A Temporary Loss

When fall falls and the leaves fly

In cities, wilds, and suburbs,

Think of Edwin Arlington

Depicting leaves as God’s means

Of committing suicide

By so many little knives.

Well, that’s a local image,

Autumnal melancholy

For lands with woods and seasons.

Deicide as suicide

Would find other metaphors

On low-latitude islands,

Or on permanent ice sheets,

Or in the open desert,

You presume. Something changing,

Something going, some sadness

At an ordinary loss,

A temporary loss,

The expected way things go,

Comforting actually, no?

Hell is more than half, he wrote,

Of paradise. Exactly

Why it seems such paradise,

Wherever gods choose to die.

A Change in the Structure of Information

All causation, even local
And not a bit spooky at all,
Is a kind of entanglement.

Nothing has the strength to create,
To bring about a specific
Outcome at a given distance

Or at any distance. Knowledge
About that outcome spreads around.
Knowledge gets redistributed,

And the brain sees distribution,
By habit, as having a cause,
And takes great pains to distinguish

True causes from correlations,
Not to say coincidences.
In practice, causation itself

Is just an idealized form
Of knowledge concerning events
In sequences that can be linked

To necessary, sufficient,
Precursory, correlative
Components and correlative

Events in indissoluble
Chains, which, metaphorically,
Amount to if-and-only-if

This then also this. This caused this.
But that’s still just information
About certain entanglements.

Action at a distance only
Serves to illustrate how causes
Aren’t so powerful after all,

Are only something that you know
About what has to go with what.
The knowledge is spooky, that’s all.

In Code

They’re strange documents, really,
Those Classical Chinese poems,
Dangling strings of characters,

Asyntactic, not pronounced
The way they would be today,
Denotations uncertain

For some terms, connotations
In great clouds around them all.
They come with names and stories,

Fables in many cases,
Of origins and authors,
Bookshelves of commentaries,

But at their core, their kernels
Are short strings of characters,
And all language is in code.