Assumption, The

Climb, the
Premise, the—

What drama
_____of the size of signs, of sighs
Seized at zero.

A dry soul is best
_____because combustible—

But to stand
_____beyond witness, burying the sun

_____or else writing fire
_____along a circumference of unclosing

—this is my faith & my reason.

I enter history
As a secret agent or stone effigy

_____dedicated to communism
_____but eaten away by music.

My chorus
_____vacuum-crowded, I
_____beg to begin—

If now
_____is a precipice, then
A human voice predates the universe.

Everything sends, never to receive
This message

Premonitory to a shriek—of
Shredded
_____immensité the vocable, irrevocable
_____Proof.

_____________________________________________________
Andrew Joron is the author of Trance Archive: New and Selected Poems (City Lights, 2010) and translator of the German fantasy writer Paul Scheerbart’s The Perpetual Motion Machine (Wakefield Press, 2011). Joron lives in Berkeley, California, and plays the theremin in the dark ambient quartet Cloud Shepherd.