In My Dream, Turing Shows Me His Greatest Machine
       

Turing and I fling ourselves
into a river black as a lake.
We kick, ungrapple, kick,
his hand heavier, pulling us down.
His hand clamped like a small
mandible over mine, my first jarring
attempt at diving; his aim, true.

We sling down to where
the machine, far below,
curries lights over the fanged weeds.
Like a flat, open palm, the mechanical bottom
seems to hold the river up.

We reach its circuited face
where the strands button off.
Turing tinkers with a panel,
his hands clawn, over-busy, his hands
the quietest thing above the lights.
From his work, bubbles
fury overhead, lit, then lost.
I lose time. He is there,

but then he is gone. He has flown
into some moment I wasn't attending,
leaving no instructions for proceeding.

How beauty, pith-like, sits
in the center of incomprehension.
This, his last machine, seems
to creature the blind dark, offering
anything that passes there long enough
its own set of eyes.

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Copyright © 2022 Tobias Wray All rights reserved
from No Doubt I Will Return a Different Man
Cleveland State University Poetry Center
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission