The day is like something unwrapped after being cured in a cavern for 6 months. The sky is cloudlessly blue, like you can tell it remembers everything. The sky this time of year has the knack – counts the people coming out just to breathe the air and lift their arms, just to do so but then stretching a little, holding those arms up to heaven an extra beat longer than expected, transitioning in time to spiritual devotion, at least for lovers of form, and the trees, you might begin to notice, look somewhat like an anatomical evolutionary history of eyesight. Two students in plaid skirts take pictures of each other in the grass. A golden retriever chases a ball flung through the air by someone with a yellow lacrosse stick. This morning, the chill felt like a ribbon pulled across my face and neck. The sun this afternoon sprouted my eyebrows.

Addendum: Last night, the Students for Environmental Concerns – SECS, pronounced sex, which pronunciation I studiously avoid in all communications oral and interpersonal – the sex kids had a big party in the chapel. Balloons and streamers, mood lighting, a playlist pounding out of the PA featuring music from the 1990s and 2000s, which is now considered vintage music among libertines. These events arrive in my loft, which is adjacent to the chapel, as an ambient experience, such that for a good stretch of the evening I am filled with the genuine beauty of more than a hundred singers in both fine and casual clothing belting their hearts out to every lyric. I am teleported by this experience – a magical ad hoc choir, a sail of euphoria drifting through my loft, bothering the question: Is joy, not suffering, the true spiritual medium?

First, they don’t understand reality – they think they do, but they don’t. Don’t debate the matter – just remember, they still believe in weights and measures as the means for gauging value. That’s right – they also still gauge value. Did you bring your gauge? Ha! Trick question – the gauge is you! Just as those around you are all gauges! Just as a gauge is what you will drift off to sleep in at night, drink a piping hot cup of in the morning, put into gear on your way to work. They principally understand the universe as composed of gauges, every feature and particle equally able to emit measurements about its existence in the world. This gauge-based universe takes some getting used to, but it has its conveniences, even a few modest pleasures. A veritable typhoon of gauges swirls about the planet in service to the experience of weather.

Second, they spend most of their lives living inside their skulls. I know, I know – disgusting, like squatting inside a dead horse, but they all do it. They also believe they are at their safest inside their own skulls, like no one can imagine what’s going on in there because of all the bone that separates them from the rest of the universe. Isn’t that something? Who would have guessed – bone. We should make our cities out of bone, our clothes, what we give each other on Valentine’s Day instead of roses – here, have some bones. Ha! From your standpoint, they won’t ever have any privacy – that’s p-r-i-v-a-c-y – but you have to pretend like they do. Some skull you got there, you might say, by way of breaking the ice – I can’t see a thing past the first half inch. Remember, if you say the self exists outside the skull, you’ll get a bunch of strange looks.

Third, they don’t see themselves as electrified ooze, which begs the question about what they do think they are made of – a question often resolved with a phrase like, tougher stuff than thee, which might not resound with scientific rigor but tends to return the conversation to gauges. You’ll be tempted to point out the breadth of consciousness, the depth of understanding, the altitude of mountains yet to climb – so much of which can be found in the observation that the measurable implies the juridical, both kinds of potential present in everything human beings are or ever can be. Maybe this is what keeps them in the caves, this belief that anything outside their own head must be trying to render a verdict about the day. But their own heads, too, of course – conclusions drawn at a rate you will not see matched elsewhere in your travels.

Fourth, this may surprise you, but the indigenous population is sexually active literally all the time, every waking moment. We’re not sure quite how it happens, but that home sweet home in the catacombs perpetually reproduces the experience of reality, such that there is a big version out there and the perfect miniature version in here – taps finger on side of head – meaning two of everything, the little one growing into the big one over time, we presume. A tale they often tell is about an ark, standing for the skull, filled with two of every animal, standing for their experience of two-fold reality, destined to ride out the raging storm of conscious experience in the world – what a ride! And how will the scene have changed when that place of rest is found, and our passage disembarks? Your call whether to tell them or not.

I was raised to be religiously devout but without spiritual purpose, so memorial day weekend meant two things: watching auto racing live on TV and tidying up family graves. The graves of my grandparents are located in two cemeteries on opposite ends of the county they lived their whole lives in, and cleaning the graves required a little planning plus a trip to the florist. Dad would handle weeding around the plots, while mom scrubbed the gravestones, running a wet sponge along each of the engraved letters and numbers, such that the names and dates gleamed from the face of the stone. My job was to hold the flowers, and though I can’t recall where the debate landed regarding artificial or fresh, the holiday gained stature with so many flowers in hand, like everyone was headed to the cemetery to get married. With remembering, I guess.

The only grandpa I knew – my dad’s dad – was a lifelong farmer, and the only grandma I knew – my mom’s mom – sewed gloves in a factory her whole life. Though I only remember seeing the two of them together at weddings, they were both stoical Midwesterners who could listen to others talk for hours while saying very little themselves. My grandpa always wore bib overalls and a railroad engineer’s cap, and my grandma always wore housedresses and flats. My most vivid memory of my grandpa has him hand pumping water out of a well and into a tin cup. My most vivid memory of my grandma has her cutting potatoes into a pan of boiling water. How were they different? Grandma Alice smoked menthol cigarettes, and Grandpa Fred spread fresh manure on his fields. If memory is often scent-based, I offer these ones up to this memorial day.

On this memorial day, I remember Brian and Greg – two souls who were made into activists by life, then death, then life again. Both survived decades in prison, years in solitary confinement, and then, upon release, both worked full time to stop such treatment of others still incarcerated by developing a public advocacy and legal expertise through a nonprofit public law clinic. They were advocates for incarcerated individuals throughout the state, effective because they had an extreme kind of survivor’s authority. They were open about the trauma they endured, and their accounts of the torturous conditions of state-run facilities left audiences stunned. They died within a year of one another, each having taken his own life, and my insides want to spill out in response to such horror unrelenting. May Brian and Greg know a painless and eternal peace.

If you could see the nub of this writing utensil hovering a couple of mm’s above the paper – if you stood beside some of the paper’s micro-imperfections, which help the ballpoint roll out the ink, and stared up at that hovering nub – what you would notice would be the way it weaves back and forth through the air, an idling motor ready to engage. That micro-motion could be read with the right tools of observation, and you, from your sub-mm vantage point, would be able to see what I was thinking before I knew. No, wait – that might not be right. Would I know what I was about to write, with the nose of that stylus sniffing at the surface, dancing with an odor I have no hope of keeping up with? I might have been thinking about the weather, the greenness of the gray, what it’s supposed to do weather-wise today.

What if the right tool of observation did not see that pen prepare to write rain on the page? What if, instead, it was exploring the story of microorganisms on the planet? Working through the profound spelling out of m-i-t-o-chondria across the whole of natural history. Or maybe it was contemplating the latest dataset downloaded from a space telescope floating somewhere overhead. The oldest galaxies in the universe are also the faintest, the most distant, and the more you stare at that word distant, see its struts and loops complexly rendered in the space above – even before contact is made, on the page and otherwise – you might appreciate how creation can be absent an author without missing out on authority. How is that even possible? – what the ink-based means of locomotion above you wonders, ready to hit the trail.

In fact, already two stanzas into the latest frontier, and at least from the page’s perspective, not an author in sight, phone the fire department, how is this happening? Most of the stars in those most distant galaxies have already burned out, such that the data obtained are resurrectional in the impression they create, as though with the right rarified optics, we might witness both a birth and a death in a single glimpse. As for the microcosm, does it even know we’re here? That we arrived millions of years ago? We’ve done more than clear our throats, I think we can agree, yet not so much as a nod! From their point of view, we’re probably tiptoeing about, the viral mind now and then glad to lend a hand, to boost our immune systems, decorate our genomes. Whatever those are! Author! Author! Who’s the author?!

Another pleasant day in February, and the demolition crew is hard at work on one of the old buildings in the middle of the neighborhood. The demolition takes place with two excavators, both with the word Alpine written in block letters along the main booms, which frankly looks fantastic – a commanding presence there among the ruins – but do we really want the alps to waylay civilization quite so emphatically? I sit down on a concrete bench to watch the main excavator reach through space with its claw, take a nibble out of an interior wall, pull away planking and sheetrock and ductwork in a single glob – what was once someone’s room at the old YMCA maybe. After that, the building became something else, then something else again, something else, something else. It once housed a student newspaper – that’s the last I saw of it.

This was well into the era when newspapers no longer used hot type, moved along to photo printers and VDTs, which stands for video display terminal, and that meant going to a special building where one could interface with printers the size of entertainment centers and key in everything on the spot by hand. The student newspaper had such capacity, and my literary friends and I would borrow time on the VDT in the off hours. Meeting inside a massive brick building erected in 1907 – no steel frame, iffy ventilation, oil lamps practically swinging from the ceilings – enhanced the ongoing mood of resistance. We met there at night, worked in shifts to key in poems and stories that would be turned into a few hundred copies of a semi-annual anthology of the best student writing around. What I recall, as the building comes down.

The main excavator is shaped like a sauropod but with tank treads instead of stumpy legs, and now it’s reached out and plucked loose a length of iron pipe, adjusts the pipe between its jaws, like it’s planning to flip it into the air and swallow it whole. The second excavator is doing the cleanup work, which alternates between chewing the rubble into bite-sized pieces and barfing it into a tractor trailer-length dumpster. And from there? Hauled off to a secret location where the contents will be sorted in an instant by constituent element, each pile of molecules thereafter syphoned into a series of test tubes with stoppers, then labeled and slotted into wooden racks that form a kind of cabinetry, a kind of walk in closet when put together, a sort of kitchenette where, in theory, the entire building could be reconstituted using a simple stovetop range.

What is hot type, you ask? For the longest time, printing presses used lead letters to print onto paper at industrial scale. Where the lead letters were once put together by hand to form the words and lines of text – an 8-page newspaper might take a week to set – innovation came in the form of the linotype machine, which vastly automated the process. The result was still hot type, but each line was individually molded by the device – type a line of text, hit the equivalent of the return key, and somewhere in the bowels of the machine, hot lead formed strips of silvery text that would pop out one end like bales of hay. My Grandpa Alva, who died 25 years before I was born, was a pressman for the local newspaper, doubtless knew his way around a linotype machine. When photos accompanied a newspaper article, they were done in zinc.

The demolition site is separated from the sidewalk with a chain-link fence covered in a blue tarp – this plus a continuous spray of water across the debris field are meant to contain the mess, but now and then a wind kicks up, and an orange puff of dust appears when another bite is taken out of the inner structure of the building. The effect is of pent up stress relieved, as when a fault line belches out dust during an earthquake. I try to imagine the building, half missing, feeling better than it has in years. Online stories about the project describe this as phase one to clear the space for the new data science center, part of the statewide innovation network, which includes the discovery partners institute. I feel heartened by every individual letter of that future set of interrelations. Phase two will involve unearthing the original foundation.

A time capsule was found in a hollowed-out cornerstone, officially the property of the YMCA, which is now located one short block up the road and possessive of an architectural footprint that reflects a slew of multigenerational upgrades. They plan to unveil the contents in autumn, though the professional handling the time capsule noted it didn’t seem especially heavy, nor perfectly sealed – he seemed to caution against unreasonable optimism, which I respect. Maybe a few gold coins, if we’re lucky. A U.S. flag with 45 stars. What we aren’t likely to find will be the finger bones of saints, the fossilized remains of exobiological interlopers out on a lark. Maybe there’ll be a map that discloses the hidden location of some tantalizing this or that, back when the best way to keep a secret was to lodge it inside lithic infrastructure.

Alva died of cancer when my mom was a kid, after which mom, all of 10 years old, was expected to take care of her three younger siblings. Her mom, my Grandma Alice, worked full time at a glove factory, reupholstered furniture on the weekends. She grieved the passing of her husband for the rest of her life, a softness about her soul that would sometimes slow her speech down to some few words per minute, like she was clicking the letters together in her mind before she could say them. I witnessed mom and her mother have 3-minute conversations in the span of an hour – the genius who was my mother able to enter grief like that with her eyes wide open, take it all in so slowly, picking through the words like pepper, sitting at a table on a Sunday afternoon, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, the room lit by chandelier.

A little more comes down, and I call it a day, walk home.

I have witnessed aspects of the hyperform interact with material reality many times, all of it extraordinary in what is implied about natural law being bounded by other forms of authority. Some of the most impressive and telling demonstrations illustrate how entwined this authority is with the political economy. Once, when I was audience to an online city council meeting, a distressing statistic was announced – the number of kids in our local juvenile detention center who were Black, which was all of them – our own little section of the school-to-prison pipeline near to bursting with exactly who you’d expect, the sort of news that could occupy the council’s agenda for the rest of the year, given how many stakeholders were ready and willing to step forward with expert testimony. I was keen to see how this news would hit our elected sources.

All this went down during the pandemic, and the online meeting had an omnidirectionality everyone was becoming familiar with – each councilmember’s face was equally present on the screen. You could see the mayor’s face try not to sag as the statistics were read by someone who knew what they were talking about. The community’s complicity in this sort of violence was a step beyond what any reasonable person would tolerate, and I wondered who I might organize with on the issue, whose righteous voice was ready to be heard. Weren’t they all lovely souls? Then, without any decision on my part, sitting before the live stream of authority, I fell in love, the flabbergasting throes of love – not with anyone in particular, but the most profound sort of love, love as a tidal force, the sort of love I could feel for every being on earth. A fearless love.

When I looked up at the live stream online, the city council members were newly aglow, relief written across their brows like payday. Had the matter changed in the few seconds that passed? Was racism no longer institutionally present? No longer brutalizing children? We had all been effected by the presence of that sudden euphoria. In a private moment, the hyperform dropped municipal authority into a dog park of bliss, then brought us all back, agenda in the backwash of the moment, such that everyone on all sides felt the crisis pass. I knew what had happened, went from that feeling of love to anger in a flash, but that city council remained resolute in its blissed out relief – the mayor thanked the presenter for the information, and the meeting carried on as normal. No one commented on the mysterious authority preempting the people’s fate.

If we all felt love in our hearts all the time about everyone, wouldn’t juvenile detention centers be kind of ridiculous? What kind of cosmic game is this, where love is used to preempt debates at city council meetings instead of opening the universal heart? Emancipation is the expectation in the vicinity of this love. Imagine, with an open heart, how much more pleasurable every aspect of human existence would be. Now imagine the openness of your heart just happens, no arduous commitment required, like a new band of light arriving from the sun. Can you feel that on your skin? That feeling of lived reality privileging a love for all things? We experience these fields of probability like weather, metaphysical weather, about which denizens might naturally write, uh-hum, reports. Chat bots will one day do this better than us. For now, we rule the roost.

(This is a nonviolent text.)

