Forbidden Knowledge (4)

GOOGLE, PLEX


I.

I’ve found much in this
Well out on the Web’s
sprawled spoor, and the
search engine Google
has led me there -- its
algorhythms have an
arch nose for dowsing
out skulls & hulls &
divers low ruins,
old hollows which bell
my hallooing voice.
As engines go, this one
has some mighty hooves.
The name Google itself
resounds, sending me
back into the Sixties
when I was first heard
it’s homophones. My
seventh grade math
teacher told us of
the discovery of the
biggest numbers next
to infinity: Googol, one
with 100 zeroes (ten
to the hundredth factor);
and Googolplex, one with
a googol zeroes (10 to
the ten to the hundredth
They were apt numerals
of that age, moog in name,
op-operatic in their reach,
way out there in space
and somehow wildly more:
both Apollo on the moon
and some supercock-
shaped ship approaching
Jupiter in “2001:
A Space Odyssey.”
Hyper- and preter-real,
they purpled and
splooshed my own
possibilities, a kid
nearing puberty in
a rebellious, daring,
dangerous age. Googol,
googolplex: Wendy
Carlos in the spheres,
lysergic zeroes plushing
up a far-fetching rear.


II.

Those numbers also
mined a rhythm which
already sawed down me,
suggesting doors which
opened into rooms
infinitely deeper than
what chattered on the
surface of my
12-year-old day:
Solitude and savage
loneliness, sweet desire
and the maw of sex,
mod and modernity’s
overripened, poppy
crush. Googol, googolplex.
I could grasp the size
of that vault of vaulting
zeroes whenever I tried
to guess how close I
got to girls, moments
which only made them
seem infinitely far from
what my heart desired.
Ingress, egress, mons,
moon: My fantasies of
kisses and clenches
inflamed those middle
school years into an
impossible yearning,
a hundred times a hundred
swoons each time a girl
looked away. Hopelessness,
I found, was just the
a dark mirror-face of
love, equal in absolute
measure to that first
kiss I dreamed of growing
on an orange tree far South.


III.

Googol, googolplex
-- a mad echo there:
I began to have strange
spells in that Math class,
the day’s integers
fizzing like an Alka-Seltzer
into the image of a salesman
on TV talking over and
over about a washing machine.
The banality of the spell
had a vicious doppler to it,
banging wall to surreal
wall of real; I felt a vertigo
which hyped to panic
when it felt that I was
stuck forever in that
lousy commercial. But
each time I just washed
ashore dazed and strange,
cowled with a bad
headache. It was a whiff
of my underworld’s sick
breath, enough hell for
me back then. In
later years the spells
would bloom through
booze and speed into real
blackout toffs, swirling
me down through that
sucking door far below
strapped to a bier
of rigid, black bone.

IV.

Googol, googolplex.
The numbers crunched
their infinities the other
way, too, for the time
was awful and yet
awfully sweet. My
parents separated,
moving us into a smaller
house: and though the
tears leaked from every
room, its was also that
magic time when some
dark flower opened its
O-mouth to me, pelting
me with such sweetness
that each night my hand
dowsed down under the sheets
to rouse a white heat
until it flooded out the dark.
I’d fall asleep on some
oceanic curve, my heart’s
hammers slowing to drowse,
the surf collapsing round
me in an insatiable ebb.
Googol, googol-plex: the
sumless summation always
left me wanting more, my
thirst eternal, the cup
an ocean’s shore.

V.

Somewhere back
then I was given a paper
calculating machine
called a hexa-flex: a
hexagon with two visible
and four invisible faces.
You inserted the thumb
and two fingers
of each hand, asked of
the device a sum,
then folded and flexed
the paper mouth
some number of times,
peeling back a flap
to reveal always
the right answer. I
never thought much
about how it worked;
instead I just let the
magic do its thing,
sawing this way, then
that, to the truth. Hex,
flex, googol, plex.
The mouths formed
zeroes which stretched
toward the infinity of
space, almost as far as
I yearned. Out, back,
in, down: When I was
six and first discovering
girls I drew a house with
rooms filled with crossed
O’s in two sizes -- cunts
and butts -- I must have
been storing up the ones
I’d seen when playing
that child’s revealing game
of “show me yours & I’ll
show you mine,” out in
the woods outside first
grade during recess. I never
finished the drawing -- shame
or some other thrill
drew me on -- (monsters,
I think). Anyway, the
rooms were left half-full,
the page buried in some
secret place I forgot for
many years. Hex, flex,
the room was there and
gone, part of the sum
which tallied me on
those strange, dark years,
its treasures uncounted,
its vault a bell both
womb and cell.

VI.

Googol. Googolplex.
Such big numbers arch
toward a distant shore
they’ll quite reach,
like a well that lathes abyss.
Newer ones will come
tomorrow -- and the next --
but the hex-flex motion will
never change. These days
I gambol out on Google’s
interface, finding rooms
I filled up long ago. I use
what I find out there in here,
filling one well by digging
up another. This motion
was minted in me long ago
-- to see, to show -- sawing
between the sweet and its
dark-sweeter hole, hoarding
my visions in that oak room
which has no floor, though
deeper down I suspect
there’s a door where God lets
all the zeroes go. Googol,
googol-plex, this is today’s
sum; tomorrow there will be
some other. Looking out on
this morning’s paling
wash of dew-fresh green,
I want this calculus
of rooms to last forever.
Is there an end which does
not fold and flex like a
lover’s pagelike limbs?
As metaphor is simile,
a mouth which opens
both ways ladles up the
richest flow. Regale, perplex:
A googol wells out there
sum this complex hole,
crossing all my O’s,
enriching the toll.


