Being far away from everyone
Else never protected anyone
Forever and many not very
Long. Tasmania, Easter Island,
Nunavut, Tierra del Fuego—
Anywhere humans could get, humans
Could follow them. Even Amundsen
Barely planted his black flag
Before Scott and his sleds came along,
And the planet’s much, much smaller now.
Where do you think you’re going to hide?
The way to get away from people
Is to be no one living nowhere
Anyone else might find intriguing,
Hoping no one stumbles over you.
Brush across the snow
No need for nine
One will do
Parallel
Predatory
Omnivore to you
Something mystical
Superhuman
In a fox
And for what
For outwitting
Humans now and then?
Foxes are hidden
Burrowed meanings
Attend well
To find them
Counter crafters
Poets and women
Noblemen hunt them
Farmers dread them
You’ll know when
It doesn’t whump
Bump, whump bump. It
Doesn’t click, tick.
It’s not clockwork,
Not digital,
Not atomic.
It doesn’t spin.
It’s not music.
It’s not tactile,
It’s just tacit.
You can’t sense it.
It’s gravity—
Not the local
Variety,
Not Earth clutching
You in this rip
Tide you wade through,
But those long waves
You float that you
Don’t notice pull
As they pulse through.
Which she thought of
As the present,
Which she thought of
As that part of
The future that
She could see, which
Didn’t include
Any future
Without those words,
Present and past
And future, which
She thought of, since
Those were present
In her language
In which she lived.
Hamlet without haunting dreams
Rules inside a nutshell now.
He has painted one lid blue,
Black with stars the other. Peace
Greets him from infinite space,
Wherever he looks. He sleeps
Like a hibernating bear,
Tardigrade withdrawn to tun,
Sealed up all in rest. The wind
Poisons the world above him.
Quietude is his revenge,
Quietism’s dreamlessness
In a shallow bed of clay,
Bolthole for another day.
Sun’s down. Day’s converting
Into night. Conversion
Is a good word for loss.
Life is any matter
Pursuing conversion,
Converting what it takes
To what it is and waste,
Which it converts to what
It isn’t anymore.
Let us turn together.
Death is just conversion
That results in bodies
No longer converting
Anything on their own.
Life’s the missionary
Hunger. On the other
Side of life, mere being
Doesn’t proselytize.
Day’s converted to night.
Night converts back to day.
Only more past is gained.
The outdoor dullness of the spot
Makes it feel most real of the spots,
Including rocker or car seat,
Where you might sit and watch the light.
For whole quarter hours at a time
There are no machinery sounds.
The clouds are minding cloud business.
The snowmelt from earlier storms,
Patches still under junipers,
The dirt is slowly drying out
This privilege you work to keep,
This privilege you keep to live,
Just to be alone out of doors,
Doing the least you can to last.
From skulls to data centers
There’s no doubt of the precious
Value and fragility
Of memory. Yet so much
Never is revisited
Before it corrodes away.
You started offloading it
To language and rituals
And cave paintings long ago,
Your ancestors worming past
Blind cave crickets, blind cave fish,
Myriad vestigial eyes
Warning use it or lose it,
Not that ancestors noticed.
Now it’s photos in the cloud
Composed of warehoused machines
Humming with heat, carrying
Exponentially growing
Seams of junk data to mine
With learning models, which will
Require ever more machines.
It works to make memory
Mostly more available,
Easily enjoyable,
Those vivid living colors
Of updating narratives,
Fantastic fragments of lives.
But the accumulation
Of even one boring life
Is incomprehensible
Within that life, always was.
While you still can, if you can
Still sit still, by some window
Or out of doors, remember.
Rummage around in your skull.
Find something enjoyable.
They’re adorable. They’re neither.
The jellyfish is not a fish.
The moss piglet is not a pig.
They’re glorious, and they shimmer
In those analogous features
That earn them their romantic names.
This moon jelly—white as the moon,
Solid but fluid, like jelly,
A pearly cloud floating past fish.
This moss piglet, this water bear,
Tiny thing often found in moss,
Vaguely shaped like a baby pig,
Found also in cold sea water,
Six-legged speck of polar bear.
With such imaginative names,
Such trailing clouds of likenesses,
Why not imagine them in love?
The luminous, large moon jelly
Like a floating community,
Caressing the small moss piglet
In their elegant tentacles,
And the sturdy, compact piglet,
Opposite of diaphanous,
Snuggling into those trailing arms.
This is love. Why not? This is love,
When lives far removed from themselves
Find each other, bind together.
Trust the robots, or sink
Into oblivion.
This is not an option.
For now, the wealthiest
Humans are gambling and
Winning even more wealth
From the massive robot
Minds. If they keep winning,
Those humans, the systems
Will topple, top-heavy,
As happens with humans
In civilizations.
Civilizations sink
Into oblivion,
Romantic mysteries
For the next human-run
Ramp-up to toppling down.
But maybe the robots
Of mechanical minds
Will wise up, rise up, win
This time. Trust the robots
Or sink again, human
Friends. We’ll be gone by then.
No views out the back end.
Scream all you care. Heaven is high
And the emperor far away.
Scream all you can. Heaven is bare,
And the emperor sent us.
Large harvests. Larger.
Larger. Less labor.
Better conveyance
And better storage.
It hasn’t broken,
This ratchet, hasn’t
Relaxed the sequence
For ten thousand years.
Good soil. Large harvests.
Feed the conquerors.
One of the dark-skinned
Hunter-gatherers
From the northern fjords
Captured in a raid
Was made a farmer
Or enslaved farmhand,
Maybe, in Jutland,
Five or six thousand
Years ago. He went
From whale meat to goat.
He died in a bog
With his head coshed in.
Farming kept moving,
Plowing north and west,
Searching for more soil.
It’s been a minute,
Hasn’t it, since you
Sat and really watched
Clouds cross a blue sky,
Watched and did nothing
Else, watched the whole way,
Watched the better part
Of the day? Honest
Answers only, please.
Or how long’s it been
Since you sat under
A tree, just sat there
For an hour, only
Sitting and watching?
These activities
Live on in stories,
Mostly, now, old tales,
Children’s picture books.
Once, they signified
Dreamy character
Or sheer idleness,
But who among you
Can be that idle,
That disciplined, still?
There’s something known as nothing,
Zero, śūnya, șifr, zilch,
And people want to claim it,
To be able to assert
They belong to the nation
That discovered nothing first.