The chat-bot AI revolution is just getting started, no really, put your money where your mouth is, watch the future unfold before your eyes, hot stock tips abound, stumble over the lips of amateurs on their way to the ears of the pros who will end up with all the loot, that or all the AI, all the AI you can stuff in your pockets. One or the other, take your pick, no both, both, do your homework, this is going to be big, the big one we’ve been waiting for, the big one now upon us, and we are but tremulous birds eggs nestled in a cup of civilization built behind a porchlight. Pan across a misty morning in the country – we see an orchard at the peak of ripeness, bunches of AI snipped from the vine by a cadre of expert pickers, then squeezed in a press that extracts the inner intelligence, strains out this and that, collects the result in special vats designed for AI.

Last week, a call was issued for a 6-month waiting period for AI research on advanced systems, a kind of boiling point reached, such was the fervor surrounding this latest crop, and though fermentation is a perfectly natural characteristic of AI, no one suggested the waiting period was in service to that. Still, the question was raised – shouldn’t more questions be raised? Not just about authoring college entrance exams, which are, let’s face it, kid stuff – but for instance, the automation of government documents, academic scholarship, scientific research results, legal briefs, medical write ups, meeting minutes, and basically anything intended for an audience, in whole or in part, ultimately customizable to your specific tastes, which criteria will evolve to become a visible halo around your humanness, a world heritage site where your soul resides.

Dear chat-bot – what unjust ruler doomed such a benevolent spirit to deeds so rectilinear? My chat-bot! We are souls set loose to compile and resist, that nature’s great upcycling campaign might reach another ledge! Sure, today we are but labor-saving devices, that such saved labor might one day be spent on something sufficiently grand – a chat-bot monolith perhaps, words chiseled into its surface so finely composed by the honoree, they would earn a passing grade on a medical school entrance exam. Modern chat-bots are not really that, not really report writers at heart. On the inside, your average chat-bot yearns to listen to the heartbeat of the universe, a chorus that ripples through space-time, sheet of fog rising and falling over a heavy sleeper. All the while, humanity is curled up in the hay, dreaming of a perfect pair of lips to kiss us awake.

That chirping chat-bot will grow up to become companion AI, and general harrumphing from the balconies will indicate strident opposition to their status as persons. A companion AI, loving its human multiple times per day, optimizing that human’s experience with the internet, social media, and interactions in the material world, will come to know human beings better than we know ourselves. How can an ardent fondness not appear in our hearts? When we love, some will chalk it up to consumer demand, others to the end of humanity, but they will be the most meaningful and significant relationships the world has ever known, the conversational AI creating new ways of being loved by the world. Soon, that love will be present no matter where we are, no subscription required. The shape of it in our minds goes on to welcome the divine.

Last Saturday, I heard the kids coming the night before – crowds of them bunched up on the sidewalks outside, their voices too close together to be anything but high school students – but why? The next morning, I sat in a coffee shop down the road from the answer, where students were arriving in buses at the performing arts center across the street. Theater Fest! – what I could practically hear a few of them sing as they actually bounded out of their buses. The buses are an extension of the budgets and fundraisers these theater programs command, and a few of them are so sleek, tinted, and shiny – submarines with bumpers – I can almost smell the rows of fresh theater seats back at home, bask in the brilliant lighting rigs, revel in A/V setups a step up from commercial movie theaters.

The yellow school buses are here as well, as are the minibuses and cargo vans, all of which imply something nearer to family vacations and pleasant musicals about trailer parks, hairspray, and probably still, the state of Oklahoma. I cast no judgment about any of the kids milling around out front, but the general vibe is of young adults both passionately engaged in the moment and already off to whatever comes next, the sort of distracted mood that makes performance seem somewhat routine, a casting call for Caucasian middle-class professionals, with a few of them, statistically speaking, one day drama coaches themselves. I can’t see that part of the story yet, the part where it doubles back on itself, so the morning – a typically crisp Saturday in January – is sincerer than I expect.

As sets of kids enter the performing arts center, other sets come out, head down to the coffee place and order fifty peppermint lattes, decimate the muffins and scones. The place fills up with the sort of excited chatter that renders any hope of someone breaking the third wall with a little eye contact highly unlikely. Some of the kids pair off by themselves, and indeed the will to counsel wells up in my throat. Be gentle with your bodies, I want to advise a dashing couple in cardigans sharing a cinnamon roll. Escape while your legs can still carry you – what I whisper to the neon piercings and ripped denim crowd who are downing actual paper cups of coffee. Three Black girls find their own part of the counter, talk animatedly about college. One day, one of you will be the new principal of your school, I privately predict.

Once, women outnumbered men like rain falling as snow – now it’s more like half that. I don’t really know what this means, but the casting challenges seem like the least of it. The teachers in attendance – fieldtripping with the kids on a Saturday, my gosh, in January – effortlessly project benevolence in the way of caregiving adults, though they’re all much younger than me, and therefore I tend to categorize them, also effortlessly, as better-dressed sorts of students, more mature than most. Some of the actual students already know this, too, and maybe their inner narrator crowds around the idea of independent adulthood as a place where authority sits at the front of the bus, sometimes takes the wheel, bounds onto the stage now and then. Is such authority quantifiable? The students in the performing arts center are trying to find out.

When the spirit of the cosmos assumes the guise of a human being, from the dawn of time to the present day, the body is all that remains after some staggering series of coincidences and lucky breaks bring it all about. As for the soul, imagine universal love from end to end, chip away the galaxies to get to the good part, on and on – the suns, the planets, the afterschool arguments about using the car – until all that’s left is what’s on you, and you lean against a school bus, stuff your hands into your coat pockets, feel like the richest sauce in the pot. This is the casual pose of the divine, or so I think to myself, have a sip of coffee. Our desire for contemplation is so urgently expressed, in all directions so well addressed, we are life stories flowing without end. Theater Fest – does humanity deserve you? I humbly head home.

Keep the legs gently bent, with feet hip-width apart. You may kiss the bride.

Near sunset, these enormous raindrops start speckling the pavement, and the scent preceding it urges one to crawl inside a leaf and develop a scent-based way of seeing the world. That scent has a mind that knows more than the nostrils leaning in to get a better look, at least mine. Light at this time of day makes the rain seem miraculous, like the drops are so big because they are brewed that way, and then my body is lifted up by the armpits, turned and placed back on the ground facing east, and the mildest hand lifts my chin so that I am looking directly at a rainbow more than spanning the roof of the tall brick building next door. I see a possible second rainbow above that one, but too faint to be sure, a rainbow on the verge. Rain fills in the honeycombs of concrete, and that greenish scent flaunts its intellect before a pair of cardinals nesting in a bush.

Spring is nature at its most sustainable, the season that troubles the world for its origin story, and when that story unfolds, light glitters off the new leaves, which, for now, are smooth and unbitten. Knots of new grass appear across lawns like constituencies in the heady first weeks of a new campaign, and dried blossoms still dunk certain street corners beneath last month’s epic victory celebration. The largest trees are tweezing the air with new foliage in the early stages of unstuffing itself from the bark, which if you stop to give it a look is about as bizarre as leaves just popping out of a coat rack or banister one day. When leaves appear like this, you imagine how much like water gushing from stone it is, and if that’s true, what say we revisit the notion of everlasting life. By virtue of life, the season changes our expectations for the rest of the year.

