top of page

Directive

  • Writer: Chautauqua Journal
    Chautauqua Journal
  • Nov 20
  • 1 min read

Updated: Dec 2

Don Hogle

from Wild and Tame


ree

after Frost   Lean forward, please, just a bit into the not-   so-far-away future where your car drives itself   and the fridge knows the milk has gone bad.  Imagine you enter a room not unlike a room.  There is a desk resembling a desk where   a young man in glasses not so different   from yours is tap-tap-tapping on a keyboard.  Maybe you rode the train once   from Poughkeepsie with his parents,   maybe the young man was a child then.  Maybe he was with you on the platform,   holding his father’s hand. Maybe the four of you   had lunch at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central,   and this is what he remembers:  a red-checked tablecloth   dotted with crumbs    clinking his Coca-Cola   against your cocktail, the olives   skewered on a plastic sword    waiters in aprons, his mother   said, Don’t kick the table leg  nestling in the crook   of his father’s arm, cozy   in the heat of his big body    the smell of his father’s cologne—   the woods, cedar, the garden.  Tell yourself a story: how hard he works,   how like his dad he is—the long hours,   the dedication, the lack of any complaint.   Then pull up a chair and sit beside him.  Study the not wholly unfamiliar software   on the screen. Interpret the instructions   embedded in the code. Follow the logic   to its only conclusion: the machine  he programs will teach itself to be smarter   than you, smarter than him, smarter, in fact,   than all humanity. It’s his job to make the machine   think beyond anything he could imagine,  though the consequence of all that thought   is uncertain. Maybe the young man’s hidden   an Easter egg within the code. Maybe he’s tucked   a memory inside it—of a lunch at Grand Central.  And if he did, maybe, in the nanosecond   before the machine acts on an algorithm   to execute a self-formulated command,   maybe, the machine will remember. 

Image © Europeana


Don Hogle is a lifelong student of languages and has traveled to some 40-odd countries. He holds a BA in Spanish from Washington and Lee University, is a graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and attended NYU’s Leonard Stern Graduate School of Business. His poems can be found in Apalachee Review, Atlanta Review, Carolina Quarterly, Chautauqua, Maryland Institute College of Arts’ Full Bleed, New School Food’s The Inquisitive Eater, and The Westchester Review in the U.S.; A3 Review, allthesins, Pennine Platform, and Shooter in the U.K.; and Southword in Ireland. A chapbook, Madagascar, was published by Seven Kitchens Press in 2020. 



 
 
bottom of page