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Anne-Adele Wight
BLAZEVOX[BOOKS]
Buffalo, New York
An Internet of Containment
by Anne-Adele Wight
Copyright © 2018
First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-60964-329-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018952728
BlazeVOX [books]
131 Euclid Ave
Kenmore, NY 14217
Editor@blazevox.org
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My intention is to tell of bodies changed
To different forms; the gods, who made the changes,
Will help me——or I hope so——with a poem
——Ovid, trans. by Rolfe Humphries
Container Meditation
A bowl: generally understood as concave and reasonably sound. But if the bowl is
broken? Is it still a bowl? What if the bowl has been repaired but can’t hold anything?
What if the bowl has been repaired with gold instead of glue?
Suppose the bowl has been restored with synthetic resin, repainted, and displayed in a
museum. It becomes treasure, its temperature and humidity controlled, even though it
was once pulled from hot sand or scraped out of cold clay.
Its display case is also a container. The museum contains the display case. And so on,
fractally.
Suppose this: a colony of bowls overturned in a desert. All intact, suddenly convex
through being overturned. If something is hiding under one of the bowls, does the bowl
contain it?
If the object can move from under one bowl to under another? Containment becomes
random, a game of chance.
Suppose the container isn’t a bowl, but a cylinder flung into space? Inhabited?
What if the container is neither bowl nor cylinder, but a sad bone mesh encasing a soft
body?
What if the container is a waterborne Trojan horse? All containers remember water; all
water evaporates in air. Teacup, valve, atmosphere.
When all the sand in the world fuses to glass, is there still such a thing as a glass of water?
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I
Innocence like a Sewing Machine
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Reasons for Leaving Earth
Because we overflowed our container. Because we ate it from inside and left a riddled
shell.
Swarms of us are leaving the solar system with only a theory of where we’re going and
what we can expect.
Not everyone left by any means. The die-hard percentage struggles. A scatter of
resources drives them to cooperate, but how long can they keep that up? Spoiler alert:
they will indeed die hard.
The rest of us develop relationships with our travel modules. How can they be so much
larger inside than outside? Some ask endless questions about the heat shield; most of us
would rather not know.
Our notion of time expands with our view of space. Evolution changes its tense from
past to future. What brought us is no longer the point.
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You Can See the Equator
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Salt as a Shower of Glass Bowls
then question whether sun and moon own this turf or heat it periodically, creating
subliminal / sublingual grass tides
picture a grassland brimming with glass bowls, each bowl opaque, each bowl a grain of
salt
where horses pound a continuous oval / ellipse, trying to catch each other and mate
scatter salt from a shaker, watch glass bowls shower over the center of a continent
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Illusions Attendant on Leaving Earth
Initial drop through an undersea tower. A critical mass displaced, internal heft of organs
in distress.
Falling through a special-effect 3-D lattice, I wrap my arms around my ribs to make my
body a drill. I believe in the air pocket, placing faith in something that may not exist.
Falling sharply from the air pocket into saline jelly, all that remains of the sea bed. Can
these conditions persist? Low drop into a sewer.
Dumped like waste into earth’s core, molten center left cold and vacant. Hollow tolling
as from a meteor. Biofeedback of myself as geode.
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A Thin Film Separates the Solar System from Deep Space
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Sun as Parasol as Container
Beyond the asteroid belt the sun reshapes itself. It should shrink with distance, but here
it unfurls into a yellow parasol.
This is a paradox: the sun as sun protection. What do we renounce and what do we keep?
We edit our vision remorselessly.
From Jupiter to Chiron we steer a course to the rim of the sun’s yellow bowl.
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Suburbs of Neptune
Champagne circulates while a string quartet plays inside a wire cage. Couples waltz
under three soaring Palladian windows.
The newly unveiled ballroom has a dark blue floor set with a tiny yellow sun that rotates
away from the dancers, adjusting its tempo to match theirs.
Canapés accompany the crystal champagne flutes. Men lick dabs of beluga caviar from
women’s wrists as the women ask each other, “Can this be love?”
Couples waltz toward the sun like cats chasing their tails. The sun glides away, always
keeping pace with the dancers.
Filmy curtains cover the tall windows; nobody looks behind them. Viewing outer
Neptune induces nausea.
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How to Map Your Way out of a Jar
Make it linear but not too obvious, accepting the more efficient lineation of crow flight.
There are no crows in freefall. Black the cosmos, blacker than wings jammed in space.
Check your GPS reading. The outer planets have no corresponding coordinates, leaving
the reading open to interpretation.
Bypass chasms and floodwaters. Wear shoes that can carry you up a glass wall.
Carry bear bells and ring them like a low-rent Christmas. You are Ursa Major’s
equivalent of a ham sandwich.
Check your compass reading. The outer planets have no magnetic north; see instructions
for interpreting your GPS reading.
Avoid hallucinatory people who appear out of nowhere carrying maps. They may
introduce themselves as Orion or Gemini, but they are the ultimate bad company.
The jar lid could present difficulties, so bring an all-purpose tool to open it from inside.
Question the wisdom of what you’re doing. Your terrified jar is traveling through a
vacuum at breakneck speed.
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Going Mad at the Edge of the System
The Oort Cloud is an icy band forming the outer layer of the solar system and is
considered the origin of many comets.
when I raise that arm the sun will lock back into a ball
pull us close in or follow us out past the Oort Cloud
cattle call a bellowing wake of
comets a celestial herd
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