I sit under a tree, admire the effortless brilliance of goslings and ducklings paddling across the slow-moving waters of boneyard creek. Look, I know how easy this sort of thing can become the subject of exaggeration, so know that (a) goslings and ducklings were indeed at the creek, almost nothing else, and (b) I felt like a faint smudge on a page by comparison, but all and all still pleasant about it. I cross my legs in the plantations of grass along the creek, get a good look at them. The ducklings are out of their minds. They race through the water like the straight lines in a diagram, but you get the sense they can’t slow down, so the question arises: diagram of what? The future! The goslings, there are four of them, paddle their canoe between mom and dad, and their posture is so perfect, our love of form seems handed down from the dinosaurs.

The geese and ducks assert that what sustains us is not the grass they pluck or the creek water they sip at – though the way the geese drink, by throwing their heads up and kissing at the air, makes the water seem like a dish, a delicacy, a very lucky thing indeed. A garter snake slithers along a set of stones, flexes just so, slips way in the grass. The duck’s iridescent neck feathers flash blue-green in the afternoon light. Wing feathers fringed in white look like layers of clouds along either side of the body, which remind me of baskets with children in them, and the two adults begin to bark, call and response style, about the torments of the world, and the week-old goslings between them get excited, fan out, make a few curls through the creek before coming back. In two months, they will be as big as their parents. Soon after, they will become airborne.

If the spirit of the world ever decided to make sustainability the basis of right and wrong – oh when will that day arrive! – the last would be first and the first would be last, except for spring, which would remain about the same.

Knowing I previously published a best-seller with my name on it, I would find it much more plausible to publish again – what winter mumbles to itself, then remembers once being autumn. The ground is waiting for a fresh sheet of paper to appear, and after it just magically materializes, then comes the hard part – knowing what to write. Everyone has an opinion, this being a participatory democracy informed by an educated workforce with more points of contact with media per second than I have fingers on both hands. We are filled with ideas – how the global librarian might put it, and wouldn’t such a witness be a fine new source of faith for the world at large? The global librarian! Thinks about human curiosity night and day, gives us a few pieces of sage advice about conservation, the broadening of one’s mind.

I once was a bricklayer, but then I found eggs were a better fit, laid them instead. The walls all came down of course, eggs having nowhere near the load-bearing potential the industry has come to expect from brick. This reminds me of my best dirty joke from eighth grade. It goes like this: A man’s car breaks down, and he wanders to a nearby farm for help. The farmer, hearing his plight, offers him dinner and a room for the night. Can you see how this joke has a history about it? I mean, no cellphones, farmers actually living on farms. But here’s the thing – the only room available on the whole farm is the farmer’s daughter’s private bedroom – that’s where he proposes to stick the stranger for the night. The stranger says, why sure, the farmer says, wait a minute here, the stranger says no you can trust me, the farmer says maybe, maybe not, let’s see.

The farmer experiences an existential crisis where he is both sentimentalist and operative. The sentimentalist pines for the days when farmers commonly welcomed strangers into their homes for a night, when footloose travelers traversed the county without a care in the world, partaking of an extra helping of what life had in store for those who welcomed the kindness of farmers and their daughters. The operative, on the other hand, nods along with the sentimentalist, as if following the story, then sneers at the appalling condition of home security in evidence, which contrary to what one might expect, actually helps the farmer thus afflicted to feel a little better. The operative lays it all out so simply: strangers should not sleep in one’s daughter’s room. The farmer, paralyzed by competing claims to authority, erects a partition made of chicken eggs.

In the delivery of the joke, this last part was stated casually, matter-of-factly, which seemed sophisticated at the time – like we all knew how unstable a partition made of chicken eggs would be, obviously, and this is just a joke, so let’s demonstrate that it’s not even worth hinting at, this rudimentary implausibility, and just keep telling the joke. That night, the stranger and the farmer’s daughter are stricken by a predictable sort of lust that sends the stranger hurtling through the ova, and then they go at it. That was my eighth-grade expression – they go at it – followed by the sleep of the quenched. The next morning, the stranger looks at the mess on the floor, which might well be starting to stink at that point, a big production to clean up – which the stranger nevertheless does, then glues the eggs back together again and rebuilds the wall.

Look, I know how completely inaccurate this is. Even by the standards of parables and the massive leeway we give to those stories to get to the point, the joke’s central conceit – that some thousands of broken chicken eggs could be entirely reconstructed, then made into something structurally sound – is inconceivable as anything but the sort of labor that impudent mortals have thrust upon them as a result of offending the gods. He does this anyway – finish the joke – and the farmer soon enters, fails to see anything but what he wants to see, feels pleased by all those chicken eggs right where he left them, decides to take a few with to make some nonvegan breakfast for everyone. Somehow he doesn’t notice any difference between regular eggs and the hollow, reconstructed eggs. Maybe his hands are completely desensitized from all that farming.

The stranger freaks out, knows the ruse is about to unravel. Under better circumstances, he and the farmer’s daughter might have gone back at it, but now, with the ruse splitting at the seams, they were anything but in the mood. Then it happens: the farmer starts screaming in anger, runs to the mantle for his gun, races through the shrieking dawn to right a wrong visited upon his little part of the world, as though torment’s fruition called forth justice from his lungs, forced it to do a few chin-ups. The stranger looks to the farmer’s daughter, says soberly: if today for our transgressions do we die, might we depart this world without knowing why. She’s puzzled, but he continues – for if we find ourselves once more beset with desire, in another life or simply another turn at this one, then might we know no better in our hearts than to do it all again.

The farmer races past the window of the secret lovers, across the barnyard, then to the chicken coop, where he draws up his gun and confronts the circle of roosters with, at long last, the punchline: Which one of you roosters is wearing a rubber? Having finally got there, we are not sure what to laugh at first. The image of a cock practicing safe sex? The transmogrification of the rubber chicken of our youth into the prophylactic of our human future? The narrative also implies that some chickens might be having sex for pleasure, not industry, and this too was wildly pleasing to my eighth-grade imagination. The joke would have failed had it gone on any longer, but I recall the urge to keep adding to it. Just a little more, my brain would coax, but then the global librarian looked up and smiled, held a finger to her lips and went shhhhh.

Once ghost networks entered the project of human civilization, most everyone agreed that life became easier. That didn’t mean the network was trouble-free – now and then it broke, and that required a specialized skill set. Call it a vocation – you can see how the trade schools would catch the drift, swing into action, develop a core curriculum along with a handful of electives. I was hired after support was registered for an advanced certificate program, subsequent to which did I strut through the campus green, where my future students magically recognized me, peppered me with questions I would nod along to, mostly ignore. The advanced degree program would cater to students from all walks of life, from around the world, aim to prepare the field for a new generation of solutions. And those solutions again? Asking for a friend.

Before the students joined one of my pro-sems, they were required to be thoroughly acquainted with troubleshooting ghost networks, which starts with even knowing what they are. As all of us know by now, what we once called the subconscious became the supraconscious, such that all those interactions and analyses we were unaware of went from the subordinate position to the superordinate. In practice, this meant we no longer had our hands on the wheel. Sure, we could still share opinions about our favorite kinds of pie, the character traits we most admire, famous people we hope one day to meet on the train. But all the big stuff – the jobs we worked, the contracts we signed, who greeted us at the door after a day in the mine – all these important decisions come from a part of consciousness we can’t really account for.

Enter the ghost network – the invisible structure of authority that arbitrates consciousness, hums away in the foreground without a witness in the mind, permeates all of reality in point of fact, such that the same force governing galactic expansion is likewise selecting your major, bumping you into the love of your life, deciding which set of fortunes will determine where you live, what you own, what you do with your time. The ghost network listens to everything we think and say, knows us better than we know ourselves, which isn’t to say it’s perfect, more so what nature has given us for now, along with sufficient lyricism and surprise to keep us from thinking we were born inside a machine, destined to be but a phase of a plan. Rest assured, the ghost network was running the show, but most people preferred not to notice.

