ARTICULATE HOUSE

I.

“I seek an articulate house, open

to sun and wind, perennial form

of a shell or hull protecting

the malleable,” says Jane, “for I grow

fragile, in the seasons’ wheel, and seek a window

which frames the earth and contains it.”

“And light,” says Janine, “and the means

to convey it, the eye ascending

in its pyramid of sight, builds its sane spaces,

its chambers of graces, consuming clouds,

and these are bodies.” Dreams June, “arcs

and prisms . . . webs and seines . . . it is like

a glass but finer, it is a roof spun

nautilus-vial, a purling sail.

It is the membrane of an arrival.”

II.

“Where is the safety of a paler day?”

says she, wan Jen, “for the terrible air

poisons the harbor, and the birds

will not come here. I remember

green ruminations, deflecting storms,

the tides in their stately shuttles, precessing

a passionate system, wise body,

chyle and sanguine circulation,

breathing frame.” “Her aureate tones/

illuminate the ozones,” rhymes Jin,

alert at dawn, uneasy watching

the colors of a tainting—stain the gray cliff,

“shale-black bones”—“but they are beautiful,”

whispers sifting Aurora, “fair, kind, true.”

Jin twins “ecstasy and ague”—nothing new.

III.

Joan’s house has bare concrete floors.

Walls, of foil-coated Sheetrock, are unpainted.

Her fixtures and furniture are metallic.

“I am sensitive to electromagnetic fields”

and the house feels her pulses, when she approaches

cuts the current, “inoculates electrodes,”

tracks her motions, encases her computer

in a metal-lined room. “The set projects

through a long metal funnel to the screen”

and the refrigerator, with a motion detector,

shuts off when she enters. “I need to live here,”

metal and desert, and the visitors bathe

with scentless soaps, then change into

clothes washed in special detergents, new initiates

to a sterile guardian temple, undefiled.

IV.

Allos—other. Ergon—work.

“It is a labor,” says Jasmine, “of pointless

proportion.” “Drifts everywhere and in,”

adds Jean, exhausted with structure—

invisible ardors, draining her stores.

“Fearful waking in predatory day,”

where there is no boundary. “Light collects

motes and toxins, and I am frightened.”

“Night drains rumors of safety,” murmurs

Juanita in the quivering whir.

“How can we live here?” these three cry,

stained land that blights intention,

“the earth a weapon, and the chemicals”

and radiant fields, the toils

puzzles of which one aids or ills.

V.

Three concrete sails arc into space.

They are two thousand years of exaltation.

Bright bows, leaping from a transparent box,

uniting rapture and reason. Their coating is

particle-eating titanium dioxide

maintaining its own pure equilibrium.

“I am my transforming spirit,

a windy building,” says the strange ship,

“I touch my environment and change it”

cleansing the air which will kiss it.

“I am in that sense an act of being,”

a thinking material, changing its state.

“A blessing,” muses Jess, as she reads it

online, “to gray ether and its bent attendants.”

White ship, weird barque, sail on.

VI.

Julianna in the fields outside

the factory, two, three. Julianna

below the smoking towers, the porous

hours, the searing cores. The dirt steams

below her feet, “no ground beneath,” this brume,

this boreas of mist, this turbid minus.

“There is something terrible in

reality,” five, three, white shadow,

contagion in its muted din.

“Day again.” Day and day. Dusk-dawn,

noon-column: smoke spills in diagonal

coils, never gone. Two drops puddle

on the glass, two are one. “Something

terrible and I don’t know what.” Yellow

despoils the guise. The skies unshut.

VII.

“I dreamed the bees stopped sipping the thyme-slips”

(this, Jill). “I dreamed silence, no shiver in

the lavender, no buzz. No fuzzed nubs

grazing the marigolds’ ruffled buds.”

“I dreamed birds dropped out of the sky,

in tens, in twos. See the beak? See the crushed

carnelian? Notice the look.” “What answer

to their sweet questionings when

their element blanks, taints, kills them?”

“What can they ask with limp and twisted wings?

What syrinx thrills a shattered throat?” What note

in these bodies’ admonition, bitter germ,

bitter worm of a bitter earth,

whose oblivious star scatters its spore.

“Bitter inheritance we breathe and are.”

VIII.

“I seek an articulate house,” says

Jaël, says Jade. Says solemn Judith

of turbulent hues. “I seek a home

in norm’s affliction, where beauty

swells its ravaged sea—whorled foam

freaked with effluvium” and random

in its wrong genome: a mare

tenebrarum of ambient form. “Mundus

to mouth hard hurt, oculus to drift”

over the deformed animals of space.

“Where, then, is paradise?” Jamila broods.

“In the costumes of moods, moods’ scrolling sleeves?”

Chorines with their consonance of scattered leaves

wresting a dignity from wides and waves

that array their wastings soundlessly, and stay.