In Blue Fasa, out from New Directions next month, Nathaniel Mackey writes:                                   We the migrating they trans-                              lated. Draft meant drift meant                                scheme meant sketch. We                                                                           the                                 migrating they were back                              in school... Step's incline                               toward stride, we stood in-                            structed, theirs the advance                                                                         we                                were learning, rote's auto-                               mata, rail we were bound by                             scraped as we verged outward,                                                                                we                               the magnetic they they turned                                 out to be...   A meteor twisting through atmospheres.  Pronouns pour through us, meaning melting into melting.  The poem seems to combine incompatible realities, a helix of scales and angles of repose.  And somehow, around the edges of an oppressive scene -- people chained to a rail, robotized by routine, moved by a mysterious, flickering they -- there's a sense of a kind of search, an intimation of transformative freedom.  Later:                                   Lip, leg, star.  Name after name                             sang change, rang changes, God's                                                                                    need                               not to be still...   It seems like an obvious thing to point out, but the immensity of the unseen world is completely overwhelming.  Antlion death trap.  Assassin bug versus bat.  Fire ants behead rival.  Her majesty, the termite queen.  Twin chickens.   Every they a we.   A fuzz of chaos peaches this world, and has a weird tendency to freeze up into spasms of order.  Interpretations collate themselves on the surface of experience.  Viewed from a greater distance out, the aggregate form of these crackling, emergent orders can, under the right circumstances, become language.  The night air cools.  I can see the illuminated fishtank by a neighbor's window, two stories up and across the line of yards and past the magnolia.  A mesh of circumstances and contingencies checkers itself across the rippling surface of the polis.   Which reminds me of something true and scary that Tracie Morris wrote:   The dust particles of New York after 9/11 coated and obfuscated the markers of all city inhabitants that day: the wind currents united boroughs and the tristate area that had been fractured in sentiment, if not by name, for at least 100 years.   A kind of we-ing but not the we-ing we wanted; a pause in legibility.  Uproar is an amazing word.  To feel the city open its mouth that wide and lose track of the difference between ants and lions.  9/11 may have been the end of America, or maybe it was Katrina, or Bush's usurpation.  The truth we often know is that America never started.  We have only our cities.   Tracie Morris goes on to say:   Whatever identity is, "traditional" concepts of it in the U.S. can't be ignored because of the eco-emergency we face.  (Katrina has demonstrated that certainly.  The doors granted that Cain-seeming mark of what?  God's wrath?  Man's wrath?  The "genus" of our "human family"?  The only moment of being equal.  How FEMA, absorbs both the Fe[male] and the Ma[le], lets the flood take them all, lets the sun bake all the bodies brown).  Fundamental nihilism is ingrained in the prejudice of the elite of the elite (the base).   And about what they'll say of how we lived, if we're lucky enough to engender a speaking they in a future, if that's what luck is.  Cradled in concrete loopshafts, ruled by people who pray to reptiles.  Unwilling -- the terror of the zero eye -- but unwilling to find any way of living in masses together without creating disposable populations.  A nightmare never stays in sleep.  America is outrageous pain.   Tracie Morris goes on to quote the lyrics of "Race Babbling" by Stevie Wonder (off Journey Through The Secret Life of Plants):   This world is moving much too fast They're race babbling This world is moving much too fast The end's unraveling This world is moving much too fast You can't conceive the nucleus of all Begins inside a tiny seed And what you see as insignificant [indecipherable]   She doesn't include this last line in the lyrics, but I like the way it makes things feel a little more old-tablet-y.  And there definitely is another line in the song, but I don't think anybody in the world knows what she sings there.  Perfect eclipse.  And surprising, because it's pretty much the only part of the song where the vocals haven't been run through what sounds like the hair-dryer from a space hotel, an effect that Morris notes "calls for saving the human race through a technologically displaced voice that could also be interpreted as the voice of another species of being, the plants' voices."   And that's so wonderful, and could religion be that?  The technology of displacing voices to save us?  And then could poetry be one?  A technology for displacing voices into justice?  Plants' speaking?  A mouth to say we in?   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lko1JUVh5w   Gérard Macé wrote of  the decipherment of hieroglyphic:   ...it's all very well to classify, translate, interpret hundreds and thousands of inscriptions: this is not yet reading, if one accepts that reading means on the contrary no longer seeing the presence of signs, so that a river in the grasslands might appear in place of the twists and turns of writing, a crenellated castle in the place of the more regular characters of the printer, and, as in illuminations, an abundance of fruits, leaves, and flowers behind the disappearing letter, making us believe that things could be born of language as if from a horn of plenty.   Public writing makes so much of the texture of experiencing a city.  The languages you can or can't read, or in between, everything resonating into a quantum foam of wildly various disembodied speech.   In Writing Signs, Irene A. Bierman talks about a later period in Egypt.  