Fibered Optics
By berightback
Published: August 21, 2009
Published: August 21, 2009
Fibered Optics
Invisible: the border
between our faces shimmers
liquid, crystalline as air, as a
drop of rain:
pendulant, quivering,
suspended from
barbed wire.
Glassy, gilded guilt
encrusts every word
as we simulate
the nearness every word disproves
as it travels through fibers
optic like telescopes, like
microscopes, like
eyes, scaled and artificial:
you and I
scaling a ladder of ones
and zeros, maximizable,
minimizable, but always
scaled down.
Eros: it makes my body
ache everywhere your
hands don’t touch, an inverted
sore, a scrambled
rose: it’s the softest part
that makes me bleed.
BRB, this is lovely and evocative. At the same time, haven’t they come up with a Wii program to deal with this yet?
BC: Hmmm…I wonder what the special controller would be shaped like?
I love this poem. What I first noticed about it — and consider to be its genius — are all the bilabial consonants in the first stanza followed by the alveolar consonants in the second stanza. The final stanza brings it all together. Just amazing poetics. I’m so envious! Can we see more, please?
That last stanza makes my chest physically ache, it’s so lovely and searing. Thank you.
Lovely, BRB. Am trying to work out the ones and zeros line. I can attach a feeling to it, but not a meaning. You know what I mean?
Exactly.
Mama: Thanks so much. And wow, I like to think I’m an educated person, but I had to look up what those two types of consonants are! Needless to say, playing the two types off on another was purely unintentional or intuitive. But it is wonderful to be read so perceptively. Wriitng is mostly subconscious anyway, at least for me.
Helman: I meant something pretty prosaic (we “climb” toward each other using rungs made out of the ones and zeros that comprise the little video-chat windows we see each other through, which we can make bigger and smaller). So I’m glad I’ve defeated such banality and foregrounded the feeeeeeelings instead.
@BRB: I wish I had your ear for sounds.
@BRB: This was really beautiful…long-distance relationships are so difficult, but it’s amazing how far new technology–something which is often guilty of making humans less intimate and personable–has taken the ability to sustain a long, healthy relationship between people who cannot, for whatever reason, physically be together. I got such instant flashbacks to the semester in college when my boyfriend was studying abroad in Italy…wires really can keep people together! Though it is seldom so eloquently expressed…