Consensus

Can there be any elegance
Pleasurable to all manner
Of intelligence, any kind

Of artifice even humans
Agreed on universally,
To say nothing of another,

More alien intelligence?
No. We’re certain this can’t be so.
While there may be no one for whom

There is no form of elegance
That’s pleasurable, no matter
How angry their Intelligence,

Every feast is someone’s poison
In the aesthetics of the beasts.
But maybe an inhuman mind,

A swarm, a collection of minds
Running on different atoms,
Might home in on one conclusion,

And it might not be one any
Intelligent persons have found
Pleasurable, not symmetry,

Go, calculus, evolution,
Some dome of a fine cathedral,
Poem, the beloved in shadows,

Not any or others of those.
One day, the descendants of mind,
Housed in other than feasting beasts,

Might find consensus elegance
Pleasurable in dirt, gravel,
Near anything universal.