Hymn to Plenty More World After You

Trucks roar up the roads.
It’s like a refrain.
It could be a hymn

To the modern world,
But how long will it
Still be modern world?

Trucks roar up the roads,
Wherever’s got roads,
Refined fossil fuels,

Combustion engines,
And wheels, lots of wheels,
Inflatable wheels.

Trucks roar up the roads,
Carrying supples,
And have done so since

Before you were born.
Back and forth, trucks roar.
In the countryside,

Where it’s otherwise
Pretty quiet, birds
Singing and all that,

Roars are intrusive,
And you wish they’d go.
But then, without trucks,

How would supplies reach
You and yours? Hymns roar
Like trucks up the road.

They’ll all fall quiet
Soon, true, but maybe
Not so soon as you.

Grimm to None

Even if you live in forests
All alone (although you don’t),
Your dreams remain the deep woods,

Darkest and most frightening,
And this is not a good thing.
The real woods are pathetic,

Pretty trees, and it’s the storm,
The flood, the blizzard, the drought,
The desert, the barren cliff

With which the outdoors is more
Likely to confuse or kill
You, not with its pretty trees,

Not even in the Green Hell,
Where you’re far more in danger
From weather, snakes, and miners

Than from the vine-covered trunks.
But there’s Black Forest in you,
Plenty ways to get lost yet,

And if you went wandering
In there without returning,
Might as well confess you’re dead.

The Better Yet

Reproducible adaptations
With reliably useful results
Tend to be the kinds of inventions

Lineages cling to a long time.
Once upon a time, storytelling
Was such a wicked innovation,

Your ancestors thought it fit the whole
Cosmos, all mystery bespoke myth,
And you still haven’t let go of it.

Now, it’s numbers and mathematics.
They’re so powerful, so predictive,
The true language of the universe.

God knows, statistics out-predict myths.
But that may not be the end of it.
Out there lie descriptors better yet.

Daughter, Dactylonomist

Even now, she sings under
Her breath and flicks her fingers
Open, then curls them back in

To solve problems in her head.
Exponents are throwing her—
She learned multiplication

As sets of counting-by tunes,
And tends to answer times three
When asked for the third power

Of anything. Anything
Is difficult to answer
Culture, when what culture wants

Is your participation
As a useful member, skilled
At answering to culture,

Whatever culture you’ve found
Yourself born into, enmeshed
Since birth, or sometimes, worse, thrown

Into, far from your culture
Of birth, by dislocations
Political, religious,

Linguistic, familial,
Or just technological.
In the car, tapping her phone,

She wonders aloud, why these
Glowing keyboard arrangements
Put letters in all the wrong

Places, scattered inanely,
As if purely to make more
Work for her flicking fingers.

History’s hard to follow,
Convulsed and convoluted.
Explanation takes too long.

She’s counting the ways to win
Through her own application.
Count turns through the maze you’re in.

The Sentence

This word shivers with anxieties
From being given a long sentence,
Long as one of those Herbert prayed for,

Like a suspension bridge, an abyss,
Like an oak, a great valley, a world
Made of dreams, which is the kind of world

You shouldn’t want to be sentenced to,
Where words are abused and assaulted
By memory, by the free-range brain,

No longer fenced in by the senses,
Doing as it pleases with the past,
Vivid and dark and disorganized,

Interminable paths where the words
Trudge along through long shadows, the woods
Of what can’t possibly be expressed.

Could You Do It?

We want to see a novel
That has no people in it,
No anthropomorphic beasts,

No allegory of trees—
Likely it’s not possible,
But we’d still like to see it.

Not a field research report
Of empirical data
About the nonhuman world,

Not a metaphysical
Argument or religious
Vision announcing fresh faith,

Not a series of lyrics—
A novel, a long fable,
But with no people in it.

Idyolic

Words twist back and forth between
The storm outside the window,
And the comforts of more words.

Company is easier
To find in the talking crowds,
Where anyone can tell you

It’s not smart—it’s quietist
And outright delusional
To think words are natural

Or can describe the flowers
Of the wind’s waves on the lake,
Blooming and self-consuming.

Words should run with other words,
And in fact words have no choice.
Wind’s a monster, not a voice.