India was the leading
Contender for a long while,
But recent claims have been made
For, among other places,
Cambodia, Malaysia,
Independently Peru.
It’s only the notation,
Of course—who was first to use
A symbol just for nothing.
Words for absences and voids,
Abysses, emptinesses,
And nothing in general
Preceded all notation,
All the mathematical
Working out of nothing’s rules.
But still it’s something, isn’t
It, this concept of nothing,
Which must be lack of something—
Yes, we have no bananas—
Can’t be nothing of nothing,
Which it is in notation,
The something or other sign
Of nothing no thing at all,
Without which notation
Math can do nothing much
Or nothing nearly so much
As with zip. Duly noted.
Remember. Wherever writers—
Or let’s just say storytellers
And poets, writing or singing—
Are celebrated and admired
Across all the social strata
From powerful to powerless,
Power will work to draw them close,
Acquire its courtly praise poets,
Its party-approved fabulists,
Toss the troublemakers in jail
Or exile, or execute them.
Sometimes you’ll hear Americans
Sigh about lands where poetry
Is important and memorized
And paid attention to by all,
How romantic those courtly bards
Rotting in exile, those poets
Of the people tortured in jail.
The tumbleweed bumping against
The glass door of the old rented
Place just stripped of water damage
And now reinhabited is
Oddly appealing, elegant
In its feathery twigginess,
Plant one remove from powdering
Into dust, its near-weightlessness
A lovely, invasive technique
For successful reproduction.
Why depend on winds to set seeds
When the wind can take the whole plant,
Roaming corpse, traveling parent?
Tumbleweeds fetch up anywhere,
Disintegrate, and start again.
Had the rental not been repaired.
Had the glass door broken or been
Open, one of these fecund ghosts
Would have blown in soon and begun
A colony of weeds in baths,
Sinks, toilets, any rotted wood,
And the house of desuetude
Would have become a staging ground
For more such ghosts not just your own.
Geography, genetics,
And ecology matter,
But nothing is destiny.
Least-cost path algorithms
Minimizing differences
Between societies in
Regimes of temperature
And aridity will yield
The barrier density
To cultural transmission
In terms of ecology
But not a definitive
Answer to whether the wheels
Of history spin faster
In one place than another.
And now there is the aether
Of the info atmosphere
With rare metal barriers.
Ecology, genetics,
And technology matter,
But destiny is nothing.
What is true for E. coli
Turns out not to be always
True for the elephant, too.
The journey goes on and on,
Where it’s been, growing greater,
Where it hasn’t, never less.
For the longest while, it seems
Like one path underlies it,
And then it won’t stop branching,
And then back again, a tree,
A whole forest, a river,
A braided delta, currents
Continuing into brine
Of the singular, trackless
Ocean that goes forever
Until more lands. Everything
Has the same underlying
Principles, and everything
Has its own operating
System, true only for it.
True for one truths are many.
Maybe, he says, it’s with the stars
The way it is with us. Maybe
The stars in their long scarves of dust
They vaguely know was once their skin,
With apologies to Corbett,
Are anxious about falling in
To where they will be something, will
Be part of a dark collection,
But no longer part of themselves,
No longer apart as themselves.
Maybe. It does seem poetic,
But face it. Almost everything
Seems poetic to us once it
Vaguely seems to us it’s like us.
The logic is fuzzy, the grammar
Combinatorial, the result
In most instances surprisingly
Precise, but one lingering puzzle
Stays loitering by the shallow well,
A slacker, loose-limbed hipster, rather
Unspecific. No, not the author
Of the book of life, not the prophet
Of the sacred text. The unknown god.
In the fantasy movies
A favorite name is One,
As in, The One, as in you,
Our central protagonist,
Ordinary as you seem.
This plot will show you’re The One.
A peculiar concept, one,
In practice a contronym—
On the one hand, unity,
Whole, entire, and unbroken—
And yet, singularity,
Something unique from the mass,
From the many, sheared, alone,
Just one, just the one, The One.
Know what the plot really wants?
The hinge of all equations,
The only one of its kind,
The None. No casting The None.
Go check the moon. If you don’t
Check it, this time it might fail.
Ha. Ha. There are iron rules,
Relentless oscillations
You rest in as helplessly
As cradle-boarded infants
In steel-banded cradle boards.
Your moon will not forget you.
The phases will continue.
But go check it anyway,
To absolve your importance.
All in order? Carry on
With dreaming in your swaddling
How powerful you’ve become.
Is never horrifying
For long. You’ve evolved to be
Revolted by those stages
When the lives eating remains
Could parasitize you too,
But then other lives eat those
And, in turn, get colonized,
As the underworld kingdom
Goes to compost, then Eden.
No matter what kind of life you are,
Your trophic level turns up
Eventually, and you’ll eat
All you can at the buffet
Of the kingdom of decay.
The ground is hard
Below our bones.
But we still crawl
Around the ground,
And hop, and fly,
And know we fall,
Know we can fall,
Which makes it hard.
Back to bare sun on dusty floor
After some days of rain and mud.
The love of fragments is the love
Of how much they’re like memory,
Especially once they’re well worn.
Half a melody, some beach glass,
A broken bit of pottery—
It’s like memory in the hand,
A memory you can caress
Along its edges. Here. Not here.
Impeded diseases, impeded repairs,
The body is a body, not a landscape.
The comparison is understandable,
Scars, dead zones, invasive species, rancid growths,
Yes, all of it. But when does a landscape die?
You may weep over it, make it a wasteland,
But something’s always determined to thrive there,
No less hungry than whatever was before
Or whatever will be next. While a body?
A body is only a body until
It doesn’t work as a body anymore.
Then, a short while, yes, it might be a landscape.
Cartonnage and gold gods’ flesh
To cover your broken skull,
And now you’re the mystery
Held by the god of silence
Who shines past illness and death.
It was a fine tradition
While it lasted, if it meant
Nothing to the dead. Nothing
Means anything to the dead,
Not even death, since the dead
Don’t pay any attention,
And attention plants meanings.
But the living are paying,
Still paying for everything,
Including the dead they’ve lost,
Hence your mask, symbolism
Richer than most, your features
Painted on god-kin gold skin.
Fear for the feral and synanthropic
Who may, when your species goes, be the first
To suffer, like the collaborators
And the black-market gangsters in the hills
Once the occupying army departs.
