Except the butterfly
Can’t will the tornado,
Can’t direct the cyclone—
It’s your past you see has
Sensitive dependence
On its conditions
Leading it to diverge
Yawningly from itself—
Nonlinearity
Won’t follow the intent
Of wings of butterflies—
Chaos carrying on
In consequence of you
Can’t be something you choose.
A fair amount of argument
Goes on re the environment
Of your evolutionary
Adaptedness to this or that.
Did your ancestors mostly hunt?
Did they forage starchy tubers?
Did they always live in small bands?
Were they peaceful or prone to war?
Whatever their environment,
The idea is that it shaped you
To be naturally at your best
Like that, and now you just don’t fit,
You’re all misfits in the strange world
You’ve generated for yourselves,
Of packaged fats, sugars, and salts,
Electric sedentary shifts,
Massive, pressing crowds, and hurtling
Metal conveyances, garbage
Piled in mountainous midden heaps,
Twenty-four hour media hives.
Mostly, where your ancestors
Were moderate in moderate
But fluctuating conditions,
You’re choking on too much of it,
Fluctuating in the extreme.
What animal handles such speed,
Billion-body mind-melds, constant
Bombardments, massive disasters?
You know another thing you’re not
Equipped to deal with well? Rooting
For sides. Go stand outside somewhere
Boring and consider how rare
It would have been to have the chance
To root for a given outcome
In pre-agricultural lives.
It would have happened—like music
Played using carved-bone instruments
Happened, like painting caves happened—
Occasional, special events,
Games mixed in with ceremonies.
It’s ceaseless competition now—
Not just competitions you’re in—
Endless fights and games you witness,
Addicted to rooting interests.
Pause so the cattle being
Herded down from the mesas
To winter pastures don’t spook.
A man waits by their trailer,
Gate opened, foot of the hill.
Two women herd from horseback,
Flanking the trailing cattle.
The cows move straight down the road,
Stepping carefully around
The paused car, keeping side eyes
On it as they amble by.
Only one almost blunders
Horns first into a fender
As she stumbles from the ditch
That passes for a shoulder.
Eye to eye. Eye to eye. Wet
Eyes and muzzles cattle have.
The women chat casually
To each other and gee up
The last calf, take no notice
Of the cyclist who zips through.
Anything you understand
Is something you made more than
Whatever language it was
By which you understood it.
We wish it were otherwise,
That each of us was hoarded
Treasure locked up in our chests,
Meanings our precious contents,
You just the discoverers.
But it’s not. You make us more.
We can absorb what you make,
As your imagination,
From your side, can enchant us.
But we’re gravel, wayside dust.
What this cosmos could use
Is a tiny bit more
Diegetic music
In the score—not so much
So that those caught in here
Can seem realistic
To any audience
Observing these antics,
But so that we can sense
There might actually be
An audience out there
Emoting to our woes.
Frosts of flame or strange to you,
What is to come. What you will
Go through will have become you,
What you were. Vivam, Ovid
Concluded, and the word did.
About the man, not a fleck
Of identifiable
Ash still floats on the Black Sea,
Daughter of melt ice, mother
Of shipwrecks. Perambulate
The bounds of empires drowned there.
What is left of anyone,
Other than scattered mummies
And inscrutable patterns
Of ochre on cliffs in caves?
One, the person goes for good.
Two, the body carries on
Into a mesh of living
And nonalive existence.
Three, we hang around perhaps,
By happenstance, accident,
Luck, a risk you take with us,
Risk, which has no destiny.
Nothing is to come of you.
