The Invention of Kindle Glass by Emmanuel Hocquard Starring Thomas Pynchon, and The Fly

6:49-7:49

I'm reading Pynchon on the back porch.
The dog is skulking around scenting to see
if our friend the wily rat is still
among our potted plants and dangling
debris.

Finally, bored, he attends my thigh
with a nuzzle as I sit pondering
the fly who has so eloquently landed
on my kindle.

I think of him as me landing
on the oeuvre of Pynchon, and me
as some Pynchonian protagonist
plopped down into the sprawling
mise en scene.

"The medusa is still the one who sees. See,
we go further." He does't say that.
He says, "See. See farther."
Emmanuel Hocquard isn't in Pynchon.

With just one small genetic change,
like Jeff Blum changing from fly to say,
alien computer hacker. I could be Pynchon.

I could suss out the alien arcane, the man
with the bald head and chest tattoo
whose human arms end somewhere
in the middle of the bicep, but
continue on as crimson red squid tentacles,
the kind that flare out into mandorlas
at the end, which have eyes, of course.

You can imagine the scenes. He's spying
on Hocquard, or me, looking over
the shoulders of the fly who just
alighted on the surface of literature,

that ice floe parsing summits
as nadir, and nadir as nimbus,
that jangling of keys down
a dark and jessamine jade-tiled chute
now a cabinet whose heralds
are perplexity and vague,

a serene rage of flies
reduced to reflections
in a kindle glass,

of two tubs of bamboo
and a concrete Venus
stained with faux rust
which hides the factiche
that Botticelli never sculpted,

but some guy named Gyorgy did,
and probably in a town south of
McMinnville, Oregon, maybe even
Amity.

It is still no crime
to see the ancient languages
as green.