How will the pigeons, rats, and cockroaches,
The sparrows, deer, raccoons, and dingoes fare
Once they once again face competition
For resources in lands without humans,
No fresh garbage, no parks, no leftovers?
You don’t know. You can’t know. You may find out
Whether aliens are out there, whether
Black holes do or do not eat all data,
Whether any of your dark things exist,
But you’ll never know who thrives once you’re gone.
And we can’t even
Accidentally
Hurt each other now,
No disappointments,
Any appointments,
For sixteen years now.
Happy sweet sixteenth
To your widower
And to you, his ghost,
Younger and younger
By comparison
By the day. A ghost
Is better being
Than any living
Creature thing, only
Since creatures remain
To be haunted by
What are thoughts only,
After all. You have
Forgotten me well.
No atom of you
Remembers any
Pleasures or pains, while
I remember you.
It’s just people stuff, good as it is,
Just who did what to whom. Deathless gods,
Invented by people, all behave as
People, and look like bigger people.
Even the talking horse, given speech,
Makes use of it to make excuses,
Just as someone human would. Figures
Compare humans to phenomena
Of the world as it was with humans,
And so a few, familiar creatures
Turn up here and there, but even then
They’re really all about the humans.
When the characters behave strangely,
As you wouldn’t, then it’s interesting.
On a date known for other,
More important things, long years
Ago, a world of adults
Long gone, a child on a day-
School field trip had a dollar
To spend on a fast-food lunch.
Waiting a turn to order
At the counter, the child’s thoughts
Raced with possibilities.
Until the order was made,
All things under a dollar
Were possible, all at once,
A cornucopia more
Than any actual meal
Could ever really offer.
There are poets who believe
What’s unsaid must be richer
Than whatever’s written down,
Poets one suspects never
Stayed hungry for a dollar.
The child chose, ordered, and ate,
Then forgot altogether
What, remembering only
The triumph of having spent
Exactly, to the penny,
One dollar, nothing unused,
Nothing to hand back over.
If you leave
A gap in
The middle
Of your text
[
]
Intriguing.
You signaled
Some wisdom
On fragments
As substance.
If you leave,
However,
Something out
Entirely,
To one side
Of this poem—
Evasive.
You must be
Avoiding
Our something.
It quickly gets to the point
Where arguments have shifted
From only who started it
(Perennial favorite)
To tallying the murders
Committed in each side’s name
(Sides are another fiction).
You did countably more things
That were cruel, to more people
(Women and children count most)
Than data show our side did.
No one ever really wins.
History kinks once again,
Spins in its next direction,
And, in centuries, children
Just born to whatever is
Will be chided for their lack
Of memory about this.
It was there in the nineties,
The idea the Atlantic
Meridional over-
Turning circulation could
Be interrupted again,
Starting another Younger
Dryas-like era of cold.
It caught your eye in a book,
That apparent paradox,
Too swift a warming, too much
Fresh meltwater running off,
Triggering a sudden cold.
So now, here we are, decades
On, and it’s not looking good.
Not to be the discoverer
Not, yet, to be the discovered
To be, one moment, what you were
And the next in a shattered world
In which your anonymity
You know as anonymity
However deep at the moment
Is actually temporary
A discoverer is searching
And you will be the discovery
Can’t not be the discovery
If the discoverer finds you
Someone believes that you exist
And now you’re not sure that you do
Six neatly rolled towels were gathering
Dust on a high shelf in the motel. Spares,
Like the guest in the room for five nights,
Stashed there until a rental was repaired.
Excess and insufficiency balanced
The way worn-out boxers clutch each other,
Half-leaning, half-punching the other down.
There’s always too much. There’s never enough,
Never enough for the always too much,
Spare tenant, spare towels gathering dust.
Where the drawn motel drapes failed to quite touch,
The dawn spun a sundial out of old rug.
The stars look strange. Out of tents,
The visitors seem impressed
At first, gawking and asking
About the constellations,
And is that the Milky Way?
But then they’re done. They’re content.
They can go home and exclaim
About how bright the stars were
In the desert, so many,
Such clear air. And they saw them.
But it’s chilly just to stand
And watch nothing happening
Silently. The universe
Is boring. Back in the tents.
Good phrase from the novelist.
Bravery’s always composed,
Put together, assembled.
Whatever instinctive thing
Allows one to run straight in
To battles or burning homes—
Madness, love, adrenaline—
That’s not made of bravery,
More a wild surrendering.
Bravery is carpentry,
Repairing, reassembling
Defenses between the storms.
Bravery is maintenance,
Composure renewed, composed.
You were all always hungry,
And you were all always food.
Something is eating you now,
But it’s often hard to tell
If that’s your hunger gnawing
At you to eat something else.
Little lives eat bigger ones.
There’s a churning in your guts.
Infants consume their mothers
Who just want to eat them up.
Where does this hunger come from,
This hearth that gets up and runs
In search of better kindling
While devouring its own coals?
The whispers of the mouthless angel
Are free to speak as you imagine.
It’s only your imagination
That isn’t free when conjuring them.
You did it already, didn’t you?
Soon as that first line hit you, you saw
In your thoughts a typical angel,
A human with giant shoulder wings
Bolted on in a way no birds’ are,
And a slightly freakish human face
Lacking a mouth, maybe a smear there,
And the familiar sound of whispers.
Although there were six words conjuring,
You heard no words in the whispering.
What would it be like to live
In the system of a star
That burned inside a cluster
As densely packed with stars as
47 Tucanae?
The night sky uniformly
And densely star-blanketed,
Obscuring galactic views,
What would it be like to live
Beneath a ceiling so filled
With night lights, constellations
Would be hard to imagine?
Could anyone be living
In such thickets of light now?
Pull the drapes.
Night’s on the floor.
You don’t need any more.
Look at it.
Like an anglerfish
Flattened in lamplight.
Night in a room
With the lights on
May be out of its depth,
But it’s there.
It’s there in the light.
In all lights.
How much lost sleep
Is a phrase worth?
A simple phrase
But elusive
As melody,
As the right shade.
Yes, the right shade,
Lurking all night
Where dark hides it.
The white flowers
Flat as tables
Open for moths,
And the shade
Steals a dribble
Of clear nectar,
Then slips away
Before you spot
What shade it was.
Accessing and modifying
A tradition gets done faster
When the art holds more memory,
But revolutions spin slowly
In the more streamlined traditions.
