The programmer had requirements to fulfill
and codes to apprehend,
he had miles of functions he had to distill
with a view to a finite end.
So he filled out a lexicon leaving no space
for a word his world didn’t know,
and he fleshed out a software, each stroke in its place
with pointed executions to show.
And soon enough, his world was filled,
each concept and image in place,
and everything else summarily killed,
for even the slightest queer taste.
The programmer reminds me of God in a way,
or Adam and Eve in their garden,
determining all it’s possible to say,
leaving no further room for a pardon.
3 comments:
Got your email Travis. Good to hear from you and very glad you're still at it - whatever it is. This is my favorite poem. by Hayden Carruth. You probably know it.
I'll check in during the month. Stan
How many guys are sitting at their kitchen tables
right now, one-thirty in the morning, this same
time, eating a piece of pie?—that’s what I
wondered. A big piece of pie, because I’d just
finished reading Ray’s last book. Not good pie,
not like my mother or one of my wives
could’ve made, an ordinary pie I’d bought at the
Tops Market in Oneida two hours ago. And how
many had water in their eyes? Because of Ray’s
book, and especially those last poems written
after he knew: the one about the doctor telling
him, the one where he and Tess go down to
Reno to get married before it happens and shoot
some craps on the dark baize tables, the one
called “After-Glow” about the little light in the
sky after the sun sets. I can just hear Ray,
if he were still here and this were somebody
else’s book, saying, “Jesus,” saying, “This
is the saddest son of a bitch book I’ve
read in a long time,” saying, “A real long time.”
And the thing is, he knew we’d be saying this
about his book, he could just hear us saying it,
and in some part of him he was glad! He
really was. What crazies we writers are,
our heads full of language like buckets of minnows
standing in the moonlight on a dock. Ray
was a good writer, a wonderful writer, and his
poems are good, most of them, and they made me
cry, there at my kitchen table with my head down,
me, a sixty-seven-year-old galoot, an old fool
because all old men are fools, they have to be,
shoveling big jagged chunks of that ordinary pie
into my mouth, and the water falling from my eyes
onto the pie, the plate, my hand, little speckles
shining in the light, brightening the colors, and I
ate that goddamn pie, and it tasted good to me.
Very nice. I love the cadence, for some reason at the end of each line I want to read it with an exclamation. Well done. I also like you current sign-off, "general confusion".
Once Upon a Time
Echo something at me.
Sing aloud our emptiness
Hello
hello
Hello
hello
I thought you were answering,
and it was only my voice.
In the Alps
once upon a time, as they say
in tales of fairies and fetishized times,
there were no cell phones.
And yodeling was commonplace
communication,
for two people.
Sound waves
would prove your substance,
hilly knolls, happy to swing assurance
that you were approaching.
They would help me find you.
A yodel sounds
and I search my pocket for it.
A customized pink yodel announces you,
and my echo is lonely.
I look across the hills,
and you are nowhere near here.
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