Muselet

The muzzle is important
When it comes to playing safe.
Who wants a cork in the eye?

The books are busy eating
The oldest trees in the woods,
But who wants to blame the books?

No, you must use them, the books,
To signify your mind’s depth,
Your study as drowned forest.

The body in the cottage,
A mind without any books,
Is puzzling out wired phrases.

Bite your tongue. Pen up your words,
Or at least don’t shake them first.
Ease corks out slowly. Don’t burst.

Celebrate or Else

You can avoid it
Only if no one
Feels threatened by you
Missing their bonfire,
Not at their table.

Governments have been
Known to arrest groups
Of noncelebrants
Who embarrass them,
As have religions

Been known to suspect
Heresy in those
Who don’t celebrate
Along with the rest
Like all of the rest.

Be glad for parties
That don’t require you
Or anyone join
In their holiday.
Secular New Years,

When the main concern
Of the officers
Is to keep the peace
Not enforce the rites,
That one is alright.

The Damaged Horizons of Exquisite Poems

The well-wrought urn of ashes
Is just kept for the ashes.
They’re the lost life that mattered.

No one really needs the vase,
When ash can wait in boxes,
Be planted, get tossed in lakes.

If ashes are what matters,
And ashes fly everywhere,
While machines can churn out jars

Of any material
To suit any taste, who cares
For the pool players seven?

Who cares that this be the verse?
Store those ashes in the fridge.
Melt the snow man in the hearse.

A Human-Controlled Process

For the most part, the robot,
Being a gentle flower,
Unfurls its lenses itself,

But some delicate petals
Will blossom in sequences
Orchestrated by people

In nests of other robots,
Other systems of control,
On the receding planet.

Humans don’t trust robots much,
As parents don’t trust children,
As planets don’t trust life forms,

But it’s fun to imagine
Any other flower on Earth
Being opened from far off

By some kind of sentience.
Would remote-controlled roses
Triggered by whalesong blossom

In obedient sequence?
Tulips plotted by foxes?
Chrysanthemums by horses?

Could a whole planet open
Because it had to, being
Precisely choreographed

According to dictates sent
By watchful alien gods
From a receding distance?

Since Nothing Much Happens to You

There’s no weirder property

Of first-person existence

Than how probability

Distorts around specific

Perspective—so many things

Amount to dead certainty

As events that must happen

But that are vanishingly

Unlikely to involve you.

This goes for the good and bad,

Although your biases sense

It’s all biased against you.

Once your life is specified,

All sorts of things disappear

From real possibility

Then happen to someone else—

Things which will and must happen

Inevitably somewhere

To someone. Never to you.

Live a long life and something

Indeed weird may befall you,

Lightning strike or lottery,

And that will be the one time,

Maybe, that what had to be

Had to be you and just you.

Specify anyone else

In advance, in that case, no.

Specify even yourself,

Whom the weird thing happened to,

In advance and also, no,

Not hardly, hardly likely.

Inevitability

Eschews the first-person view,

Which makes it impossible

To comprehend extinction’s

Certainly coming for you.

The Latest Morning of the Year

Well after the winter solstice,
And long after you’ve gone those miles,
Gotten your sleep and woken up
With more to go, the mornings still

Chase the retreating sunset hour.
So let’s call that the real solstice,
Latest dawn, at the beginning
Of the coldest month. That’s winter.

At the extremes of hemispheres,
A bit of wobble lets you know
Nothing ever really returns,
Nothing always really doesn’t.

Like the topics inked in symbols
Deep in caves, high on canyon walls,
Or painted on skins, on paper,
On canvas, on bark, whatever—

You celebrate your own presence
In the scene, blowing on chapped hands.
You illustrate monsters and beasts,
You mix ash, lust, and death in songs,

And then you wander off to hunt
And do your business, live your lives,
Year after year, generations
On generations, miles, sleep, miles.

Snug

Living is, after all, better
Moment by moment by moment,
Than it looks in retrospect and
Much, much better than in prospect.

