“For in my nature I quested for beauty, but God, God hath sent me to sea for pearls.”
    —Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno

“So what’s our straightforward definition of the ideal search engine? Your best friend with instant access to all the world’s facts and a photographic memory of everything you’ve seen and know.”
    —Marissa Mayer, The Official Google Blog
    posted 9/10/2008 12:15:00 PM

I waited in the car reading a magazine. It said:
Fear what you can’t see, not what you can, which I took to mean
loathe what you don’t know, but love it also,
as you crave the binding and

                                        the breaking free. This is the lesson

of the loose dog darting toward the road at the edge of the park,
and of the cabbage rot wafting

                                          from the plowed down farm

at the tip of September. We praised the dusty path
pocked with stagnant rain because it carried us
from the field called striving to the one

                                          called the body’s ambition. If

anything were buried there the dog would find it, but he circled
the soccer goal without regard for the creature, all talons
and wings, caught, strangled

                                          in the net. To me it was an owl,

and to you a hawk waylaid in pursuit
of a field mouse. To the boys kicking the ball
it was the goal within the goal, the thing

                                          they strove for while their sisters

splashed each other in the fountain and their mothers
swayed modestly to merengue booming from the tailgate.

In the search bar I typed the fear of the Lord, for
that seemed to be what was called for,

                                          round, transparent,

what clear glass will reflect in certain light, a mother
sitting at a picnic table with her back to her children,

                                          all you can’t see.

All you choose not to. His hands searched the small of my back
for a pardon I refused, miniature ungivable grace. His thumbs
turned the crux of my voice into a secret

                                          I relished with my tongue

like a lozenge, swallowed—sweet, quick—for safe keeping.
In the concrete darkness a voice instructs:

Tell it.
Tell the secret.

                                          But I have lost it, and anyway

I do not fear the Lord, who delivered me.

In the search bar I typed my grandfather’s name, which at first
seemed a way of mending everything, of causing him
to appear on the porch having crab cakes and

                                          birch beer for lunch

whistling after goldfinches among the castor and jack-
in-the-pulpit.

                                          I entered the word

logos. Then: apogee, apotheosis, heuristic theory, war
letters, forgotten water. Everything’s connected underneath
though not at the surface or above,

                                          not the apex of agape,

but in the baptismal muck I drink
from the puddle on the path between longing
and devotion, longing for language,

                                          devotion to the hushed house

in the hour of absence.

This morning in the boxcar chill
of the kitchen I find myself
singing, as if to a lined-out hymn.
I don’t know who is feeding me

                                          the words. I am

the only one here. I sing
Love you, hot stuff, like a stranger,
then Ayudame, like a child slipped in a fountain,
then Look at that, I’ll be, like an old man

                                          amazed by the finches

flitting at the feeder. I read somewhere there is a perfect
algorithm that tethers every question any of us might ask
to its answer, if we want it, close now
only unwritten. Through the window,

                                          on the empty porch,

the sago palm in its low blue pot
widens to welcome the filtered light,
each of its thousand spiny leaves

                                          a term of silence,

a path from the death of the dog
to the search for its owner, from loss itself
to the sense of having caused it, from

                                          having been delivered

by your fear, to becoming the thing that is lost,
the secret word, the thing you can’t see.