An empty room, the television on,
rooms where the baby's fed and the vacuum's run,
then elevators playing CNN ,

a silent baseball game above a bar,
amoebic pictures from a distant star,
three models waving hands across a car—

I see these screens and, feeling pixelated,
dust in a sunbeam, so disintegrated
I can't divine the cases being stated,

wonder if a particle, afloat,
can teach itself to pray, or to devote
its substance to the god of the remote.











From Poetry Magazine, Vol. 187, no. 4, January 2006. Used with permission.