Milo Lev

Action at a distance

It was a pleasant surprise to walk indoors
where they found the gently whirring shadows of chromatographs.
The day had been one of action at a distance
facial expressions beamed across outlandish chasms
each test case increasingly difficult for the particles of sentiment to master.
O gentle particles, what you understood
at the outset has been badly undermined! There was consent
of sorts, but only in the most rudimentary way.
He was seated on a molting kind of chair.
The ancients used the term anting
to describe, among other things, what the light does
or any irregular radiating motion; in the wake of which
the scrubbing of teflon pans commenced.
Scrubbing dishes in someone else’s sink is always fraught
with very specific anxieties. So the formal period
of experimentation had ended, but a solid taxonomy
was far from their grasp. The faucet spluttered ink.
No one in this world has seen it, though systems
of refracting surfaces claim to achieve almost perfect resolution.
All he could do was point to the relevant passages,
and there was a certain pathos to that. This yellow piece of piss-colored
drapery was doing most of the work, filtering objects
from the air. The rest of the work was being done by means of reluctance.
At some point progress reached a standstill:
it was in those moments of leaning together at right angles
without instruments, or inventing together
the things which they did not have the courage to investigate
that the worst kind of futility set in.

Milo lives in the United States.