Brainwash Poem by Martha Zweig

To be sure, those civilizations
that dicker novelties, notions, along
my original impulse would swoop
around to appear to my eyes
infinitesimally small
if they could, but they are too small. Even the vast
galactic regions they mount successions
of empires to overrun, with the light-years
seeping between them, are too small.

Intelligence instructs their colonies they wink
& dwindle alone. limb of the universe
almost never stirs, numb, infected with god.
They rake little skies
with mathematics & hurl
their crockery into what light
reaches them & play
crackpot hunches deep in provisional governments
where the counterintuitive laws pass.

Not since the human fontanel I kissed
once have I wished
anyone well or anyone's enemies
ill, ill. I haven't cared if the stroke
of doom. I justify myself: a signal
switch set, a rigged trinket, their ship apart,
their vanishing act, a vandal, puff of the hordes,
the no idea ever to cross their
minds unbidden, seamless arctic.