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Contents
Talk Show
By the Waters of Lethe
Moo and Thrall
Lady Xoc
Urgent Care
A Debris Field of Apocalypticians—a Murder of Crows
En Route
1 Morning Drizzle, Chicken Little
2 Office Hours
3 Critique
4 Someone Else’s Cake
5 Sixth and Cumae
6 Selfie
7 Happy Hour
8 Going Under
9 A Book before Bed
10 Man semblable,—mon frére!
Fortune Cookie
Banana Palace
Murray, My
The Living Teaching
Meanwhile
Melancholia
My Sentence
The Point of the Needle
Watching the Sea Go
At the End of My Hours
Notes
About the Author
Also by Dana Levin
Acknowledgments
ACROSS THE SEA
1
We used our texting machines
to look up the definition of soul
in the middle of class—
thumb-joints at work
above the stitched paper
of actual books in which
we’d been reading
poetry
about a Prophetess,
one of the human cave-bound Time Machines…
She had traveled a long way through the four dimensions
to be with us.
From someone’s mouth to someone’s ear.
Someone’s hand
to tablet, papyrus, parchment, paper, the liquid crystal light
of our computer screens—
Liquid crystal light they’d really
called it that,
the inventors
at Marconi Wireless.
“See if you can hear anything,
Mr. Kemp!” Marconi had cried, the day they sailed the letter S
across the sea—I loved
the synesthesia of that, See if you can hear, they’d coaxed some radio waves
to propel the alphabet
through the air—
Was that Marconi wishing
he was a liquid crystal light and not a
break of bones
that had to fear the future—
2
A human-headed bird, the Egyptians said.
A butterfly, an innermost.
A Web site
I was afraid to enter: wewantyoursoul.com the students
laughed and laughed—
soul-adorning, soul-afflicting, soul-amazing—
soul-and-body-lashings—
They really called it that, the ropes they wound
round oilskin
to keep out sea and storm, our sailing men—
who sent the cheeriest message you could imagine
to usher in
the Telegraphic Age: Thanks
am well—
The soul, it was an ellipse in white, it fizzed,
their chaplains said, with God’s
CPR,
“breath