Human Form (audio only)
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Propping his tripod, Hine remembers
Childhood snowfall in Wisconsin,
Flakes careening in prairie wind,
A red sleigh skimming a frozen lake,
Curlicued breath-mist of two dappled drays.
But this is a blizzard of cotton dust
From the looms & thirty thousand spindles,
Gauze-air, whirlwind of innumerable floaters.
The thermometer reads one hundred & three.
—author of the earliest known signature
That arrow & life were homonyms. That his name
Predates all others, incised sunbaked on a slab
Of Eupratian clay. Stylus a broken reed, though it
Carries somehow the bedazzled opalescent mojo
Of transfiguration. The hand which holds it edges right
& reaching the margin circles back, right to left
From euphoria at the blossom's destruction * in time-lapse, save us. We quicken & hiss like serpents, * our tongues flick us forward. We are studies of peritonitis * at the U.S. Forensic Death Farm in Tennessee. From the stunned * half-smiles of the decomposed, we rise. A dwarf inflates * to a giant, bloated like a Macy's float.