one poem by Peter Milne Greiner

Amoc Time

Brimstone and flood basalt are not the same thing

Counterintuition and cold fusion are not the same thing

Jules Verne and Bram Stoker are not out here calling every islet

a micronation–every ocean exposition–every

albatross a pteranodon

But I am

A legibility: history of weather modification after the hail cannon

Project Cold Wand: America’s war against fog

Project Cirrus: Dump dry ice into a hurricane

Project Stormfury: Cloud seed a hurricane with silver iodide on the East Coast

Operation Popeye: Cloud seed the Ho Chi Minh Trail

Operation Argus: Create artificial radiation belts in the sky with nukes

Our weather station on the Rocks is encrusted with solar panels and the solar

panels are encrusted with guano

The arches of guano the friezes of guano

the pinnacles of guano the chapterhouses of guano

the parsonages of guano the fleurons of guano

the blades and gables of the Rocks the craters and pits

of the Rocks the grotesques and chimeras of the Rocks

There’s nothing quite like watching all that

energy and death–black bluegreen algae on the Rocks

is called Mucous of the Threshold by some resident biologists

Nothing surrounds us and holds us

quite like an Exclusive Economic Zone–

Trade all the gutters of Byzantium

for all the gutters of Purgatory

and what’s left of these are emptying here

all day long and all night long

at St. Peter and St. Paul’s Rocks in the South Atlantic

After the spring session: summer cyclogeneses

When I think about paths I don’t

want to think about complexity and tools—

process or elimination

When I think about belongings—

I want to be safe from grief

When I think about evacuation—

The painted caves’ finger fluting

isn’t an annal of vivid self-abasement

so why is that what comes to mind first—

the desire and dread of the countdown

mentality–There are no caves here

Here there are experts amongst coelacanths–

and guests amongst tectonic regimes–

Coelacanths amongst guests

Conning towers amongst waves

Dowsing rods amongst radar pickets

A legibility: the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation

is one of those hypercurrents it is worried could collapse

Is it a song if an effigy can sing?

Is it a golem if instruments are heard?

Is it an essence if there is portrayal of movement?

Is it oblivion if its facets of lucidity burn bright in its distances?

Not every winking stranger is a coy telepath

and not every rupture summons the Army Corps of Engineers

With my colleague whose nickname at the Rocks is Franz Mesmer

I have come to the biologists’ sound bath

to soothe our shared and placid paranoias

It can felt in the amygdala–

a baby of UFO in a King Cake of radar

During the Cold War–I know I promised

to stop doing this–Raytheon built two radar pyramids

called PAVE PAWS to protect America

from sea launch ballistic missiles

and the pyramids–one in California and one

in Cape Cod–worked together to bathe their ranges

with beautiful wavefronts and if you

were a missile the pyramids would find

you and you

would be neutralized–

that’s what it felt like to be abob in this sea

of frequencies–like something pacified by a fatherly array

Cold plunge–hot stone–

geyser-assisted myofascial release–

belly button reopening ceremony–

apple abob in the baquet–

actual electric eel communion

Even now I yearn for an abyss of August

whose refuge is irreversible Franz complains

Yes–the trap has its heart set on exile

and innocence is the oldest

cerceaux in the book of vulgarity–

the surest succor in the book of animal magnetism–

I wasn’t sure what to say next

I envied the men he knew who knew

everything when the little I

knew felt so potent and universal

Is there wise envy? Erudite envy?

Envy that can speak over knowledge

that can be knowledge–that can

be colossal–that can connect some

and isolate others?

Is there an envy whose overclone

could—could smother their libraries

and bait their decoys–pollute their

oeuvres—lure them away from any

(except me) who is vulnerable?

Is there a pearl of one’s flame–

a grail of one’s silk–

a scroll of one’s frost–

a spine of one’s braid–

a stripe of one’s void–

a whale of one’s refuge?

Communion in any of these?

First you love whales

Then you chase them in a boat for fifty dollars

Then nothing you behold of them

is enough

You must be swallowed by the whale

You must build a life of poverty

in its cavern

and be digested

Be a candlelit skull in its catacombs

Then your shadowy atoms must travel

through the umbilicus into the calf

Into the brain of the calf

The heavy spine of the calf

The long nerves of the calf

The musculature of the calf

The navigation of the calf

The years of the calf

It was a dark time and I was in a dark place

That time is still here but it is hidden

It exerts obscurely and coheres covertly

That place is still here but it is hidden

The visible does not remember what happened here

But Franz does

Back in New York we stood on a dead jetty

A seagull teased meat from a horseshoe crab–an old one

They can live to be twenty-five

The jetty is a big ugly thing that reminds

us of amputation sequences in movies

It is the widow’s walk of chthonic puffin shit

to be found in the crotch

we joke

of every river valley