What Is Real

And though we had fed long and well at the table

the talk always turned to whether to go on

regardless of what it might say about our moral sense,

regardless of what it might cost us in the end,

or whether the time had come to surrender,

let the sum of our particles back into the flow

hoping they might in the longview recombine

into something of value, or of beauty, but humbler

than the human—not that we'd ever be able

to judge, not that we'll ever be able to know

what comes of what we did, or whether it was

worth it, like the towering alien humanoid at the start

of Ridley Scott's Prometheus, how it paces

to the edge of a powerful waterfall somewhere on what

appears to be a still primarily mineral Earth,

takes one last look at its oblong mothership

surveilling from a mist, removes its monklike robe

and drinks as if in ceremony from a cup

of animate metallic ooze that quickly disintegrates

its all too pale flesh, unleashing new organic matter

into the ecosystem, strands of DNA unzipping

haphazardly in the rush to mix it up with Earth's

own chemistry and into offspring whose tumble

up it will never witness—not the earliest infinite-

simal blips or suppertime in old Persepolis, not opaque

dawn in Beijing or any single sentient being

separated a moment from the chaos, wholly

unobserved, in whom life sank down as if to test itself,

limitless, dark, spreading, unfathomably deep

and free. As if at play in ether, a meadow of

possibility skittering as axons of foam across the surface

swell of the North Sea. I felt once I belonged to

it in a way I would collapse the instant I began

measuring it in words: waves in blue profusion

dissolving into geological undulations and then

pulses in yellow sand. Here a snake crosses

my path again in Texas, the length of it like a dew-

damp privilege wriggled by a cloud-hid hand

conveying deep troughs and amplitudes back to the sun.

We do go on. Near movie's end, the last known

humanoid of the type to seed life on Earth

is uprooted from cryogenic sleep on a made-up moon

by a crew of corporate human blunderers it then

looks down on with informed disgust, killing off

in minutes all but one. In America, Baudrillard

says the products of our imagination remind us

what is real, the way weariness of existence is

how we come to feel, buried in all this abundance,

we are still alive. Hold on tight, my circumstance.

Tonight we're diving in. Tonight we'll find the bassline

subatomic-style, let particles of us entangle

knowingly with those of a gold encyclopedia

in the ruins of Vienna or an ear of teosinte across

an open border, a common source of being, before I

die—let us be, let being be, continuous, continuous.

Source: The Problem of the Many (Wave Books, 2019)