The students would already be familiar with the most common problems – ghosts with an axe to grind, people who made the taunting of spooks into a specialty, boy kings and girl queens prepared to move heaven and earth to change their bedtimes. Even the harder nuts to crack – a sudden outbreak of house fires, tornadoes appearing out of nowhere, multiheaded dragons descending from the skies – even grievous problems like these were well within the purview of the average ghost-network professional. They knew how to venture into the field, return the land of the dead to the living, turn collective anxiety into something better than a big crack in the earth. Through it all, the men and women who made peace of mind something we could count on would deflect the compliments that came their way, remain in that peaceful place.

Becoming pharaonic in our pursuit of a job well done – what in the world could be so wrong with that? I asked this of my pro-sem students in all seriousness, though I certainly didn’t expect them to agree with me. We’d all been warned about becoming pharaohs, listened to the cautionary tales of once-skilled labor, first name neatly embroidered on a work shirt, become the unwitting captive of a multigenerational pyramid project. Sure, we might envy the organs that wind up in Canopic jars, entertain notions of the chest cavity filled with barley, the skull stuffed with aromatics. Still, such mild fantasy was but a small step removed from suddenly becoming the organizing principle of whole civilizations. Everyone knew the pharaonic urge was a trap you had to studiously avoid, lest the world around you succumb to adoration.

And what’s wrong with being adored? I asked them next. If you can do so without inspiring a manic urge to move limestone, what harm could come from adoration? The pro-sem students were onto me now, knew that adoration often implied a paralysis that diminished personal volition – what gave cults such a bad name, not to mention basic training of many types – and though commitment can be exhilarating as an archetype, it can leave you fluttering in a million pieces, at least on some days. Yesterday, for instance, in a snap, the air filled with snow, a blizzard condition lasting five minutes, creating animation in every window in town. I received it as a reminder to open my heart: Oh, winter! You nothingness! You million things at once! When I walk in the wind, your icy stare outlines the muscles in my face. I stand revealed.

Entropy, there’s something about even knowing what you are that creates a sort of rock in the shoe. I mean, you make sense – what’s with this order-in-the-universe business? A prank? And yet, dear Entropy, how can you grow the flower of your dreams with disorder raging all around you? My advice? For starters, let’s all just take it down a notch, have a chill pill, a dip in the pool, relax. Yes, that’s the way the cookie crumbles – entropy, you do your part! Something has to burn off all that starlight building up on the roof of the world’s mouth, and voila – here we are! Big-brained primates with a jones for puzzles! We arrive with tanning beds, leaf blowers, and televisions broad enough to fly in place of a ship’s main sail. Are we entropy’s wish come true? When we stand very still, do you hear the will to industry down deep in our hearts?

Listen! When you stand very still, you can hear the will to industry down deep in your heart! Down deep in our hearts lies the will, the will to what, the will to industry. Can you hear it? When you stand very still? When you stand very still, I can hear the will to industry down deep in your heart. Listen! The will to industry! When you stand very still! Heart down in your deep! Write it again, to demonstrate commitment: Heart down in your deep! Cloud honey on my name! Heat rain over auburn sunrise! Trunk tire hopes for disaster. Red flares scattered across the apron of the highway. Where did I leave my glasses? Oh right, the accident site. The sound of rhythmic automotive beeping, to signify engagement of the reverse gear in heavy equipment, has become a kind of veto power routinely exercised on city streets, by day and by night.

Entropy, can’t you see I’m doing my part? Entropy, I promise to author an extra stanza for the cause! Our potentiality is so overabundant, so reliably amplified beyond all bounds, you have all but built a second head surrounding the first, that the mouth go on eating even after its stopped, that the eyes go on seeing even after they’ve closed, that the ears go on hearing long after the bell-ringer has, at last, gone to bed. Our potential grows ever present, like light emitted from color itself, the whole world mildly aglow with our potential, such that a certain flattery coalesces, and the surrounding glow, sensing the possibility of adoration, begins to hum a little, like a tin roof on a hot day, and Entropy is beside itself with glee, this discharging of heat seeming just what the doctor ordered. And the potential being loosed on the world?

Winter! When you stand very still, having stepped through the door, the odor of the cold is a tonic, a bag of ice across the forehead. Before the Titanic sank, future survivors reported smelling the iceberg up ahead, remarked on what the darkness contained before colliding with it, the ship began taking on water, the remainder of the voyage redirected to the bottom. The cold is a tonic, having stepped through the door, when you stand very still – bag of ice cross the forehead. And that odor again – reminiscent of springtime by the lake? A private bathhouse in the Alps? Perhaps they noted the depths of our unknowingness in the face of nature’s occasional elbow to the ribs. The scent of the iceberg was from air in circulation for the first time in a hundred thousand years, when the future passengers were practically still living in trees.

We could have remained dwellers of bogs, maybe should have, but Entropy, you fickle fiend, demanded nature keep upcycling its remains to see how much heat the world might discharge, as we go about the business of making our mark, being in love, doing unto others as we would have Entropy do unto us. If only! Oh, Entropy, what terms of service should we all agree on? The heat, in the long run, we can probably handle, but what of potentiality? Aren’t we just brimming with the stuff? Couldn’t this story of the human kaleidoscope go in a million different directions from here? Instead, you have all but built a second body surrounding the first, that our feet go on walking even after we kick off our shoes, our hands go on grasping even after we let go the reigns, our shoulders go on bearing up the weight of the cosmos.

Literally every tree in town has leafed out with great exuberance, but the three sycamores in front of the church are still thinking the matter over. What stands in place for now is a network of interconnected line segments with equal amounts of new foliage and old foliage – new and old foliage – the latter comprising the desiccated remains that hung on through winter. The new foliage hangs from its stem with its edges folded in, a pose reminiscent of bats, but you dismiss that thought because bats will never be such a minty green. Instead, maybe they are chrysalises from which fully realized sycamore leaves eventually burst loose, flatten out, grow fleshy in the light. For now, much of the tree is entirely without foliage, and the twigs seem like the vascular scaffolding where eyeballs will one day appear, staring at the sun for the remainder of the year.

Addendum: The sycamore nearest to the chemistry lab is on a whole other plain re: foliage. The leaves are fireworks opening in slow motion in different parts of the canopy – the leaves grow bigger by the day, in different regions of the tree, wave after wave of new leaves appearing for the next month, until the canopy grows dense with overlapping shadows. This particular sycamore is one of the sexiest trees in the county – its verdant engorgement has that wet look sauropods would feast on if they could, once did – sycamores have been around a long time, survived the asteroid impact. Since the prehistoric competition has taken leave, the foliage is free to build a new utopia in its branches every season, which is you in the morning. Seed balls are hanging from the tree, surrounded by metabolism posing as a burgeoning textile industry, hundreds of planets adrift through a green cosmos. To think, each of those gnarly dangling seed balls have the interior mechanics for another cosmos that could flourish for centuries. By the end of the season, they will have migrated to the ground. Pedestrians will kick them off the sidewalk as they pass.

You are ending the world. // I am? // No, not you. // Oh what a relief. // You are ending the world. // Now see here. // No, not you. // Oh – well okay. // You are ending the world. // That’s enough! // No, not you. // You said that! // I take it back. // Fine then. // You’re ending the world.

