Smoke and Sign | Intelligent Design

Smoke and Sign

The story about the man
Who played piano
For the lyrebirds in the scrubland, perfect mimics
And how to this day
You can hear his casual tinkering
Hundreds of lyrebird generations later, thousands
Fragments of the songs like tapeloops in mouths
Of flightless hatchlings who don’t even know where what they’re singing came from,

To try
Another
False memory
A last attempt
It’s like, the tremulous hand of Worcester
The 13th century monk whose handwriting shook just so much
You could tell from his manuscripts
When he had either been drinking
Or not drinking
The moment in the notation when the hand seems to steady,

I am the soft tapping of the quill in the night
And I throw these glossings
Like flat stones skipped on a lake
I only dream of freshwater, never the sea
Of you in the mountains, far away
The snow blind, sudden light
To emerge
From this dark egg
To tell such stories waiting
To waste the time, to weigh the hours
To wait for me, and my dusklike flight
Eventual over the plains and pastures

---

Intelligent Design

A static-like photograph of a moonlanding, not the first one but one of the others that came
afterwards, when we didn’t care, quite so much anymore
But you can see, the landing gears and tripods of missions past, perfectly preserved in pseudo
darkness, on the sea of tranquility

When you look at this kind of thing
Is it, the quality of the camera, like a machine with astigmatism, trying to catch what light it can, or
does everything outside, just, fade, the farther you get?
I don’t have an answer that would satisfy
But I still have the same telescope given to me, for my 13th birthday, my Bar Mitzvah, a long time ago

And look,
There’s a museum from the future, floating above us

Nate Maxson is a writer and performance artist. The author of several collections of poetry including ‘Maps To The Vanishing’ which is available now from Finishing Line Press. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.