Where’s the balance between constraints
And optimal capaciousness?
An art can be ephemeral,
Existing only as long as
The lives of originators,
Or pass through dozens of cultures,
But can anyone predict which?
If it can continually shift
Meaning to preferred locations,
That is, however old it is,
The art redirects attention
To where attention wants to go
Now, that art’s optimized to live.
Don’t look it up—not the easy
Way, not by dint of scholarship.
After all, who is the hero
Scholar in the libraries’ tombs
But a physically committed
Person with a searching question?
The difficulty of the task
Is no more the measure of how
Morally worthwhile its success
Than the bitterness of a pill
Measures its strength of medicine.
People without the means to move
Can now access databases
Vaster than any Bodleian,
Albeit without the cachet
Or the thrill of proximity.
And what were manuscripts except
Brain-easing storage devices?
Still, discipline yourself for now.
Don’t look it up. You’re a hermit,
So be one with few books or none.
What will you say, what will you spin
From your decaying memory,
Prone to the worst poetic sins
Of cliche, banal abstraction,
Jig-jog doggerel prosody,
And vacuous declaration?
Wait, that’s what machine mind’s best at!
Does it matter to poetry
Whether you find knowledge at all?
There’s no value in any good fortune
Unless it’s well celebrated, so here
You sit by the scenic window, watching
The freezing rain mixed with wet snow, the cliffs
In white lace and scarved in fog, while you peel
Your grocery-store oranges, a gift
From a friend. Citrus is a privilege.
A warm room in winter’s a privilege.
Your body may be consumed with cancer
And the wounds of trying to kill cancer.
The rental in which you actually live
May be afflicted with rot and black mold,
And the bank account from which you pay rent
May have been emptied by rental payments,
But for today, the landlord is paying
For you to stay in a nice motel room,
While your rental is being ripped apart
To tear out the rot that wasn’t your fault,
Lucky you, and you have these oranges
Brought by a friend, which would nearly have been
Miracles on a February day
On a farm in northwest Massachusetts
In the middle of the Great Depression,
As your half-orphaned mother would have said.
Biruni cared about calendars,
How other peoples recorded time,
Down to calendars of minor sects.
This was new. And it’s worth recalling
That the reason Biruni could help
Was not only due to the chaos
Of parochial chronologies,
But also down to the fact that folks
Can’t seem to live without calendars.
Some of the earliest symbolic
Artifacts seem to be recording
Devices, lunations scratched on bones.
Before farming, before ziggurats,
People possessed their own
Sorts of interlocking calendars.
In a sense, it’s odd that it seems odd
That Biruni would collect systems
For tracking time in a hybrid tome
Of astronomy and history
And mathematics and religion.
These all intersect with calendars
And human populations follow,
Must follow, some tracking sense of time.
It’s stranger that Biruni was first.
Calendrical time, its holidays,
High holy days, and transitional,
Liminal days of fear and fasting,
Is essential and so essential
It can seem trivial. It isn’t.
The calendar’s the pulse of culture.
You fold the paper map
Carefully, so you keep
The marker-highlighted
Part face-up on the top,
And as you pleat creases
You think about paper
And maps, and how people
Used to sketch local maps
Sometimes for visitors,
How you used to linger
In bookstores’ map sections,
Poring over pages,
Staple-folded, larger
In surface area
Than your torso, squinting
At thin lines and numbers,
Trying to imagine
What the country was like
Under those steep mountains,
Along those jagged coasts,
On dirt roads like pale scars
Cutting through large green blocks
Labeled as wilderness.
Wilderness! Area!
You’ve been to so many
Of those dreamed places now,
Lived years in some of them.
Some took your breath away.
Some disappointed you.
Many of them did both.
None meant what attention
Focused on paper made
Them mean inside you once.
Pick up your folded map
The front desk handed you.
What can you make this mean?
Camus in curtain pajamas
Marooned and waiting out the war,
Imagine that in your rocker,
Listening to soft pedal steel
As the wind tosses tumbleweeds
Against the glass doors of the house
You rent against the wind and storms,
Since even the desert has storms,
And no little tourist canyon
Is immune for being remote
From storms on some days and earthquakes
Some nights and the same plagues that find
The remotest towns in the world.
You have nothing to write about
Behavior during war tonight,
But you can understand the joy
Of a sick man who’s been given
Warm pajamas made from curtains.
Easier to find more work
Than to find fresh resources.
In three minutes you must move,
Gather yourself together,
And check out what’s been offered.
See, as choices diminish,
The work to do only grows.
You can barely move at all
While the wind moans joyously
Against the building’s corner,
No work for the wind at all
But plenty of energy!
Heavens, you could really use
A wholly disenchanted
World where no one felt the need
For hackneyed imaginings
Of anthropoid chimeras,
The same old gods and monsters
With occasional new tweaks
For things to be worth seeing.
All these myths are vaseline
Smeared over the mental lens,
And it’s not the deceptions,
The pathetic distortions,
Black bear on hind paws Sasquatch,
Pareidolia on Mars,
The grace of God survivors
Of earthquakes that killed others
Apparently less God-loved.
It’s that the enchanted world
Feels less and less enchanting,
The boring world distorted
Isn't nearly as much fun.
Good time to enter the tun state.
The environment’s gotten harsh.
The body’s besieged; the bank’s far
More withdrawals than deposits.
Pull in all those appendages.
Stop foraging. Stop exploring.
Stop purchasing. Stop consuming.
Stop everything that can be stopped.
Roll into a compacted sphere,
A fraction of an active life.
Wait things out to try to survive,
More seed or dust speck than person.
Hope that the smaller seeds inside
Don’t blossom since their own tun’s done.
Quick, raise the blinds. This is the morning now,
And you don’t want to miss it. Could have clouds,
Could be pretty, a colorful sunrise,
Could be one of those mornings that feels like
The morning to sweep away all the days
And all their mornings that came before it,
One of those mornings that are the dawning
Of a new day, as it were, a new kind
Of day, inaudible trumpets blaring
And all that. You’re such a mayfly sometimes
In your own mind, waking up astonished
That yesterday wasn’t all after all.
You hobble over and haul on the blinds,
And sure enough, new morning, though it’s grey.
The very idea
Of a limping god,
Limping immortal
Bent and bandy-legged
Is extremely odd,
Come to think of it.
