The poem of tomorrow won’t be pretty.
It will clean the toilets with its flush,
a rude acidic caustic swirl.
It will dream in macroeconomic terms:
not single markets but a massive whole,
with aggregated indicators, models
of a complex world that churns in systems
larger than a single mind can dream.
It will think of capital and long-term growth,
enjoy the overview but like details,
the one-by-ones or two-by-twos,
like Noah’s animals in arks of verse.
It will need the facts, but never fret.
The poem of the future will be radiant
with those particulars and wear its feelings
on its cuffs, a motley coat of many colors,
patchwork language gaudily displayed.
The poem of the future will adore
all humid luscious local gossip.
Yet its sadness will be global when
alas it takes to heart the end of green,
regards whole forests in decline,
the oily rivers where the bloated fish
rise to the surface with an eye
turned upward to a sun that beads it,
breaks it into many gleaming parts,
with noisy flies that feed to frenzy.
It will sing, of course, and celebrate, of course,
but not itself. No! Anything but that!
It will move beyond the tightness of the skin,
will open into air, its tingling gases.
It will dig beneath tectonic plates
to find that infamously molten core.
It will slither backward through the phyla
and approach beginnings, dawn-like pools
where ganglia begin to grow like cultures
in a petri dish, where consciousness itself
evolves from matter like a flame that breaks
from coal, a blue-vermillion tongue that lashes,
leaps—the sparks that breach a synapse.
It will make the universe its theme:
Why is there something in this space at all
and not just nothing, with its gap-toothed grin?
Is space just time hung to dry?
The poem of the future will attract detractors,
as it really must. It always must.
Some readers will be left, and far behind.
They’ll prattle on about the garden,
and will find a spot of time to cherish
and specific places on a crinkled map.
But poems of the future must break free
of self and place. And even politics will seem
a petty adjunct to the world they rumble
with their harsh new syllables of dislocation,
voices in some register of sound
inaudible to everyone except the wolves,
who will come running from the farthest steppes
through evergreen and icy valleys
with their heat of breath and razor teeth.