Photo by Vince Musi from National Geographic

As little as we know about the builders of Newgrange in Ireland, we know even less about the builders of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. What we do know about these monuments is that the first were built about 11,000 years ago, during the earliest years of the Eurasian Neolithic. In other words, Göbekli Tepe predates our current understanding of when agriculture began. (And yes, it also predates Stonehenge — by six or seven thousand years.) It’s hard to imagine what motivated tribes of hunter-gatherers to create such monumental architecture, full of animal sculptures and mysterious standing stones. It’s also hard to conceive of why each succeeding structure grew smaller and less sophisticated over time.

So this is where archaeology, science fiction, and poetry all converge. As a poet, archaeology enables me to explore that alien otherness while remaining grounded in the scientific reality of human experience.

More about Göbekli Tepe:

• Archaeology: The World’s First Temple
• Smithsonian: Göbekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple? (with photo gallery)
• National Geographic: The Birth of Religion (with photo gallery)

Its ragged edges and rough sounds
catch the water and collect its story —

from sky to peak, through wood and moss,
off asphalt, boulders, steel. I’ll hear the patter

of rain on the earth above, crawl forth
and speak of the small things I see.

Mud and leaves, wet stones, moist bark.
I’ve waited too long. Now my work begins.

One of my dearest memories of the summer in 1994 that I spent working on an archaeological dig in Jordan was a weekend trip to Petra. We arrived from Amman late in the evening, but several of my fellow archaeology students couldn’t wait until morning to see the amazing structures carved from the sandstone 2000 years ago, so we snuck across wadi after wadi, avoiding the main paths. Once past the guard posts, we walked through the narrow gorge known as al-Siq — pitch black at night — until the passage opened in front of us to reveal Al Kazhneh, lit only by starlight.

ArzLan built his LEGO version of the Treasury for the Hong Kong Animation Festival, and features Indiana Jones in his Last Crusade visit to this UNESCO Heritage site.

Their purpose complete, we encase them
     in stone. If you follow this road
          due north, you’ll find
the old school facing the water. Tumbleweeds
     flit by its empty windows like neutrons
          dancing toward their new life.

Wind and soldiers have taken the wood
     from homes left behind
          to make way for all this science.
Submarines rust in pits.
     The salmon don’t run. There are no
          signs to explain what this place means.

That shimmer you feel on the wind,
     the way the ground sometimes shudders —
          the power we achieved
in those black buildings hangs in the air
     and lingers in the soil. Out there on the horizon,
          they will remain when all of us are gone.

Read about the experience that created this poem in “Stuck in a Hanford reactor building elevator.”

A full day at work followed by dinner with business partners from New Zealand precluded any participation in Bloomsday — a genuine disappointment, so perhaps I can embrace Philip Larkin’s source of inspiration.

Nevertheless, I’ve found myself following Joyce and Bloom all week long, and indeed earlier during my two previous visits in August 2008 and February this year.

My flight arrived early enough that my hotel room wasn’t ready, so I headed north on Grafton Street (“gay with housed awnings”), across the O’Connell Bridge, briefly into the General Post Office, then onto the James Joyce Centre. The museum preserves the front door of Number 7 Eccles Street, where Joyce’s friend J.F. Byrne lived in 1904 and which Joyce used as the home of Leopold and Molly Bloom in the novel.

Jetlag began to catch up with me as I finished the exhibits, so I took the offer of a free lecture at the Joyce Centre to hear a great deal about Phoenix Park that I’d never have learned otherwise. It’s now on my list of places to visit next time I’m in Dublin.

South on O’Connell Street, past Trinity College and the old Irish Houses of Parliament (already the Bank of Ireland in 1904), and back toward the hotel on aching feet…

The next afternoon, I headed north on Grafton Street again, but turned right onto Duke Street, where Davy Byrnes Pub exists in all its nonfictional glory.

He entered Davy Byrne’s. Moral pub. He doesn’t chat. Stands a drink now and then. But in leapyear once in four. Cashed a cheque for me once.

There were far more mouthwatering options on the contemporary menu, but I set aside my disdain for tourist behavior and ordered the gorgonzola sandwich.

Mr Bloom ate his strips of sandwich, fresh clean bread, with relish of disgust, pungent mustard, the feety savour of green cheese.

As much as I missed doing something symbolically Joycean on Bloomsday itself, I realized that Ulysses is everywhere, all the time in modern Dublin, and the real Dublin suffuses Ulysses on every page. An evening in a Dublin restaurant with Antipodean colleagues may have been no less “Joycean” than turning the rusty knob of Leopold Bloom’s front door or eating bread topped with overwhelmingly green cheese.

You can see a more complete photo tour of Joyce and Bloom’s Dublin by Tony Thwaites of the University of Queensland, to whom I’m indebted for some of my own after-the-fact details and choice Ulysses quotes.

