Certiorari: Connectionist’s Path to Rainy Mountain

The way to Rainy Mountain is preeminently the history of an idea, man's idea of himself. . .

What remains is fragmentary: mythology, legend, lore, and hearsay—and of course the idea itself.

-N. Scott Momaday

1. A Billion Marriages in a Time of Desertification

Man of a billion marriages

abundant junctions

of distant endpoints

consummated, dissolved, archived

you are not childless

if to connect is to conceive

to list the numerable

& marvel at the less so

when a boiling-over pot of connections

proves the disparate only seems so

from effort’s lack

or memory lapse.

If you return often to a single image

-- an Alsike clover

or Birdsfoot trefoil trembling in the breeze

boot-flattened as mere crabgrass --

it is because you were planted here

to slow erosion

in a place of dwindling thirst

in a time of desertification.

.

2. The Idea Itself

The duty is a constructionist’s.

To reassemble fragments extruded

from something whole

by Hadrons of chaos

To see the picture in the picture

or disappearing frame,

cancer in the fetal cell

poisonous spider’s silk

To weigh love’s weightlessness

portent of its wanderlust ton

to see a hurricane’s ascent from Africa

as a long drought’s treacherous end

To collapse great distances

Wittgenstein to Verdi’s Requiem

to study disorientation deeply

to become lost in geologist canyons;

where some remind

or just rewind

you hypothesize revise

classify objectify

so as not to underestimate

the ornate

so as not to embellish

the naked.

3. Scenes from a Hitchcock Interpreter

Mint-green sky through the jacaranda

where he had planned to tell her she was beautiful

& that criminal justice reform could only be found

in screenplays of early Hitchcock . . .

Best ones don’t make it to screen

He remade her as odalisque

despite the dailies

to surface a dying Madame Curie’s ingénue

explaining all the while

it need not be your eye at the eyepiece

that canvas is after all

also for luggage, tarpaulins & sails.

That monasteries closed before they could be shot

foretold disappearance of the luminous

so that now it takes a certain Nordic

-- which is to say cold – sensibility;

when Orson Wells shared your kitchen

Mercury Theatre players crowded in your flat

turned hearsay & dramatic hesitation

into panoramas of unfilmed loss,

mourned poets playwrights

exquisite sex traders lost to AIDS

with your jeweler’s appreciation

for retrovirus guile.

4. A Fashion of Countersigns

Your cultivars of flora are countersigns --

upas groves & air-breathing water lilies --

a stern epicure’s Götterfunken!

marooned on a carnivorous planet,

your voiceovers

alternately declaim & murmur

a kaiyu-shiki of place character event

in which fiction slithers offstage.

To speak of riches on the path to Rainy Mountain

even if what is craved remains

folded & motionless beneath a central fissure

is the honorable certiorari you don

Orson’s clown tunic

or commoner cerement:

discernible fashion

in a sparkling sea of dispersion.

9 May 2012

for Brian