and Ambrosia
We Are the Reliquaries of Lost Time
Anybody Who Can Make Great Strawberry Shortcake Can’t Be All Bad
And Have You Seen God’s Birds Collide?
You Can’t Go Home Again, Not Even if You Stay There!
Of What is Past, or Passing, or to Come
Ode to Ty Cobb, Who Stole First Base from Second
Let Us Live But Safely, No Bright Flag Be Ours
Everyone’s Got to Be Somewhere
The Past Is the Only Dead Thing That Smells Sweet
Good Shakespeare’s Son, the Typing Ape
Que Bella! The Flagella of the Beasts
The Haunted Computer and the Android Pope
Haunted Computer, Android Pope,
One serves data, the other hope.
The late-night ghosts of man’s dire needs
Are snacks on which computer feeds
To harvest zeros, sum the sums,
Knock something wicked ere it comes,
And drop dumb evil to its knees
With inked electric snickersnees.
While Android Pope takes up from there,
Where physics stops mid-flight, mid-air,
There Papa’s primed electric mind
Grows faith in countries of the blind.
Where mass and gravity bulk huge—
Andromeda its centrifuge—
Or matter dwindles to mere flea,
There Android Pope makes papal tea
To serve to doubtful Thomas me
And thee and thine and thine and thee;
Last suppers his to circuit there
Where physics loses self in air,
And man surprised by large or small
Sees naught beyond the two at all.
That is the moment where, well-met,
Electric Pope/Computer fret
Where stuff gives up its ways and means
And emptiness fills in-betweens
Where label-less the mystery goes
In veils and prides of cosmic snows
Which rationed out by God beyond
Are light-year sea and lake and pond
Which shallow are but drowned in deeps’
Computer mind that finds and keeps
But cannot answer final thirst:
Which, egg or chicken, arrived first?
The primal motive hides in stars
Where astronauts in rocket cars
Will never solve it, so bright Pope
With fireworks inside for hope,
With tapes for tripes, A.C.-D.C.
Speaks metaphors from Galilee
And bakes good bread and serves a wine
That bloods the soul most super-fine
And emptiness fills up with words
Like flocking flights of firebirds
That move and motion, merge and mull
So men gone empty now are full.
Yet, all mysterious remains,
So man stands out in ghosting rains
And makes umbrellas with machines
Half-satisfied with in-betweens,
His life twin mysteries given hope
By Ghost Computer, Android Pope.
Go Not with Ruins in Your Mind
Go not with ruins in your mind
Or beauty fails; Rome’s sun is blind
And catacomb your cold hotel
Where