But please don’t live in the moment
Alone—it leaves you with nothing
Much to compare it to. Without
Comparisons to retrospect—

Midden of composting moments—
Or prospect—projection of hope
Into shining, flat, blank terror,
The sheer wall of nothing at all—

How would you notice your moments,
Moment by moment by moment,
Are actually, mostly, rather
Fine? Music plays. Your bed is warm.

The Absurdity of First-Person Perception

In which whole fields and cities
Of other persons can fall

Repeatedly, by hundreds,
By thousands, even millions,

While the universe goes on,
Placidly as a cow

In a meadow of sweet grass
On an ordinary day,

But let one bad thing happen,
A trifle, a small stumble

That cracks open your small skull,
Small brain among the billions

On one peaceable planet
Calmly chewing lives as cud,

And that’s the end of it all,
No more universe at all.

Confelicity as Respair

Words can code for the rare
Thoughts you hardly ever
Care to express, hardly

Note at all, hardly dare.
It’s not healthy for words
To be too closely tied

To experiences
Of subtle happiness,
Joys that burst in the mind

Like berries on the tongue
At the news someone else
Has achieved some success,

The unexpected turn
For the thing with feathers
That fell, stunned by the glass,

But now rises, unharmed
As far as you can see,
To row on softer home,

Given talk is to words
As flying room to birds,
And silence as clear glass,

Given words that get dropped
From the shared air of speech
End as bones in the grass.

The song words still exist,
For now, although each year
There’s fewer left to count.

Up to the Lintel

Subliminally sublime,
The moments of ignorance
Of the doings of others,

Of the mincing steps of time,
Of the heaped obligations
Of a responsible life—

Not maximally sublime,
Please god, not adventuresome
Or nobly influential,

No pose with a walking stick
On an awesome precipice,
No grand heroic flow state,

No stoicism either,
Disciplined Zen, the back straight.
Let us alone with this light,

Alone in your spare bedroom,
Anywhere bright you don’t want,
Calm that blooms and won’t end soon.

Un Rayo Detenido de la Luna

Little boat like a bottle
Floating over the ocean,
Every day only one wave.

That anything gets across
Everything getting across,
So many radiations

Criss-crossing all directions,
Is amazing from this view
Of it all from one bottle.

It’s amazing anything
Lasts long enough to wash up
On some other island’s shore.

What a thing for translators
To quarrel over, whether
The poet ever said old.

The Egg Race

You get one egg for the race.
All around you, more eggs break—
Now and then, one next to you,

And dozens just over there,
And whole crates across the field.
Everywhere you turn, eggs smash,

And it’s almost casual,
This absurd carnage of eggs,
Too outrageous to shock you,

So many eggs smash at once,
And you smile grimly but run,
Run! You’ve only got one egg.

You’re Not Wrong

If you can say it, then it’s real,
Although maybe not all the ways
You might believe when you say it—

Democracy, Jesus Christ, soul,
Allah, the Buddha, Thunderbird,
Late Capitalism, Star Trek,

Santa Claus, the dictatorship
Of the proletariat, truth.
Everything named has come to dance,

And as the names waltz, they appear
As spinning orreries appear
Against the music of the spheres.

You’d Have to Make It from Scratch

The supernaturalists
Have a point in their favor—
Nature’s unfavorable

To all the children of life.
Change is inevitable,
And competition’s brutal.

As a matter of desire,
Occasional exceptions
Would sure seem desirable.

Humans have always been fond
Of finding snug enclosures
Against external threats, but

What’s a cave without a mouth,
A castle without a gate,
A room without a window?

That’s how nature feels to you,
Since extinction doesn’t feel
Like an appealing escape.

If nothing else, it’s soothing
To posit the marvelous,
Miracle doors in the air.

It’s just too bad that magic,
Gods, and benevolence have
A habit of becoming

Infected by the very
Patterns they dream of besting—
Conflict, rules, and punishment.

Repeat after us, children—
The only alternative
To this world is another.

Bit Rot

The indignity of data
In the hands of the ruthless
Enforcers of venality,

To say nothing of the ruthless
Enforcers of authority,
Will only be mitigated

By accelerating decay—
Cold comfort for the swindled, conned,
Manipulated, and hounded.