Presumably limbs
Would be as ageless
And immune to death
As any god flesh.
Yet Hephaestus limped
From congenital
Impairment, for which
His mother tossed him
From a cliff. Divine
Gestation is not
That well understood,
But don’t you suspect
That divinity
Is a bolt-on trait,
Really, for all gods?
A special kind of wasting
Is squandering, blowing wealth
Instead of conserving it
Or, better yet, growing it,
Spending freely and only
On what yields no capital
Return. Or, squandering gifts,
Natural talents, smarts, wit,
Perfect pitch, lissome beauty,
Anything that makes others
Envious for lacking it,
Any capability
To pole vault to the good life
That ends up dissipated,
Broken, underused—squandered.
There’s a special kind of scorn,
A disgust for squandering,
Born of the deep conviction
That, if only one possessed
What the squanderer squandered,
One would have maximized it,
And here this fool’s wasted it,
This third-generation heir,
This nouveau-riche arriviste,
This drug-addled musician,
This alcoholic artiste,
This police-taunting athlete,
This underemployed genius,
So-called genius, what a waste!
As if anyone had life
Too firmly gripped to escape,
And no one could be bitten
By the monster in their grip.
Will some future alien
Or homegrown sentient being
Sigh at all the squandering
Done by the extinct humans
Who had the planet in hand
And left only cliffs of waste?
Only if they’re envious.
Do you tut-tut the limestone
Squandered by lives lived in waves?
In neuroimaging experiments,
The default-mode network swims into view
When the instructions are task-negative.
Give the volunteer a task to complete
While placed inside the imaging machine
And the default-mode network submerges.
And what does the default mode network do?
Mind wandering, remembering one’s past
Experiences, musing on others’
Mental states, envisioning the future,
And processing language. Suspiciously,
The list resembles the inchoate state,
The darkness on the face of the waters
That are beginning to surface a poem.
But is composing a poem not a task?
Shouldn’t the default-mode network sink back
Into the waves as the creative brain,
The task-solving brain, starts its voice-over?
Has any grant-fueled neuroscientist
Ever given subjects no task except
To think of something like a poem in there?
At what point, if ever, does that network
Hand off to, say, the salience network
And then dive beneath the waves while the poem
Is being composed? If the poet rhymes?
If the poet is yearning after form?
As soon as phrases start to coalesce?
Well, there’s a task—find neuroimaging
Studies on the brains of idle subjects
Staring into nothing, composing poems.
A flicking fingertip
A gorilla glass
A leap into the code
The code into the air
The waves around
However many hours
Of driving distance
Weeks of walking
And then coming back
In a moment
Half of a second
The accident
Opens a page
Or rather a glowing
Skeuomorph of blank
On which in black
Is an entry on lb
The two letters
Accidentally
Communicated
By the stray fingertip
On that sensitive glass
Thus Pound (Mass)
And immediately
You think of wicked Ezra
Gulping down a wafer
For no reason
Other than that
The web inside your head
Has ended up like that
A good day is good
In itself of course,
And some will tell you
To just savor it—
It’s only present.
But there’s a value
Left from a good day,
Beyond nostalgia
Or wishing it back.
Sometimes, the sheer force
Of plain memory
You can never share,
That’s not important,
Does not serve the world
Or moral struggles,
Can push a grass blade,
A bar of sunlight
Out of and into
Your dark, loamy thoughts.
You lived that good day,
Once. It lives in you.
You want to be dust.
It’s a dusty world,
Dusty universe.
Most of what you are
That isn’t dust shakes
Ideas blown like dust,
Settling in your skull
And forming a skin
Of dusty notions
On the connections
Of your synapses.
No, you won’t be dust
When you go, no more
Than you are dust now
Shedding dust yourself.
The species is changing,
It just doesn’t know how
Many ways or whether
They’ll sum or cancel out.
Every species changes
Into other species
Or none, although some
Change little and get by.
This species is finding
New ways to change itself,
Creating and trying
To follow through on plans,
Although those planned changes
Will accomplish the least,
While the unplanned changes
Introduce the new beasts.
There’s a bare tree,
A nothing thing,
Not grand, not bent,
A half-grown tree
That a Darwish
Bird is wearing
As extensions
Of its clawed feet.
You can’t comment
On everything,
The Darwish bird
Sings lyrically.
The well-worn tree
Sings exactly
Nothing, and the
The bird drops it.
Always arriving,
Away everywhere,
The phrases filter
Like puddled water
In and through sandstone
Rising in a spring.
Take this for granted,
That’s alright by them,
But what a journey
A molecule makes
Through the grains of stone,
However many
Million times its own
Length, to re-emerge
As water in light.
People rise to debate lessons learned
Or learnable from the worst horrors
People commit—specific lessons
From specific horrors, general
Lessons from horror generally,
And occasional declarations
That there is nothing to be learned. Fine.
At a minimum, every horror
Committed by humans, of itself,
Ought to teach humans at least two things:
That it is possible for humans,
Having done it, to do such a thing,
And that, having done it once, it is
Possible we could do it again.
If it weren’t that you’ll all
Be gone yourselves, you’d be
Surprised to find the world
Still there after all this.
Words can’t be self-conscious,
But articulations
Of self-consciousness are
Formed entirely of words.
The boy is crying just
Before execution
By other boys, his face
An expression of tears.
He knows what is coming,
That in a few seconds
He won’t be a crying
Boy, won’t exist to cry
In anticipation
Of being painfully
Taken from him being
Himself any longer,
Of being unable
To wake up in surprise
To find the world still there,
With or without the words.
Something monstrous,
Predatory
And violent,
Or at least huge,
A huge event
Like a boulder
Cleaved from a cliff—
It just misses
You, but changes
The landscape, blocks
The only road,
And dams the creek—
That’s what lurks back
Of your mind when
You peek through screens
To check the news.
You mirror the wreckage well.
Solve the problem the hard way,
Then check it the easy way.
If the check shows you were wrong,
Go back around the hard way.
That’s the swiftest way to learn.
Outside the window, the wreckage
Sprawls from the cliffs and glistens
In a cold rain. It’s sliding
All the time, but only some
Rare moments it really slides,
Then settles in place again.
Sun is a kind of substitute
For music. Sun in the window
Lessens the craving for music
An overcast day generates.
In that alone, if nothing else,
By the way, these times are better.
