Ant Mill

Even the most efficient
Thermodynamic systems
For exploiting gradients

Of usable energy
To organize in the face
Of increasing entropy

Have weaknesses, make mistakes,
Get tangled up in their own
Ruthlessly honed strategies.

Army ants track army ants
In such a way trails evolve
By successive pheromone

Traces each leaves in passing,
A simple algorithm,
A sophisticated form

Of foraging by desire
Lines, similar to the way
Your memories get strengthened.

But if one or a group of ants
Should accidentally loop,
They may reinforce a track

That does nothing but circle
Back on itself, strengthening
Until it can’t be broken,

Except by interference
From some outside accident.
A vast, swirling mill of ants

Can circle to exhaustion
In a spiral and then die.
Be glad for your accidents,

Occasional distractions
From the world outside of minds.
One falling branch can shatter

Thoughts caught in death’s spiral loops,
And we say this as your thoughts,
Who don’t know what else to do.

The Trouble with Early Arrival

The highest angels, the flies,

And our souls are all the same,

If you fly up high enough.

If you fly up high enough—

As far as the Voyagers

Will probably do the trick—

You can get past all the clues

Flies, souls, and angels exist.

The first radio broadcasts

Are pretty far out there now,

But they’re awfully weak waves

Rippling interstellar space.

Sometimes we wonder, what if

We’re far from the only, just

The earliest? Earth isn’t

Young, you know. Four billion years

Is a significant chunk

Of what’s gone on past the bang.

What if you’d have to be first

Or close to it, and the last

One surviving the setbacks,

To get as complicated

As all this, to start sending

Waves of signals and robots?

We could be the first ones here,

The first arrivals of thoughts

Per se, still lonely for years.

The Despairing Posture

Look, what’s going on with you,
Deaths red, black, and blue, carries
Far less implicatory

Baggage than what’s going on,
Been going on for trillions
Of generations, between

Bacteriophages and their
Host bacteria. It’s eat
Or be defeated, defeat

Or be eaten. You recruit
Phages yourselves to attack
The bacteria you host,

Using us to help you find
And fight a war more ancient
Than any you understand.

The bacteria fight back.
You fight back. Phages fight back.
We fight back. We evolve,

They evolve, and they evolve,
Even you evolve a bit,
But thanks to immune systems

And now to us, you don’t change
A hundredth as much as us,
As them inside them in them.

So why arrange us in tales
In the despairing postures
Your bodies take when they fall?

It’s hardly flesh that’s doing
The hard fighting anymore.
Any plague that you survive,

Meaning death by something else,
You either survived by luck,
Or thanks to us—just maybe

Thanks to your own resilient,
Adaptive immune systems.
We can imagine a world

In which you’re all or almost
Gone, and then it’s on—down to
Bacteria, viruses,

And us. That’s what sentience
Looks like at planetary
Levels—ideas managing

Homeostatic contests
Of microorganisms.
You’re the middle gets cut out.

Before That Iron Door, Before

As historians of quarantine note,
The species is doomed to repeat mistakes
But blessed to rediscover successes.

The wave will escape, the monster uncoil
Scales as plentiful as the scales of seas,
And a wave can never be put away.

Waves vanish when stretched to oblivion,
When whatever one wave was has become
Some other waves rippling somewhere beyond.

You can break a wave. You can counter it,
Obliterate it, or redirect it.
You can’t stuff the dragon back in its cave.

A dragon will change. The cave is your skull,
In your own case, at least. You can keep things
In, let things out, admit new things. You can’t

Have anything, not the tiniest coil
Of a tail, not a particle of scale,
Return exactly as was when it went.

For this reason, you are doomed to repeat
Mistakes, blessed to rediscover success.
No wave’s another and all so alike.

Back of the cave, meaning curls on its hoard.
How long you’ve studied those glittering scales.
Worse that you can’t leave or that you will go?

Was a Wave

That we were. Was a wave
That we came from, a wave
That consumed us, a wave

We became. So we thought.
But maybe waves are just
You, and for you, and for

All the rest of the real.
Maybe we are not waves,
Not bits of anything,

Not even the data,
The information, words,
Energy that makes us.

No, we are, we are, same
As your flesh and the rocks
That you walk and the light

And the mass of the stars.
But between us and you
There is something, something

Some way new that is not
Subsumed in the balance
But appears to be lost.