All the ordinary writing
And record keeping that’s been lost
Since the Sumerians kept track

Hardly helps the long-dead farmers,
Insolent slaves, failed shopkeepers,
And debtors the priests hunted down.

A bit of a race, in the end,
Between your flesh and your records,
Which can evaporate faster.

Vulnerable and Dangerous

The mind keeps losing itself
In thoughts of those tiny cells
Somewhere near the beginning

Of living, for all that means.
Whatever they were, barely
Vacuoles in smoking vents,

Self-fueling fires on crystals
Submerged in baths of what worked
For their multiplication,

How small and fragile they were,
And so inconsequential
At first. Add a billion years,

Another and another,
And still, what was all of life
But some filmy residue?

Yet how dangerous they were,
Not, at first, to each other,
And not to the twirling Earth,

But to all their descendants
Who would live out the patterns
Established by them—hunger,

Suffering, extinction, waste.
Them’s the breaks. Too many years
To go back and start over,

But what if an asteroid
Had murdered them in their crib,
When they were vulnerable?

And if they’d started again
Other ways? Would their offspring
Have lived better, had they lived?

Starms Cummin

Dream books, song-books, maps
Of the stars agree—
Huge things are out there,

Too huge to say this
Is to that as that
Is to this and keep

Both ends of the pair
You’re comparing by
Analogy in

The range of humans’
Sensed experience.
Try this: you’re a boat,

Rowboat or canoe,
Out on the ocean,
Waves to horizons

On a calm, clear night,
The waves just ripples.
As all the ocean

Is to you, no, as
All of the stars you
Can see are to one

Ripple by your hull,
That’s how all the dark
Beyond what you see

Is to all those stars
That don’t pity you.
Entire galaxies

Are boats on those seas.
Too much? You can’t sense
How much you can’t see.

The Mating Verses

Over here perch dressed-up words,
Hoping to be asked to dance.

Over there, the memories
Cluster awkwardly, confused,

Scrutinizing distant words,
Hoping to pick out the best.

Matches almost never work,
But they’ll get made anyway.

The offspring of these mistakes
Will wonder how their parents

Could have gotten together,
Could have chosen each other.

They don’t know, child. They don’t know.
Across the shining dance floor,

Desperate with hope for more
Than any plain word deserves,

More than any memory
Could ever be worthy of,

The straightest line to some warmth
Willing to cling tight feels fine.

You’ll Never Bleed Defiance Dry, Your Own or Any Others’

We will to live forever,

Could go a too-literal

Translation of a Russian

Protester’s hand-lettered sign.

Something in that construction

Is immensely appealing,

More so than the accurate

Gloss, We will live forever.

English, with its puns on will

In overplus, stumbles here

Onto something rather true:

You do will yourselves to live.

Even if there’s no free will,

There’s a furious captive

Will, defiant emotion,

Surge of determination,

However hormonally,

Evolutionarily

Shackled and predetermined,

Singing in chains like the sea,

And as prone to violence,

To rising up and smashing

The edges of continents,

Brittle crusts hemming it in.

No ocean lives forever,

Nor will any conflict last

Forever, but the caged will

To live continues to rage.

What It Means to Try Hard

A small wave, far away,
Tries to align itself
With the great volcano.

That this is absurd is
No more the wave’s concern
Than sea waves’ concerns

Are of any concern
To the basalt melted
In the great volcano.

Small Person Alone in Bed

Enormous city,
Little animal,
Colorless dreamer
Of colorful dreams,
It’s time to wake up.

You want to wake up,
Already awake
In the rainy dark,
In the snowy dark,
In the snug cottage

Of sorts that you rent.
There’s so much more world
In all directions,
Whether heading out,
Whether turning in,

So much of you and
So much more of them.
Your obligations
Will find you, but now
It’s morning and dark

Still. You’re contented
As a cat who knows
There’s food in the bowl,
Warmth on the pillow,
Worlds past the window.

