At Length

This following poem is from a manuscript-in-progress, more alphabet, which extends the work of Danish poet Inger Christensen’s Alfabet (1981), translated into English by Susanna Nied (alphabet, 2001). A book of intersecting forms, Alfabet is an abecedarian long poem that uses the Fibonacci sequence, one of the so-called languages of nature, to determine line count from section to section. This lends itself to a spiraling and expansive poetics. The intersection of linguistic and mathematical systems allows Christensen to question the limits of sense-making and to engage the senselessness of war and planetary destruction.

Christensen’s Alfabet ends on section “[n],” fittingly perhaps, given that “n” is the first letter for “noun” and for “number”—in both English and Danish—and is used as a variable in equations and mathematical expressions. In adherence to the Fibonacci sequence, in which each number is the sum of the two previous numbers (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, and so on), “[n]” should have consisted of 610 lines. Instead, it consists of 321 lines. We might read this as a countdown (“three, two, one”) to liftoff or explosion, to the start of a race or the end of a world.

In the excerpt below, I pick up at “[o],” which consists, in its entirety, of 987 lines. I am now working on “[p],” which will be 1,597 lines.

with their diverse pollination strategies,
with the mosquito-need of some that

revises the mosquito in one’s mind,
on one’s skin, so often thought intol-

erable, orchids exist, miniature orchids
one needs a magnifying glass to observe;

wild orchids exist, risk vanishing as
the insects that sex them vanish, but

before they vanish, one evening, we
order chiliguaro and offer our takes

on whether eating ceviche on a boat
after delighting in swimming along-

side fish, alongside filter-feeding whale
sharks with inscrutable teeth, is obscene;

with its antioxidants and the joyful
mountain cemented in its name,

oregano exists; oregano exists
at the intersection of the culinary

and the medicinal, in fields, sunny,
conceptual, in areas where one might

expect opportunism, the monetizing
of wellness, the telling rhyme of health

with wealth, the potency of access;
the length of lasting, the outage exists,

with its estimated time of restoration,
the outage and the update, the hour

later, the hour again delayed; the oracle
high on methane had existed, high

high priestesses, thick with utterances,
tongue a churn in the mouth, the future

a butter spread on the bread of conscious-
ness, the words eaten up, but the message

undigested; in a notebook, a record of or-
dinates, tattooed on a bicep, on an inner

wrist, the body a placeholder, a placemat
for the cracked plate of memory, the wrong

knife for managing tenderness; the con-
trasting plumage and onomatopoetic name

of orioles; orioles, the sight of which was
once thought to cure jaundice, exist inside

and outside of song, their song, this song;
their, our—such distinctions exist; ostracism,

akin to the loss of bone mass, but, that here, bone
is thought to not be weakened by what’s gone;

ox-eye daisies and osteoporosis, the celestial
equator’s belt, ox-eye daisies and the obstruction

of stars, the star-loss of constellations, night’s
thinning; never the outcry so cried out, dried

up; to dehydrate to outsmart rot; to swing for
the outfield’s gap, to find a way home; all that is

over that continues to exist: the overcharge,
the overextension, the overstock and oversatu-

ration; within the egg of the oviparous animal,
the nourishing yolk, within the amniotic sac,

the buoyancy-enabling pee one makes oneself;
one makes oneself exist; the good egg’s good job;

with shifts in ocean temperature and
seawater chemistry, existing ocean climates

are vanishing, but before they vanish, one
evening, we peel skins from flash-boiled then

ice-shocked tomatoes that we then core and
crush and can, the putting to death of micro-

organisms, the strategic use of heat, one’s sub-
sistence a challenge to another’s existence; one

of us opens the Opinel and severs the stringless
string beans, keeping them separate from the

string beans with strings; resourcefulness exists, re-
use, the original label for Ocean View Brand Refugee

Wax Beans crossed out and printed over with
“Emergency Label Early June Peas,” now an objet

d’art; the upside-down strawflower omitting its mois-
ture for the woody yawn of the wreath, on occasion,

multi-headed, a golden Cerberus one retrieves near
the gates; the dupe of the pink and white Orchid

Mantis should not be judged; neither the officiant
referencing the script; think like an occupation,

to be that which earns a living; think like an off-
season and quiet down; think like the varnish

restoring the oil painting’s vibrancy, a consol-
idant that prevents further deterioration; the

narrow want to be omnivorous, the onerous,
newly light; with advancements in minimally

invasive techniques, open heart surgery is
being bypassed when it can, but for now,

while one lies open, while some contemplate
the work of vessels, repair depends on disruption;

the clementine’s opening reveals the coral-shaped
pith, albedo harbored in the core, the vanishing reef

displaced by mimicry; as an orange hue, coral will keep