The Sonic Flowerfall of Primes

[Editor's Note: Many thanks to Andrew Joron for giving us permission to reprint his work for a limited time in conjunction with Greg Beatty's "Reading the Rhysling."]

We welcome these cool auspicious hours

A red dusk on the radar promenades

A muted gong: and like ghosts accusing us

This agape's guests appear

Surely to ascend again

Their angry forum—O golden solons

From a metal-poor Utopia

We shall dismantle them anon

It is a brittled language they must speak

For our attention: fingering

Some little machine-pressed rose of Number in their hope

We raise up columns of soft light

Far out of these dust-white airs: undinal

A radio sings, but the signal is failing

Its static sadly

Echoes not a datum across the courtyard

Our precessing singer's artificial star portends 0—0—0

He'll see this dusk

A blood-edged knife as it falls from the hand

Of our thin white mistress Moon

He sees too our mortal remains: now our metal habitations

Stained cirrus & the heart of continents stilled

We absolve ourselves there & above, wash in the Absolute

Most through his absolutions, his blood-soluble

Emotions

. . . Piquant telemetries, per hour passed downlink, into rooms

Where no shadow is

Fly in electra, he

Suspends our veiled supper of the Masses

So that even as we view him now, orbiting nightward

A blue-green blip on verdigris'd scanners

One favored dwarf or fool; the player on his oud

Must pluck blossoms of this Sun-heightened music

Holy notes to nerve the optick stem

His fingers light-spun on the frets

A spine that to our blood-beat banks

Must speed wishes & electric measures

The signal fades & our thoughts turn out of color

Other words are activated: revenants of his twenty-hundredth

Revolution-songs, devoted to his female double

Whom we'd developed as the back-up unit: she shared

His programming, smiled or sorrowed / and grew ill

On-line, the thread of her own breath broken

While he played one night upon his oud

A gold untuned Eternal thread

Those noon orbits he sang for one who sat alone

Her head bent to the stone

Never to know him except as herself

And herself as the embodiment of a star-blind purpose

Separate as two monads, each felt the other's suffering

Both remained distrustful of their symmetried desires

His studied fingers had never touched that throat

To strum glad cry, the gong resounding in her eye

Still she came to him in dreams, as our neural s(t)imulating shows

Still pained with the magneto-prints of their closed-loop identical

Design, they made love (or so each of them supposed)

. . . A face turned to the wall, fearsome, yet triumphantly

Aflame: her smoky skin, the black hair curled

Upon her neck like ciphers

And his naked torso arcing out the window, Heaven's inverse

All below, in the dark brass bowl of Sahara dayside

Then their bodies were wasted, cells and fibers

Accelerated, to meet our stony stillness

Toward the light's abandoned dwellings

Those energy-sinks where a gelid aether drips

And our voice dies in its echo

But his thoughts of her were subtler by their weakness

Palely pictured

Like the meaningless calligraphies

Arising from a blown-out candle

Beyond the Moon all motion

Must be uniform and circular as sleep / There

Stands a hermaphrodite of whom it is impossible to speak

The distance of an Absolute love is hers

She'll not acknowledge the votive ranks of technicians below

Hungering sheep on that once-green hill

When their missile hangars open rusty eyelids

Down a pew-narrow dull perspective; he hears dust

Delayed booms in midnight air

When, heart-frozen, he speaks to her from his steady star—we obey

As zeniths late the fuller Artemis, we have only

The safekeeping of being: a sere system, the steering of these cogs & wheels

To follow his or her thought's helpless longitudes

And in flights of neutralized Inertial joy

Our flame-winged barques roll out and Out

Athwart the dead audience: a nightside lit with cities

Zapping with bluest energy

Binary citizenries, one- and zero-numbered

Where whose eternal cameras scan

The test patterns of our social constants

Beyond the mile-high buildings

Earth & sky are

Rising discs, but he chords them gone

Abstract icons call them back again

As useful (shimmering

Heat-hymns across the civilized moraine)

We applaud: the player shall timely please

Us moving glacial megadromes

He alone in his cat-carved spacecraft Thoth

Lets his oud decrease the fire-line of day

The inanimate horizon acts against him

Finally: vagaries of wind & water, after the Sun goes

Erect cloud-cities / vast

in their changing, gas Urs and Chicagos

That cannot mean to mock our dying

Intentions—though farther off we hear

Our heartbeat's brief god-protecting thunder

Its one cause, those ionized highways on which no courier rides

Today's dreaming of the landscape is done

That set free the citizenries into our fine-tooled deserts

And did not let the six-armed towers collapse

& saw winter forests blow away like seeds

Who else looks down on the glittering wastes

Where we were sovereign?

Who knows better the rubble left behind

By these technologic glaciers

The human center all in one head, his despair

Is our consent: fixed here & efficient

His one response to the manufacture of her Miracles

A thing, reclining to this feast of fools

We shall not cease to measure