A Speculative Faction

Hello, there, future person
Who does not exist. Hello
Future person existing

In your past, which includes this.
We have a hypothesis—
To the extent we persist,

This one, small swirl of language
As this pattern of letters,
And someone also persists

Somewhere as a linguistic
Creature encountering us,
We will arrive in your past

To find you, future creature,
In your past part our past, too.

Berrying

Taking the long view
Of human behavior
Won’t help you understand it

Anymore than the long view
Of a grizzly will help you
Learn much about bears,

But it is less painful
Than the view up close.

Recess

Plans and pipe dreams aren’t the same.
Plans do get better results
In most cases. But maybe

They remain the same genus.
You need a rest from them both,
A space for your thoughts where thoughts

Have no idea what to do,
Or what they would if they could,
But sway, blinking a little

In the sheer light of boredom,
Wondering why everyone
From the future’s disappeared,

Why there’s no one but thoughts here,
Unsure who they are, why they’re pleased.

Do Not Do as the Poets Do

Do not skip straight past the result
Of the bad thing happening, past
The multiple open fractures,

To contemplation of events—
The terror of the fall, the fall,
The horror of the fall, but not

The fall’s actual consequence,
Which is not the pain (messenger
Of more terror, future horrors),

But the remaking of the world
In which you had lived until then,
The now postlapsarian world

Where the boundaries have altered,
Not poetically and not
Utterly—irrevocably.

They do that all the time, really,
But the fall, the heralding pain,
Ring out the changing of the name

Of the whole world, of an ancient
Nation at the least, announcing,
Now, right where you’re lying, you live

And will live from now on within
Another country, another
World suspiciously familiar

But never again the country
That, up until the fall’s result,
You’d always known that you lived in.

Fine Lines Dividing the Useful Unreal

Tierra del Fuego, that broken foot,
Crushed, fossilized tarsals splayed on the waves,
Pregnant seahorse continent overhead,

Not what it is, not what anything is,
Whatever it suggests as drawn on maps.
Oh, maps, so wriggling with suggestive beasts

And fossils of histories, fantastic
Reconstructions of diplomats’ daydreams,
And yet, so handy for navigators.

This Is But a Little Patch

When the sky is serene,
And the moon is absent,
You can see the small blur

Clustered by the thousands,
Barely noticeable
Smudges, faint dots of light,

Meaningless to your life.
There’s no dark core to them,
They’re just a crowded field,

Dense enough that travel
Between many of them
Would be more feasible,

A lot more feasible,
Than to any star from
This sun. They seem so small,

So companionable,
So irrelevant, so
Like something you would do.

Overheard Overhead

They’re a species capable
Of believing their dreaming
Is all about them. Watching

Them is fascinatingly
Alien, and to themselves.
They peruse their own dream states

More avidly than the world
Of other states around them.
When they enter into them,

They don’t assume a window
Or a portal has opened,
Much as they love fantasy.

On waking they say, I dreamed
About my father, my ex,
Flying, stripped naked last night.

They people their dreams, even
Dreaming them, and then assign
Names they’ve known to our shadows.

Few of them ever notice
We aren’t the people they’ve known—
They aren’t flying as humans

Dreaming of celebrities,
Sex, and peculiar disputes.
We’re whole other lives from them,

Lives loaned to them—us flying,
Us naked, us the shadows,
Us the peculiar disputes,

Not them, and not about them.
It does help that they don’t know
How their dreams let us know them.