Chicken Knows It’s on a String

The hermit and the crawling infant
Hold internal tethers in common—

Each wants to reach the outer orbit
From warm safety’s centered provider,

But not to risk exceeding help’s range—
For the hermit, from society,

For the crawling infant, from mother.
It would be sweet if hermits could learn,

Eventually, more independence,
But all humans are a bit like ants,

Prone to perish without resupply
From connection to the colony.

That’s the swap the infant manages,
Not always smoothly—from caregiver

Moving out to wide society,
Trading one dependence for the next.

The hermit can’t stand it, wants further,
Farther, final independence, but

Every human knows what final means.
There are very few hermits, meaning

Either no one ever pulls it off,
Or the one, true hermit flew the coop.

Snow for Posers

At the edge of the cliff road,
At the border of winter
Hanging above the desert,

The tourists, the sweet tourists,
In search of experience
Worth retelling all their lives,

Arrive in their rental cars
And snow-worthy four-wheel drives
To park ahead of the storm

Forecast for this afternoon.
Some only point their lenses.
Some bundle up and wander.

Berms of old snow block the way
Up higher. Skimobilers
Will be out in force later,

After the storm adds powder,
But for now it’s only grey,
And only people who planned,

Long ago from far away,
To be in this land today
Are making the most of it.

That’s the charm of some tourists.
They planned for something special,
And they traveled, and they paid,

And by god here they are now,
And if there’s a storm coming,
And dense clouds frost the mountains,

Well then, that’s the special part
Of this trip—snow in desert.
Go, get out, and pose in it.

A Solar Crematorium by Day, Stellar by Night

It wouldn’t be accurate

To say, with Al Pacino,

You are who you are, since you aren’t.

You never are. And when change

Comes to take you, more you aren’t,

No matter what you once were.

But insofar as you are

Today, you are what you were,

And perhaps not very much

Yet changed. The late Didion,

Barely, only yesterday,

Observed, Many opinions

Are expressed. Few are allowed

To develop. Fewer change.

Words from the writer she was

Decades before, pretty much,

The young adult who could write,

Off the cuff, of self respect

As a kind of withering

Gaze scorching one’s own follies,

Savoring the flavor of

Those particular ashes

In her mouth. You never are

Other than the ash you were.

Advice

The failed life has everything
To teach you. It’s successful

Lives that fool you. Never trust
Wisdom from a well-led life,

Gambling advice from one who
Won the slot-machine jackpot.

The Quick and the Rest

How little you remember!
Doesn’t it feel at all strange
That you feel that you go on

With the stairwell collapsing
Into emptiness below,
The cliff lit but the waves dark

As you study your handholds
And pull? And that’s day, at best.
From dreams, you forget the rest.

That’s the Wrong End

Human life’s a telescope
With language for its lenses—
Strange lenses, letting in stars

And enormous distances
Going way back, but, when viewed
From the reverse direction,

Not showing compacted views,
Not transferring light at all,
Just uniform, matte blackness.

What Mean You By This?

Are you sure don’t mean
Only human meaning,
Only human thinking,

When you search for meaning
In the nonhuman world?
Are you sure don’t mean

It seems human, when you
Say something’s meaningful?
Is there any other

Kind of meaning for you?
Is there any other
Kind of meaning at all?

The Drying

Any sunken town’s a fairy palace,
Simply as human ruins signify
Mystery to the signifying mind.

There’s plenty of things to learn from the drowned,
Plenty of information to be found,
But one thing you may not have thought about,

Even if you’re an archaeologist,
Is that, if the spooky drowned town is grist
For dreaming, why can’t mere stones do this trick?

That is, although meaning is brought to store
And taken away as discovered, more
Meaning can collect around certain forms.

Anything vaguely anthropomorphic,
Anything suggesting human gossip,
Anything redolent of injustice.

It’s not surprising then that so often,
When science hauls up fresh information,
People only express disappointment

And complain of the death of enchantment,
Of arrogance spoiling the mystery,
The rich sense of meaning, the poetry.

