Chess Masters
after Viviane Houle
Baby Snake, The Hand, Stormy Petrel—names
for chess players—but the chess board is a spiral
made of string, white against black.
When Baby Snake faces off against The Gormaliser
in Round One, their pieces are slack noodles
connecting each player to the twisting whole.
A crowd gathers while the players, more
accustomed to lessons of wood and stone,
consider how to proceed. Baby Snake
cannot hear the center of the thing,
and The Gormaliser decides the string
closely resembles a system of incandescent
filaments. Strategy, at this level, involves a dizzying
amount of sequencing and substitution.
Enter The Beast from Baku, The Iceberg, and
The Northern Philidor—all grandmasters.
Their prayers ping through tin can telephones
learning little, except the fact that no one may
take a turn without giving up the game entire.
Baby Snake is still listening to the looping wave
and The Gormaliser is aware, now
more than ever, of intestinal indigestion.
The viscerally-spiritual-incandescent-filament-
soundwave of a chessboard is finally tugged—
no one knows who tugged it—and things
unravel in such a way as to suggest shared
trauma. The spiral linguini can be heard
as a bleating field traversing a park,
and the park opens to pristine water,
trees and such, and it takes a full day
to go around it, through it, to realize
the field has opinions and a set of biases
against the very ground, that, without it,
there’d be no field at all.