For a time ending in 969 -- about five hundred years after the last writing derived from hieroglyphs -- in Cairo, now where Egypt was ruled, ethnic and religious minorities were differentiated foremost by their alphabets.  Every social and religious group had its own discrete set of symbols for writing Arabic, now "the language of rule."  They filled their holy places, gathering places with poetry, names, dates in their own alphabets.  Public writing as memory, ideal, and demarcation, melting aesthetic into mnemonic into territorial.  Alphabets jostling tensely across yellow stone courtyards, a weird balance that complicatedly both preserves and intertwines these communities -- Copts, Judeans, Armenians -- for whom each other's spaces are defined by the illegibility of public writing in a language they share.   And thank the moon or whoever for this, that language is so resilient I mean, so constantly new.  Any we can crystallize in any of its configurations, flicker stages.  In conspiracy we breathe it, we spend our lives watching it turn physical.  At one stage the city is a falling bird; another, an alphabet of fury.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2YlgbMXGyI   "We got addicted to snorting 9/11 dust / and listened to the feel good hits of Generation X."  I think Dan Magers means this differently from how I read it, somehow.  But I like the weird dark Assyria of my reading, running my mind down the historical mise-en-abyme of 9/11s we can't seem to stop doing to each other.  The cities of murdered gods.  Jan Assmann defines the Ancient Egyptian city as "the place on earth where the divine presence could be sensed by everyone on the occasion of the main processional feasts."  Later he says:   The Egyptians conceived of themselves as members of a town or city rather than as members of a nation.  The city was where they belonged and where they wanted to be buried.  Belonging to a city primarily meant belonging to a deity as the master of that city.  This sense of belonging to a god or goddess was created and confirmed by participating in the feasts.   Jan Assmann writes about the pharaoh Akhenaten's revolution, the first monotheism.  The local gods were abolished by force, entire priesthood knocked low.  Freud thought it was the earliest Judaism.  A pervasive upgrade to the cultural operating system that reformed aesthetics, sovereignty, all the structures of transcendence.  But the reform proved short-lived, a debacle, and was remembered by the people who'd endured it as a rush of anguish. Trauma canyon.  "The abolition of the feasts must have deprived the individual Egyptians of their sense of identity and, what is more, their hopes of immortality.  For following the deities in their earthly feasts was held to be the first and most necessary step toward otherworldly beatitude."   There's a graffito Jan Assmann writes about a lot, written around 1340 BC (the middle of Akhenaten's reign) on a doorjamb in the tomb of a man named Pairi.  The writer, a blind man named Pawah, addresses the suppressed god Amun:   My heart longs to see you, Lord of the Persea-trees, when your neck receives garlands! You give satiety without eating, drunkenness without drinking. My heart longs to see you, that my heart may rejoice, Amun, you fighter for the poor! You are the father of the motherless, the husband of the widow.   Which is an awful sweet thing to say.  At the end, the voice seemingly splinters and becomes someone else speaking to Pawah: "To your Ka!  Spend a happy day in the midst of your fellow-townsmen!"  The god's presence amid garlands and townsmen means his festival, when heaven and earth fleetingly coincide and the god himself emerges and proceeds through the city.  The opening ocean.  Renegade socialities surging through the streets.  Ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo et cetera.   I wonder whether armies had to occupy cities to suppress the festivals.  Pairi was eighty years dead when Pawah got there.  He wrote his poem near where the festival of Amun had been painted in the tomb.  In one place, as though burning into the conjoining illegibility of festival air, he merges the names of Amun and Osiris, calling them together Omnophris, a name not found elsewhere.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hO_x3yUVgRM   Akilah Oliver writes:   come visit us this afternoon you, ye who swill the day's fracas, our granary is full and we delight in you to make haste, competing vocabularies laid out as in a retiring covenant, will not a complicated sentence embrace this preposterous dread   Carl Hancock Rux says, "Cain asked me to be Abel."   The illegibility we want & the illegibility we don't.  When a city not ours roars up we pour into the streets in processions also, we chant together, the air between people crackling with emergent public language.  It's a feeling there's a lot of religion in.  The people of Baltimore have been fed dust and sometimes killed by bureaucrats, many armed, who do not believe their lives matter.  And now they are interrupting the monumental language of triumphs and polite concern that fuels itself on their disposability.  A festival is breaking out, enacted as courage and renegade sociality.  The plants talking, the power to make meaning being contested. Divinity is disruption in this tottering state, and it has come to Baltimore with the memory of Persea-trees, ready for garlands.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKcc5zpfcyw   -IAN DREIBLATT Ian Dreiblatt is a poet and translator.  His poems have appeared in Elderly, Bomblog, Web Conjunctions, Pallaksch. Pallaksch., The Agriculture Reader, and Sink Review, among other places.  His most recent translations are of Gogol’s The Nose (Melville House, 2014) and Comradely Greetings, the prison correspondence of Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and philosopher Slavoj Žižek.  His translations of composer Victoria Poleva’s writings are forthcoming in Music & Literature magazine, and he has contributed translations of early Soviet texts in museum theory to the forthcoming Avant-Garde Museology (e-flux, 2015).  His sonnets was published last year by Metambesen, and Barishonah, a letterpress-printed chapbook, recently released from DoubleCross Press.