Clocking up from the Basement Rocks

Delaware’s surface area, crumpled,
Would fill the Grand Canyon close to the rims.
Somewhere, there’s someone who’s hiked the Canyon
And walked the length of Delaware as well.

Information is shameless. It degrades
Itself repeatedly and has to be
Redressed. Trivia. What will Delaware?
A shame, and, as with shame in general,

The source is a species of deception,
Either the kind with its tail in its teeth
Or the kind with a fresh head for a tail—
Meaning, it’s not meaning’s escape that makes

Information’s blushing degradation.
If data’s ferrous, meaning’s oxygen.

Whole

Or you could pretend it’s all on hold—
That is to say, will all be on hold—
Taking a wait-and-see attitude.

Maybe some version of you will pop
Back up in the hall of ancestors,
Some sense of your continuity

Not much more deceitful than the one
That has popped back up every morning
Of your life, pretending you must be you,

The you today the you yesterday,
You you anticipate tomorrow.
Maybe someone will reconstruct you,

Beginning with a facsimile
Capable of thinking of itself
As you, which it will do. Who are you,

Long since returned to nothing by then,
To lecture not-you about pretend?
Anything on hold ever’s pretend.

No Containing You

When you’ve got no more bucket,
Worry less about your lists.

How exciting it’ll be
To be beyond all haunting—

That is, instead of being
Haunted to do the haunting.

Watching other people go
Makes people indulge the strange

Notion that the gone person
Will come to the point of view

Of long solitariness,
Not of nada’s new freedoms

But of something like exile
Or prolonged prison sentence,

A heroic misreading
Made possible by longing—

Also, oddly, by the trap,
Also, oddly, by the fact

That people live in the trap
Of story, of narrative,

That closes when the buckets
Are revealed nonexistent,

Like a variant version
Of Sorceror’s Apprentice,

Nothing enchanted, nothing
To clean the floors with at all.