✷
Idyll Five
The energy in a closed system is neither created nor destroyed. There’s an accommodation for each gender and each gender is in its accommodation. Of my service recognition is diminishment. The moving sidewalk may end without notice and the humans may fall on their faces, having lived until just recently in trees. That the humans agree with me is the result of some pathology or misalignment of the planets. Quality is inversely proportional to quantity, adjacent to the rain and glistening with chickens.
The occasional defenestration surely serves a purpose. Buy one volume, temperature and pressure, get one free. Did Rorschach or did Heisenberg discover or invent uncertainty while spinning up or spinning down. The disgraced optical illusion returns to its silken web, a blind spot. Two eternities are served in sequence or concurrently. No sooner unsaid than undone, the frequency no greater than that of the ultraviolet, no smaller than that of the infrared, the human’s time of life is calculated using Newton’s Law of Cooling.
Archimedes Versus Earth
Run that lullaby by me again. Perhaps the fact that I look like my dog amuses you. The flugelhorn is either not invented yet or not yet banned. Among the fleets of trucks of crates of cups, Valhalla monitors say maybe yes and maybe no. In search of my sobriety I’m crawling in the gutter. Biodomes are synchronized, the acts of the apostles put on hold. The synesthetics stop to listen to the roses. Revered politicians lie in state. Of furniture the future is unknown.
What’s not to celebrate excessively? The three concentric spheres of opposition may as well be Matryoshka dolls. If Archimedes has an air-tight alibi, his fleece is surely white as snow. One can not echolocate oneself out of corners which one did not echolocate oneself into and one must have the proprioception of a saint to know which way proprioception goes. I will have no Beelzebub before Beelzebub. Does saying a militia is well-regulated make it so?
✷
Heikki Huotari, on a hunger strike in opposition to the war in Vietnam, was court-martialled for refusing to eat. Since retiring from academia/mathematics he has published more than 400 poems in literary journals, including Pleiades, Spillway, the American Journal of Poetry and Willow Springs, and in six chapbooks and six collections. He has won one book and two chapbook prizes. His Erdős number is two.
