SUNDIAL
“The danger is the collected pursuit as which positionality pursues the self-refusal of world with the forgetting of its truth through the unguarding of the thing. The essence of technology is positionality. The essence of positionality is the danger.” Die Gefahr [The Danger]. From Einblick in das was ist. Bremer Vorträge [Insight into That Which. The Bremen Lectures] (1949), Martin Heidegger, translated by Andrew J. Mitchell i. Leaves worried, shiver their stalks. Week of wet ground. Wind-plucked from the tender ligament stamp of red, yellow revenant dried and lifted; shifted. Left again, a black stain. Decay. Out- lined spell on the porous sidewalk. Needles are raptured bodies. When a hole in the atmosphere blasts upward, the azure leaks its residues into space, which is not so empty as it is patient. The wounded ether frosted in shock bides unbounded like a cored apple. Some pockets are lost and other prolapsed parts are pulled back down by gravity. All this only after silhouettes are scored into topsoil and pedway. The lab imagines a final rise, points with glowed cuticle. Whalebone in foundry; the rocky, bleached belly of the Titanic suddenly visible from a cliff face. The satellite grins, wide- eyed, barreling toward a barren seabed. A wax gourd is five times hotter than the sun’s center—900 times brighter than desert sun at noon. I cut the vegetable in solar cross-sections. sliding out its fleshy whites, to striate its prophetic insides, its stony capillaries. Every glacier is in bloom. All in an instant is turned to thick, stained glass. ii. Kerf of ashen snow on a surviving landwire. Fiberoptic bone and shell. Sweet, bleeding algorithm. Concerto of grand rubble and archipelago. A windless forest of upright, diamond skeletons. In 1789, Uranus is discovered in the bowels of the Kingdom of Bohemia. A century later it vibrates X-Rays from an evacuated tube. A Freedom Riders bus is fire-bombed near Anniston, Alabama. Sukhoy Nos flowers a mirth, constellations unimpeded by sky. Pillar of fire, column of cloud—halfway between crust and infinity. 58 megaton revelation north of the Matochkin Strait. Shock- wave propagates around the stratosphere three times. The Lenin Mausoleum is vacated. Global anti-matter, bread, shirt, reddening heart. Those without love for anything human heave themselves to guarantee your flight from history. Long, woven button— kill-switch of misery. Feature of false sunrise. Pathway to past telling time by vanishing affect. Supersonic jewelry through the burning skull of Father warring loudly for its children, for children who are not her children. Total eclipse hushes Earth over Asia days before a mine explodes in West Germany; 299 pitmen fulminate into space. The Danger outperforms the Thing—the likeness of being is a residuum of ionizing pleasure always shooting for the lung, fishing the netted fissure. Race arm-in-arm: the limits of the nuclear family—its luminous pales, twinkling privacies. The thrumming heat from Little Boy—now in rivulets of hardened shadow. Cold and bashful; litter of Cain’s sons pour molten starlight back into the American countryside. iii. Terror is a dark plasma, and fear a neutron star. I can tell you I’ve loved you since I was cosmic particle. Before the body is blown to nothingness, to streaks in zodiacal light, I fuse a devotion, fizzle out our infrared failings. Queer quasar, then instantaneous cremation. Boiling blood burst a typeset dawn. His leg has locked me into him. His thigh below the fault of my waist. Asleep he is ever more radiant, taking me in in roomed, glossy breaths. We are both, at once, lens and enclosure. Fixture and dissolution. Less than seconds with rich blindness, a chest he ticks me into even in slumber. My knees are hollow, plutonium cores.