Your Sense of Meaning

Not to go on about it,

But then again, who doesn’t?

Haven’t you noticed the word

Mourned and valorized? Meaning.

And the urgency of it!

What if there is no meaning?

All this effort, meaningless!

The profound search for meaning!

It’s the strangest thing, this quest

For something humans produce,

And produce in abundance,

And produce compulsively,

And only humans produce,

As far as humans can tell.

Is that it? The loneliness,

The wish for the non-human,

The greater-than-human world,

To join in your production

Of meaning? It’s as if bats

Couldn’t for the life of them

Accept that maybe the night—

Skies, clouds, everything out there—

Never echolocated,

As if spiders were distressed

By the thought the universe

Might not be a giant web.

No, it’s worse than that. Meaning,

Which you can’t prevent yourselves

From making, seems fearfully

Insufficient even so,

As if trees shook heavy crowns

All summer, worrying where

In this world they might find leaves,

As if ocean waves argued

Endlessly over whether

They’d ever lead to water.

None of these analogies

Are accurate. You can sense

They’re not all that meaningful.