Animal Geometries

Storm King Wavefield, 2007-08

Was it hysterectomies that we talked about?
I cannot remember, but the green

sang over the former gravel pit, sinusoidal
as sky. The cut of the turf

swallowed us into the period of a standing wave,
its swells marked by a riding mower.

If there was conversation, it was lost
in the voice of the wind, rushing ahead

of an afternoon storm. The body told itself
instead: the press of skin on skin,

the holding of fingers on arm. The bumps
raised by moving air.

A pregnant horizon regarded the surface
of the earth the way we studied

each other: bilateral port-site closures, or long
abdominal sutures; cutaneous layers

scalloping and puckering, ribboning their way
over a fretting landscape.

Why We Kept Relocating

—after “Aerial View of Levittown East of Wantagh Parkway” by Thomas Airviews

Whisper in its curves lot minimums
setbacks         subdivisions
forms set apart like speculations
fingers tangenting          into arcs
an echo          how did you become phantom?
suburbia being a noun both countable
and uncountable
stumps of landscaping about a cul-de-sac
the first haunting was Long Island
the second outside Trenton
so many utopias          their names

Park Forest
Lakewood
Silver Spring
Queen Creek
Daly City
Deerfield

I nearly forget where it began
for us          for ou-topos means no place
I remember growing into you
beside the dresser that moved with us
I grew into you          out front
where the new grass blanched in sun
I grew into you          and found
only saplings where trees should be
in their place we tended the curb
and paving slabs          we fought
over dishes where they piled up
countable          uncountable
we weeded the laundry
and folded our dust
we exchanged unmeaning promises
and when we fell you whispered

suburbia
is no place
for a woman—

In Graz

—after “Graz” by Adolfo Natalini (Superstudio)

, all was still. Graz was still that morning. The air in Graz was still. The Schlossberg sat, looming and still, covered in green. The chancel of the Franziskanerkirche, already the tallest point in Graz beneath the clocktower on the hill, made as if to get up, thought better of it, and stayed still. The people of Graz had been told to stay indoors that morning. The rats of Graz — they were, of course, still rats — but they too were still. A cloud sat on Graz. The architects had retreated to their observation post the night before. They had been overseeing the fabrication of their continuous monument around the Innerestadt for months

, and they were now finished. Their monument, which you can see now only in the postcards that they made to commemorate the event, was framed in an unrelenting grid, each cell infilled by sanded glass. When they were finished it seemed like morning. The representatives of the DryIce Corporation of Long Island, New York* had been consulted at great expense, and they had transformed part of an ageing ammonia factory into a facility for the mass production of dry ice. The architects had insisted that they could retain a route into and out of the great walls of their monument despite their building work. They were right. Throughout the streets of Graz now lay enormous slabs of dry ice. Solid carbon dioxide was in the process of sublimating into its gaseous form

, and it caused the temperature of Graz to fall. Water vapour condensed out of the air as it cooled into the streets of the Innerestadt. In the still Graz morning lay a pool of fog. In the still Graz morning lay a pool of carbon dioxide. Denser than air, it collected everywhere within the continuous monument, retained by its walls. It sat, pooling, in the Mur. The people of Graz stayed indoors and wore sweaters, and the architects drifted above in a balloon. They rubbed their hands proudly. The rats of Graz that had not made it out of their nests were rapidly asphyxiated.