The Disc

On the third they found the carcass,
adrift in the high Arctic,
with herring gulls and frozen hulls
floating like a dream.
They cracked it open like a barrel
and found such things inside:
Posel světla, Love Labour’s Won—
the second half of Kubla Khan—
and most strange of all they found in there
A DISC
which was onyx-black, with gentle grooves,
a central hole rimmed fine in bronze.
They took it back onboard their ship.
Fed their cassette spools with tape,
made it run, however one does,
and touched the disc with golden hands
to give the wheel a spin.
This is what it spoke.

  Testing? Testing? Are you there?
  I suppose you can’t respond. That’s fair.
  We come to you from a distant year
  Where we’ve discovered, it appears,
  A CYLINDER
             of hand-span’s width
  An arm-bone tall, thickness a fifth.
  Material seems some sort of wax.
  If it had markings, now it lacks.
  But there are imprints on the sides
  Vibrations, maybe, now incised
  On physical, trapped amber-like.
  We’ve procured for ourselves a mic.
  Material damaged; very poor.
  No chance of any recovery, for
  Once the data’s lost, it’s lost.
  Time does that. Sunrays. Rain. Or frost.
  Provenance some southern plain
  A desert-place, where sand has claimed
  The wild horizon, encircling round.
  How then, now, to produce a sound?
  A metal needle’ll slice the face.
  So we use thread, bound to the base
  And with each spin the web vibrates.
  Herein records the sound it makes:

    For the emperor
        recovered now
            A SPOOL
              wound round
    the oddest thing
        white like bone
            tighter than that.
                the ribbon, then,
    black, deep brown
        rough to touch
            runs between
                another bone
    and the whole thing
        trapped in glass
            square, on all sides
                or a brick
    it makes a noise:


                or so we think.

  More work to come. Now we sail north.
  Further research follows forth.

The disc stops spinning; they halt the tape
and sail homewards along the cape.

Written for LITR 1110N at Brown University.