This photo is of fire-scorched trees in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, northern Minnesota. This poem was published in Denver Quarterly (Vol. 27, No. 3, Winter 1993). The placement of ‘only’ is one of the keys to meaning.
Lightning
To tell the truth
or
How analysis of the effects of disturbances can be reduced
to the calculation of an impulse response
I only want
Let time be the set of integers.
Binary fat fish near the
sheep-colored edge of a continent
Eighteen hundred thunderstorms are
now.
I want only
The map is not bijective.
The boy with three coats on
Who sifts through out dumpster at dusk
A suitable forgetting factor can be
determined
by monitoring the excitation of the
process.
I only have
Seventy-five hundred volts here to go
there.
A tribe of plastic squaws from Hong Kong
Within the fetters of long, straight skirts
Feedforward eliminates measured
disturbance.
I have only
The sound waves of air
heated to fifteen thousand degrees
Celsius.
The catachrestic nouns of my thirties
The profile of her lips in blue mountains
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