ENVIRONMENTAL Poetry: THE WAY WE REMEMBER TOMORROW, by Debra Rymer

From this future membrane
window I’ve launched a drone
to dispatch a noisy insect. Actually,
I said destroy but everyone knows drones
won’t kill, only deliver. As if we forgot
they used to be weapons. These days,
even whining flies get taxied, then deposited
on the straggly clump passing for canopy
and signaling the last stop: Behold!
The reclamation pod: last stop of the living,
or first stop of the dead, democratically
inviting poets and flies alike
to become nothing then something
reordered and new.

In this version of the future, we actually listened
to the engineers and the experts just enough
to have reinforced the thinning bridge
above oblivion where our machines
built a hive to keep us tucked safe
inside. Outside is occupied
only by machines, insects and drones. Some defiant
fauna. Our artificial Hermes have full charge.
Do they hum? Whirr? No one living knows.

We resent their liberty. Envy their purpose.
Oh to fly in the radiance unsinged!
Machines adapt their shapes to more exactly
fit specific tasks. No one alive can know for sure.
We guess at unseen factories attending
unguarded docks stacked with multicolored crates.

One creation myth attributes
colors to a distant human, a decider, who commanded
changes in the palette every three months from when we
had seasons. Oh this was way
way back when people designed everything,
even machines, and back when people decided
everything for everybody and not
everybody survived it.

Another myth says the seasons are still there
just invisible to all but the faithful,
assuring us that the invisible, if indefinite,
remains plausible. We can’t see them but know
there must be hundreds of unique machines

making, packaging, gathering information, occasionally
data leaking our secrets because machines will gossip
but never apologize nor forget, just ardently collect
us scrap by scrap without explanation.
Perhaps for some future book telling all that’s left
of a world we’ve barely seen. Some
waited for a book release but eventually we knew
it’s not for us.
It’s for after us.

Watching them, I’ve also wondered
If our machines categorize us as garden?
Or weeds. Do they prefer round numbered
flavored data or favor armored
parcels for their insectish texture?
Once they could have ranked us
by income or efficiency. Now we are weighed
against the sagging sentiment in our mail.

How much longer will they oblige
our passionate insistence we would
surely have done better
if only we’d known. Alas! We were duped!
Somebody said the guy at the wheel could
drive: turns out he’d relied on chauffeurs
but it never came up before he
made it to the final round. He stole off in a rocket
in the middle of the night. That was the last
we heard.

Now only drones and insects go. The rest
of us shrunk to fit vacuum-packed lives. Two
windows, two sinks, two lights, one bed—two
occupants enclosed by amber walls that thin to
to clear. One window for each occupant ,
whether waking or sleeping or
comatose with watching. Some of us write.

Outside, second shift drones
deliver fresh stationary before they unfurl
nets broad enough to sift charge from the sky.

Our daily season begins with first charge
suspended between
optimism and waning resolve.
Machines repair and operate the hive,
performing human tasks now
alien to memory.

All of us watch, but some
build a cult of conspiracy, recording drone
trails for evidence of their ineffable plans.
At least, machines will not build guns.

We know. We tried. Definitely we ordered
swords but received farming implements.
One guy protested, “they’re mocking us,”
but it didn’t catch on because no one
else believed machines can laugh, so
probably just a glitch. Next time let’s try
binoculars. See what we get.

Meanwhile, first shift drones wait until assigned.
Are they summoned by serial number or do they all
have names these days?
The first season is shopping.
What to order? There was something.
Tooth? Thumb? Search essentials. Scan
purchase history, but nothing.
It is coming to me. Dig something. Dig
nity, was it? Rare now, but once more common
back when we still walked roads we built and
ate plants we grew right out of dirt. Back
when we created and destroyed with the same hands.
It was surely dignity that propped us up beneath the open sky,
unafraid of its terrible weather. Back
before we ate the world. Before
we voted by text at the pageant’s close. Before we
organized the world into grocery aisles.

We’re over here in perishables, dear. Let’s dare confess
the dirty truth out loud.
Even in this future, we die. We tell ourselves

this is but one possible death told in one possible
dialect. This ending’s actually
kinder than most where by now we’re all
extinct as the farting dinosaurs.

We’ve got a team working on spinoffs but
so far, this
is the gentlest decline.

Our organic brains can nonetheless sustain
belief enough to gamble. Others pray, begging for
divine reprieve, but most of us accept it’s
a DIY job. Thus we wake

each identical day before first charge,
prodding our paper witnesses awake, make them
testify
of course we would have done
better if only, if only
. . . we’d done better. This is how I start, today.
This time I begin the story with do better—

Today’s heroine is promising—an engineer who
speaks only math. With ease, she flatters variables
to fix, making introductions until they are known intergers.
Cassandra, sees the bridge, the collapse, the whole
thing but humans mostly don’t talk in math.

She weaves the thing from spun theory and abacus string,
knotting the tapestry with primes, gilding it with fractional
topography. She will do better and this time surely
they’ll listen.

Today’s heroine is neither beautiful nor a frail consumptive.
She’s spectral, trans
formative, becoming algebra, then argument then
a recipe book for do better.

Second charge approaches, and this days memory
of the future is resolved,
clothespinned up to dry. We each sign and enclose
obligatory fees with whatever pragmatics
remain in custom.

Perhaps this will be the night
our weak, biological eyes will read
a future we might agree to build. Math
becomes a common tongue.

As every morning, this morning we affirmed
to mirror selves these five words
“We contain all possible futures.”

Really all we need is one
human future with a workable
ever after.