poetry

Textually Transmitted
by Ramil Digal Gulle

Words, wild, from a god’s
mouth: orphans taking to the sky.
Black wings, triangles and teeth
—raucous mass of bone and beak.

Verbiage and raptor, you who
open my chest in the night, who roost
in a dream’s bronchi, iron claw

and clutch of brain-stem. I awake
with a mouthful of feathers, an urge
for understanding.

What’s the difference? Waiting
for a bird or a word to point
the way? The nets of perception
nearly always break bodies
in flight, and each poem holds

The same weight as a sackful
of dead crows, dead-eye stares
climbing infinitely.

Jargon or javelin, all our
desserts are just to a man.
Laughter and sadness,

laughter and sadness command
a common price of time
and attention. One great goal
or grief keeps pushing you forward,

and not knowing one from another
is both choice and blessing.
As for me, if you ask of my whereabouts

by word’s end: I will say I have seen
the end of the word and it’s not
so bad. Text gives up its ghost gladly
at a thumbstroke. Vision pixelates in a

rush of strings and sequences, code
one-zero, on-off, life and almost-life,
algorhythm of truth: supermusic equation.

O computer! Little genie of light
and dark, sonics, motion and color:
when did we make you our hearth
and altar? What do you make of
our hair, our fuzzy logic?

When we root for mind or soul
like some sorcerer’s louse, some
magic outside mathematics, we
find something less than cloud—

artificial air of something mysterious
made boring, out of sight, a chill-factor
missing from the maps we download
from the Internet. Whatever the Devil

wanted from our magi of old, nobody’s
buying it anymore. If you can’t sell it—
whether it’s the soul, honesty,
or imagination—if no deal

is struck, it is of dubious importance.
How much are these words worth?
Which museum’s vault seals
the most human of artifacts?

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