Time is motion, energy, stress, and speed, divided by the sun's
circumference at half past equinox tonight: so say
freeze-frame images of tummied pregnant women
who elbow dumbweights, as knock-kneed men step
up footstools in a watercolor squat. Before these
ambrotypes, Eadward Muybridge shot lava beds
for the army, in a dry-bone valley of bell tents
blowing against a Cenozoic drainage of salt-flat seas.
For months, a band of Indian outsiders with breech-
fed guns suck rye grass, burned down manifest destiny
along the borders of now and nineteenth century.
Later the heads of Captain Jack and Boston Charley
are shipped to a medical museum in the East.
Here the artist plants an enemy Klamath scout in
an igneous gash, to simulate a battle, a yield
and amplitude of war--never yet caught
with a candid eye. Barncho and Sloluck are gagged
and box-carred off to Alcatraz, as Modoc myths
of stealing fire--Lost River Blind Man's bet
with one-eyed Watchman--are spent in Coehorn mortar,
but the desert ocean music stays unmetered and unspoke.

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