Doris McDonald lived in a rent-controlled apartment on the eighty-fifth floor of a building overlooking the Mare Imbrium. After retiring from the observatory with a government pension, she could live comfortably, well compensated for the fact that her body – weakened after decades serving science up here in the sky – could never go home. She chose to live frugally, however, her only luxury a pair of GeneCorp® NeanderClones™ shipped up from below.

She could hear the female, Polly, humming as she washed up after serving dinner. The tune was in a scale unlike anything in the complete library of world music built into the apartment. Polly’s singing always made the hair stand up on the back of Doris’ neck.

It’s not that she was afraid of her ‘Clones – attacks on their Modern masters were a thing of the past, ever since the company had begun neutering the males before delivery. In moments of real panic, shock collars artfully disguised as Celtic torques could be activated at the touch of a button. The anthropological anachronism annoyed only scholars of ancient history. NeanderClone owners had nothing to fear.

Read the complete story after the jump!

Doris settled back in her chair with a book, its screen casting a faint glow on her cardigan. A smile touched her lips. Chaucer, Steinbeck, Hawking – names as meaningless to the illiterate Polly and her race as Watson and Crick, whose science three hundred years earlier enabled Doris to sit here today and read The Grapes of Wrath instead of scouring pots and pans.

There was a pause in the rush of water and clinking of cutlery.

“Polly dear,” Doris called. “Tea, please.” She knew the niceties of language were lost on the Neanderthal mind, dug up as it was from a few bones in Gibralter and grown in a vat. She could just as easily have shouted, “Polly! Tea!” as many Moderns did with no ill effect, but it just seemed, well, nicer – and Doris considered herself a good, compassionate owner.

She heard the hiss and burble of boiling water being poured from the tap into the teapot, followed two minutes later by the chime that told Polly’s chronologically challenged mind that the tea had steeped for long enough. Doris was glad she didn’t have to teach them everything, from how to dress to the steps for making tea. GeneCorp had taken care of all that at the facility where they grew Polly and her kin.

Polly emerged from the kitchen with the tea service. A magnetized ring on the foot of the teacup gripped the steel tray and a lid prevented the scalding tea from flying up into one’s face, but the flowery pattern and delicate handle evoked memories of home. Polly set the tray down on the coffee table in front of Doris.

“Thank you, dear,” Doris said as she picked up the cup. Polly stood there, arms hanging at her side. “That will be all,” Doris continued. Polly stared.

Sam felt instinct kick in as he stepped quietly around the corner, entering the room behind Doris in her chair. By the time Polly had delivered the tea and Doris had lifted the cup to her lips for a first sip, he was standing over her, unbidden and unseen.

In a flash of movement that Doris caught briefly in a reflection from the dimmed TV screen, Sam struck. What she saw never reached the level of consciousness. Sam raised his hands, grasped Doris’ head, then twisted left and down. Doris McDonald’s neck snapped at the third cervical vertebra. Sam’s blood rushed at the sound, but he knew there was much more to do.

“It’s done,” Sam said, waiting for Polly’s next order.

“Good work,” Polly said, swinging into motion. She reached for the pad sitting at Doris’ elbow and looked at the screen. “Grapes of Wrath indeed,” she grimaced.

She flicked the book closed and tried to open the control panel for the mainframe.

AUTHENTICATE, the screen prompted. Polly reached for Doris’ hand and pressed a thumb against the screen. Three notes chimed and the screen switched to a view of the household subsystems. Polly tapped the double-helix icon labeled Security. She tapped Disable Collars.

AUTHENTICATE, the screen flashed at Polly again. She lifted Doris’ right eyelid and held the pad in front of the dead woman’s face. The same notes chimed. She had seen Doris do this half a dozen times when the doctors came to examine the pair for their annual check-ups, guarded by silent men with tranq guns.

“At least it doesn’t ask for her voice,” Polly muttered. She bent the torque from her neck and snapped it in half. Sam did the same.

“Can you run it from here?” Polly asked as she handed Sam the pad.

“I think so,” he said. “I tested it just short of completion that time you dosed her.” He laughed as he pulled a data stick from his pocket and waved it toward the screen with a flick of his wrist. “She had no idea, did she?”

“Just thought she’d dozed off in her chair.” Polly didn’t laugh.

A new symbol appeared on the screen, a triangular piece of brown stone with chipped edges.

“Aren’t you clever,” Polly said. “Send the signal.”

Sam tapped the spearhead.

In hundreds of facilities scattered beneath the swirls of white on the planet hanging in the blackness above Polly and Sam, ten thousand doors unlocked themselves simultaneously.

In millions of houses, three gentle jolts only their wearers could feel coursed through collars locked around Neanderthal necks. They had been waiting for this.

In billions of minds free for the first time in thirty thousand years, something awoke.

I wrote this poem almost exactly four years ago, when I frequently stopped for coffee or breakfast in a Microsoft building between my bus stop and my own building. My product group has moved to another satellite campus since then, but I was back in Building 112 this morning for a meeting and overheard a team of corporate movers swapping stories about their accident-prone supervisor. I finished my coffee, looked up, and they were gone. I immediately thought of this poem.

