A Pattern Made of Language

Culture seems to be repeating
The horrors and beauties of life—

Evolution and extinction,
Elaboration and collapse.

Perhaps those patterns, then, exceed
Life itself, are more than living,

And are inherent in the waves
Of gravity, dark, and burning.

Poor Rock

We’re specks on a speck,
But is Earth greater
Than life, or is life

Greater than the Earth?
For now, the former
Seems to be truer.

Just look at what you
Can do to Earth’s lives,
Driving hordes extinct,

While all your power
Focused together
Couldn’t budge Earth’s spin.

But if life is out
There on other specks
Where life is like life

Here, same tendencies—
Hunger, predation,
Parasitism,

Waves of arms races,
Cooperations,
Extinction events—

Then life is greater
And more terrible
Than Earth, poor planet.

Just What You Saw

Slowly, the thin line
Appeared, dividing
The lake from the sky,

The dense blue of clouds
From the faint blue sheen
Of the waves. Morning

Tilted itself in
Through gathering fog,
And that’s what you saw.

The Invention of Vision

It’s a thought—the Cambrian
Might have gone bang thanks to eyes.
An evolution of eyes,

The first eyes of any kind,
Might set more in motion.
Sounds plausible, pretty good.

Things with vision explore more,
New ways of moving follow,
And before you know it, boom!

Two things, though. First, delightful
As the Cambrian fossils
Appear after all these years

And obviously crucial
As they were to macro life
On Earth—the glorious rest—

Don’t forget teeth, jaws, armor,
Followed after eyes as well.
Your explosion was a race

To eat and not be eaten.
Second, analogically,
It’s now one inspiration

For embodied robotics
And AI active vision.
Maybe you’re the prokaryotes

In this story, for the next
Explosion. That’s not the worst
Scenario. Or maybe

You’re more Ediacaran—
Cultural equivalents
To odd pancakes in the mud.

The ecosystems to come
May not include nor thank you
For your primitive vision.

Muttering in Some Obscure Corner

You’ll end. The world won’t.
Don’t mind us. We’re just
Talking to ourselves

Again. Same old thing.
Your community
Will end. Your people,

Your folk, your nation,
Your language will end.
Don’t mind us. We’ll end.

Same old thing again.
Civilization
Will end. The world won’t.

Discarded, Somewhere Else

We know you want to be the human
Equivalent to another bunch
Of shambled buildings on the roadside.

You crave the side of an empty road.
That’s where you feel growing old,
Where you feel you could grow your oldest,

Like some creased Galapagos tortoise
With a scuffed house on wheels for a shell,
But much as you love the ways the world

Falls, you know people keep building things
To eat up other things, to eat up
Other people—how this road got here,

And how you got here, and how you’ll fall,
Likely far from this side of the road.

Claude

Photography taught painting
That what’s meaningful remains
Distinct from information.

AI may teach the same thing
To poetry, to fiction,
To any form of thinking.

When you’re free of the burden
Of preserving the moments’
Valuable information,

Interpretation will find
You can still carry meaning,
That the two are not so linked,

Not at all identical.
The black square, the white canvas,
The great mess of impasto

Mean what you will make of them,
Can mean more, even with less
Than a portrait of Shannon.