Читать книгу Sun Bear - Matthew Zapruder - Страница 11

How Do You Like the Underworld

The completely to me magical screen

sits in the middle of this black desk

I put together with such trouble,

following the instructions, muttering

its nonsensical Swedish name like a spell.

The screen is a dark window.

It can be made slowly light

by pushing a single button. It nobly rises,

a monument to a process begun

some years ago in a completely

dust free facility thousands of miles

from Oakland where the free sun

beats gently down on the heads

of my neighbors. I hear them

now for two sunlit moments pause

to converse as their dogs touch noses.

Meanwhile in the factory the workers

wear white dustproof suits.

The boss watches from a catwalk above.

To be troubled only abstractly

by the thought the thought in me

of those totally pure white clad

very real workers makes me

a kind of boss

though I wish I were not

is the ultimate white person problem.

To solve it I would like to ask

an ancient philosopher, preferably one in a cave.

But they are extinct. The humans

who are not robots at all

are right now robotically putting together

insanely precise atomic components

that make what we do go.

Thus I can watch and interact

with people I call followers or friends.

Or rather the words they have put together.

Down the screen they scroll.

It makes me so dizzy.

For a while I watched and thought

how interesting. Then sad

thinking animals. Without a thought

to make them close

I closed my eyes and saw

a monk reading a book in the garden.

The book was about music others

left for us long ago and departed.

What can you learn

from a book about music?

Some say to settle for winter.

But they have read way too much Rilke,

he is very dead, and his problems

though cosmic did not include

the round earth becoming hotter.

I heard somewhere in Africa

they have found a glittering valley

an asteroid crashed into millions of years ago

and filled with useful silicate.

The frustules i.e. shells of single cell

diatoms, make a white earth

you can pack into tiny packets

to keep things dry on their journeys

to our stores. I bought some

at Grand Lake Ace Hardware to combat

the tiny harmless ants that plagued me.

They plague me no more.

It’s time for the patriots to move forward.

Let’s go live now to that lake.

The smooth black totally ichthyic

divers plunge. To watch them

and wonder is like donning

the ceremonial oven mitts and trying

to grab a black coin in a darkened basement.

Beautiful pre-middle-aged people,

right now in the uncountable moments

interposed between us and lunch

together we sleepwalk

in the best interest of claws.

We have broken the future of thunder.

Is it interesting or sad? There is no difference.

All children’s books are now about death.