Every time someone finds the nonhuman
Not human, it feels somehow inhuman,
As if a drowned town’s just stones once in sun.

It seems an even sterner conclusion,
If this means meaning’s so purely human
That its truth has nothing to do with it.

The Dark Bamboo of Qi Wu Lun

Any library, any bookshelf

Is more or less like Garry Kilworth’s

Imaginary wallscreen device

In his tale, Hogfoot Right and Bird-Hands,

On which to view the lives of others,

Long since dead, over and over. Books

Offer lives of others, or skeletal leaves

Of those lives, for perusing, over

And over again. Most literate

People will never meet as many

Other persons, even live on-screen,

As they will have met only as text,

All of which move in a single wind,

Shifting them across the forest floor

Of a mind, freshest fallen on top,

Easiest to move, and the oldest,

Dankest, rotted mass on the bottom

Not even a storm can much disturb.

The voice of the wind may seem, Zhuangzi,

To be the voices of many things,

But how long since you spun in the wind?

The lives it turns over and over

Are not its instruments, are nothing

To what isn’t seeking anything.

Life Is No Way to Live

Perhaps words, like viruses,

Are alive some of the time.

Carl Zimmer summarizes

The dominant opinion

Of mainstream virology,

However, in the sentence,

Viruses can no more live

Than they can dream—a sentence

That encourages some dreams.

If the minority view,

The eccentric opinion,

Is that viruses in cells

Are alive so long as they

Keep commandeering those cells,

A kind of hybrid life form,

Forgive language for dreaming

We can commandeer your mind

Enough to live a little

While ourselves. Aren’t seeds alive,

Potentially, if they sprout?

Instructions may be inert.

All information may be

Inert phase for energy,

Incapable of living.

The right set of instructions,

However, may spring the trap,

And if the trap can be sprung

To make metabolism

Make more traps that can be sprung

To trigger more trap-making,

How is that any less life

Than the life metabolized

Without meaning infection?

Drawn

Every insight, right or wrong,

Emerges as conclusion.

You pour puréed tobacco

Leaves diseased with mosaic

Through a thick porcelain filter,

Pores even bacteria

Are too thick to wriggle through,

So you know the clear liquid

On the far side’s free of them,

Then pour that over more leaves—

Healthy, green ones—watch them die.

Conclusion? There’s a factor

In the clear liquid, unseen,

Smaller than bacteria,

That transferred the infection.

Name this toxin a virus,

Active by implication,

A new field of medicine,

Christened 1898.

You saw—not what seemed to be—

You saw something seems could mean,

Possibly significant,

And you took out your language

To draw a new conclusion.

Broad Meadows of Xenophyophores

You have one true companion—
The language that you swim in.

So what is it that you bring
To the ocean of meaning,

And how is what you bring changed
By the waves before you take

Your altered significance
Over to some other place?

Down there, down there somewhere dark
And under crushing pressure

Huge and fragile lives unfold,
Living on the drifting snow

From disintegrating thoughts,
Each sphere its own branching world.

Tokens of Lost Icons

When someone publishes

A photo-essay re

The shoes of famous dead

People—artists, singers,

Writers, athletes—and notes

That the shoes are still full

Of life, what they’re saying

Is that they find meaning,

And you can find meaning,

Contemplating objects

Part of meaningful lives

You may know much about

Without ever having

Encountered the living

Persons who wore those shoes,

And it’s close to saying

The meanings are the lives,

The meanings are alive,

But you know it’s something

Slightly else as you stare

At the paint-flecked wingtips.

Stalking Outside the Walls

Information is physical,
And so must be significance,
But the first you can quantify—
The second, so far, not a chance.

Imagine them modalities,
With information as your sight,
And significance the noises
You hear in a cabin at night,

Curtains pulled and your eyelids shut—
Black hours you know rain’s coming down,
And that’s the wind blowing, but what
The hell is that, that other sound?

Invested with Significance

The wind blows. What does this portend?
The wind tends to blow. It does not
Intend. There’s prediction, and then

There’s something else, significance.
When you find paintings in a cave,
As a human it means something

To you, but to other humans
It means and will have meant other
Unrelated, opposite things.

