Late Empire. Lisa Olstein
like a dog’s run in sleep
through made-up meadows.
Every breath borrowed, every breath
owed. We’ve been going about it
the wrong way: kissing with our mouths
full of rings, trying to read the future
in the prism cut of snow. No amount
of calling means someone’s there
not answering on the other end of the line.
No amount of belief or disbelief keeps
the plane from falling from the sky.
All around the world we light up
like stars, like searchlights, like
the map of the earth we actually are.
We talk about talking: this sensor
to that satellite, a ping, a blip,
an uneventful goodnight. We think
about thinking: how distances are
calculated, how long the mind
of a machine might hum. Malaysia
then is everywhere tonight’s meadow
of sleep or no sleep, of dark waves
cradling dreams of flying. Tonight
we are all Malaysia Airlines
as we like to say, as we have learned
to say, as it somehow comforts us
to say. Tonight, this week, for as long as
we can bear it or until something
pulls us away we are all one hundred
and fifty-three Chinese nationals and
six Australians and three
Americans—and it doesn’t feel to us,
and we are very rational girlfriends
who also happen to be scientists,
that they’re gone—and twenty men
who worked for a weapons manufacturer
and the Defense Minister who is also
acting Prime Minister and the mainland
army night watchmen dozing in front of
their radar screens. We are all kissing
something dark tonight, in the dark
tonight, with our words or no words
but we are going about it the wrong way.
WHAT WE’RE TRYING TO DO IS CREATE A COMMUNITY OF DREAMERS
Horses, airplanes, red cars,
running. The Japanese sleep
less but do they dream less?
What do women in Stockholm
dream about in wintertime?
Show me every car dream.
Show me every car dream
in Moscow. Show me every
red-car dream that involved
men living in Las Vegas.
Compare that to Tokyo or Paris.
Do famous people dream
differently? If you have
more money in the bank?
Can we run an algorithm,
can we quantify, can we teach
that? The distance widens
and narrows, sometimes
a grapefruit, sometimes
a beach ball. Invisible data.
They say Einstein came up
with relativity in a dream.
What if you could go back
and find it?
WE LOOK FORWARD TO SEEING YOU AGAIN SOON
Maestro, meet me in the dark.
The truth is we prefer it this way,
stumble-gay and keening, I mean
preening, like the black-tongued
parrots on permanent display.
Herman the Giant German
Rabbit suffers exactly one fool
per day, the smiling silver one
bringing him food on a scuffed
aluminum tray. Past a certain age,
you don’t ask a woman how she does
her hair no matter how elaborate
the braid. Straight queens and dry
drunks, fellow former future kings,
the gerbils of Kazakhstan—desert
rats, in point of fact—have something
to tell us about death riding shotgun
in our subway cars. Life is always
left-handed. Sleeping bees are
immobile bees whose bodies and legs
hang in the direction of gravity.
Lucky ones who find homes,
don’t expect the left-behind to
thank you for remembering.
IT ALL LIGHTS UP
It’s hard to feel spry in any room
they’ve pushed you in or out of
as if the walls remember the wheels,
their muted whine, and your own
whimpering cries as rosy-fingered dawn
licked you clean with her rough tongue.
We’re all going to die, you’ve heard
a thousand times from your own
mother’s mouth. You never believed her,
how could you, she invented life,
but then one day stuck in traffic
you catch yourself muttering the line
and it sticks and every stupid argument
comes back to you stupider still
and your petty feelings about the special
Employee of the Month parking space
and all those nights you settled
for takeout and a blindfold. Here
at the university, the corridors are
labeled Corridor. The visualization
laboratory is dark. Inside, scanning for
shark-shaped shadows, the surfer knows
to borrow the seal’s suit is to borrow
its nightmares, too. Maybe today
species are outdated modes of technology,
and this is why we give them up
so easily. Sometimes there’s a glitch
in