An Address to a Person or Personified Object Not Present

Early in an afternoon
In a world still overfull
Of backed-up information

In all sorts of media,
From languages linking skulls
To waves inscribed on thin air,

Listening to doves, finches,
Wind stirring the grass, traffic
Stirring wind in the distance,

The random vicissitudes
Of future preservation
Drift into mind. Once most books

Have burned, most digital files
Rotted, and all this year’s skulls
Long since settled as fossils,

The fragmentary remains
Of piled-up millenniums
Of jabber and argument,

Data and conversation,
The news of what this world was,
Will be probabilistic,

Summed over all, peculiar
In exact particulars—
A receipt, a child’s diary,

A pun on a coffee mug.
It won’t matter what text’s left,
Only whether entities

Interested in language
And those who heaped it happen
To be in the neighborhood.