This Counterfeit Year

There’s a stochastic parrot in the tree of life.
he’s eating clay to calm himself; he wants to turn

the brackish lagoon of his acidic, oracular mouth
into a better semblance of the natural world.

Brazil nut shells fall from him like bullet casings.
Oh, he’ll do anybody’s speaking, believe me.

By tree, I suppose I meant a tapestry of a tree.
By life, I meant hamsters consuming meticulous

tiny burritos on the internet, slow-cooked by
tea-light so as to engage the wonder of scale.

I asked our child please not to speak in memes,
and he promised he wouldn’t. Except, he specified,

in the capstone slide of a series of slides.
It was only then that I remembered the darting

trills that issued from him when he was a glossy froglet.
There is a ring around the moon tonight and I wonder:

where is the lodestar, where are the primeval voices of children

*

You know, you never show me that you recognize it:
that I’ve only been pretending to be your wife.

I went fossicking through our memories because
I wanted an origin story. Do we have one?

I found an image of you, in that other life, standing
in your galley kitchen with five sickly bean sprouts

languishing in pickle jars, my first time in your space.
You had tried to train them onto sticks but, twigless,

had built each stick from a hundred staggered toothpicks
glued together. Who does that? I wondered, while you

puttered somewhere else. Little squiggles, staked
like prize orchids. You put a rag beneath a seeping

bottle of liquid catnip, blew drugged bubbles to your cat.
Asked: Don’t you love her fluffy little orange pantaloons?

She settled into herself with a flounce, like a verklempt
ostrich. Her absconding fur found my mouth and nose,

my eyes bald as Scotch eggs. I still feel the scratch of it all:
that giddy fur, that popping air. It must have happened.

*

If there’s a soundtrack to this life, please let it be done
on instruments people breathe into. If we can’t continue,

let me remember the time our child lost two clear beads
in a snowscape. I called it a fool’s errand, pressed him just

to accept the loss. But you went out into the new drifts
flush with intention, the sunset settling like the spreading

crest of a Major Mitchell. The two of you darkened and shrank
until you were chill silhouettes, combing the white surface

with your fingers, trying to identify the made from the natural
prism by the force of your personal glow. And I didn’t know

whether your effort or the departing light would settle your
question. As you came in, I was still only reaching for my coat.

A note on the poem: the term “stochastic parrot” was coined by Emily Bender et al. to describe generative AI, or a large language model that strings terms together without understanding.