Graywolf Lab

The year is 2060 A.D. The skies are green
like dollar bills, and some would call that prophecy.
In Lost Vagueness, you call it collateral. Or
is it capital. You never could get a grip

               on terminology. At least we can all agree
               to leave it to the chatbots? They are
               so experienced, after all, and they save us time
               and time again, and time, as everyone still knows

     is monotony. You have to spend some to
     get some, the way the golden goose lays golden eggs
     subsequently sold on the market for tender
     and currency. Fictitious capital doesn’t grow

                       on trees. You are a citizen of the world, steeped
                       in the literature of cash cows, gravy, highway
                       robbery. You can’t take it with you where you’re
                       going going going GONE to the gorgeous dark

                                        beyond but not yet.

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The year is 2025 A.D. We’re not gone yet just nearly
departed. By we I mean yours truly. What I mean

is that some people really seem like they died
a long time ago. Picasso, for example, died

in 1973, but most people think he died in the 1600s
or 1700s or what my friend Jay calls the long

18th century. What is it like to be dead
to so many while you're still kicking

the women in your life. Just kidding.
We all know what that's like. There are others who seem long-

dead, but I won’t name them now because they’re still alive.
Though with John Irving, it’s really a compliment——

so classic he must have died. But you know how people are:
never wanting to hear what they already know.

I too prefer to keep some things from myself: to keep
frolicking in the pesticide, careening

with anyone who will have me, dead or alive.

*

If you could have sex with anyone
dead or alive, the correct answer used to be
alive. But the veil between worlds
is not what it was. In 1895,
when Wilhelm Röntgen made the first x-ray
of his dear Anna Bertha’s hand, she regretted
ever promising it to him. I have seen
my own death, she said. But in the year 2060,

there are no skeletons among us.
The waking dead and the alive
enough shop at the same shops. We talk
almost the same thoughts. Anna Bertha lived
for twenty-four more years believing
she had seen what was coming. In reality,
she knew no more than I do here, pretending the year
is 2060 A.D. when I don’t know if we make it that far.

It’s July 2025, and the skies are sometimes clear enough
to see the Milky Way, and I can still say markets
and pesticide and women and sex and green and alive
and alive and mean that someday
before we die I just want to be yours
truly and what if I could tell you about it
but not right now.


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