in the guest room, and now I'm downstairs, ready to letterpress, standing in front of the drawers
of fonts, aligning letters one at a time upside down. I start the first podcast of the day, “The Daily,” this episode called When AI Comes for Your Purpose in Life, imagining I will be bored or angry
because AI scares me even though I used it recently to plan a four-day trip to Iceland.
Because AI solved a Millennium math problem in just hours, the guest math professor shares
a devastating truth: no human will ever be faster or better than a machine, and somehow,
he was pulled to the song, “Turn, Turn, Turn”—its lyrics lifted from the ancient words in “Ecclesiastes”—and he feels rearranged. Here is where his voice cracks into an ache of tears
which makes me weep and then the podcast host is weeping—all three of us caught in a terrain
of pain or, well, maybe, it’s joy, a heat that has no vocabulary. How tears release in the landscape
of being grateful to breathe. Maybe there are no solutions. Or everything is one. Maybe it’s time
to revel in the warmth of milky tea, time to see everything out the window as altar, time to listen
to the rainfall on the sill, hear the syncopated drop—drop—drop as music from the sky.
After years in the classroom, Sarah Dickenson Snyder now carves in stone, sculls on the Connecticut River, and rides her bike. Travel opens her eyes. She has five poetry collections: The Human Contract, Notes from a Nomad, With a Polaroid Camera, Now These Three Remain, and To Eve. Several poems have been nominated for Best of Net and Pushcart Prizes. Work is in Rattle, Verse Daily, and RHINO.
