J e f f A l e s s a n d r e l l i —

Taco Bell Hemingway

for Benjamin Peret

Taco Bell Hemingway is what I heard
and so I nodded immediately,
completely assured by the phrase,
its meaning and gestation,
although you actually said
To hell with the right way
or maybe to hell, right away!
and later I thought my mishearing
had been a version of my life
that I had interred
so deeply
for so long
that it had suffused
into what might be called
my sense of self,
its attendant reality,
where something as melodically discursive
as Taco Bell Hemingway I simply took
to be how modern life had coalesced around me,
asserting itself while fading away
into the background, omnipresent, faintly pulsating.

(You have always told me the truth;
you have always insisted on “telling it like it is.”)

Taco Bell Hemingway. A certain way of life.
“Beautiful as the accidental encounter,
on a dissecting table,
of a sewing machine
and an umbrella.”
And so I hear in the back of my head
what Randall (oldest student in the class,
faux designer glasses, always wore a long sleeve
checkered shirt even on the balmiest of spring days)
in my WR 514: Advanced Workshop class
would always say after I read a poem:

“I like this, I really do, but I’m just wondering--what are the stakes for the writer and for us as readers? It’s interesting, it is, but also feels kinda...abstract or amorphous. I’m wondering what everyone else thinks?”

And now I’ve graduated, long ago,
and in some instances the colors have brightened
and in other instances paled
and through it all I have come
to understand that the world is, in most cases, Randall
and his immediately rendered
opinions, his stuffy long-sleeved shirts.
How the biggest requirement
is to always think with one’s head,
nothing else. You have
taught me many things, it’s true
—to hell with the right way—
and yet oftentimes I still lament
a black snowball against the tyranny
of so much white snow,
a pound of billowing smoke
vs. a sullen heap of ashes,
the sentimental past
and the moody, ecstatic future.

In the back, all afternoon long,
they are throwing down
slivers of the sun.
In strict regiment.

A minor testament.

Daybook (Early Winter Afternoon)

It’s an honest thought:

If I keep charging my computer for the rest of my life I’ll charge it to perfection.
My phone, my superior craftsmanship, only-needs-to-be-charged-once-a-month-and-will last-forever electric razor.

What’s honest about it is the way that the more something is given--I hope--the more it gives back. Power as life-source. Perfection as power. All night before the transatlantic flight I charge my phone, and it lasts the whole way there. Or perhaps I also charge it while we’re in the air and get off the plane at full power once again.

Featureless, blemish-less, black holes are perfect. As the theoretical physicist (and coiner of the term “black hole”) John Wheeler put it, black holes “have no hair.” Perfection as hairless uniformity: “All black holes of a certain mass (and spin and charge) are identical to all other black holes of that same exact mass (and spin and charge).”

There’s no way to charge a computer in a unique or individualized manner. Every charge is like every other charge, with the goal of each also the same: full and complete. And the wish for endurance. So the dream of the eternal charge, one we now know is attainable and right around the corner. Perfection as the ability to think about everything except itself, its dim, incessant consistency. (The perfect painting is unviewable, it’s been both seen and unseen for so long. In its rhythmic and syncopated perfection, the perfect song is unlistenable, etc.)

On the plane I stare at the window from time to time, but for most of the flight I work, on either my computer or phone. Toil as work and grace as work and work as work, hard, relentless, routinely soul-sucking. Satisfying at times but more often stultifying. And always more of it. (Obvious, if silly, analogue: A black hole will feast and feast and never grow full. Perfect hunger, persuasively thick.)

There are 40 quintillion (40,000,000,000,000,000,000) black holes in our universe and 1-2% of all stars eventually form black holes.

Eating light, the blackness of a black hole isn’t dark. It’s bright, brilliant. In this deception it too is honest, although in a way that disregards actor and set, blindness and marrow.

.