☀ Today's Poem: "The Post Human" Jorie Graham

How much of you has gone has it all gone all
at once.
It has been just a minute now—I don't want the time to go in this direction—it does.
Now it has been two. Elsewhere. Elsewhere someone gets on a train—
we're almost there, a man says to a child,
prepare for landing, the fields are rushing towards us,
we are setting out with the picnic, the woods seem far but we have all day...
Standing next to you, holding the hand which stiffens, am I
outside of it more than before, are you not inside?
The aluminum shines on your bedrail where the sun hits. It touches it.
The sun and the bedrail—do they touch each other more than you and I now.
Now. Is that a place now. Do you have a now.
The day stands outside all around as if it were a creature. It is natural. Am I to think
you now
natural? Earlier, is it an hour ago, you sat up briefly looked
out. Said nothing but I looked at your eyes and saw them see. You saw
the huckleberry, the plume of rose, the silver morning grow as if skinning night,
that animal, till day came out raw and bleeding.
Daybreak mended it for now. I saw you see the jay drop
into the clearing light, light arrive, direction assert itself for you—what for—but yes
that is East, with its slow grace. The jet went by way overhead.
Shade one more time under the tree you love. Shadow then shade.
Its body like a speech the tree was finally allowed to make, coming free of night.
A statement. Which would evolve as it grew to
know—[you passed in here][you left]["you"—what did your you do?]—the bush,the
birds, hills; the hundreds of branches like snakes, top and bottom
making their event—the unbleaching from dawn to the rich interweaving
knowledges of
the collapse of knowledge
which is day.
Saw you sit up and look out. Just like that. Information is our bread and butter
is what you loved to say. We each have a thing we loved
to say, I think. How many minutes have passed now. Have we caught up yet with
where we just
were? There are so many copies of this minute.
Not endless but there sure are a lot
from when I started, going through my motions, part of
history—or, no, cup in hand, end at hand, trying to hide from the
final ampersand. Where are you waiting, where out there, the wrong part of me now
wants to
ask. And turns around and says, cue consequence, cue
occasion. There on the bed just now—(look, all of a sudden now I cannot write “your”
bed)—I watch your afterlife begin to
burn. Helpful. Making a space we had not used
before, could not. Undimmed, unconsumed. In it this daylight burns.