15: Stat

That woman with the graph. This black box, open to the numbers.

White boards, black lines, blue lines, red lines, green lines -

what cannot be expressed

in lines, she says: it's really about the hills and valleys.

Troughs and peaks: this mess of heads,

this audience.

She says: this mess of heads is in the hills and valleys; lines

are our best representation of what

we need to know today. What this white board is about is lines,

borders;

around the room I see the audience in

Middle Eastern countries, Chinese - Asia outside China falls here, she says -

Black American, Black African - then Sudan should be here, she continues -

Anglo Saxon - EU - Russia -

Caucasian - Hispanic/Latino Americans - this graph is: what she says.

I think.

Jackson Pollock, like art, removed sound and installed chaos, in lines.

Drip by drip, no foreground,

no background; his canvas

beneath his movement, dancing it out like Natives

in the sand;

there are lines drawn

in the black box

but I see

hills and valleys everywhere, feel a canvas on the floor;

here long hair, short hair, dark, light, woman, man, tall, short, all these heads

of ears,

noses, and eyes, crests and valleys, the topography astonishing,

the glorious use of color,

facades: humans.

Longitudes and latitudes are just

these lines,

belts holding together cardboard hemispheres

in an office.

Rise above the canvas; listen,

for the heart beat of the talk: flat lines, and

on a mountain, Abraham is shy around the corner.