Surprisingly, the answers lie in our past.
—Judi Dench, Spaceship Earth, 2007-Present

Here, in this hostile world, the mammoth keeps dying. Every fifteen minutes,
our ancestors leave the cave to re-spear the wounds they’ve already made.
A scribe never finishes chiseling the ibis while their pharaoh mid-diatribe
turns to me, one of another million fathers in the tired dark of this ride,
and smiles. Thank the Phoenicians. Thank Pythagoras lecturing endlessly,
pupils bored and nodding the years away. Thank the animatronic horse
forever waiting, an apple in the groom’s hand just out of reach, this reminder
of how close we all are to being good girls. Here, in this future, I have a son
who points at a monk asleep at a transcription desk and exclaims, it’s daddy!
A wife who laughs, points at an even older looking Gutenberg in a funny hat
eyeing his parchment, look, it’s daddy again! Of all the hereafters to inherit,
I’ve got to admit it’s not so bad being stuck in this one, running circles
most algorithms only dream of. The choirs sing to God as so many do,
Hallelujah, Hallelujah, etc. New languages spoken not by man, but the family
couched in cathode glow, mute and happy as their evening rut so finely worn,
are invented to crunch bigger numbers, send a few more people to the moon.
There’s a mountain of dark stars before the Omnimover stalls on the track,
no attraction to view except a garage in California, Steve Jobs working
the same old glitch, circuitry greening with code under his plastic fingers.
At the end, the stars are there to ache us into asking whatever we haven’t
brought ourselves to ask. Could I live the rest of my nights on the cusp
of breakthrough? Am I as bright as everything my face held long before I knew
to make the face pleasant? Here, in this beginning, the best one can hope for
is being and remembered for being so. A body that continues brief as ruin,
smolder, clay and again. Managing the world of tomorrow. Managing just fine.