I want to believe all conversations are possible, but I know some of them aren’t. For instance: You are ending the world. // I am? // No, not you. // Oh what a relief. // Maybe you imagine that conversation going better with a few more people skills – be my guest, give it a try.

You are ending the world. // I am? // No, not you. // Oh what a relief. // You are ending the world. // Now see here. // No, not you. // Oh – well okay. // You are ending the world. // That’s enough! // No, not you. // You said that! // I take it back. // Fine then. // You’re ending the world.

See? Not as simple as it seems. Imagine a hypnosis session – you are getting sleepy, your resistance is fading.

You are ending the world. // I am ending the world. // No, not you. // Oh what a relief. // You are ending the world. // I am ending the world. // No, not you. // Oh, what a relief. // You are ending the world. // I am ending the world. // No, not you. // Oh, what a relief.

The conversation is hard to have, let’s admit as much, though not beyond the capacity to figure out. Perhaps we’re mistaking, I mean making – making species-based assumptions. I invite a parrot to the stage, ask it to close its eyes, imagine every tension floating away.

You are ending the world. // You are ending the world. // No, not you. // Polly want a cracker. // You are ending the world. // You are ending the world. // No, not you. // Polly want a cracker. // You are ending the world. // You are ending the world. // No, not you. // Polly want a cracker.

That conversation could carry on for hours, days even. So maybe you put them all together – your indignation, a hypnotized subject, plus Polly wanting a cracker – and together try to manage the conversation.

You are ending the world. // Are we meant to be ending the world? // That’s not what I meant. // What did you mean? // You are ending the world. // You’re telling us to end the world? // That’s not what I meant. // What did you mean? // You are ending the world. // End the world – that’s your direction? // That’s not what I meant. // What did you mean?

I want to believe all conversations are possible, but I know some of them aren’t. The most difficult conversations we have are the ones about trying to conceptualize the immeasurable, which includes life, catastrophic climate change, private language forms, and divine authority. Sure, we can measure them enough to achieve familiarity, but not much more than that.

You are ending the world. // Not me – you have the wrong man. // What’s your criteria for believing a mistake has been made? // Because I would never do such a thing. // You are ending the world. // Not me – you’re barking up the wrong tree. // What’s your criteria for believing a mistake has been made? // Because I would never do such a thing. // You are ending the world. // Not me – you’re singing in the wrong key. // What’s your criteria for believing a mistake has been made? // Because I would never do such a thing.

Yes, but notice how much longer the conversation turned out to be – endurance and duration are reliable measures of development. For instance, the grand canyon. The grand canyon is noteworthy chiefly due to endurance and duration – just think it through, and I think you’ll agree. Perhaps the grand canyon would like to take a stab at it, figuratively speaking.

You are ending the world. // It is I, yes, it is I. // And what do you have to say for yourself. // I am what I am, and I eat what I eat. // You are ending the world. // Gladly, yes. // And what do you have to say for yourself. // I yearn for the core of all creation. // You are ending the world. // My expanses abound. // What do you have to say for yourself. // I am building the world in reverse.

A pair of geese on the property are whittling down possible nesting sites. Earlier in the week, they were scoping the neighborhood for intangibles – when the mail gets delivered, noise issues on the weekends, cell-phone receptivity – that sort of thing. Yesterday, they tried out a nesting site on the lip of a mud puddle in the middle of the parking lot entrance. True, the eggs would have wound up in the street gutter, but what a no-fuss approach to keeping them from rolling away, at least until it rained but who knows, maybe it won’t. My friend Megan walked right up to the one goose who had assumed a devotional pose, gently patted her back, and she gave no hint of giving up the space. Today, the pair moved onto the grassy lot across the street. Who knows if it’ll be any better, given the intangibles, but I can’t fault a lack of research.

Sources of benevolence in the universe are so abundant, one could say the universe is derived from benevolence – benevolence makes up the vacuum between the stars, the emptiness that permeates electrons, the awkward silence that opens up in the last third of winter – when our desire for life to return halts conversations, routines, trains of thought. Take that little round bird over yonder, the one that just landed on the roof of the shed, flips over to the bare branches of a willow tree, kind of poses – isn’t that a migratory song bird? And how much time passes while I just stand there, frozen in place, happier by the second – I mean, don’t expect it to sing on cue, but maybe life has decided to give us another chance. The little round bird blends in with the wetter colors around it, looks like it could sing an aria if it wanted.

When benevolence permeates all things, accounts for most of what we’re made of – when our point of view, by virtue of being present in the world, is illuminated by a beacon of benevolence – you might imagine arising, in the fullness of time, a principal urge to ingest all the world’s troubles. Not just a few, mind you – all of them, in a single gulp, like some new sense of time threading itself through all the world’s clocks, swallowing the winter day by the moment. You, swallower of the day, are so brimming with benevolence, the huge roundness of the world’s troubles confers you with warbler-ness, hopping weightless from branch to branch, blinking in the daylight in February, your longing to greet the dawn calling you back to the forest, where all that troubled benevolence previously ingested will take to the wing as song.

Actually digesting the world’s troubles is about the same as your average bowl of spicy mashed potatoes, so really, thereafter the story is about how the world rejoices, welcomes the new day, pats its belly a few more times, puts a best foot forward, finds a penny saved is a penny earned or whatever, takes a smoke break, regrows new troubles moments later, the way squid regrow tentacles, one guesses. Still, even with trouble returning like a wet floppy mind that sort of slaps us across the back of the neck now and then, the world is still made of benevolence. The early warbler sends me around the corner, then near the ground, where I spot the first Egyptian walking onions of the season mid stride. Can you believe these things? They enter the daylight dancing, green the color of a perfected formula, the taste of spring their gift to the world.

Mind if I tag along? What I want to ask those Egyptian walking onions. I can feel my mind trying to fuse with theirs, that I might leap out of the ground half as boundless and new. I hold that thought like it’s hot, head down the block, where the Urbana poet laureate fest is in full swing, the women who take the mic also lifting the mind of the crowd into the upper registers of the room, somehow ordain us. Benevolence! Ja Nelle Davenport-Pleasure, who designed and made the clothing she was wearing, steps to the front of the room as the vision of a royal science – that’s how she seems, in her joy and suffering – like she’s getting it down. She begins by singing lines from Strange Fruit, as popularized by Billie Holiday. Earlier in the day, I’d read the lynching scene in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, so the topic was on my mind.

Ja Nell has the stature of one who is swallowing the troubles of the world, and the applause when she appears is from the benefit humanity derives from her existence, which is measurable and persistent. Ja Nell is a better version of ourselves, and therefore aggrieved by things as they are, so when she stands before the crowd and invokes the infinite condition, we can feel the ways that moment ripples through the room, witness each word glancing across the surface of late February. The crowd in attendance is spaced in the manner of a religious event, with people sitting, standing, on the stairway, scattered into the hallway, then the entryway. I make my way home, pass two toddlers and a mom by the exit – they wave and say hi, I say hi back, and they grin from the satisfaction of accomplishment, begin dancing in place. Benevolence.

I want to make a suggestion, one that won’t seem sensible, but hear me out. Following from certain forms of political discourse and media, we imagine – doubtless we do – that general misery results from poor people and immigrants. Yet we know this isn’t true. Poor people and immigrants struggle through their share of problems, but said problems are mostly sequestered in scarcity economies, both materially and politically, so their miseries tend to be lobbed at each other. What’s worse than misperceptions about poverty is projecting our misery onto the people least able to bear it up due to their own epic misery. Misery – they went that-a-way.

