Biomechanics
for Bob Hicok
The machinery was there before we even knew it existed.
A low hum like industry supporting the horizon.
This is where your face meets the mercenary creed
of wind.
Eight hundred thousand jobs lost in April and spring’s
decidedly offshored its labor for an early fall.
Adam Smith had it wrong: the economy isn’t run
by an invisible hand but by a ghost-ship manned
by a crew of severed limbs.
In the blind altruism of ants the queen
is dismembered in a conveyor belt of drones.
At company X the first tier of layoffs was strategic.
Safety in numbers is the ineluctable dream of
teeth
lined up row by row by row for the tearing into meat.
A murder of crows sounds like an epidemic of hope
in the suburbs when mortgage rates go soaring.
Accretion apparently works both ways.
Nothing a pathology of elves couldn’t cure
at the merest wind chime and how convenient
for hemlock to grow along the side of the road.
In Diego Rivera’s Pan American Unity mural
there is the worker by the left shoulder pinned
to a factory press, face half skull: left eye
the serpentine-tinctured glass orb of prophecy.
Long before the astrolabe,
mapping the night sky was a science honed
by scorpions to find water in the desert.
Let us all drink in praise of stars.
José Luis Gutiérrez
Copyright © 2011
José Luis Gutiérrez is a San Francisco poet and host of the
BookShop
West Portal Poetry Series. His work has appeared in Spillway Review,
Eratio, San Francisco Poets 11, Margie, and is forthcoming in Stone
Highway Review and in the Mutanabbi Street Anthology due out 2012
through PM Press.
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