copyright © 1996, 2002, Sheryl Smith

Sestina: Stress

Computers churn in the night, algorithms,

Their bleak meanings flung into numb dawns

Of business days. Humans enter the escarpments

Of buildings, all in a hurried surge,

To pick up the remnants of run software,

Absorb into minds the results of crunched numbers.

We are these humans in our haunted numbers:

Caffeine-dragged from the shaping algorithms

Of our dreams, dreams that should inform dawn's

Forgetfulness awhile, shoring up pain's escarpments.

But the computers' products take the mind in a surge

Of caffeine, and we run repetitious like software.

Mornings we forget that we are software:

Sleepless minds drive to the beat of numbers,

While skins and hearts obliterate the algorithms

Of caress from their memories. We are flogged by dawn's

Relentlessness, alone in the escarpments

Of massed cars, each locked in his own surge

Of morning noise. Commuters in a surge:

Highways of hardware hide the driving software

From its vulnerabilities. Cowering in our numbers,

Our minds untuned by the loud algorithms

Of the media, willingly do we lose dawn's

Unique dreams, the human escarpments

Of selves quelled in the hard escarpments

We build out of cars and numbers. The surge

Of business life is our refuge, software

Clinging to hardware, safe from itself, as the numbers

Of commerce substitute for the richer algorithms

Dream strains to bring into stressed dawns.

Wisdom might come with dream into dawns

Of slower waking, if we filled the world's escarpments

Sedately instead of in a forced surge,

And calmed the beat of commerce. The impassioned software

Of dreams that refresh the screens of our minds might turn numbers

Of subsistence into substance, drench us with algorithms

Older than those we fashion, the algorithms

Of nature. Their energies might run through refurbished dawns,

And glaze with light not only our cities' escarpments,

But our internal cities. Yet what would that surge

Of structured light illumine? Could we cope if the software

Slowed, and showed us the roots of its running numbers?

In our numbers we are afraid of the algorithms

Night's computers show us. Can we face in dawn's escarpment

The surge of inner light, the self redeemed within software?

Flight's exhaustions: flung

Like a skipped stone through a slow splash of clouds

To overtake the night. Under heaven's waves

The world throbs with summer.

I live in fragmented air

Where curdled skies mottle a lake with sun,

And ice is beveled but never breaks--

Winter, at the city's feet.

Against the grain of day

Flung further, I look down at a crannied dark,

Where man's dynamics, fractals charged with light,

Coil in smothered landscapes.

Out of frozen tides I stare

At water-shifting springtimes. The earth below

Is beaded with energies. The ice within

Strains toward warmth interred.

Baptized in thawed oceans,

Buried in human ground, I could regain

My fallowness. Down in the world

Let flight leave me, drenched, though I must fall.

You spurn me in verse--

I draw breath, for breath hurts.

I am stung with your lush words,

For what I've heard unnerves me.

My ears and heart hold

These burning transcripts, blistered with distress:

Could you not love me, though

I would give all the world's rhyme

For your cool "yes"?