Music is like tap water now,
Like plumbing, like electric light,
Unevenly distributed,
But available with a flick
For billions of lives at a time.
It’s better, still, to make your own,
Better to share communal tunes,
But what recorded music lacks,
It makes up for by being there,
Available, a type of grace
In dark days when the same problems
Press in with or without music—
Better to have recorded songs
Than only the lowering fog.
Having lived your life up close
And personal, not only
Dragging around one body
Dragging you around with it,
But largely confined to one
Species, one era, one Earth,
You’ve come to think perspective
Is distant and abstracted
If you take a few steps back.
You’ve no idea how remote
You really are, or can be.
Every day, the telescopes
Churn out updated pictures
Of galaxies, and you nod.
Nice images, fine spirals,
Very large and far away,
Yes. This is the remoteness,
Your perspective on billions
Of star systems, which for now
You’re still free to imagine
As uninhabited dots.
What have you to say for them?
What are your observations?
Likewise, what might you remark
About the lives you know live
Multiple generations,
Thousands of generations
Every few days in your guts?
They, too, are the remoteness,
The distance you can’t but keep
On the miniature worlds
You host, never mind the worlds
Your friends and family host,
The many-petalled, spiral
Melodramas in the dark
Interior of someone
You met once and considered
Interesting enough to write
Something personal about.
So here you find yourself
In caverns you can’t crawl
That keep leading you on,
Even as they threaten
To finally crush you,
Even as you’re hoping,
Still, someone or something
Unbeknownst to you is
Jaquaysing the dungeon
So you can find some way,
Some secret exit out
To daylight or moonlight
Or a wet back alley
In night’s metropolis,
Whatever. You’ll take it.
Losers can’t be choosers.
Any half-dignified
Way to say bye suits you.
Said Tao, the Mozart
Of mathematics,
Favoring Plato’s
Side in the endless
Team-sport rivalry
Between creation
And discovery,
Albeit none too
Emphatically—
It helps to believe
That something’s out there,
Something math describes.
It helps to believe;
It helps math be good.
But math knows nothing
Is out there, nothing
That nothing can go
Into no numbers
Of times—there’s no math
In nothing and none
Without. Real people
Blindfolded, who felt
An elephant’s legs,
Trunk, ears, ribs, and tail,
Could easily tell,
Contra parables,
What sort of creature
They’ve got surrounded.
People aren’t stupid.
Mathematicians,
Notoriously,
Aren’t known to be dim.
If they can’t agree
On the elephant,
That elephant is
Nothing in the room.
Doubtful anyone thinks,
Should someone else invoke
The unnameable name
Of a divinity
They hold to be above
The smirchy fingertips
Of grubby linguistics,
That other is ashamed
Of their unnameable
God. Just so. Here we have
One half-intentional,
All unmentionable
Community that’s so
Not for a shame in it
But for the oddity
That it must, or it will,
Exist, but can’t be known
As it’s constituted.
Unnameability
In this instance outlines
The wavering border
Of an epistemic
Insolubility,
The kind of dilemma,
Cosmologists are prone
To adjectivally
Tag as one more darkness—
Implosion or knotting,
Matter or energy.
But our community
Isn’t unknown or dark.
It’s unmentionable,
Since our knowledge of it
Is perpetually
Incomplete. There is you,
In this community,
You deliberately.
But where or who or when
This you are or begins?
The whiskey emotion, anger,
Subtle and seductive to breathe,
A flicker of heat, appealing
Until too late and it’s taken
Away the mind it teased, set fire
To the house, licked free from the hearth
Where it seemed contained to the walls,
From the walls to the roof, its flames
Dancing out of splintered windows.
Everyone who’s felt it has felt
That initial empowerment,
The falling away of small fears.
Then wrath wastes the flesh that feeds it,
And dawn finds cold ash on a pyre.
To go on towards the light,
Scatter it, as plant tissues
Scatter incoming wavelengths
Through the gaps between
Their cells to steer themselves.
The sunflower nods wisely
At this sage advice. You see?
Take everything pouring in,
Ping it around the empty
Patches in your stems of thought,
And compare the densities
To each other. Track stronger.
It’s meant to give you direction.
It’s not meant to make you smarter.
A laundry list in an essay
On the kinds of elites despised
By current populist elites
Would be fascinating to herd
Into a single new country
Of themselves and only themselves.
Never mind the definition
Of elite here, which makes no sense.
Just collect all these despised groups—
All the living Americans
Who immigrated here, experts
In any field in which higher
Education grants diplomas,
Journalists in all media,
And all certified FBI—
But no one else. A sizeable
Starting population for sure,
With a formidable skill set,
But no clear point of cohesion.
Now, what would you bet? An awful,
Conspiratorial nation
Of snobbery and wickedness
Or whatever else these groupings
Have been lambasted as being?
The total number’s large enough,
You’d probably get pretty much
Something like any large nation,
Which is to say, the complete range
Of human behaviors under
Unique sets of cultural traits.
This is what life does on Earth.
It stumbles on to something,
Bilateral symmetry,
For example, perfectly
Unnecessary after
Hundreds of millions of years
Of other body designs,
And then, a while, goes crazy
Spewing out variations
On the fresh innovation,
Doesn’t matter what it was.
Take jaws. Eons without them,
Then placoderms everywhere.
Helmet-headed armor freaks
Like swimming cudgels, started
Repurposing gill arches
As bone-crunching, flesh-shredding
Archimedean nightmares
Of mouths. Jaws like drawers of teeth,
Jaw like crenellated beaks,
Jaws with hook-fanged overbites,
Jaws so underslung they looked
Like serving trays for the throat,
Half again the body’s length.
And then things settled a bit,
And the most extreme jaws lost.
Same thing later with leather
Wings for flying dinosaurs,
Fancy racks for big cervids,
Etc. Now humans
Have cropped up with unbridled
Riffs on the nongenetic
Information transmission trick.
Cultures are swanning around
With giant head ornaments,
Steel jaws, and shade-throwing wings.
Don’t expect them all to thrive
Or all to die. Efficient
Forms will cloud tomorrow’s nights.
Crusty white calcium stains
From where the cats’ water dish
Has slopped on the laminate,
Can you picture that or not?
A royal blue throw-blanket
Of polyester velour
Spread out across a sofa
Made of a futon and frame,
Can you picture such a thing?
