Nebraska
Nebraska does not exist. Nebraska is a word. The real Nebraska is
a shellfish, a theorem logical as dirt. Creosote & billboards, the
ferocious history of a scar.
This is a pronoun prong. I glance down to see Katherine Bates &
Jennifer Jason Leigh brooding, minatory, haunted. But what is it
to be a poet? The memory of a hawk, a jaguar's shadow.
A centrifuge is a machine, meaning or content, the spin of a star,
the spin of a sun, the spin of a world, the turn of a page,
different densities of blood.
An eye haunts this language like a ruby, a night of rubies. Onyx &
owls, sonnets & gloves. Fonts of a pool of meaning, shine of a
parchment moon.
Daylight is a public voltage. Men in yellow slickers crawling in &
out of the ground, backhoes on either side, thick metal plates,
chunks of asphalt, a middleaged woman waiting to get on the bus,
Derrida's essay on Benveniste under my arm, the feeling of space
as public & intimate as a bone, the taste of fish, loquat, blood
in the wrist.
The wiggle & sway of worms a mile & a half below the ocean's
surface. Styrofoam packing in a box in the rain on a Sunday in
April. The smell of jasmine from a motel garden. Paul Newman
smiling & applauding as Tom Hanks receives his second Oscar.
Red rake in a blue lake. The grammar of roots, the genius of
leaves. A man in the underground in a wheelchair powered by a
giant battery, a tangle of wheels & gears, his hands stuck out
like a scarecrow, palms flush, fingers splayed, hands & arms
wobbling like lightly bumped rubber, going in circles, spirals,
backing up, going forward, doing figure eights, then resting
momentarily to indulge a gaze at the others, a wonian stretching a
leg, a man examining a watch.
The seven shuttle astronauts watched in delight 470 miles away as
the rescued satellite was rocketed into high orbit.
Near the limits of the outer heliosphere lies an abrupt
discontinuity at which a myriad of intriguing physical phenomena
are thought likely to occur. "Thus language has of necessity
recourse to indirection, to substitution: itself a substitute, it
must replace that empty center of content with something else."
But is a sign a stick? "Nay, I shall ne'er be ware of mine own wit
till I break my shins against it."
It is the seam of a cellar door. Oraibi, oolite, orchid. Buttons
on a jukebox. A tome on tops.
Copyright © John Olson 1995
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