All that any of us truly know
of death
is that in the face of it, we can rely
on the sight of a peach tree
split black and rotten from top to bottom with
almost every one of the branches dry and cracked,
and on how upon the few remaining green arms
are handfuls of fruits waiting to ripen.
I’m SO glad the Mayans and Aztecs had all those extraterrestrial aliens to help them with their pyramids and buildings and the Nazca Lines and the astronomical calculations. God knows those benighted savages couldn’t possibly have done it on their own…Even the fucking Egyptians needed help.
Stonehenge, though? Those guys were SMART, I guess. I mean, why else would the dramatic television recreation of the construction and meaning of Stonehenge be filled with reenactments of the Celtic ancestors working so damn hard to drag and raise stones according to their astronomical labors, and the ones about the structures built in the Americas always include statements like, “no one knows how the Mayans were able to calculate the movements of stars so far in advance, although experts are still working on possible theories. One theory suggests that they had help…”
I’d lay odds that when it comes down to it, the aliens are pretty much white guys in the minds of these filmmakers. Maybe they even have hardhats, laptops, and Starbucks’ cups in their beneficent hands, or they’re tapping away on their Blackberries to the mothership while the dusky chumps in front of them cower in wonder and invent Quetzalcoatl to explain it all.
I’m exaggerating, but I detect a touch of racism here.
I’m a tiny animal,
just one of trillions
(but who’s counting?)
who really own the world.
We’ve been here
just shy of forever
and the one thing I can tell you
about people is this:
they are good real estate.
You have to love them
with their migrations and
their filth. I know
they’re sure
that when we move in
we’re some kind of God thing,
but honestly? They
don’t get it: we aren’t trying
to do anything but get by, reproduce,
suck up what we need to live. God
has had very little to say to us
ever since he gave up on the
real estate market. His money
is in commodity futures. He leaves
the hard wet work to us: the homesteading,
the improvements, the clear cutting.
God doesn’t send us, he just
depends on us. We build where we want
and he banks on the results.
I’d say
it’s like one hand
washing the other,
but somehow,
that doesn’t seem right.
Dennis has got a picture
to show us:
ears he cut from dead VC
in the Mekong Delta.
Like dried apricots,
they’re lined up neatly
in the shoebox
he keeps them in.
One ear from each kill,
Dennis, or
did you take two?
He laughs and winks.
I had a lot of fun over there,
he says.
We sit next to each other in
Urban Studies. He and the professor
get along well and he has a grasp
of some of the nuances of the evolution
of cities that is admirable.
Right now, we’re stoned
out of our gourds
after a lunchtime drive.
No one will sit near us when we’re like this,
when I’m sitting looking at Dennis’ picture
of the apricots in the box, when I
an trying to imagine
how it must have been, amazed at the fact
that this was permitted,
that men who were permitted
to do these things walk among us
with their children and their insights
into the way civilization grows.
Wow, I say.
I want to hear more,
I say, and y’know,
I’m hungry, I say.
Let’s get a burger,
says Dennis.
And we do.
Dark Matter 