Roger Shattuck
INCOMPATIBLE COMPONENTS
This stereo must be alive.
When you turn it off
it dies
the way I'm prepared to die–
no cut to black, rather
sound and image holding after the click,
all those warm circuits still glowing
in slow fade.
Psychic scientists and old wives concur:
on the way to outer darkness we screen
a monogrammed freeze-frame feature
undercranked and overexposed
all scenes shot
with all scores settled.
"Snatched from the jaws of death,"
the headline says,
"Sea captain saved from drowning
tells of passing over and coming back
reborn into his own life."
Dr. Clay squirts mind-bubbling drugs
into college prisoners and death-row students,
claims he can simulate death
all but the sting.
His emissaries stagger back
bearing tales of comic geometry
and paleolithic memory traces
too stark to be fake.
Case histories stir up the old refrains–
Humani nihil a me alienum
.
Ontogeny recapitulates .
Something like that.
I shudder to think
the distance traversed may be equal
coming in and going out.
0 death
where is thy click?
