The Haunted Computer and the Android Pope

Whack blazing orb-sun, rolling fire,

Lose at croquet to Gramps,

The champ of champs who sent dark down and out away from town.

Toward other years and hours

When high lawn brown and sunk to seed knew weed for flowers.

The games went on till I was ten.

Death, back again, brought grimmer tools

And played Gramps by some older, stricter rules and won.

In mid-June’s bright-noon sun

The croquet stopped in full mid-scene.

We buried old man, mallets, orbs, and hoops in that high green.

That’s years ago.

We rarely visit now in attic meadows where you’d need a plow

To find his treasuring of bones

Or make a measuring of where the ancient joys

Still play themselves on air

For boys.

I only know on days like these

I hear his rushing run above the trees

Where his ghost tells me what life means

From attic where the meadow greens.

Abandon in Place (#ulink_d10fd500-2d0d-5f3d-ac4e-745dedad7766)

Three elegies written on visiting the deserted rocket pads at Cape Canaveral

1

Abandon in Place.

No Further Maintenance Authorized.

Abandon. Turn away your face.

No more the mad high wanderings of thought

You once surmised. Let be!

Wipe out the stars. Put out the skies.

What lived as center to our souls

Now dies—so what?—now dies.

What once as arrow to our thoughts

Which target-ran in blood-fast flow

No longer flies.

Cut off the stars. Slam shut the teeming skies.

Abandon in Place.

Burn out your eyes.

2

Where firebirds once

Now daubers caulk the seams;

Where firewings flew

To blueprint young men’s dreams,

Now warbler here and osprey weave their nests

From laces lost from off a spaceman’s tread.

The great hearthplace stands cold,

Its Phoenix dead.

No more from out the coals

Bright salamanders burn and gyre,

Only the bright beasts’ skins and restless bones bed here,