Pity the Poor Anthropologist

in my backroom (a dust-ripe tomb),
in a box with cables, connectors, and parts,
a cave of sorts sits- awaits a cryptographic explorer.

In the back country of Northern Arizona,
in Loy Canyon at old Anasazi ruins
in the hollow of the cave at Robbers' Roost, we
engaged in late-night shamanic ceremonies under
the ancient eyes of petroglyphs - 
attaching soul-ladder ropes to our fellow wanderers 
we wanted to make certain we could bring them back 
across the dimensional divide

in the recesses of my file cabinets, i still have 
old lines, partial poems, scribblings from as long
ago as my first college years in the sixties ... packed in
among old correspondence, divorce papers, IRS forms ...

but the five and a quarter inch disks from the eighties
may live for antiquity to come- undecipherable
hieroglyphs of dead word processing programs: poems, fragments,
love songs and rants commingled with old IRS forms
never to be defraged into usefulness again.

Even if i pulled the 5.25" floppy drive from its box, reconnected
the cave, installed an old disk into its hollow, and shined the light
of my Pentium IV onto its antiquated walls for a new expedition,
would there be any ladder left with the backwardness
to salvage the well-worn text from its digital digs? 

Back  to most recently-visited page/ or

Recto / Permanence / Impermanence / Alteration / Obsolescence / Obliteration / Verso