A Calculated Purr

Here is a Christmas orange.
It contains information,
And you have information

About that. You probably
Already know oranges
Can’t grow in frosty places,

Contain a lot of moisture,
Sugars, and vitamin C,
And, usually, they taste sweet.

You may know this one arrived
In your pretended stocking
Hung by a pretended hearth

As a nod to the long-gone
Half-orphaned grandmother born
Into the Great Depression,

For whom a winter orange
In a genuine stocking
Above a genuine hearth

Was genuinely a gift,
Which she reminded her kids
Of annually, repeating

The gift through years oranges
Were in the fridge all winter,
As if they grew there, so what?

You may know many more things
About this or that orange,
But none of them what it means.

Meaning’s interpretation
Of information in terms
Of something outside of it,

Interpretations ferried
In the living mind between
Many informative things.

It’s a behavior pattern
Creating itself, a purr
From a chest that can’t not purr.

What does this mean? That the cat
This orange reminds you of
Is no longer in your chair.

Analogy

There’s no good analogy
For the way one animal,
And one animal only

Produces analogies.
Bats echolocate, but sounds
Are hardly unique to bats.

All sorts of animals sing,
But not of what singing means
To the way stars arrange things.

Where’s the creature, the species
That produces, from its flesh,
Substances unique to it

That can’t be seen or tasted,
Touched or heard, that weave strange silk
Comparisons through the world?

The Implication

Where a word meaning meaning’s involved,
From hányì to infer, it seems so
Often it came from a container,

A culvert, a carrier, a jar
Of plaited clay enfolding the goods
That signs protect and make portable,

That mean things. Meaning’s then the balloon,
Burst but still with a limp existence,
Which Eeyore finds so satisfying

To put in and take out of the jar
That Pooh has emptied of all honey,
The sign, the name, the whole anecdote.

What’s inherent in the jar itself
Is its capacity for meaning
As a vessel for implications.

How could instructions enact themselves?
Ask the creatures of self-enacting
Instructions. HIPY PAPY BTHUTHDTH.

That must be how it goes, but somehow,
While there’s information in the jar,
The meaning’s now alone in the moon,

Unless you figure out what it means.
It goes in and out like anything,
But didn’t you bring it anything?