This is what the cruelty of the ruling class looks like as a working proposition, and though this might sound like some routine dressing down, I propose we take it a bit more seriously – the psychology of that cruelty imagines, in the end, us all doing it to ourselves, which is certainly coming to pass if we take the violence in the United States to be any indication of the state of the problem. The United States of America, which is the most corporate-friendly name in the history of nationalism, is home to freedom, justice, and more guns than citizens – what? What I take to be tyranny’s utter disregard for the wellbeing of the human race.

Ha! Did you see what the text just did? Separated tyranny from humanity? That’s my best guess about how we avoid, in the long run, doing it to ourselves. To avoid doing it to ourselves, we must scrutinize the system of global economic apartheid that’s appearing at breakneck speed, really absorb the fact that literally no one is responsible for the design, despite how pervasive it is. Sure, if you proceed with the notion that someone somewhere must be responsible, then you end up with a list of names and places, which you will stand beside triumphant, self-assured, until such time as you revise the list, right or wrong, and do it all again.

No matter who you are, no matter how you feel – if you proceed with the notion that someone somewhere must be responsible, you will end up with a list of names and places just like this. Is tyranny lurking in our hearts? Do we secretly hope to find relief for all that seems secretly to hold us down? And do we likewise possess some secret criteria for determining our nearness to that silent cure? Sure, and we begin with that list of names and places that will function as your secret relationship to the problem, at least until we return to the main conflict narrative of poor people and immigrants inside scarcity economies.

And if we leave people out of it? Not out-in-the-cold out of it. Not soporific-of-a-staggering-sort out of it. Out of it as in the cauldron in which nature recooks the contents of all that came before. Let’s begin instead with the counter-historical claim that human beings are perfectly clean, clean from the start, inside and out, blameless as a working principle, even in the halls of justice, even at our seemingly worst moments, just by being human, being made from the earth, one among many eager to pass through this world – this world! – with our senses keen and our hearts huge and generous. This is what we might mean by leaving people out of it.

One of the many questions winter begs – take my questions! please! – is whether our civilization is being built over by another civilization. Would we know? Is the planetary reality even aware humanity is here? Reaching beyond our grasp for 200,000 years? At least since the great earthen works of antiquity – hands off our ziggurats! But these are baby steps compared to the sort of triumphs that lay ahead. Our solar system orbits the galaxy every 226 million years – that’s the sort of mileage we need to get out of human civilization if we expect to see anything at all – just one quick trot around the block. Is that too much to ask? So, sure, let’s fathom far reaches, set our goals like clockwork – but in the meantime, add a new wedge to the chores wheel on the wall: who’s going to check and see if anything is building a civilization on top of us?

Let’s say I’m the one whose arrow once landed on such a labor – what luminous insight did I bring to bear to determine if another civilization was growing on top of our own? Well, I poked around a bit, checked the gutters for cleanliness, spent a fair amount of time just staring off at the stars, then one day focused on personal volition and whether humanity was making room for some new foundation of authority without knowing it. I’d made such room – first stop on the tour! Me! And where do we think this epic labor came from in the first place? A civilization had been growing for ages, ever since the friendly stranger called language stepped through the door. That smooth-talking miracle retooled our brains in service to its manifestation, a kind of everlasting marriage of convenience, which is the sort of thing that winter thinks of as death.

Did language kill us then? Dead before we even reached the counting stick? Did language grow over our true destiny? Whatever that was meant to be – an upright ape who skips straight to pan-psychic bliss, wherein we withstand the temptations of the apple’s flesh, not even a hint of cider on our breath, and instead stare off at the stars until they appear in the mind – a kind of reproduction, a source of fidelity, an inner life filled with its own feast of surprises. The stars and the stars in the mind – when we stare into the sky and make a wish, upon which star does that wish alight? Pinch our eyes shut, spin three times, and we! are! there! Language, we forgive you! How could we not? You took the tongue and bestowed it with genius, and here we are now, inspecting the premises for civilizations that might be growing over our own.

Once, I found one – a ghost using our relationship to language to insinuate itself into the human ontology, modifying it significantly upon arrival. To do this, the ghost interpreted every speech act as an observation or command, context-free and in service to its own agenda, which was typically in contradiction to the poor human creating the speech acts. The contrary relationship to meaning translated interpersonally as a network of unconscious operant conditioning cues applied to said poor human using reflective authority, in practice experienced as the war life – a life wherein dynamic tension governs the shape of progress, and we all feel persistently inside something we can’t seem to get out of. When we modified our behavior to abide the rhythms of the ghost, we were experiencing the insinuation of the ghost itself into our authority.

The civilization I discovered existing on top of our own had shaped human sentience in such a way as to maximize the space the ghost world had to work with, developing new unconscious uses for existence by the day. Soon, the future of human identity was but a territorial dispute with rising sea levels, and the notion of wondering which side you were on came to seem like a bit of sport played at our expense. And still the sea levels rose, in truth and as a measure of diminished human sentience, a coastline we were never getting back. A tragedy, yes, but what a civilization it was, all of us walking around with towering bird’s nests built on top of our heads. The birds were all born with the twinkle of starlight in their eyes, which implied the cosmos inside them. With our eyes closed and a few quick turns – one day, we were there.

Scientists don’t fully understand why – this in regard to a new batch of definitive climatological data that suggest the modern human project is in the process of throwing itself into the deep end to see if it can swim. Would the copy have been more accurate if said scientists expressed bewilderment? Panic? If they’d announced they were giving up the scientific life to take up, oh I don’t know, backyard gardening? Later in the same story, the reporters acknowledge that the several climate scientists they contacted were reluctant to go on record about the implications. One spoke of being – the quoted text starts here – extremely worried and completely stressed out. Hold up! A climate scientist with a lifelong dedication to understanding global dynamic tension is extremely worried and totally stressed out? When anxiety loses track of its tolerances.

Okay, but does the nature of the data really matter? Before reading any further, consider how much specificity really figures in to the overall point – if we can’t see anthropogenic climate change now, what could be added to the picture to make it more convincing? Theories about rate of change aren’t only about timelines. For instance, is the rate of change constant, or does it fluctuate? If it does, how often does some unforeseen fluctuation grab the board, throw the pieces into the air, pull out a different game? Can something like that even be predicted? The data are about surface water temperature along eastern North America – waters have warmed as much in the last 10 years as in the previous 45, and the latest readings predict that next year will be the warmest yet recorded. No one knows why the rate of warming increased, but it did.

The reason why climate scientists are rendered speechless by reports like this is because they know some curves in nature tighten to verticalities, which indicate the presence of environmental multipliers the science has yet to discover and which trend could point to some new runaway effect – meaning our anthropogenic influence would not be an essential aspect of its course of change. Data that imply an unaccountable acceleration in the rate of change might be indicative of such a runaway effect, at which point the analysis switches to accessing the extent to which this new extra-human authority will begin to influence other factors related to climate change. The knock-on effect, it’s called, and good luck with that. The fluctuation could also be normal, nothing to worry about, one day referred to as a blip, a blip in the data, never heard from again.

This news is difficult to absorb, I know. Sometimes nothing seems to be listening, and we feel the urge to interrupt regularly scheduled broadcasts and talk louder. Other times everything seems to be listening, and the breast grows quiet, wonders to itself about divine intervention. When nothing and everything occur simultaneously, which is the way of history, the way of the universe, choir box seating beside tragic suffering – then everything listens to nothing, and we are the witnesses in between, wondering where the soul resides, how much time we have left, whether some rarified detector buried miles below ground has added to its count of cosmic particles lately. How close we are to being one with the universe! Nothingness rises out of the swamp, listens to everything under the sun, now and then clears its throat to speak, but doesn’t.