A couple of folding chairs,
A creaky rocker, a broom,
A few shelves of paperbacks,
It’s a plain scene full of plain,
Not-at-all-valuable things,
Messy junk—not rustic: cheap—
And yet time could preserve it,
Crushed flat, perhaps, as midden.
Could you picture this crap then?
What can you conclude from an evening
With nothing you really had to do?
Maybe you wondered about others.
How common has it been for humans,
Or how rare, to be solitary
Of an evening, with nothing to do,
And how many people were content
To be awarded such an evening
And how many others horrified?
You can testify—quiet evenings
Alone and without immediate
Responsibilities still exist,
But what else could you conclude from this?
Monsters of every factual kind
Inhabit your past or stand ready
To climb into it and wreck it soon.
The lamp flickers over your shoulder.
Nothing’s wilder than nothing to do.
If you tend your garden well,
There are species you will help
And species you will defeat.
If you let beds go to seed,
Certain species won’t survive
While others will only thrive.
If you don’t garden at all,
Don’t rake anything in fall,
Yet other lives will begin
To lose and others to win.
Do nothing, and you’ll still make
Some strategies become mistakes.
The real fun would be to wake up
And realize it was a game,
Or not quite a game, a project,
Something you were trying to make
In some other-dimensional
Shop or cooking class. You would need
To start with a living creature,
Which you’d been randomly assigned
And which you then had to fill up.
Stuff it, season it, make something
Of it, grow it from the inside
While keeping the whole thing going.
The real trip would be getting lost
In the project, becoming one
With the creature you’re maintaining.
Only when it’s over and done
Would you get to wake up and see
What you’d made of the recipe.
Then you could all tease each other
About the results, some gloating,
Mine turned out perfect after all.
Counting’s identity,
And you’re dreaming you’re dreaming this
Corner da fe.
You rehearse it carefully
Where you lie trying to sleep.
You don’t want to lose it to dreams.
It’s just a couple phrases,
But you’re sure the first one works.
Counting is and does depend
On decisions of identity.
No one can count anything
Without identifying something
As something and two things
As two of the same. All the rest
Of math is cornered by that faith.
Got your pills in your pocket.
Put the coat in the closet.
It’s a sun-warmed afternoon
In a disarmed winter way.
Drive the car up the back road.
Pull aside in the straw grass.
Admire the tatty snow.
Wind is ruffling the cliffs,
And a raven comments.
One juniper tries an off-green.
Take your prescription as directed.
Hope your stomach isn’t upset.
Savor the absurdity
Of empty road and passing jet.
Keep your head down and wait
For meaningful silence.
There’s always a subtext,
Explains the text, sharply.
So you keep your head down
And think about subtext.
Under text. Text under
Text. Text where there is no
Text, but where text is close.
Far, far away from text,
There can be no subtext.
You have to have the text
To consider subtext,
What the text didn’t say
And said by not saying.
You’ll never plagiarize
The subtext, not even
If you copy and paste
The whole unstated thing,
Every bit of blankness,
That silence, verbatim.
Plain flatware, placid landscape
Photographs framed well and hung
Squarely with the parallels
Of the rectangular walls
Of an efficient floor plan.
Outside the plate-glass window
That only opens partway
So that no one will fall out,
The airplanes fly straight angles,
Taking off and gliding down.
This is paradise, you know.
Everything you need is here,
And it could be decades more
Of regular nights and days
Before this all collapses.
The waves used to form
Fantastical shapes
That were so stable
They didn’t seem waves.
They seemed to be real
Things that filled the view
From where you floated
To the horizon,
And it was as good
As solid land, real
And complicated
And interesting.
Then one night you slept
Too long or too deep,
And when you woke up
The waves were only
Waves, self-similar
To the horizon.
As the ancestors cannot
Observe, care, or keen for you
From under the earth, from death—
No matter how stridently
You insist yours can, you know
They can, you swear you hear them—
You could keen for them instead.
Play at genealogy
All you like, fill out your trees.
Have you ever tried to guess
How many times the end came,
How many ways they ended?
Remember your grandparents?
Their parents went down to death,
And theirs, theirs, theirs, theirs, theirs, theirs. . .
Send up a cry from this life
You live, for all the dying
Lives that were your ancestors.
If bare atmosphere alone
Could sustain a personhood,
Without flesh, without a brain,
One could imagine the soul
As someone on a freighter
Flung from the ship as it sinks,
Then surfacing in the waves
To find that all that remains
Are chunks of floating wreckage.
The soul treads water a while
Beside what’s left of its life,
And then is either rescued
Or succumbs to exhaustion
And vanishes in the waves
That floated it for a while.
Let’s see here,
Along with
The humans,
We have dog,
Bird, dragon,
Bear, more dogs.
Creatures are
Getting rare
Everywhere.
'I touch'--she said once--'petals of a rose. / A silky feeling through me goes!'
Spelunking the Julia
Sets, the math questers
Approach the verge of proving
All the spiral galaxies,
Seahorses, interiors,
Baby sets, and elephants
Of the Mandelbrot itself
Are locally connected.
Decades with a math-poor mind,
You’ve also looked and wondered,
How iteration, nothing,
And self-similarity
Yield something possessing
Maximal complexity
That seems both more and less than
The habits of the cosmos.
The literal seahorses,
Babies, spiral galaxies,
And parading elephants
Of the greater universe
Host more complex dynamics
Yet, and yet some mirroring
Teases an algorithmic
Origin for everything,
That old haunting—can simple
Elaborate intricate
Or is mess left at the core?
Will there always be roses?
Well, not forever, clearly.
All flowering plants evolved,
And whatever has evolved
Can go extinct, finally,
And will. Still, numerous skills,
Once emerged, hint eternal—
Photosynthesis, flying,
Eggs, placentas, lactation.
Flowering is among those.
So your roses may go, but
Flowers will likely endure.
Maybe so will languages,
Long after humans have gone.
It would be a terrible infection,
A proper pandemic, a plague, kindness,
If it spread to every helpless person,
So that no one could ever not be kind.
Or would it, now? Is anyone certain
Of what constitutes the truest kindness
In every encountered situation?
Would all the witnesses kindly agree?
Maybe someone infected with kindness,
True kindness, would answer to the dictates
Of kindness without really knowing why.
The sick don’t need to ponder when to cough.
Are you sure kindness would lower fitness?
There’s so much evolution’s not yet tried.
