Polysemic Psalm
By Toby Fitch
(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.