First contact, i is for Imaginary, Cymbal eyes & Antimatter
by F J Bergmann
[ poetry - november 05 ]
First contact
We killed the mother and father, but we didn’t mean to.
The father grew frightened (we inadvertently used
the linguistic paradigms of the wrong subcontinent)
and when he began emitting projectiles from a device,
we overreacted. The mother was standing right behind him.
We insisted on making amends personally, once
the diplomatic formalities were concluded. The children
seemed to find our furrier bodies and higher-pitched voices
comforting. We did our best to serve as surrogate parents.
However, the local customs were quite confusing:
bedtime stories, rectal thermometers, vaccination records,
rollerblades, noogies, snow days, sex education, s’mores, track.
The sustenance we extruded from our posterior glands
went unappreciated, and was difficult to pack for school lunch.
We were very good at helping with math homework, though.
When the eldest qualified for a temporary driving permit,
we assumed that she would like to learn to operate
our transporter as well as the vehicles of her own culture.
This assumption was correct, as far as it went, and we think
they went a long way. We are thinking of it as a field trip.
It is sure to be a learning experience. They have maps.
i is for Imaginary
Other numbers may or may not be imaginary, but i is not real.
i peers over the windowsill of algebra;
i lurks around the corner, on the other side of the door,
just beyond the threshold of rationality, floating in the vast darkness
where a solid grounding in mathematics ought to be.
If i were just a linear segment, you could call i plane j,
but that is more complex, and who needs complications?
i can make itself useful.
i explains where the light goes when it’s gone.
But i is hard to grasp: you have to keep your eye on i.
i says that a positive attitude is irrelevant to negative feelings.
Don't count on i for a square deal;
i languishes in tipsy sinuosity while other numbers
with more integrity perform their everyday tasks.
i is easily misunderstood.
Cymbal eyes
Our wishes trickle endlessly through narrow-waisted days.
Sometimes at sunset, when the light gapes briefly open,
the mescaline skies swivel and now the constellations
of the Air Pump and Microscope reflect
in the dry interstices between clumps of black grass.
The giraffe house is in flames.
Pools of topaz light pour into the impotently
sulking shadows, stretching the limbic darknesses
of the patio furniture across the mown stripes
of the croquet lawn. The balls have all gone stray.
Surprise, surprise; the one that got away
rises above the rim of the peacock world
and scuds swiftly toward us over the heaving breasts
of the kingfisher sea, hissing under its breath
about what went wrong in the veiled interpretations
of a dream that is somehow vindictive,
where you know the shirt the headless
mannequin wears means endless water,
its buttoned skin brimming over with liquid
and no leafy place where a bird could ever land.
Water, sand, and alcohol; all the desolate places
where Hermes and Kickaha talk shop in slithering whispers
and the unkindness of man hallucinates his own celestial reward
in the cerebral praline of an imaginary tomorrow
borrowed from banned books.
Somewhere in the empty deserts of cyberspace
a magician juggles the lost moons of my rough drafts
like porcelain plates licked nearly clean,
spinning them out into the infinite West
of the inaccessible past to frighten the horses
and initiate the duplicities of sex
like two ships that crash in the night
and slowly turn belly-up to sink
through a distending slick into a dark sea,
taking their drunken captains with them.
Antimatter
it began as an idea
who knows how long it took to plan
before substance could mushroom from absence into the infinite
in one instant moment, the egg conceived laid fractured hatching
the pearly swarm emerges legs arms reaching out out outward
a luminous pudding spilling into the pool of blackness
the invisible surface now curving under mass
swirled by the unseen wind of gravity
all that there can be curdles into a scrim of far-flung strands
each particle wears a face
but in the rogue’s gallery of physics
mirrored in another somewhere on the other side of matter
the same car waits at the stopsign for the motorcycle
the same horse dreams under the apple trees.
