The Oracle at Detroit

The last Michigan Oracle died in 1983. Not knowing
who she might belong to, the citizens
of snow-packed Hamtramck
lowered the corpse down into the bowels
of the Gear and Axle factory, committing
her body
to the deeps.

There, she settled onto a many-toothed gear,
her back arched like St. Teresa transfigured. Her hair
tangled in the ironworks, wrapping itself around
dusty, unused molds empty of plastic, coolant tanks
dripping unnoticed to the spider-laced floor.

Her flesh became green, blotched as though
beaten with ten fists, and then violet,
black veins like ink bursting within her,
wet skin erupted, sloughed away, and still
her hair grew.

The forgotten levels of the Gear and Axle factory
began to turn towards her
like a field of daisies towards
a bloated sun. The cords of her hair dangled,
slowly bringing mechanical arms around
to hover tenderly over her bones
as though she were a half-built Chevrolet.

And above, in the clang and cough
of the work-floor, a welding arm attacked
the door of a smart red coupe, and wrote
in molten letters, orange and sear:

When all else shall be taken,
A bulwark of wood at the last the heavens allow
sole to remain unwasted,
which thee and thy children shall profit.
And still her hair grew.

From the cap of her skull it descended,
pulling electric cables into her joints,
her eye-sockets, her chest cavity. A second
skeleton spooled out inside her,
sparking and crackling
its black bones. Between the rows
of her teeth, in the cavern of her nose,
filaments nest like flaming cilia,
waving in some unseen wind.

And above, in the clang and cough
of the work-floor, a stitching arm sewed
verses into a driver’s seat, white thread on
maroon cloth:

The cast is made, the net spread,
The tunny-fish shall flash in the moonlit night.

And still her hair grew. The web of it
stretched beneath the Gear and Axle factory,
lightless and thick. In the smooth, meatless
cave of her brainpan,
circuits like eyes flashed complexities
at the bone-wall,
and the rust-wedded gears,
dead thirty years and more,
began again their old grind.

The silver robotic arms spread out
like hoplites on the factory floor,
and the line manager saw them arrange
themselves, banging out oracles into
sheet metal, plate glass, hubcabs,
engraved filigree into dashboards
and steering wheels,
stamped into wheelwells,
blazed into still-soft steel.
The prophet-building howled
in its birth, soundless, severe:

I know the number of the grains of sand and the extent of the sea!
I understand the mute and hear the voiceless!
(O, when the Medes have a mule that is king,
a mule that is king,
a mule that is king,
when the Medes have a mule that is king
The Lydian’s feet shall fly!)
The smell has come to my senses
of a strong-shelled tortoise
boiling in a cauldron together with lamb's flesh!
(Ask me not for Arcadia! Ask me not for
acorn-meal! But Tegea, O, Tegea,
Tegea I will give you, wrapped in red rope
like a birthday present!)

And still, her hair grew.