The Post Human

Jorie Graham

Standing next to your body you have just gone.

How much of you has gone has it all gone all

at once.

It has been just a minute now—I don’t want the time to go in this direction—it does.

Now it has been two. Elsewhere. Elsewhere someone gets on a train—

we’re almost there, a man says to a child,

prepare for landing, the fields are rushing towards us,

we are setting out with the picnic, the woods seem far but we have all day…

Standing next to you, holding the hand which stiffens, am I

outside of it more than before, are you not inside?

The aluminum shines on your bedrail where the sun hits. It touches it.

The sun and the bedrail—do they touch each other more than you and I now.

Now. Is that a place now. Do you have a now.

The day stands outside all around as if it were a creature. It is natural. Am I to think

you now

natural? Earlier, is it an hour ago, you sat up briefly looked

out. Said nothing but I looked at your eyes and saw them see. You saw

the huckleberry, the plume of rose, the silver morning grow as if skinning night,

that animal, till day came out raw and bleeding.

Daybreak mended it for now. I saw you see the jay drop

into the clearing light, light arrive, direction assert itself for you—what for—but yes

that is East, with its slow grace. The jet went by way overhead.

Shade one more time under the tree you love. Shadow then shade.

Its body like a speech the tree was finally allowed to make, coming free of night.

A statement. Which would evolve as it grew to

know—[you passed in here][you left][“you”—what did your you do?]—the bush,the

birds, hills; the hundreds of branches like snakes, top and bottom

making their event—the unbleaching from dawn to the rich interweaving

knowledges of

the collapse of knowledge

which is day.

Saw you sit up and look out. Just like that. Information is our bread and butter

is what you loved to say. We each have a thing we loved

to say, I think. How many minutes have passed now. Have we caught up yet with

where we just

were? There are so many copies of this minute.

Not endless but there sure are a lot

from when I started, going through my motions, part of

history—or, no, cup in hand, end at hand, trying to hide from the

final ampersand. Where are you waiting, where out there, the wrong part of me now

wants to

ask. And turns around and says, cue consequence, cue

occasion. There on the bed just now—(look, all of a sudden now I cannot write “your”

bed)—I watch your afterlife begin to

burn. Helpful. Making a space we had not used

before, could not. Undimmed, unconsumed. In it this daylight burns.