Two-Part Inventions

ONE

The First Invention, ear laid to earth, is listening

to the fingerlength underground beings moving in segments

through tiny tunnels; one inch shrugs out another,

as bamboo climbs in segments, joint by green joint ...

Or an inexpressive mask that must travel

the world, uphill and down, always keeping its own

counsel, impelling  forward from inward—

unspelling a logic that cannot look out or see.

Or a thought that recurs, till one wonders

whether Bach’s theme, without cause, or pause,

is like a cat in a night-closet, the cat evenly leaping

from level to level; the theme that sinks down

into one hand, next leaps to the other, reprises itself,

then doubles down softly, a counterpane on a shelf.

SIX

Have you ever noticed, in Piranesi’s Carceri

d’invenzione, the tiny repeating figures in the foreground?

Brittle, frugal, fugal, they ignore that above them

stairways rise out of sight, and somewhere else

collapse, in-swallowed, devolving through walls or domes.

The same way Bach’s motive splays out to the right,

swoons flatly, swans it, footnotes, follows up,

talks to itself, purls, mutters, dawdles, resumes ...

Six is playing at infancy, one three five,

that’s all Baby knows, a block pile clumsily building.

Then the tall chord falls sideways—pretends

it’s a melody—everyone knows it’s a chord—

or a problem in long division which at one point just sticks

on that endless, that déjà vu decimal, six six six ...

ELEVEN

Eleven is caterpillars, two, marching: the one

stave of thick-barred sixteenth notes set down

precisely beneath the other, tiptoe to toetip,

close-clinging, rising and falling and mirrored:

one looks down and locks the other’s horns,

or its own; the two could be said to be linked

like the locked yet endlessly out-spiraling

spindled ribbons of DNA. Yet there’s something

scary, like Cicero’s dizzying concept

of motus animi, hurtling mind unstoppably inventing

figures on figures, yet with no vanishing point,

a world of ladders or stairwells

where space keeps revolving, welling up into space

endless, unfree, unfolding like stairs in a case.