The Galactic Herald of Daedalus Goes Shopping for an Engagement Ring, and Settles on the Perverse, Adolescent Genius of

The Galactic Herald of Daedalus Goes Shopping for an Engagement Ring, and Settles on the Perverse, Adolescent Genius of the Wenger Giant Pocketknife


“The smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.”

Werner Heisenberg


The silver body paint
Mother bought and applied to me
streaks and runs black.
Another needle breaks off deep
in my shoulder.
The oily suspension
requires a bigger gauge.
Anyway,
Mother’s no good at injecting.
An orange smear where she swabs my arm with
a cotton ball,
the smell of rubbing alcohol
tickles my nose.
I'm unsteady on metal casters as Mother leads me
down the aisle of shadow box displays angled like a saber arch or A-frame overhead,
where laid out on green felt Swiss army knives
have been mounted according to size, from the larger below to the smaller above.
The ones at the apex
achieve the sublime, a Platonic ideal of the multitool,
manifold function distilled to an essence, a question of how you decide
between tweezers, a lens, and file, or scissors, hook, and reamer, punch with sewing eye….
What algorithmic mystery of usefulness and need
the design of each knife suggests.
Totally different from
the old-school
analog synth on the counter.
Tweak a knob, and the sound from one
key depressed, making sound
at a time will change.
Could have only one yellowed plastic key,
with endless dials and buttons to marshal a galaxy of sound.
A pistol grip drill in her delicate, plump hand,
Mother gently revs the motor,
to spin the chuck.
Her other hand swabbing my temple she says,
“Now,
that one is a real gem.”