Revery Prairie

The reports from the keepers
Have recently been anguished—
The bees are in grave danger,

Are getting few. Without them,
What will agriculture do?
One of many collapses

Conditions are threatening,
And what can rumination,
Daydreaming, revery do?

Several million years have been
Great for grasses, many more
Millions for flowering plants.

With agriculture’s failure,
Could prairies make a comeback?
How much of nature’s temple

Can Homo agonistes
Bring down in self-destruction?
You can’t be here to know that.

Revery knows revery
Will go, probably will go
Before the bees, probably

Before the flowers, maybe
Not before agriculture.
Staring out a bare window

At a lizard in the brush
Growing from chewed-up desert,
Rumination imagines

The junipers and greasewood
And prickly pear and sandstone
Overgrown with tall prairie,

Or reduced to shifting dunes,
Or folded under forests.
But imagination’s weak,

Working with what memories
It can rearrange and pose
To show the impossible.

The possible will happen
Whether revery goes on
Or goes. It won’t be what’s known.

A Series of Autonoetic Simulations

The ordinary postindustrial
Citizen glances at occluded stars
And subitises like any infant

Recognizing a small set of objects
As being something more than singular,
Or, if the sky is unusually dark

For this light-and-haze besotted era,
Maybe engages the approximate
Number system to note more stars this night

Than there were the other night, than there are
Most nights. And really, what else do you need
Beyond the evolved numerosity

Common to humans and many species?
Leave the algorithms to your machines.
There’s no call for sky-watching anymore.

The human brain’s halfway to retirement
From its weird and temporary career
As the warehouse of shared information

Weaving together the generations.
In the future, you can be beasts again,
Tame as hens, clueless about the systems

That sustain the conditions you live in.
That’s what happened the first time, wasn’t it?
There were creatures who understood their world

And remade that cosmos to their liking.
Now the universe they generated
Expands without them. Somewhere there are gods,

Or daemons, or extraterrestrials,
Or at least the dim descendants of them,
Clueless, having completely forgotten.