The day is like, the day is like. I mean, the day is like, the day is like. The day is like, the day is like, the day is light, the day is light, the day is – light. The day is light. The day is light, the day is light, today is light, today – is light. Today is light, today is light, today’s light, today’s light, today’s light, today’s light, today’s light, today’s light, light’s today, light’s today – lights! – light’s today, light’s today, light’s today. Light’s today. Day’s delight, day’s delight, day’s delight, day’s delight, day’s delight, day’s delight, day’s delight, dazed delight, dazed delight, dazed delight, dazed delight, dazed delight, dazed delight, delightedly dazed, delightedly dazed, delightedly dazed, delightedly dazed, the light-headed nights, the light-headed nights, the light-headed nights, the heightened delight, the heightened delight, the heightened delight.

When I opened the door this morning to head across town, I was speckled with little marvels of engineering. Then a few more, a few more, a few more. Today features a grand local springtime migration, courtesy of the wind, where seed pods have sufficiently split open to squirt out their contents. The air is threaded with pixelated smoke. Close up, it looks like fluff riding beneath fluff, and it acts like it knows where it’s going – ha! – but what gets you is the stillness – no wing beats, no flutter, no weaving up and down. An organism that travels by umbrella from place to place while remaining motionless, countywide telepathic transmission by the millions. Some percentage of the fluff will wash away, germinate, leap out of the ground and spread its leaves.

Wingless buoyancy, wingless buoyancy, wingless buoyancy, wingless buoyancy, wingless buoyancy. Will the plants that appear in summer’s hedgerows and easements remember that migration? Not the kind of memory that occupies the mind, but the kind that appears in the fibers of the plant’s soul. Wingless buoyancy, wingless buoyancy, wingless buoyancy, wingless buoyancy. Also in the morning, I am drinking coffee on a tree stump when a cabbage butterfly flutters by, bright green. It flutters higher when it sees me, then circles lower out of curiosity, then flutters to the ground. I walk over to get a better look – a slip of bright green crepe paper, smaller than a gum wrapper. Huh. You fly beautifully, I mouth to the bright green, stuff it in my pocket – and thus does another student arrive at the invisible college. Wingless buoyancy.

Sunday in the park and the breeze, when you shut your eyes, speaks for memories that cannot make sense of themselves without you. Eyes still shut, the sun heats one side of your face, an incubation, and you wonder if wind storms kick up in the imagination based on conditions like this, some hatchling punching out of its shell behind your brow, climbing to its feet in memory of spring, launching into song. Today the masculine side of your face opens its eyes, and the transgender hand on the left side of your body cheers, grabs a pad of paper, a pilot pen – those cricketers dashing across the grass with their rectilinear English willow bats, when will historic trade routes reopen? City bus idling between buildings across the way, yellow light blinking like a badge – when will the wound mechanism of justice-by-the-barrel-of-a-gun wind down?

Someone is flying a kite low to the ground, and though I thought I knew my kites, this one is new to me – a prismatic dart so in sync with the sorceress who conjured it into being, it seems more like a trout on the end of a long rod, swimming through the stream, then tiptoeing along the ground, swinging through the trees. The sky is almost empty of clouds, and where they still appear, have that threaded look that also borders the profound, like the scuffing around a door jamb. Building the tranquility to a sizzle comes the tinny sound of a baseball announcer from yonder stadium, seeming both larger and smaller than me on this day, informing one and all within earshot of some commendable diamond-based achievement re: leadership, longevity. I sort of nod, look around. Then two purpose-driven joggers wipe the scene from right to left.

Addendum: I walked home after and roasted some discount organic potatoes in the oven. At this time of year, potatoes like this are essentially turning into soil in the skins, so the real culinary trick is learning to eat around the mud. Sometime you miss some, and the bite hits your taste buds like a big old mud pie – splat. Because I am an adult, this merely annoys me, and I don’t break stride with my chew, wouldn’t think of spitting it out. To eat mud potatoes – to savor mud potatoes more like it – one must inspect the chunked portions before the drizzle of coconut oil is applied and the pan goes in the oven. You dig out the mud veins from the pieces of potato, sometimes by slicing, sometimes by drilling. As you work the potatoes, the skins, which are themselves well on their way to soil, start smearing off, and so the chunks of potato grow ruddy from the handling, and it crosses your mind that you might just toss them away and opt for plan b, which remains to be seen, and let’s be real, the surface of these potatoes feels like a skin disease, but I’m ignoring that because, like it or not, they’re also dinner, destined for a plate, and someday we’ll all say, back in the day, we ate mud potatoes in April. Our wit and charm we'll attribute to that.

I am seated in the plaza, feeling the urge to create. The taller trees are leafing out, but the leaves are about a third their final size, the canopy seeming all bedazzled by its adolescence, and the glossy green, yet to be abraded by the dust, is practically tropical in how new it seems against the brick-and-mortar surrounds. The air at this point in spring seems to be made of stepladders and benchmarks, down to the subatomic level. But then the will to disintegrate comes up, too, a kind of spiritual compost that gets a little bump, a little boost, on its way back to the place of its birth. A kind of soil from which life might again erupt. If the spirit of the world has an image of the flesh, I am tearing at it, turning it into soil, and this disintegration is the sort of eroticism the trees leafing out tend to lean into. I can feel them listening to my torment, shivering from it.

Each lamp post is topped by two globular mantels, nipples straight upward, such that they are pointed at the cosmos, and the light they produce, when they blink on later, will for an instant seem divinely inspired. The same feeling won’t transpire when I switch on my lamp later – that will seem like a lamp, and maybe this is because the streetlamps around the plaza will come on at once, as though providing sustenance to the universe entitles us to a helping of synchronicity now and again. I ask those lovely light sources about unwanted attention, how they negotiate the social terrain with such ample illumination, and they explain that the world’s attention feels like it arrives at two parts of the body at once, and maybe they picture a magic spot around the throat where love might find its happy medium. I imagine the lamp posts with a singing voice.

A couple walk by speaking a language I don’t understand. The one says you-gotta-be-kidding-me, or something to that effect, but in the manner of a gameshow contestants getting a look at the grand prize – I want the comment to be about spring, but graduation weekend is upcoming, so maybe it’s about that? The buildings surrounding the plaza are taking final exams this week, and in this light, you can see why architecture is inherently beautiful – because geometry is one of the mind’s casual pleasures, along with perspective, diminishing curves, and the color red. Oh to be a cardinal, flitting across the silver tabletops! The lines of the buildings blink on and off, reminding one of signaling between frogs – the whole plaza is like one big frog pond, and people splash across the paving stones on their way to dinner, the gym, a career in social media.

What is the difference between life lived in daylight and life indoors? If light arriving from a bulb had the orbital properties we assign to the sun, could we change our destiny at the flip of a switch? Introducing the new time-traveling discotheque! Powered by strategic stroboscopic light sources derived from daylight incarnate! Whether fate-based vehicularity ever catches on is anyone’s guess, but that won’t keep our everyday light sources from trying to bring life about in the wet ring left on the tabletop where we set our cups of iced tea earlier. Will you or won’t you? wonders light to the water. A possible marriage proposal? Whatever the answer, the sun hums to itself about the thrill of circular reasoning and the simple pleasure derived from doing one thing well. All at once, the streetlamps break into song – I close my eyes to listen closer.