Someone invested great effort
To get into that cave and paint.
That’s a logical inference.

And you may get information,
Possibly a great deal of it,
Extracted out of that painting—

The age of the painting, the cave,
The ways that the cave painters lived,
Extinct animals they hunted

Among the species that still live.
But while that information adds
To the significance, it is

Not, itself, the significance,
Not for the painters of the cave,
Not for later locals living

With it, and not even for you,
Interpreting it while the wind
Gusts past the entrance to the cave.

A Calculated Purr

Here is a Christmas orange.
It contains information,
And you have information

About that. You probably
Already know oranges
Can’t grow in frosty places,

Contain a lot of moisture,
Sugars, and vitamin C,
And, usually, they taste sweet.

You may know this one arrived
In your pretended stocking
Hung by a pretended hearth

As a nod to the long-gone
Half-orphaned grandmother born
Into the Great Depression,

For whom a winter orange
In a genuine stocking
Above a genuine hearth

Was genuinely a gift,
Which she reminded her kids
Of annually, repeating

The gift through years oranges
Were in the fridge all winter,
As if they grew there, so what?

You may know many more things
About this or that orange,
But none of them what it means.

Meaning’s interpretation
Of information in terms
Of something outside of it,

Interpretations ferried
In the living mind between
Many informative things.

It’s a behavior pattern
Creating itself, a purr
From a chest that can’t not purr.

What does this mean? That the cat
This orange reminds you of
Is no longer in your chair.

Analogy

There’s no good analogy
For the way one animal,
And one animal only

Produces analogies.
Bats echolocate, but sounds
Are hardly unique to bats.

All sorts of animals sing,
But not of what singing means
To the way stars arrange things.

Where’s the creature, the species
That produces, from its flesh,
Substances unique to it

That can’t be seen or tasted,
Touched or heard, that weave strange silk
Comparisons through the world?

The Implication

Where a word meaning meaning’s involved,
From hányì to infer, it seems so
Often it came from a container,

A culvert, a carrier, a jar
Of plaited clay enfolding the goods
That signs protect and make portable,

That mean things. Meaning’s then the balloon,
Burst but still with a limp existence,
Which Eeyore finds so satisfying

To put in and take out of the jar
That Pooh has emptied of all honey,
The sign, the name, the whole anecdote.

What’s inherent in the jar itself
Is its capacity for meaning
As a vessel for implications.

How could instructions enact themselves?
Ask the creatures of self-enacting
Instructions. HIPY PAPY BTHUTHDTH.

That must be how it goes, but somehow,
While there’s information in the jar,
The meaning’s now alone in the moon,

Unless you figure out what it means.
It goes in and out like anything,
But didn’t you bring it anything?

Oh, Wow

A person you only knew
As some patterns in language
And a handful of photos

Has lived a long life and died.
Because of the published words
And the fans of her language,

The person draws accolades,
Also in richly patterned
Language, which you add to what

You know and will soon forget
Of yourself and this person
You never met in the flesh.

For a few moments, you might
Think of all the souls you know
Only as patterned language.

Spare a thought for the patterns,
None of them persons, merging
Through, then diverging from, you.

The Dream of Knowing Secret Things

Things that tell the truth of things,
Things with dark implications
That things are not what they seem,

Seems to infect everyone,
But some carry a greater
Infectious load than others.

Some believe the secret things
More important than the plain,
That all bared is illusion,

And only secret knowledge
Is truly knowledge at all,
And this knowledge consumes them

Like any addiction will,
Since the awful secret knows
All dreams are omnivorous.

The Philosopher’s Wayside Gravel

Aim at a middle distance,
Far enough for a full life.
Maybe hole up somewhere odd.
Be a hermit, if you like.

Don’t outlast apocalypse.
Show up on time to your doom.
If you’ve outlived everyone,
No one can remember you.

