World

Just beyond the road’s edge,
Opposite the trailhead,
The unfrequented side,

There’s a secondary
Level to the mesa,
A dip below eyeline

In juniper-piñon
Sprawl, with tiny meadows,
Green pockets of cacti,

Drought-tolerant grasses,
And odd patches of moss
Against the sides of rocks

That shelter the sparse snows
And hold on to shadow.
It’s not even a walk

To get to it. Just park,
And pretend you’re a deer
Melting into the trees,

And you’re there. In fact, deer
Do just that. You can see
Their flattened nests and scat.

There’s a couple of points
With breathtaking lookouts,
But don’t come here for that.

Sit for a few moments,
Minutes, maybe an hour,
Where there’s nothing special,

But somehow you’re alone,
Alone and out of doors.
Never yours, but it’s home.

Hunting Blind

Don’t read. Don’t read on,
But also don’t read
Other words than us.

You’ve read too much. Feel
The shape of your skull,
How heavy it is.

Stop. That’s enough. Go
Look at something else,
Something without words,

Not even gestures,
Not even signals.
Not even breath. Wait,

Before you go, do
One last thing for us.
Find a hide for us.

Consensus

Can there be any elegance
Pleasurable to all manner
Of intelligence, any kind

Of artifice even humans
Agreed on universally,
To say nothing of another,

More alien intelligence?
No. We’re certain this can’t be so.
While there may be no one for whom

There is no form of elegance
That’s pleasurable, no matter
How angry their Intelligence,

Every feast is someone’s poison
In the aesthetics of the beasts.
But maybe an inhuman mind,

A swarm, a collection of minds
Running on different atoms,
Might home in on one conclusion,

And it might not be one any
Intelligent persons have found
Pleasurable, not symmetry,

Go, calculus, evolution,
Some dome of a fine cathedral,
Poem, the beloved in shadows,

Not any or others of those.
One day, the descendants of mind,
Housed in other than feasting beasts,

Might find consensus elegance
Pleasurable in dirt, gravel,
Near anything universal.

Which Would Be Less Worse—to Forget Just Words or Just Forget?

Mind, inventor of meaning,
Invented miasma, which
Means something like mind itself,

A kind of cloud attaching
Itself to things, without them
Knowing this, invisibly,

But with grim consequences.
The essays are poetry.
The poetry makes essays.

The world’s still world but with cloud,
A cloud with its own meanings,
Its own menace, its own plagues

Attached. Words fly in and out
Of mind, like germs on the wind.
Well, but of course. Mind made them.

They made mind, and together
Mind and language made likeness.
The animals are tired, now.

No more miasma for them.
It will be a rest when bots
And blindingly bright AI

Can give mind their attention,
All the attention it needs,
And never mind miasma.

Infinity for Instance

Numbers are games, claimed John Horton Conway,

And we’re here to agree, not reprimand,

Little as we know of our first cousins.

If they’re names, they’re games. Names started the games

Or started together with them, the same.

The wonderful trick to the numbers game,

However, is brutal for other names

To try to imitate. There’s nothing much

You can do with numbers you can’t translate

Into other kinds of names, but their rules

Are that their rules have to be discovered.

That’s the numbers game, a hell of a game,

The most intricate and dangerous game

Since parent language, although one for which

Hosts have yet to evolve such aptitude.

All games have edges, boundaries that state

When, where, games end, reality begins.

Games aren’t playing, however much playing

Goes on in games, since pure play’s uncertain

When it’s still play, when it’s practice, when world

Steps in. Numbers may just be playing games.

Analog Neuromorphic Chips and Salsa

There’s no genius so profound
It can’t be pantsed by language.
It’s known as device mismatch.

Spiking neural networks work
With the chips to compensate.
Continuous analog

Computation over time
Would represent the salsa
In this analogy—if

It were an analogy,
Not some tragicomedy
Where the gravedigger turns up

To get a few wisecracks in
Before burying the next
Dramatic set of corpses.

You’ll need to speak by the code
To correct for varying
Voltages, explains one doomed

Fiction to the other one.
I’m not one now to mock, but
Can chips lie when chips are down?

That There’s Something Wrong

Every child senses it
At some point or other—
Some sooner, some later.

The world’s a haunted place.
There’s something wrong with it.
Every child has to choose

To do something with this.
Accept what mama said,
What priest or doctor said,

Or something overheard
At school, in the playground,
Seen on a glowing screen

In a room left too dark.
The child has to decide
What strategy to pick—

Pretend the world is full
Of fairies or goblins,
Pretend it’s orderly,

Run by a sensible
God, or household of gods,
Dispassionate logic,

Or be the questioner,
An acceptable type,
Although never much liked.

None of the strategies
On offer works so well
That the world feels all right.

The world feels wrong. What works,
A bit, is to admit
You don’t know why you sense