Polysemic Psalm

(after Wisława Szymborska)

The notion that nation states aren’t holey is niche, wholly.

      Nietzsche saw through it to a ‘dearth of peepholes’ populated 

            by the capital eye of the coldest of all cold monsters.

                  It’s truly an old number, i.e. cartographic claptrap:

            clouds dump whatever they hold on either side of any divide;

      sand spills through cracks between lands; a Kraken’s tentacles

overrun territories; mountains like fountains are forever overflowing

      with inflammatory boulders bounding down onto foreign turf.

            Song traverses surfaces. The tweep of a willy wagtail flies in the

                  face of any and all frontiers—beak abroad, tail at home,

            it flits and twerks through roadblocks melting into place

      like chocolate under sun. A black widow could be on the inside

or the outside of your back window; aboard the boots of border guards,

      a flea feels unobliged to field cross-examinations as to origin, destination.

            Viewed from above—from over the ocean or up in space—these

                  crossover seams can seem chaotic, like continents clashing

            like incontinence and cheese. From below they’re more like

      warring fractions, totalling each other with inevitable ease. It’s only

human, all too human, to want to take shelter in a quarantine station

      while olive branches from opposing shorelines smuggle themselves

            via numberless leaves from river to sea, endless. One day,

                  maybe, as the smog rolls in, we’ll finish undermining

            the mineless whole and can set about trolling the riven starlight

      that smites us inordinately—and might continue indefinitely, migrating,

rotating above and below, as fog drifts, dust shifts, AI lifts off humanely

      and our great conspiracy theories come to pass—as we become

            humus at last: tangled flora, underground fauna,

                  a stateless tweeping in the wind.