An engine running at the front door of our house

The sound of a mountain is the sound of many mountains
in the immediate vicinity groaning or judging
or moving a little bit with the wind.
What is it a mountain appreciates?
A sky?
A color where people pass the mountain in airplanes trying to cast a shadow.
Where the artist Cristo has begun dropping silk scraps from an aeroplane,
and the videographer in a different plane filming him
starts dropping loose change and invasive greenery.
And a debate ensues with Cristo defending his artistic genius
and the videographer defending his right to act on Cristo’s inspiration.

Remember the stupid joke you were told by that one high school English teacher?
Remember hearing at your high school reunion that he’d died?
And someone said we should visit his grave and leave that joke in an envelope.
That’s how bad the joke was.

*

Imagine the internet abandoned on the side of a mountain
and the people are converging on that mountain
to install so many electrical generators
the mountain won’t even be able to hear itself thinking,
like it’s the 21st Century
or every time someone new is “ruling” over the people
which simply means some of the people are listening very carefully
while other people aren’t listening at all.

Why exactly was the internet invented?
Why does electricity make so much noise when it’s being generated?
It’s like a plague of locusts descending on a country
or Moses operating a socket wrench while installing electrical generators at Mt. Sinai
or someone asking whether the show
about too many people talking has finally been cancelled.

*

A mountain built with so many engines running inside caves,
inside the trees,
a mountain set to lift itself above the other mountains.
A robot of a mountain, my daughter would say.
But I don’t believe in coincidences like that.
Our home had been sold with a generator in the front yard.
Our drive to the museum last weekend
that required us to drive over a mountain.
The abandoned hotel at the top looking out over all the other mountains
with engines inside each room,
powering each other with no clear purpose
except to be run remotely by the people who knew about mountains
trying to get back at the people living on the top of a mountain.

Like in that album by Joy Division,
the one with mountains on it,
and the mountains look like engines,
each song like an engine operated remotely.

How many different people have listened to this Joy Division album
and felt like hopelessness was an engine inside their body,
taking them away from other bodies to live on a mountain,
wishing only that that mountain could lift itself above other mountains.
But it won’t.
Or if it did, it would still be a disappointment
because it didn’t get high enough,
or it didn’t live up to its potential.
And living in that hotel at the top of the mountain,
it’s unclear if you really want that to happen.

*

People are always talking about disasters.
They wire their homes anticipating the next big disaster.
They write stories where Moses appears as the disaster worsens,
and his solution mainly involves making things a lot worse.
Had we not known what Moses was capable of,
or that Moses could not speak,
or he could not hold a hot coal in his mouth without ruining all the words?

*

There are many different ways to exacerbate a problem.
Most of them involve electricity.
And fallibility. And fallible people using electricity.
And fallible people befriending malicious people.
It’s called machine learning.
Or neglect. Or intentional fallacy.
It sounds like almost every song by Joy Division except “Atmosphere.”
And I never know which robot could have been responsible for a song like that.

*

When I was called to operate the internet, I introduced a pandemic.
And then variations of a pandemic.
I called the internet, Leaves of Grass.
Like how exhausted Walt Whitman was with everything
that had to do with sensation, and attention, the internet,
Harrison Ford, maybe Kelsey Grammer.
The intellectuals who get together every Sunday
and talk about a story they read in The New Yorker.

What did anything mean before people had invented the internet?
How did thinking happen?
How did people happen to find one another
to say something intellectual?

*

When God assured the people of Israel he would move mountains,
he meant one day Walt Whitman would be born.
And CA Conrad would arrive later.
God separated firmament from firmament on the Second Day.
He was clearing the way for something more.

A picture of Walt Whitman holding a picture of CA Conrad
reading their poems,
the whole poem taking up the whole room at once,
and it’s still not enough.
Don’t ever let me know again, said Depeche Mode.

Like watching an aircraft carrier pull away from the pier.
Like being on that aircraft carrier and watching the pier disappear.
It’s hundreds of thousands of tons beneath you, moving you further out to sea.
And that’s how I hear the poet reciting their work,
even if it’s just you and me in the room.
Such a mountain.

*

The whole concept of a tabula rasa is about filling in what was already blank,
but it doesn’t account for what eventually goes blank
while we keep looking for something that isn’t not blank.
Or not those blanks, at least.

Today my daughter was learning to ride her bike
and whatever happened today would likely have been one more blank.
Except I’ve written about it here.
And in five days I’ll come back to it,
and it still won’t be blank.

All the while there are tabula rasa’s everywhere.
Inside the books on my bookshelf.
Every instance of Microsoft Word.
A spare tire that kept its blank existence in the trunk of our car.
So many years of this one thing existing with nothing to exist for.
Is it a blank? Am I responsible to make it unblank?

Today a famous poet died.
And the world is filled with this poet,
the tone of his voice,
how famous he was, and the people who knew him.
And from that bounty there will eventually be blanks.
A bouquet of blank statements.
A sadness that is not so sad anymore.
There is a word, but I can’t quite remember it,
that is the brief summary of every person who dies.
And they keep dying further and faster.

I’m taking a ride with my best friend, I might sing.
I hope he never lets me down again.
And the fact is this song might never be blank.
Even as so many blanks settle around it.
And the sad day when my blank is one of them.

Kent Shaw’s second book, Too Numerous, won the 2018 Juniper Prize for Poetry and was published by University of Massachusetts Press. His poems have recently appeared in Action, Spectacle, Oversound, and Laurel Review. He teaches Creative Writing at Wheaton College in MA, and he blogs about poetry at thekalliope.org.