Tuesday poem #125: Jennifer K Dick : CERN 59

I dreamt of little green Martians in Timbuktu, of Keplar’s mountains, of a Newtonian halo drawn over my skin using a pair of compasses[1]. I heard someone down the hall whisper “When we lean together our burning profiles shatter.” What I thought was that I had been slipped something by the R&D department, said “the black funerary urn between us” and toasted an imaginary Einstein. “Oh, nobody can work the negative spaces like you, kiddo.” Da Vinci was chained in a corner. Someone at CERN explained that otherwise he took off into the night. Many sightings had caused a kind of Templar-esque society to brew up in the villages nearby. “Can’t have that,” one of the secretaries by the front door buzzed. I squinted. I blinked. Da Vinci’s beard seemed to be growing longer by the second. I thought of embryos in the 8^th week making 250,000 new neurons every minute. Far off, in Canada, a poet wrote “Embossing tools etch patterns onto gilt.” Fair enough. But I figured I should cut out while I was ahead, in a kind of cumulous nimbus. Turning out the gate, I spotted something not unlike a cheap neon sign. “God Awaits” or was it “Awakes”? I hit the gas soaring into a new night, CERN only a spot on the horizon behind me.

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[1] Using some rearranged lines by Meira Cook, from the start and end of Wife of Saint Casaubon of the Long Silences at the Breakfast Table, online at: http://www.dusie.blogspot.ca/2014/04/tuesday-poem-56-meira-cook-wife-of.html

Jennifer K Dick resides in France but is from Iowa. She is the author of CIRCUITS (Corrupt, 2013), ENCLOSURES (BlazeVox eBook, 2007), FLUORESCENCE (University of GA Press, 2004), and 4 chapbooks: CONVERSION (Estepa editions, Paris, 2013) including art by Kate Van Houten, BETWIXT (Corrupt, 2012), Tracery (Dusie, 2012) and Retina/Rétine (Estepa, 2005). She is currently at work on a large prose poem project about the CERN. Jennifer also teaches at UHA in Mulhouse, France, curates the Ivy Writers reading series in Paris and the Ecrire l’Art mini-residency for French authors at La Kunsthalle Mulhouse. She is a poetry editor for VERSAL out of Amsterdam, writes book reviews for various places and a poetics column for Tears in the Fence (UK). For more, see her blog at: http://jenniferkdick.blogspot.fr/

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan