Colorado Review

130 TREY MOODY & JOSHUA WARE THE SECOND MOVEMENT MEANT A BOOK OF BODIES AND WARPED VINYL SPINNING Inside the body, tropes exist as dust, dissolve, become exterior world always unfolding us outward. When I watch you, I am more human than light spinning round: perception nearer to truths than “truths” undoing open language. Often times, Paul Gottlieb Nipkow would mention to his friends and family that miniature human-like beings, which he called Gruaimin, lived within his body just as we live within the world. Unlike humans, though, his Gruaimin were much more technologically advanced. Periodically, they would communicate their design plans for mechanical gadgets to him through an elaborate series of barely perceptible bleeps and squeals. More often than not, these communicative efforts were incomprehensible to Nipkow. Yet, on one occasion in 1884, the German inventor (inconceivably) translated their language, enabling him to replicate a perforated, spinning wheel that could capture images for transmission across wires. Historians consider Nipkow’s “invention” to be the forerunner of what we now consider to be the modern television. In 1972, Robert Creeley published A Day Book. In the poem “Massachusetts” from that collection, he wrote: “The you imagined locates/ the response. Like turning/ a tv dial. The message,/ as one says, is information,/ a form of energy. The wisdom/ of ages is ‘electrical impulse.’” 131 TREY MOODY & JOSHUA WARE THE THIRD MOVEMENT MEANT: “BE LAKE/ OR FOG/ WE SAW, OUR HEADS” We drop bricks into water, shade splinters down streets into pools of sound. Tree branches wetly thought: music soothing us. Un containable sleep dreams birds between shoulder blades. Perched beaks warble liquid songs, dissolve brick sounds. Through accidental observation, Lester Allen Pelton invented the Pelton Wheel, which is the most efficient and economically viable version of the water turbine. Historians deem the invention “accidental” because, if not for Lester’s compulsive habit of scratching his dandruff-ridden scalp in the dry California air (or else in dire search for the nearest milk vendor, with whom he requested immediate observation of the “act”), he would not have had the “patience” necessary to watch the fluid motion of water in the first place, nor envision its relation to Newtonian physics and free-market principles. Incidentally, history tells us that Pelton was a womanizer, par excellence, and thus gives libidinous hope to all men who suffer from chronic dandruff. After visiting the Grand Coulee Dam’s construction site in 1937, fdr said: “I am always glad to see a project in the construction stage because when it is finished very few people will realize—they won’t be able to visualize—all the difficult work in the actual construction.” 132 TREY MOODY & JOSHUA WARE THE FOURTH MOVEMENT MEANT THE MATERIALS BECAME AVAILABLE “Truth” becomes equivocal: land yearns, buildings yearn, daylight yearns, pennies yearn for capital: the ideal setting, touching versions called “God”—“I” knows industry. History reveals words, builds omens: paint here; metal there. Meaning, meaning dissolves us. Architectural scholar Prof. Sean Kane discovered the following, brief entry in the diary of George A. Fuller, the man widely considered to be the inventor of the skyscraper: “I want to see people die by the penny: a copper ‘bullet’ through the skull” (Coincidentally, Charles Whitman typed this same phrase, wordfor -word, on July 31, 1966). Thus, Fuller embarked upon a decade’s worth of mathematical computation in an effort to solve the problems inherent to loadbearing capacities of tall buildings. The culmination of his investigations led to the construction of the Tacoma Building in 1889. By this point, apparently, his murderous impulses had been quenched as there is no documented evidence of his tossing pennies from the roofs of skyscrapers. Kane speculates that Fuller allayed his bloodlust by raping and murdering prostitutes in New York City during the mid-to-late-19th century. In his poem “The Building of the Skyscraper,” George Oppen writes: “There are words that mean nothing/ But there is something to mean./ Not a declaration which is truth/ But a thing/ Which is.” 133 TREY MOODY & JOSHUA WARE THE FIFTH MOVEMENT MEANT THERE WAS NOTHING LEFT TO BUILD SO WE BUILT OURSELVES Under capital’s slow dissolve, we mold light into...