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TEACHING COMPUTERS TO WRITE POETRY

Man dies among implements.

—MELVILLE

You have to tell it everything:
How chaos congeals when the light falls on it
Into the unbelievable world;
Wind, water, clouds, sand, rock,
Robins, lions, rattlers, lambs,
All the three kingdoms and every subdivison.
You must lay them in like
Thousands of days in an old brain.

You must turn it on and leave it
Humming for many years with nothing to do,
Teaching it the sadness of attenuation.

You must explain somehow about love;
A sweet bitterness of addiction
In the back of the throat.

And, most importantly, you must give it a limit;
Only an indefinite time to be in.
You must give it an end.

Death must sit by the computer
Like a patient old man on a park bench
And with his ruinous, Rembrandt hand
Must caress the hard case of the terminal
Like a parent.

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