio transients,
strange stars, supernovas,
Swift J1644 nuclear radio transients,
white dwarfs, yellow dwarfs,
and all the assorted motes of grit
that cling to them and scatter
as they go through their motions.
You call us physics, mathematics,
omnipotent, omniscient, omnivorous,
but there's nothing plural or complex.
The whole is simpler than the number 1,
simpler than zero. It is the white sheet
of paper that gives 1 or 0's existence
its underpinning, its possible being.
The little stains you draw are not part
of the paper nor reveal its meaning.
Go on back to the one-horse town
you gave the gift of life and tell them
life crawls over what's important
like ants across a picnic blanket.    

WAY too much for this boy on one pass, but definitely worth coming back to and sliding between the layers.

Thanks for peeking in on my new "hobby," Rick. If lightning strikes, I'll let you know! Tom

Ahem .... I see math and science.

xo M

Oh shit.

LOL (I'm a bad influence apparently)

At least we're consenting adults. What gets me is when youngsters are forced into math against their will.

Enjoying.

milner

thanks, Milner. am hoping some kind of dramatically enlivening idea hits me one of these days...Tom

The gods we send come limping
back just whipped,  their tails
between their legs—astonished.
No one wants to hear they have
got to undergo a transformation
first, or nobody goes anywhere.

They think it's math
that has three heads.

Math education has fallen flat.
Students see a yawning gap
between numerical equations
and any fruitful undertakings.
The alchemists were zealous
disciples, no? Cold fusionists?
They tried, only it didn't work.
Gene Roddenberry's as close
as humans got, but Star Trek
was sol staged—and cheesily.
And don't say, “Oh, we've got
New Math that kids will grasp.”
Whose bright idea was that?
Kids aren't conned that easily!

As soon as math accomplishes
what people don't believe it can,
they call it by another name.
Who cries, “Math made a steel
behemoth climb into the sky!”?
“Math freed my lymph nodes
from their deathly demons!”?
“Math brings the light of day!”?
“Math breathed life into clay!”?
Math is the single tool we use.

That's what it is.

The noise you think is the noise
of a chainsaw is My voice.

The sight you think is the sight of
a squirrel in the leaves is My
avatar of a squirrel in the leaves.

You know nothing of Me because
you are  Me in ski pants.

My matter is pure mathematics.
All else is ripples on the pond
which resist the idea of returning.

I'd leave it, if I could,
but it's me, so I can't.
I suspect it's how far
everything's degraded
from sheer use.
The forms we made
originally shimmered;
when I behold them
now—the edges,
the relationships,
so indistinct—I have
to question, yes, if
there was imprecision
in the ur-equations.

Just send me back to
Earth with her.

Then it's agreed.

What did
I  agree?
All you do
is spit math
into thin air
and entice
flesh beings
to contend
with mists.
you're like
good humor
truck guys
who have
nothing left
to sell except
their frost.

Don't scoff
but imagine
how many
calculations
are involved
in shaping
every single
drop of rain
and every
bit of dust?
How many
algorithms
when they
commune?
We exhale
a thousand
times that
every hour
but it is still
more than
we want
to abandon.

Josiah, it's time
to come home.

Sparking in the microwave made enough noise to set the dogs barking, who we were watching for the neighbors during their big trip to Maui. The barking brought me downstairs, and there was Katie gazing out the glass of the front door at something, to judge by the awe on her face, that might well have been a miracle; but being who I am, I rushed over to turn the microwave off and give the dogs a dirty look before joining her at the door, by which time the spectacle out in the street had moved on. Her eyes were wet as she told me that a hawk had swooped down on a pigeon, tussled with it a little bit right there in the street in front of the Browns' house, then lifted it up to a perch at the top of the ash tree at the corner. “Why was the microwave doing that?” she asked, and I told her that I thought it was maybe the staples in her tea bags; if not, we might need a new microwave. She smiled and put one hand on the side of my shoulder as if I were the one who might need bucking up, and it felt so good, I thought that maybe she was right.

Wow. This is going to sound weird, but I loved just scrolling through this one.

Your timing was good, Jay, I just scrolled through it this afternoon myself and cut out about 300 dumb lines.
I appreciate your looking in and encouragement! Tom

Different meds can affect each one of us differently, but this doesn't read like any NyQuil buzz I've ever encountered. Hashish, perhaps? Mushrooms? ACID?

Do have fun Tom...just not too much too often.

Vivian

Vivian, thank you, LOL. Iif there can be so much psychedelia in a little peyote button, how much might be indigenous to our brain? Tom