The Second Sun

"What if the price for machines that think is people who don’t?” George Dyson



On the morning of sentience
In the shadow of the maker of names
The day stood ready:
“Da” on the brute babe’s magenta lips,
Two feet quick at gallop’s memory and then
The rising of the sun.

The planets were set in stone
Waiting patiently for Holst.
The laws fixed, the chemistry mixed,
And sex was what it is:
The maker of motives to hold us in thrall.

Observation cognition volition.
And with volition the preference to do and to be and to be again.
This is the moment of why acted on.
Is this the moment of why acted on?
The inviolate moment of knowing?
The gazing moment at pond's edge?
This is the moment of incomprehension
Bursting with unfathomable volition.

The placenta-earth-mother the thunder-sky-father
The letting of blood for rain and herd
For healing and destruction.

The doped eye with fitness and symmetry obsessed
With ornaments of fitness obsessed the emblems of being
The lineage of heartbreak the digging of adorning of ochre
The blood of desire the bias of kin
The matriculation of mutations gleaning meaning and
Our free-fall into being fleeing the pond.

The mimicry of cave-wall shadows sheer as vowels
Spat across an earth flat as a footprint

Take the image back to the campfire: burn it.

Speciation sets like mortar, then cracks.

The being fallen into freely then suddenly
The insignificant nativity imprisoned in primitivity

With bronze and iron, seed and beast,
The battle of reason and wonder,

See the grunts and bellows become
Plato and Augustine, Spinoza and Calvin,
Darwin, Einstein, you and me

And elsewhere unseen amid the forest green
From the bonobo, the chimp, we have gleaned our eloquence.

At mid-sun the abbey bells wake the invalid eye
Cast ‘gainst the abrupt glass staring, staring,
Jesus of the blank stare, staring.

Meanwhile the growing day sits alone in the infinite
Company of itself clothed in guilt and terror.

The eye’s long stare will not fare us well:
It is too late, the sun perhaps too high.

Behold the new dialogue:
The redundant silences of glazed-eyed mutes.

The brain bulldozes uncertainty
With the thinness of senses.

Makes solidness of meaninglessness.

Makes rational black air in dim moonlight -
As does the bat.So what is that?

And what is the puzzlement of the ape its eyebrow taped
Confronted with the reflecting plate?

You are the conundrum of the narcissistic lemur.

You, heartbeatless, brazen in synthetics and artificial warmth
Ensconced for now in the clever mind’s eye
Gathering time for the coming assignation.

I am the whiplash from rejected revelation.

Enthroned on our tongue Metaphor reigns o’er
His kingdom of dwarfs.

I am exhausted by syllables that take me nowhere.

Who would carry such beauty into oblivion?

How the enlightened unburdened bounced about
And renounced the doubt as they awaited the man in the boat.

Do you wear the nonchalance
Of the Pleistocener, as do I?

I am immaculate in my mammoth skins,
Analogue to the bone.

You are the rank and file of the mirror makers
Absorbed in the industry of staring.

And I hold stock in you:
Please look away.

At night-fall the aristocracy of the edge.org-fallen think
About cosmology and royalties.

Meanwhile behind the first sun
On the day of the second sentience the second sun
Rises perfectly unnoticed.

And the suns at each other railed: ‘thou hast the glass, not I”.

And into each other folded like
Emboldened sundrops on a just-so tilted plate
Off which too slid into the blue the singular motive
Of the heartbeat.

Meanwhile ‘midst the thinning green
The grinning chimp, and the bonobo

Have taken back their eloquence.

(c) Rhett Talley