☀ Today's Poem: "Silence and Residue of Waters" Troy Jollimore

1

To take seriously the proposition that disappearance is the normal
order of things.

2

Gene and I decided to go to the movies. Gene had a rough time
around people because of how his face worked. When he was sad his
face registered joy. When he liked someone his face registered fear. But
he liked watching movies, where he could see but not be seen. But
when we got to what we thought was the right address we found that
the movie theater had been replaced by a baseball stadium which had
in turn been replaced by a labyrinthine complex of self-storage rental
units. And the city itself, the beautiful city that used to surround the
movie theater, had been replaced by a military research facility which
had in turn been replaced by desert. It was too late to go home, and
fortunately there were a few other people there as confused as we were,
who let us join their camp and shared their water with us while we
considered what to do next.

3

Silence and residue of waters, radio waves, ungrounded ground.
At the end of the ceremony nothing had been bought, but so much,
so much had been sold.

4

To wake up in the middle of a dream without the dream
ending, to wonder how this could be unless it were someone
else's dream, or not a dream at all, but rather
a pageant of sorts, a gratuitous gift. Love is theater,
she said, and you thought this was nothing, just a standard
part of the seduction, but later, in the room you borrowed
to make love to her, you felt, dimly, the presence
of an audience, and then you noticed that the actor
assigned to play her part had been switched
with another.

5

And then the corporation announced that it was about to initiate a
new program called Amazon Preemptive Delivery, in which as soon as
you mentioned or even thought about a product a drone would be
dispatched to deliver it to you, and the charges automatically deducted
from your account. Average delivery time would be two and a half
minutes, meaning that your bright new purchase would often have
arrived before you were even aware that you wanted it.

6

The man who made the announcement was wearing an Italian
suit that fit his body the way a field of wildflowers
fits a hillside meadow and would respond to objections
from various members of the assembly
by sighing and saying to the ceiling, "There are always,
in every era, those whose primary desire
is to impede the path of progress."

7

A thing on a stage is perceived by so many eyes at once
it can practically disappear beneath the weight of all that seeing.

8

Which explains, perhaps, the dream of being actor.

9

No fact of the matter, in our view, as to whether
an attraction existed that brought these two figures into orbit
around each other or some bored divinity
had decided to manipulate the game, the flow
of things, merely self-entertaining with the nearest-
to-hand playthings he could manage to find,
which happened, on this occasion, to be human.
At any rate, their habit was to meet at noon
in the lobby of the Prudential Building. And what
is a building, after all, but a larger, more durable
set of clothes that many people can wear
all at once? And what is a smile, but a way
of speaking without speaking? And what is lovemaking
but a way of saying to one's surroundings,
I, too, belong among the items that have been placed here?

10

Silence and residue of waters, radio waves, ungrounded ground.
At the end of the ceremony nothing had changed hands, but our
hands had been somehow changed.
It was our hands themselves that confronted us now, fresh-born,
unrecognized, strange.