Don’t Worry About the Data, Only What You Made It Mean

How do you write a poem when
You can’t remember your name?
Like a vanishing version

Of an old, familiar scene,
Like angels slipping away
From themselves for no reason

Like whatever the world wrote
Into libraries of lost
Information about leaves,

DNA, shivering sheets
Of family history,
Information’s vanishing,

Being replaced by meaning
As it had to be, since leaves
Are the awful immortals,

Those only wonders truly
Bound to come and go, data
Fooling you along the road—

The data hiding somewhere,
In the permanence
Of information, along with

Black holes, every secret file,
Each scrap of information
Rescued from the burning pile,

The conservation of force,
The memory of the face,
Of the best-beloved god,

Who can’t recall the meaning
That went along with the name
The information you thought

You could lose, proved resilient
As information will do,
As force and matter will, too.