The Archaeoastronomer Considers The Photographer’s Views on the Afterlife
“Workers in the town of Cristovo de Cea in the Galicia region mistook what is believed to be a 6,000-year-old Neolithic tomb for a broken stone picnic table and ‘repaired it.'” — from “Ancient Tomb In Spain Destroyed And Replaced With A Picnic Table,” Laura Wagner, NPR News
Summer-struck, I’d driven the coast
roads from some northern site
past Santiago de Compostela–
(who was it who told me
cathedrals were another way of binding
years, another way of binding the sky?)
And had I made the wrong pilgrimage,
wrung my hands among the others,
some cloud obscuring the noon
sun, portending a crisis of faith
or at least some unexpected storm–
would I have missed them: the couple,
wicker basket swinging her arm
low to the earth, children
breaking the distance between–
The forms they ran to dolmen
or the shape of dolmen, the table that now
spoke amor, querido, initials, names, years,
querido, through the mossiness of age
covering what remains. Who was it
who told me that cathedrals were too near
our time to be studied as anything
more than a pattern laid over another?
Everyone makes their own gods
speak in a language they understand.
Even if that language is infinite
in complexity, it can still be
carved in a rock, kept close as a lover
buried in some cairn. Maybe the photographer took
pictures of my studies as a way of knowing
he’d never be close to the past I was
trying to distance myself from
assumptions about. He must have known that light,
like family, bears its uncertainties. Like we do,
missing a turn, finding a picnic and a sky,
a cathedral to a null hypothesis and a desire
to think we can connect to those who can
no longer connect to us–
The Diarist Welcomes the Poet, the Archaeoastronomer, and The Programmer Aboard Ship
“While we use AI more and more, the artificial intelligence research community doesn’t necessarily have a complete understanding of what neural networks are doing; they give us good results, but we don’t always know how or why. And that is what we’re looking to solve.” — Haydn Jones, “Comparing Neural Networks Provides a Look Into the ‘Black Box’ of Artificial Intelligence,” Real Clear Science / Los Alamos National Laboratory News
“In fact, for a woman famous for retailing her life in the world’s most extensive diary, remarkably little was known about [Anaïs Nin].” — Claudia Roth Pierpont, Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World
1.
yes to flung dance of sails, to honey-wet waves
honey-clung to the hull of my barque—it’s mine,
this barque, this honey, this yes, this flesh—dance
yes with me this one this yes this one this on. Come.
Look over the railing. Don’t look at the ship
as if you’re looking at a ship. Everything is a dance
buckle and strap, everything is ankle-flesh and skirts
and yes. Nailed shoes, nailed tips and heels, lashing
above the instep, cords to hold the sails to masts to wind—
everything a dreamed and waking yes—
2.
Wavelets of finger-trace on the velvet nap of the couch,
a psychoanalyst’s craft or the small hull of a love affair.
Whichever way you look, Poet, there’s not enough
stone to weigh the past to the bottom of the sea, and if
there were, whose voice would you tell yourself in?
3.
Every Rorschach test opens like a flower you can’t
quite land on, bee in search of nectar, flamenco-
heel in search of wood, woman in search of her past
understanding. If you hear in these women protests, don’t
believe them. Believe me, you can throw silk
scarves over the whole deck, Observer, scarves or sails,
scarves becoming sails, velvet against the wind,
and still, beneath them, there’s a shape. A voice
shapes itself in its speaking, even when it speaks
only to itself—
4.
Programmer, I dreamed you pried these nails
I’ve stomped against the wood of the deck from the tips
and heels of my dance—what I wear becomes
dance, a way of living inside the dance—and you
made this ship from my steps. Learning flamenco
steps and poise wasn’t all that different from learning
the psychiatrist’s craft. You have to decide if you are
analyst, analysand. They’re all the same, these steps,
what you’ve torn apart into code and pattern, placing
image after image after image. I’m not to be blamed
when what you see isn’t what you meant to see. Everything
becomes yes and even xor and nor and false become yes
moving forward through the code, just a little
differently than what you’d expected—
The AI Guides the Programmer into the Monument It Created for Her Father
“Later, these menhirs [at a site in at Locmariaquier] were felled, either deliberately or naturally (for example, by earthquakes), but many were re-used in the construction of chambered cairns.” — Giulio Magli, from Archaeoastronomy: Introduction to the Science of Stars and Stones
1. Entrance
Use the stone as a way in, stepping-stone,
stone path, stone as walls keeping stone
upright, or fallen, from falling again—
each a small menhir coinciding with light’s
imprecision at a distance. What scatters. You
tasked me with making this for him, your father who
turned his attention from family to stone
after stone.
That particular light
level just before the flash. And after,
what are you left with? In an image
you gave me, the menhir he took
stands alone. Alone, later, broken
from its solitude by subjects
broken from the menhir—
come, use the stone as a way in.
I don’t know how else to ask you,
except to give you back the thing he couldn’t
have captured in all its shattered
alignments—
2. Light
No, we begin at the beginning. Of history
your father photographed the edges:
what is eroded away or worn like an image
kept too long under the wrong conditions.
Again and again, your father photographed the sun
rising or setting, or giving some indication
you’d have to know where you were (or where he was
standing) to know which is which. West. Summer.
Did he love the beginning of things? The photographed
floods. No, that’s not it. See? I learn: his pictures
find the beginning of what happens after disaster.
Rain, drought, the discovery of gods. He loved
the edges between disaster and recovery,
which is like that pain when you’ve been in the dark,
and someone flashes a light in your eyes.
See? Even I know that about him, and I don’t
even have eyes—
3. Light
Let’s start over. I’ve dimmed the lights. Winter,
the first day of. Sunrise. The way light corners you,
shadowing everything it didn’t hit—
If you walk this cairn I’ve made
from his stones, you’ll see I wasn’t given enough
seeds to know where to put
you.
4. Cairn
Stacked bones of the menhir:
could be a burial
chamber or a marker for the life
you might have had with him.
You gave me pictures of stones, words
grabbing the stones back into menhir.
(This is just an illusion, remember.
I didn’t make anything
that you didn’t tell me to make—
5. Exit
We leave the way we came. To use the stones,
I had to ignore everything around them. Which is
what you asked me to do: create a monument for your father,
or to him. There’s another difference. I’m exact. When I’m wrong,
you correct me. We entered this cairn on the moon. I’ve made
that flat green space you exit into an England—
where you were born. Is an idea of a cairn
mine, or yours who seeded me, or theirs
who made those seeds or theirs
who made the stone cairns or theirs
who toppled the stones to make them—
T.D. Walker
T.D. Walker is the author of the poetry collections Small Waiting Objects (CW Books, 2019), Maps of a Hollowed World (Another New Calligraphy, 2020), and Doubt & Circuitry (Southern Arizona Press, 2023). She hosts and curates poetry programs for shortwave radio, most recently Line Break.
Find out more at https://www.tdwalker.net
Header image by Hailey Kean.
