Not wanting to die was another universal constant, it seemed.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
Place names are bleeding slowly from my mind
till nothing is left but
Uruguay – which someone told me once
means ‘river of birds’
in the language of those who were killed
to make it ours.
I think of the symbols they made
on slices of doeskin or bark, when they went
upriver, as we all do when defeat
is casually dishonoured by the ones
who tricked us, flag-white egrets in the trees
flailing from branch to branch as the boat slides past,
but silent, like a person who has learned
to do without the self as worthy foe,
settling, instead, for something in the night
that tracks him from afar, some faint device
unspooling in an empty Nissen hut,
the data insufficient to predict
a future he could happily imagine,
no universal constant, no dark matter,
only a spill of cipher across the floor,
mile after mile of wavelength, feigning desire.