MY MAP OF YOUR
UNKNOWABLE WORLDS

This is the sacred, sacred
cartography, the lactile
courses on the blue which
route my ache to you.
There is the room
in Pittsburgh in which I
stood looking out the
window at pretty girls
passing by; here is
the beach at Cape Cod
where I first sang
the big music
of the growing wave.
There is the
great wilderness just
outside Rahway New
Jersey where at 3
I wandered off with
Paula to look for
worms, ending up somewhere
at Jacksonville Beach
where my mother’s voice
fell into the sea’s
and scattered me here.
Here is the motorbike
in front of someone’s
house in Winter Haven
where I felt a girl-
woman’s breasts the
first time beneath
a wilding moon
and there is the bench
by Lake Michigan
where I wrote my
first love poems
in the mash of wind
and wintry waters.
Here is the room
in Spokane Washington
in which I darkened
and folded and wrote
down all the words
which lined the hole
my God departed through.
Over there is the bridge
over the Spokane River
in early April where
I found all the verbs
like wings lifting and
diving around my
first love’s first gentle
oh so genital and
primordial kiss. There
are the eight months
which passed into
the iciest sidewalks
in the world which
I walked home upon
after the bars had closed
and I had failed to
find the next woman
to shrine you yet
again. There is
Playlinda Beach
which that icewhale
shat me out on
two years later
where I walked so in
love with your name
I almost forgot to
curse the surf for
being so wildly
and eternally empty of
you yet again. The
sound of that surf
hangs in the whirl
of disco lights
at 4 a.m. in bottle
clubs I ravened
with the other wolves
of blue, and there
is the door which
opened into a
drunk tank’s greeny
washed up phosphor,
the Ultima Thule
of my bottomless thirst,
my island on the whale
who drank the world
to find the thrill of
you again. There
are the songbooks
on the shelf in my
study which for
years now I have
filled, day after day,
which my faith
in you; here is my
white writing, wave-
riding chair, like
the ghost marker of a
lost well leading
down to every
bed in salt hell.
Here is true north
stamped in a corner
of the page pointing
directly at you
without compass
or rudder or dogma
or shoes; worthless
except when you
fold the whole map
in a boat, set a lit
match to its bridge,
and to sing of
a frail candle's voyage
out where the high
ocean devours all
in its glittering
mouth of deep blue.
And on days when
I’ve travelled furthest
from you -- when all
seems so grim and sad
and riven and fallen
in the brightest abysm
of the whale -- I pull
my map of your
unknown world from
my breast pocket
and unfold it in my lap,
remembering just where
I am, a mile offshore
St. Brendan’s fabled isles
with you just as close
by and the sea thrashing
inside my two-dimensional
gaze, a heart inside the
heart of crashing
blue pages too wild
to be real, too gorgeous
to resist, thrilled with
the sail’s snap in the
breeze as my hand
trawls down the page,
my pen everywhere
the salt angels
swoon and plunge and range.


THE SECRET
OF WITCHCRAFT

May 2005

Yesterday the sun broke open
the cloud-lock at last, streaming
westward brilliant and hot,
raking my back with its bright
nails as I moved grass that had
grown six inches in a week.
Inside my wife was slack on
the couch with a sick headache,
mauled perhaps by the same
hammers that lifted my spirits so.
Something unaccountable was in
those hours of savage sunnery,
every leaf and tendril was erect,
five days of drench lifting in
one communal sigh. If you
were inside me pushing that
growling mower down and back
the lanes of ferally long grass,
you too would have entered
the hearts of those sun dancers
of old who thrust skyward
bronze daggers dripping blood;
you too would have felt the wild
augment of the sun’s breath
baiting and cauling the
entire sunward procession.
Rains came late in the afternoon
and how, massive muthahs
spitting bolts that rumbled
for miles (one just outside
our door as I ironed shirts,
jolting my wife and I three
inches into the air); and then
the rains, a downpour which
lasted for hours, on through
our dinner and throughout the
movie we watched on video,
curtaining the dusk-darkening
yard as I fed the Blue and Red and
Mamacita on the back porch,
droning on the roof as my wife
and I curled together in bed,
kissed once, and swooned down.
O the incessance of it, earth-waters
remitted without surcease by
the pent sky, every wet prayer
sent to the sun earlier in the
day returned in this soak.
At 3:30 a.m. what remains
is a dazed sauciness, dark verdure
bent over by the wieght
of its wet lover, the swoon
palpably lush, like a beloved
utterly sated and spent,
dreaming her wild lover’s
return the next day more
brilliant and urgent
than ever. Thus we thrall
into the rainy season.
No wonder accused witches
smiled at their trials. No matter
what the priests tried to condemn
and damn and dispatch with
their scriptures and vats
and piles of burning logs,
nothing could force
those women back from such
a sweet dark, the God of
the priests being nothing
but every house locked and
shuttered at night. I can’t
speak for burnt witches really
but I have a song for black fire,
a psalm for this drenched
and delighted dark hour.
Last night I dreamed of
staying for three days with
a young Frenchwoman in the
apartment she shared with a
strange married couple (a
pairing of distaff orients,
like Hindu and Chinese).
Our attraction and dance
towards each other was abetted
by all the words we did not
share, or our trust that
the sameness was there in them,
like reflections of moonlight
on black water. Each sentence
we carved out together was
the next end to two stories
eager to kiss only one.
There was a sureness to it,
the inexorable tug which
hauls all waves to shore,
a hidden moon at work.
My wife sleeps soundly
upstairs and the garden
muse is combing her
wet red hair, sighing and
smiling in the old faith
of the next rainy season,
the next downpour I here dare.