Strange that this place doesn’t spook me out,

but it doesn’t:

working the night shift locked away

under government ground,

roaming the stacks in a library of numbers,

feeding and changing all the big

number crunchers:

fear would be a signal

coming over the horizon.
 


Sometimes I wander to the heart of the “black forest”

where a sage sits in silicon

with its head in an eastern desert.

You know you can’t beat a steam drill

with a single iron spike,

so you lay down your tools and wait.

 
 And the clouds are blowing by

 —because I can feel them blowing by—

If I could read, I would read them blowing by.
 


I know there is a language for the alphabet of weather.

I know that there are curves behind the numbers that I enter,

but you don’t get the vision of a raptor in the desert

without the hunger of a raptor.
 


There was a kid who worked here

who used to walk out in the hallways

and look at the postings on the doors:

bits of articles, cartoons and epigrams.

Dürer’s rhinoceros kept him coming back.

He said “I’ll never know how he could capture

such a likeness without ever laying eyes on one.”
 


I dreamed of a legless buffalo

as I nodded off for a moment

a couple of hours before the dawn;

I felt a piercing gaze lift me from my chair,

I felt the tail wag the dog.

Wait a minute now:

What resolution will turn a map to territory,

will melt spirit from the stones?

 
 And the clouds are blowing by

 —because I can feel them blowing by—

 If I could count I would count them blowing by.
 


There is no end to it.

My hands are busy, busy

ticking off seconds, seconds.

At dawn, when I roll down the mountain,

I don’t watch the road, I only look to the plains

where the sun appears at the head of a fleet of balloons

and I laugh, because it burns like a myth,

it howls like a bomb in the pit of my stomach

and I don’t know what’s coming.


 
 Take this hammer, bring it to my captain,

tell him I’m gone.