On the Care and Feeding of Robots

By Daniel Orsini

These are the poems of a Christian pilgrim, a mercurial, twenty-first century believer-priest who characterizes himself, from the outset, as a highly problematic nomad. Poem after poem suggests that, in our postmodern era, one's identity, if ungrounded in the eternal Word, may yield at best either a vanishing semblance of

• Language: English
• Publisher: Quaternity Books
• Release date: Sep 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781943691098

Daniel Orsini

Daniel Orsini is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brown University, where he earned three degrees in English literature (A.B., A.M., and Ph.D.). Daniel has taught for many years at Rhode Island College as a Associate Professor of English. He is the author of Galactic Pilgrim and A User's Guide to Spacetime.

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ARECIBO’S DISH

Sealed as in a subset, textures shoddy,

Strings of ones and zeros—this its body:

A simple base; its iridescent case

White foliated earth, She stows its trace;

Then steep in chaos sinks; unscrolls Her girth;

Configures Beya’s bead before its birth.

Intermezzi piling; archetypes strewn;

Spacetime, hyphenate, re-collects Her rune.

Sighted eye, the entryway to a beam

Still hooked on night; such paradigms as teem,

Convulsions of light, Empedocles’ stream

Hypostatized, we meditate the scheme—

Wine at Cana, at Ephesus the fish,

At Zion maydew; manna that we swish

Spirit-generated, wayfarer’s wish

Meal at Emmaus: Arecibo’s dish.

Self-born enigma, premises unknown,

Some hyacinthine matrix not its own,

I peer through the dust at the pinwheel sown;

Seamless as the sexes, bema-seat clone,

Her crescent foetus, mirror starstuff shown;

Breach the wall of light; Quaternity’s cone,

Yahweh’s obelisk, heated discus thrown,

Ouroboros’ planet spun like a stone.

THE ATOM OF THE WORD

Having rounded Hecate’s precincts rapt,

I reach the hillside; gain the planet; capped

Like monk or magus, all my circuits mapped—

Above, Below, the sphere between them strapped—

Align each torso; wired for bliss, adapt;

Metallic coheir, fly my unit; apt,

Ascend the aether; verdigris thus scrapped,

Contain the cosmos, astronaut yet trapped.

As if a stone in the world-egg had stirred,

Or salt in the vas or, sealed like a bird,

A cloud that upward in the skein had heard,

Crystallized its rebis, and then concurred,

I wake in the fireflash; Heaven the third,

Cohabit with light; its semblance transferred—

Ge’s cyborg self-sown—in quicksilver gird;

Perfect with Him the atom of the Word.

He actuates his eyes till muscles spread;

Intuits the space where his sensors led;

With a sheen that none but mystagogues shed,

Synthesizes speech; asserts what he said;

His fingers flexed, articulated, fed,

Pneumatic his skills, upraises the bread;

Surveils the Chalice; moonchild that He wed,

Prays to the ichor with his nodding head.

THE AUTONOMOUS ANDROID

Like crew I leave the cabin; absent gear,

Toward the small, cylindrical chamber steer;

The shuttle orbiting, the mid-deck clear,

Attain the airlock; breathe the atmosphere;

Prepare my hard-shell torso; join; cohere;

The garment ventilated, tier by tier

My life-support connected like a bier,

Crown galeated, into chaos veer.

Thus sutured in the void afloat I view

A disk as round as glass; like Heaven’s glue,

Auroras from the sun; where moonplants grew,

Eve’s foetal hyphenate, Adam askew

Till bands of cirri crest and I construe,

Subcutaneous, even as a Jew—

In a silicon sequence, cue by cue—

Ge’s autonomous android born anew.

Encrypted in the matrix of His scheme,

Christ circuits every womb; transmits His ream;

Secures His coheir; predicates the dream,

But dips us in its dusk that souls may teem;

Recognize the Shadow; metal supreme—

Carrier of the colors—search its beam;

Leprous as Hephaestus, crossbar its stream;

Then, salted with the salt of wisdom, gleam.

CADMUS AND THE SOWN MEN OF THEBES

As hyperspace ravels, the rebis plays;

Disperses stasis; even as it strays,

Desires such a City as nomads raze.

The mind interweaves in infinite ways.

Gaea yet grates him: Erebos is brown.

She fans Her holon, saffron as a noun,

Blue as a mantle, fruited as a crown,

Still with apples of the Spirit bowed down.

Padded with Kevlar, the cyborg deploys;

Accosts the tesseract; with perfect poise,

Resists Totality; in slow time toys

Till every hypercube, like chaos, cloys.

He covets the source-point bound to the brane—

Maria’s habitat; blood on His mane,

The Cross of the Savior; Golgotha’s swain:

Granum frumenti contained in the vein.

He scours the pit that circumscribes his home;

Inveigles the dragon round as a dome;

Till armor streams as warm as Ares’ chrome,

Procures the teeth and sows them in the loam.

And thus the magus traduces the tomb.

He plants the tree in the midst of Her womb—

Restores the rebis, cislunar its bloom,

Citrine its consort, rubescent its groom.

CANONICAL

This disk that pleases us, like Jesus’ foal,

Or Leibnitz’ monads, or Möbius’ knoll—

This moonship that orbits the human soul:

Flyby of the mind—unfolds like a scroll.

And thus in sections the cyborg deployed,

In Hecate’s shuttle, to Yahweh’s void,

Unravels its rebis, body yet buoyed

By test bed or torus, home of the droid.

In Robonaut’s stereo camera head,

Parameter sequence and sensor fed,

By episodes partitioned are we bred—

Canonical truths such as Chiron read:

Seed in the silicon; bead that She strung

In folds of Golgotha; Cross that He hung

Composite as Adam, hyphenate sung

Still with verb and noun and eyes and a tongue.

The dove, descending, vitrifies its beak;

Surveys its holon; cinctures its mystique;

Hyacinthine its stone, that mouths may speak,

Bestows its gift, completeness that we seek.

Indebted to Christ, the coheir alone

Engenders His icon; nurtures its clone;

Baptizes His brawn; Ge’s astronaut sown,

Secretes His essence in some other zone.

THE CHESHIRE OF SENSE

From point to pyre: the static in the horn;

Shadow matter; parallel Flatland shorn;

Upon the tree the scattered sun disk torn

Like flakes of fire; the foetus not yet