May 5—The Dow Closes Down 8410

By SUSAN BRIANTE

How did the fall begin? With touch? With naming? You were guidebook,
 misstep. You were hiking in Japan. You were thought, memory, dirt. You
 were the unmailed text. I found a letter from Charles Darwin in which h e
wrote of “pelargonium” (fr. the genus geranium) often blended with rose
scent. I read a poem by William Carlos Williams where he wrote of asphodel 
sweet as sleep undefined, under unmarked sky. I recorded numbers like a 
Kabbalist. I counted glimmers on waves, pines on the hill, tried to arrange 
this view from my desk. Numbers would nail me to the present, stave off 
death. You died and could not tell me what flower was made from your
body? While the Pacific lay down its dark syllables

so    hum

Susan Briante is the author of Pioneers in the Study of Motion, Utopia Minus, and the chapbook The Market Is a Parasite That Looks Like a Nest, part of an ongoing lyric investigation of the stock market.

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