G i l a d J a f f e —

Body of Knowledge; or, If the Ventriloquist Is the Archaeologist, the Dummy Is the Mummy

         An amateur ventriloquist,

I throw my voice to you.

In the interval between—

the limit is in it—

I’ll tell you what I learned,

just the way it was shaped:

         A puppet devoid of tone,

a fear of mine, once

said to me: “I’m much more

interested in what that

baby has to say. After all

she’s the one holding a knife.”

         Consider the point

of line-line intersection

in a vacuum. X-ing

out, a way of weaving seer

with seen. What’s

happening could be altered

         more immediately.

         So I took to looking

around myself a little.

No more angry minutes.

“Mommy, it’s a mummy!”

yells a kid in a black cape,

scouring the wall-to-

         wall-carpeted sarcophagus

room. Gilded coffins

of the Third Intermediate

Period have an inner wooden

coffin, but no one here

will tell me why. Pressing my nose

         against the glass,

I should plunder back my face

from a circle of gold

thieves—if history is only when

you weren’t, go in it—

but the sand is a crowded muscle.

Come to Life

It would take too long to yell

what revolves

around its absence.

The fire you see has no volume,

a minus in tune

with & shutting over nothing.

The animal

advances with its destination.

The fish the bird let go

comes to place

more trust in the suddenness of water,

happy stasis

in things, among other things.

I have to tell you

that lately I’ve been losing my command

of arithmetic,

blood relatives & warm winter recipes.

I want to make

connections but people can’t make connections.

This is why I lied

to you & said I was a fish.

I was a fish & I am

sorry. But now I am a boat.

A dinghy

in the undark country

at the shorelines of your thinking voice.

Polka

I forgot for a moment the memory in my hands

& I forgot it with mastery.

Which is why I ate an animal last night

behind the chemical toilets

at the utopian community visitor center.

The pouncing blue muscle

in a tuba player’s eyes

doubles or divides.

I straggled back

inside the barkless wood,

into the wreckage of the dance, for a friend.

When things go where they’re supposed to go, they vanish. Ta-da.

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