tilt this windmill

one-hundred years ago, maybe only fifty, cutting marble into inch-thick planks was a two-man job. a workbench pinned the slab into place; one man administered water in streams over the point of contact while his fellow, gripping braided wire between two iron handles, sawed at the stone with an industrial garrote as though working the head off a giant. the tandem nature of the job required a type of consensus, a unanimous approval before the cut.

today i saw a marble cutter, one man performing the work of two. an “A” frame crowned his workbench, a tracked metal truss connecting the steeples of each “A”, and on that track a motor block powering a twelve-inch saw which blade dripped water as if with contrition. the marble cutter lay down a four-foot slab, shackled it to the bench and spun up the saw to whine and shriek. he grazed the marble once over, marking a shallow track to follow on the second pass. then he returned the blade to its first position and, without assistance or second input, the marble cutter pulled the saw through the rock where water and sediment issued and gelled into a kind of blood.

porcelain fillings cut a bend through the valleys of my molars. this is my mouth: gum and bone and the ceramic that studs them like the dead masons that float the mortar of hoover dam.

rutger hauer goes to sleep a man and rises as a wolf. a hawk sweeps into a barn and emerges as michelle pfeiffer, her talon now a pearlescent leg slicing through her black cloak.

i sit into the basement darkness as a plane lifts a girl i know over the pacific. she sleeps in her seat as the steel bird sweeps for japan. when she wakes up, it’s as something foreign that sleeps when i rise and rises when i sleep. her new legs slice through the japanese sidewalks.

on the tv, rutger hauer leaps in front of michelle pfeiffer to tear the throat out of an armored bandit. he howls bloodied to the moon. i nod to that. i’d make a fist but for the fear it would open as a paw.

i am tin and the brims of styrofoam cups. i am shrink-wrap and cuticles. i exhale exhaust and gas fumes and shower steam. i am every color in the crayola catalog.

there is no romance to the nevada desert, but i-15 cuts across it in a way that before long urges me to think something grander than sage is coming, that in a mile—two miles—the earth will tilt and roll back across itself, that soon enough i will find myself traversing the teeth of the sierras where my wheels like busy shovels will kick up hidden truths and litter them in my wake: gold and prospectors’ claim stakes, pistols and scalps and brass poker chips, the bones of the Donner party, clean now as when they were first boiled.

‘4 way’ demanded the stop sign.

i looked to each driver gathered, my three companions facing me, idling their engines. their potential trajectories met mine in the center of the intersection. one too fat. another too old. one a man. i imagined the entanglement of our bodies: metal and elbows wrapped around each other. intimacy in collision.

‘4 way’ it seemed to shrug.

‘thank you no.’ and i drove through untouched.

the phlebotomist draws her finger into the eye of my elbow. her blue rubber gloves tell me i am a dish in her sink. she scrubs the venipuncture site with iodine and dispassion, looking left and repeating the timing to ‘mary had a little lamb’ in her head.

whose fleece was white as snow—she pulls the swab away and brings the needle to my skin. my vein rises to meet it, the pressure cuff on my bicep coaxing it forward.

puncture. pinch. the clear line completing the circuit from my heart to the plasma seperator terminal runs red. the machine begins to tick off the ounces as though satisfied.

tomorrow i’ll stand as i always do, and they will listen until i cease to be funny, until i cease to be interesting. i will say things like, ‘i’m going to shut up and just listen’. then i will fill half an hour watching them twitch and dig, imagining trench lines where my voice won’t shell them. i’ll wish for a shovel to help them along.

i will point at the screen, to Don Draper. isn’t he handsome? isn’t this a great class?

i tell myself i know what i’m doing. i say it loud enough for them to hear.

Don says, ‘it’s okay. whatever you’re doing, it’s okay’.

landon gray mitchell rose when announced and approached the procession podium to remove his mortarboard before hundreds of graduating students and parents-in-attendance, all of them waiting for landon to wow them.

making big arms in his graduate’s gown, he charmed them instantly as though a magician casting spells. he got them laughing at him. he got them laughing at themselves. he got them hoping and biting at the day-to-come like a curious spaniel nipping at a firefly in the night. and then quieting, he got them thinking. gesturing to the ignorant and ungrateful who soon would lord over each of their individual and collective futures, landon challenged every person looking up to him from his palm:

‘let’s get them talking. thank you.’

to get to dr. chris cokinos’s home, we drove until the foothills on hollow road, where crosswalks and street signs give way to rows of timpanogos quakie leaning into the low valley wind, a place all-too-cliche for an english professor but for chris’s preambling para-text as a science jockey. looking on his home, slanting sharp and gray against the robustly round ranch houses surrounding it, i wondered if chris’s neighbors reviled and feared him as did the burghers at the foot of castle frankenstein. 

he led us into his living room where the telescope lurked in the north-west corner, some behemoth wallflower that we seemed to catch in the act of hiding, too large to do so, perhaps embarrassed that we had discovered it. its counterweight and dew-shield, large as tribal drums, opposed each other on the extreme ends of the main tubing and its cradle. it looked heavy and intricate as a truck motor. were i to touch it, i was convinced it would swing about the room on its own momentum for eternity. the eyepiece stuck out of the mirror basin with a kind of dangerous finality, like it were the trigger to the telescope’s massive firing chamber. i stepped away from it.

chris refused to touch it, he turned to us, and simply pointed back, differing to the telescope like it were its own entity, as though, in the very moment we acknowledged it, the telescope punched a line of vision through the roof of the home, following some mystifying path beyond the rim of outer space where time and matter curved into a slow progressive round where magnified light perceived all things, vast and infinite, as if on the head of a pin. in that moment, as it angled away from us, i converted to the telescope’s indomitable power, that i presently stood in the company of a thing manipulating the universe, returning its canted vision to the room to peel back our skin and bone and reveal a team of uncertain brains marveling telescopic capabilities in small-minded conference.