Sometimes there are horns or hooves waiting to be fitted to my head and hands, feet. A tail swishing away the space-dust of any remaining light.

In my dreams I passed before the axis of human likeness, a black line that had to be contained on all sides, a pipeline.

A kind of dark traffic.

Men in uniform were posted all along its length.

Some had cameras, some had guns.

To slip down its invisible curtains.

Like sheets tied together and hung out of a hotel window.

Underneath, the ur-world, without measure or mark. Here I communed with each at its station:

Corpse

Zombie

Bunraku puppet

Prosthetic hand

Not holes but force. Electricity, instinct, momentum, the vigor of our “lives”—so many words for a progression, like chords, sine waves, lines:

Contract

Heaven

Paradise

Human (Likeness)

Moment

Lapse

Error

Mistake

Incident

Accident

Event

Episode

Emergency

Crisis

Disaster

Catastrophe

Dystopia

Apocalypse

Time

Expand

There is a code for every kind of duration. One must be careful to carry the right holes on one’s journey. Forth. Back. X. Y. Toward the familiar. . .

The bottom of the valley is the palm of time.

There, one finds rest.

All objects fall at the same rate.

No outside, no inside.

I spent sixteen years living with American parents.

They are inside me now, they are my guests.

They are my holes, like babies, like stones.

I have a thousand valleys inside me.

Descent upon descent.

The swallowed becomes the swallower.

Egg, star, event, time, hole, black, bound, devour, collapse.

Reaching for—

“However, as the star collapses, a strange thing occurs. As the surface of the star nears an imaginary surface called the ‘event horizon,’ time on the star slows relative to the time kept by observers far away. When the surface reaches the event horizon, time stands still, and the star can collapse no more—it is a frozen collapsing object.”

T h  e   r    e          i       s          n       o          e          n          d

1. This quotation and those that follow in this section are from NASA Science, “Black Holes/’ accessed February 19, 2016, http://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/black-holes.

When I’m at home

people don’t ask me who I am

They know at once that it’s me

because I’m the only one who’s home

and so all kinds of things enter me.

— Kim Hyesoon, “Shadow Janitor”

The Hospitality of Strangers

The Hospitality of Strangers

OLD ENGLISH GÆST, GIEST (ANGLIAN GEST) “GUEST; ENEMY; STRANGER,” THE COMMON NOTION BEING “STRANGER,”

Consider all doors.

Opening of an ampoule, space, wind > light.

Animal its sere, stiff robe, canters in place, species against every epoch, flower-skull and the last kick far between. Velocity capillaried like water ringing a tree.

Still-limber, hunt-cut, child-bundled. Dark star and diurnal wash all the same soaking in.

Or doored as the boards of the ship that sent you. The vessel that brought you, the arms that pulled you. Vessel, your queer coffin, your name following your overboard.