Tapestries and Strange Imaginings

[Tony Hoffman]

Grand Finale

On this final day
so much left
undone and to do
weeks compressed to hours
yet I’ve laid all the groundwork
for this final push.

Sorry I've been light on giving fluff.
I'll catch up with you
on the other side.
Now to it

[Tony Hoffman]

Atomic Weasel

There was a young weasel named Vern
who loved to go trekking through CERN.
He nipped a transformer
and found something warmer—
A lesson too final to learn.

[Tony Hoffman]

Caterpillars of the Sun

In the garden, mottled and plump
Engorged with leafy delight
Soon to be cloaked in silkiness
spun on the moon looms
entwined in a nacreous glow.
priming for interdimensional flight.

Now you hold them
now release them
to dance in and out
of the sweep
of your eyes.

One day, if you’re lucky
they will ride the starwinds home.

[Tony Hoffman]

Biotech, schmiotech
Cybertechnology
Fashion new organs to
stave off the morgue.

Call us bionic or
transhuman entities.
(No, we’re not Daleks, not
Cylons or Borg.)

[Tony Hoffman]

On Having 2.2 Percent Neanderthal Genes

You wouldn’t know it by looking at me
but nor would you see the Amazigh
(Berber to the world), the Turkish,
even the Jewish, perhaps.
The trail is lost, the case is cold
no Pleistocene epics are passed to this day
but still we bear their imprint
and can always confabulate.

Let’s call him Ogg,
admittedly a pseudo-Neanderthal name
but for want of the real thing, it will have to do.
Ogg has red hair and freckles
and is moody much of the time.
He’d rather not wield a club
and is sensitive, an artist.
He draws his people’s history
on the great wall beneath the cliff.
The headman loudly praises him
but the young men look askance.
He will not hunt, nor join them in war
and he stays away from the dance.
He pines for Grokka, who is pledged
to the fisherman’s son.

Grokka’s a master of herbs and spells
even at her tender age
and doesn’t like others casting her fate.
One night, she and Ogg make their escape
over the mountains to the lands of the Others
who care for them as their own.
Their daughter grows up to marry a chieftain—
Their children’s children’s children
are the humans of today.

Some more prosaic story
may be closer to the truth
but cavemen still inhabit us
and journey with us through our lives.

[Tony Hoffman]

The Last Tapestry

Unicorns and basilisks
struggle to the death
in the haunted hills.

Great hunting spiders
charge into the fray
out of the inchoate gloom.

Nacreous ichor
drips from the dread angel’s wounds
onto burning sand.

[Tony Hoffman]

Incantata

Dredge the well where ancient fishes sing.
Search for fallen stars, and the path to the sea
that encircles the earth. Ocean whose blue
is mythic, whose depths are unbounded.

Desert whose very name is desert
cacti whose arms embrace the sky
dune fields that undulate forever
and mirror the herringbone clouds.

Aeolian xylophone fishbone dunes.
In your fluted sandstone cliffs,
the winds twirl cantatas to migrating birds
in flocks that gray the Sun for days.

[Tony Hoffman]

Kilimanjaro

We asked the staff to release us
from the safety of the lodge
into the lion-haunted night
to take in the equatorial stars
and watch our neighboring galaxies rise
over Kilimanjaro.

They came with us
Weaponless, guides not guards
As we set up our gear on the helipad
Where the road to the Masai village
Leads off to the right.

The heavens askew—
Orion on its side, so high in the sky
Canopus and other southern stars
Forever invisible from New York
Hoisted up into the Kenyan sky.

The mountain
a long dark mass to the south
and swinging above its flanks
the Clouds of Magellan,
the Milky Way’s sister galaxies.

We took our photos
Scanned the southern heavens
With binoculars or scopes
Then packed up and retreated
Relieved when the gate swung closed
Leaving all lions and imagined beasts behind.

[Tony Hoffman]

Alpha Centauri

We’ll send a mouse to Mars
on wings of light,
a thousand atoms to Andromeda
a postage stamp to Betelgeuse
a fleet of iPhones out into the void.

We’ll shoot lasers into gossamer
Launch fleets of schooners
to sail the gulfs between the stars
measure and photograph,
beam it all back to us.
Alpha Centauri or bust.

For now, we’ll have to content ourselves
with dipping our toes in the surf
of this great cosmic sea
let our emissaries do the work for us
while we sail the starwinds vicariously.

[Tony Hoffman]

On the R Train, 8 a.m.

A Yankee cap shields the top of his head.
A surgical mask hides his face.
Will it protect him from contagion
if the always-rumored plague ever strikes
and would he find himself wishing he were one of the dead?

[Tony Hoffman]

Dominion

Capitol studded with globes
one for each planet
in the alliance.

Globes, steel and opal,
Copper, marble, gold,
Zinc and malachite
intricately mapped
to show their varied geographies.

Each globe crowns an embassy
in the heart of the city
that blazed the trail to the stars
a heavy city
of cold stone and steel.

[Tony Hoffman]

The Last Notebooks

The last physical notebooks
stashed in a cabinet drawer
doled out one by one
to a few faithful
sworn to keep our history intact
should our cyber-culture ever fail.

[Tony Hoffman]

Lifeformy strifeformy
biodiversity
all the world’s creatures
humongous and wee.

Let’s sing a paean to
Radiolaria...
Foraminifera…
give them all squee!

[Word Weaver]

I say hurrah to you at your journey's end wish I'd stopped by your thread earlier. It's quite amusing. Some clever stuff and I appreciated the pleasantly impudent attitude you strike.

[Tony Hoffman]

I say hurrah to you at your journey's end wish I'd stopped by your thread earlier. It's quite amusing. Some clever stuff and I appreciated the pleasantly impudent attitude you strike.

Thanks a lot, Word Weaver!
--Tony