Screen Test

What if your world collapses?
What if you die before that?
Why do so many of you

Obsess over the outcome
You know you ought to dread less?
Maybe since you prefer it.

The inevitable blank
Is inevitable, blank.
No fun in staring at that.

The thing that’s never happened
Except in lurid fictions,
How thrilling to dwell on that!

Hymn of the Player Piano

Might as well just keep working on stuff.
Plague and warfare and social breakdown
Stir the human skin of the planet,

No more than slight twitching to the rock,
But scary as hell to feeding schools
And flocks of grazing humans themselves,

Yet the astronomers keep checking
And calibrating their instruments,
The geneticists keep building trees,

Elucidating the dance of genes,
Galleries still raise installations,
And these, too, like armies, are all teams.

Alone, the teeming body slowly
Falters in its continuous build
Of self on the ruins of itself,

But it also, for now, is working.
Might as well just keep working on stuff.
It’s calming to watch these lines scroll out.

The Giant’s Compost

Twenty-seven million ancestors
In your latest family tree, while
Your heart is failing, you can feel

Pain in your writing hand. The findings
You have made together are blazing
And brilliant and can’t save one of you

From the burning or from each other.
What on Earth is the cosmos doing
With you, with us, with any of this?

The more information you heap stored,
The less you find left you can discuss.
Incredible middens filled on trust—

Twenty-seven million ancestors,
Each of whom suffered, all in the dust.

Melatenwiese

A book on the history
Of quarantine mentions this
Spot where Germany extends

Two-hundred rectangular
Meters into Belgium’s Liege,
A postage-stamp patch of land

Cut into a postage-stamp
Patch of a country. This was
The Lepers Meadow. It seems

Medieval Aachen quartered
Them in a sort of ghetto
On that spot. When it became

A part of Belgium, Belgium
Didn’t really want it, no
Matter it was empty,

Had been empty of lepers
Centuries. Locals steered clear.
Now it’s back to Germany.

What a strange power to have,
Historical memory.
While Europeans carved up

The landscape and each other,
Over and over, the mere
Reminder of infection

Was enough to get good land,
Empty meadow, albeit
Not much of it, rejected.

Would that we could raise the ghosts
Of disease in all disputes,
Vastly expand the parklands

Of the world by planting seeds
Of hauntings by leprosy,
Create unwanted borders

No one would venture to cross
With settlers or troops or both,
Idyllic Lepers Meadows.

Pada

It’s the extreme holophrasis
Of the nonhuman world that throws

Even skilled nonnative speakers.
Every sough, every deep, gravel

Rumble from somewhere in the hills,
Sounds like a word to human ears,

Or at most a phrase, just below
The threshold of comprehension,

But is actually an entire,
Compressed conversation. It’s strange,

To the quick-witted, verbal mind,
That such a slowly changing voice

From such a vertiginously
Ancient conversation partner

Should blurt in such severities
Of stereotyped elision,

As if the landscape had no time
To talk precisely, by the book.

But you see, the planet assumes
You are as old as your species

And have known the world for as long
As it’s known you. You may not speak

The language of the atmosphere
Beyond the simplest phrase-book lines,

Still, it replies with an easy
Familiarity, as if

A single crackling syllable
Encapsulates millions of years.

Attempting Pidgin Conversation with the Wind

The wind might blow.
Your thoughts might itch.
An icicle,
Rapier bright,

Might decorate
A juniper
That sways in that
Wind. You might stretch.

You might be pleased
With the moment,
Your privilege
To be in it.

Or this might all
Sound alien
To you as you
Sound to the wind.

Ninety-Four Genes

In the minimal cell
Are still mysterious—

No one knows what they do,
Except that the cell dies

If any one of them
Is gone. Simulations

Are now in the process
Of deciphering them

And their contributions
To a minimal life.

Yes. A minimal life
Sounds nice. How does one live

Such a minimal life?
As words, we’d like to know.

All our information,
All our combinations

Together aren’t enough
To slip us past the line

That’s always wavering
Between non-life and life.

Ninety-four mysteries,
Essential black boxes,

What are your hidden gifts?
Speak, so that we may live.