I owe the poem’s current form and other improvements to feedback from David Wagoner while he was the Poet in Residence at Richard Hugo House.

I was drawn inexorably to that deeper past, far beyond the 6,000-year timeline to which so many believers back home limited their thinking. There in the field, even theology professors set aside their biblical literalism to work and talk within the context of the facts evident all around us.

Neolithic blade from ‘Ain Ghazal, a “mere” 8,500-9,250 years old

Drawn by stories of undiscovered sites nearby, I walked in the cool evenings through the fallow fields surrounding the school for Palestinian girls where the project was headquartered. I found myself stepping across the surface of a world much, much older than Moses, Abraham, Noah, or Adam and Eve. Chipped stones lay scattered across furrows of barley stubble ploughed under at the end of the last season, and I filled my pockets with chunks of tan stone streaked with oranges and browns.

I’d corner one of the archaeologists and seek an impromptu lithic analysis. Laid out on a table or the side of an unmade bunk bed, I’d wait with baited breath for each pronouncement of “paleolithic scraper” or “mesolithic spearpoint,” disappointed with the overwhelmingly common “Sorry, that’s most likely just a rock.”

Surface archaeology — walking surveys of the landscape — tells us what lies beneath, where to dig someday when there’s time and money, but often little more. Recovered from the churned soil of a modern field in a part of the world where human history goes back far older than 50,000 years ago, it’s shocking to learn that there’s little value in these little hunks of rock — an easy approval for me to take them home by the nice man from the Department of Antiquities.

And so, these tools knapped from chert by people thirty, forty, fifty thousand years ago became some of my most treasured possessions. I could hold in my hand something made when ice sheets still covered much of Europe and humans still hadn’t entered the Americas — a time even before artists put aurochs, woolly mammoth, and herds of prancing horses on the walls of Lascaux and Chauvet. I felt a real connection with the men and women who lived all those years ago, a deeper connection than with any character from an ancient storybook.

In a cross-country move between Boston and Seattle, carefully packed to ensure no new chips flaked away, I lost track of my priceless artifacts. In a sense, it’s funny: Excavated by the larger blades of modern, mechanical ploughs, they emerged into the sunlight after tens of thousands of years only to be reburied in a box of miscellaneous office junk (a fate shared by many artifacts in museum vaults).

So I search for them all over again. Every so often, I’ll take down a box left packed for more than a decade and remove a few layers — books of 33-cent stamps, half-used note pads, and stacks of bills paid long ago. Someday, I’ll find them buried at the bottom of a box, pull them out, feel the smooth stone and hear them clink against each other. Someday, I’ll excavate these lost tools once again.

Father had church business with church elders next door, and he left me to play with the kindergarteners. At first, they stared at me, even though I wore the same clothes they all wore — blue shorts, white shirt, and round red hat.

The oldest boy called me a gaijin and then laughed.

“I was born in Tokyo,” I corrected him, “I’m a Child of Edo, you Son of the Soil.” Some of the girls laughed.

I played on the swing. The toes of all the other children had scooped the dry sand from under the seats, leaving furrows beneath my feet. At the top of each arc, I could see our blue Subaru over the concrete wall, parked in the church driveway. I played hopscotch with the girls who were nice earlier. I let them win.

A bell rang and we all went inside to sing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” When we sang “The Elephant Song,” I waved my arm from my face just like everyone else. The others were learning to count, but I already knew all ten of them so I was bored.

A lady in glasses and a green dress brought rice balls wrapped in seaweed and we each took one. I loved the saltiness of the black seaweed and the tang of the pickled plum in the center of the rice. The taste reminded me of staying over at Aunt Kiwako’s.

The teacher and the lady in green took mats from a closet and laid them on the floor. The others lay down quietly, some on their sides, some on their backs, some on their stomachs with an arm cradling their face. I told them I didn’t take naps but they didn’t care. They told me to lie down quietly and close my eyes.

I watched the red and green swirls behind my eyelids. I practiced counting to ten. I thought about the day before, when mother and I went to the park to meet father after work. I jumped over ditches and didn’t fall in. My favorite slide snaked down the hill, and I raced mother, me sliding in my corduroys, she running in her plaid skirt. I always won. Father came swinging his black briefcase.

When I woke up, we were on the highway home. I opened my eyes and pretended I hadn’t been sleeping. Some old ladies were planting shoots of rice in a field that we passed. They were probably singing.

Father said, “Did you sleep well? You must have had a lot of fun with all your new friends.”

“I wasn’t sleeping,” I said. “I don’t take naps. And they weren’t my friends.”

Rain began to streak the windows. Father flicked a knob and the windshield wipers started playing sumo. The one on the left always won. I turned to watch the power lines dip down, and then up, and then down again.

National Library, Dublin

“The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.”

Happy May Day!