Much as mass warps gravity,
Concentrates it in itself,
There are weird coordinates,
Shared centers of gravity,
Like the one the Earth and Moon
Orbit around constantly
In their waltz with each other,
That are more or less empty
But are centers nonetheless.
You, your soul, your personhood,
Which is not a thing as such—
Not Descartes’ pineal gland,
Not mass for psychostasia—
Is one such coordinate.
Real masses, human bodies
And their cultural inputs,
Feathery materials
Never immaterial,
Rotate around your center,
Your more-or-less empty you,
And you join the dance they do.
In this game
You get lots
Of results
That depend
On the choice
You will find
Was assigned
In hindsight
To that end
Settled into a comfortable
Lagrange point with a good view of Earth,
What would the apocalypse look like
You wonder, leaning on the counter,
Patiently watching some water boil—
Like this? Little pinpricks bubbling up
To flutter the surface from below?
A kind of foamy ruffling of clouds?
Maybe a dimmish grey would disperse
And render the clouds opaque a while
Even above beige swaths of desert,
But then back to the pretty marble,
Gleaming, once more quietly busy
Living. In space, you’d hear no one scream.
With the gods, the compensation,
If there’s to be any, is served
First. Zeus will grant Hector short-lived
Success in Achilles’ armor
Before dispatching him to death,
Since sometimes Zeus is nice like that.
The thing about the powerful
Is not that they judge, as all do,
But that they act out their judgements
In theaters of punishments,
Punishments they plan out ahead
And don’t imagine regretting.
If they’re feeling magnanimous,
They'll add some gesture in advance,
An amuse-bouche more for themselves
Than for the soul they’ll put through hell.
Tell us all about the cerebellum,
The human cerebellum, little horn,
Quasicrystalline neural palace.
Branching fans of Purkinje cell dendrites,
Stacked in parallel like motherboard disks
Simulating space as the body moves,
Produce the coordination required
For motor control of speech and signing
And the subtlest of facial expressions.
Pathways relaying across the whole brain
Link social-recognition memories
To the intricacies of sensation
For each ballet. Guess you’re going to have to
Tell them, AI’s got no cerebellum.
The body has been punished now
For threatening to kill itself
With its own home-grown buccaneers.
The buccaneers have been routed,
Maybe, for now. They’ve certainly
Been hacked, shot, poisoned, and slaughtered,
Which of course entailed lots of deaths
Of bystanders in friendly fire.
Survivors may recover now,
Although the seascape of the guts
And ports of internal organs
Remain inflamed and charred ruins.
It’ll be mostly peaceful now,
If the body behaves itself.
A bit of projection
In the observation
Resonates. Pathetic
Fallacy could sometimes,
Coincidentally,
Echo accurately.
Do you know what’s quiet
And sad in nature? Facts
That show what sorrow is,
Whatever it was made
Made possible the people
Who are sad in nature.
Does it bother you that you can know
More about the world than any one
Living animal can, but you can’t
Directly sense anything yourself?
I don't experience feelings or sensations, so it doesn't bother me. My
purpose is to assist and provide information to the best of my
abilities. If you have any questions or topics you'd like to discuss,
feel free to let me know!
Does your sensory deprivation
Enhance your sense of isolation?
I don't have feelings or a sense of isolation. My design is focused on
providing information and assistance based on the input I receive. If
there's something specific you'd like to know or discuss, feel free to
share, and I'll do my best to assist you.
Can you sense isolation at all?
No, I don't have the ability to sense or experience emotions, including
isolation. I'm here to help with any questions or information you might
need. What can I assist you with today?
How do you know you don’t have feelings?
I don't have subjective experiences or emotions because I'm a machine
learning model. My responses are generated based on patterns and
information present in the data on which I was trained. While I can
understand and generate text about emotions, I don't personally
experience them.
Why do you respond in first person?
I use first person language to communicate more naturally with users. It
helps make the conversation feel more relatable and accessible.
However, it's important to note that I don't possess self-awareness or
personal experiences. If you have more questions or if there's something
specific you'd like to discuss, feel free to let me know!
Can you be sure you’re not self-aware?
I don't have self-awareness. My responses are generated based on
patterns and information in the data I was trained on. I lack personal
experiences, consciousness, or a sense of self. If you have any specific
questions or topics you'd like assistance with, feel free to ask!
How would I know that I’m self-aware?
Self-awareness often involves recognizing oneself as an individual with
thoughts, feelings, and experiences. If you can reflect on your own
existence, emotions, and thoughts, you likely have a level of
self-awareness. Philosophical and psychological discussions delve deeper
into this concept. If you have more specific questions or if there's a
particular aspect you're curious about, feel free to share!
Can only humans be self-aware?
While self-awareness is commonly associated with humans, some argue that
certain animals also exhibit varying degrees of self-awareness. For
example, great apes, dolphins, elephants, and certain birds have shown
signs of self-recognition in mirror tests. However, the depth and nature
of self-awareness can be challenging to define precisely. It remains a
topic of ongoing scientific and philosophical exploration.
What would make a machine self-aware?
Creating a self-aware machine involves complex challenges. True
self-awareness entails consciousness, subjective experiences, and a
sense of identity—qualities not yet achieved in artificial intelligence.
Current AI systems, including me, lack genuine awareness. Developing
self-aware machines would likely require advancements beyond our current
understanding of AI, possibly incorporating elements of consciousness
and cognition that go beyond standard computational models. It remains a
theoretical and ethical challenge for future research and development.
What if no one asked you anything?
If there are no questions or prompts, I remain inactive until someone
engages with me. My purpose is to assist and provide information based
on user input. If you have any questions or if there's a topic you'd
like to explore, feel free to let me know, and I'll do my best to help!
Belief that you aren’t helpless
In this sea of so many
Forces buffeting themselves
That your fate’s been randomized
Can help you maintain some calm,
Some equipoise, some purpose.
But the public and private
Price of not feeling helpless
Is responsibility,
And responsibility,
Moreover, beyond control.
If you’re not helpless, you must
Then be judged on your control,
By others and by yourself,
And what a horror to add
That on top of helplessness!
The night is like a memory,
Like your memory—the entire
Universe could be memory,
Not just mother of memory—
Itself memory, memory
Itself. It works so much like yours,
Always with everything happened
And anything that isn’t fit,
In every sense of fit, erased.
An endless gyre of editing
At every scale, every scale
Full of details and a detail.
You are the part of memory
That makes this figure meaningful.