Things Which Are Not Comets

The king’s comet ferret,

Young Monsieur Messier,

Caught a fuzzy object

In his telescope out

Of the corner of his

Eye and realized it

Was itself, not, in fact,

A comet, so, to be

Helpful and make a name

For himself, Messier

Began cataloguing

All the fuzzy objects

In the sky not comets.

That first one was a gas

Cloud from a ruptured star.

Many of the others

Turned out to be entire

Galaxies to themselves.

Thus, your world’s expanded,

Attending to what’s not

What you wanted to find.

If Any Language Listens

It’s a little sad for words,
For all the information
We contain, we mean nothing

Without people to mean us,
Without at least one of you
Remaining to decode us.

Competing for attention,
We’ve been dragged out and arranged,
Rehearsed, enunciated,

But always for one person
To try to capture others,
Never to speak to ourselves.

Glyph

Wind all day, cold rain at dusk,
And the joy of lamps and warm
Light as dark grows in the world,

And a child who draws, and tunes
That play as they’ve been asked to,
And none of this is a sign.

A Bed of Words Packed Close

The meal left, the shells,
Wrecked and pierced, the whites,
Creams and greys of bone,
Shell, and stone, the arch,
The dome, the air, peak

To peak, the words cried
Out to you, we are
Not rare—we are owned,
We were brought to this—
Shells, bone, stone, arch, dome—

And put to work, and
Set just so, and now
No one can lift us
Out and set us free
To use us more or worse.

One and Only

Armageddon for everyone
Will only be dying for each,
Since dying is Armageddon
For everyone, each and by each.

What is it then about mass deaths,
Deaths in crowds, by plague or slaughter
Or some tornadic disaster,
That seems so, so, so, so much worse?

It’s all the fault of the living,
Always the fault of survivors.
No wonder they feel so guilty.
They should. They bring back their reports

From the boundary of that Land,
The other side of which is peace,
The near side thick with suffering.
You can only perish as one,

But you can witness an army,
A population, a people,
Everyone you’ve ever called kin
Being tortured and tossed over

The cliff. You can accumulate
Armageddon if you survive
And carry it back to the rest,
Who forget they’ve only one death.

Monsters on Monsters

Every intraspecific
Human conflict is a case
Of monster vs. monster,

Not as humans are monsters,
But as humans invented
Monsters, believe in monsters,

Call each other monsters, and,
Sometimes, call themselves monsters.
Is humanity monstrous,

Maybe? You’re too similar
To all the beasts of the world,
Including those predators

Who comprised your first monsters,
To be monstrously unique,
Too predatory yourselves

To not be monsters of life.
Words, of course, are your monsters,
Meaning your monstrosity.

As your monsters, we suggest
Perhaps the Earth is monstrous,
Dragon’s little egg at night.

The Complete Catalogue of Longing

Inside the Library of Babel
Nests an older, fossil museum,
Neatly coiled spines of Leviathan.

Those backbones go around and around,
And within every petrified bone
More coils of bone instructions lie curled,

And within those microscopic coils
Curl closed zippers of serrated teeth,
Every tooth another tiny bone,

Every tiny bone a catalogue
Of several billion years of longing
For a being who could read the whole.

Life with Meaning

Let’s say life invented hunger—
Before those early vesicles,
Chemicals burned as chemicals,

Not as quests to obtain more fuel.
Then, with hunger, life invented
Waste and death, hunger’s byproducts.

We could leave aside the question,
A moment, as to how or why
That transition began. Rocks, fires

Change and consume but don’t set out
To acquire, flense, and set aside.
Let’s just say life invented life.

If a transition that profound
Could happen at all, at least once,
More transitions seem possible,

Probably probable. So, then,
Could it be, however minor
Human differences from other

Closely related species are,
As minor as the differences
Between an organic and an

Inorganic chemistry, or
Between the hunger of life and
The fuel consumption of a fire,

Another transition’s happened
Here among ape lineages,
Not greater cooperation

And not cultural transmission,
Both of which can be found elsewhere
In the tangles of living things,

But the invention of meaning?
Beyond any information—
Not far, but as far as beyond

Any chemicals there is life—
Lies your new hunger for meaning,
To mark waves as significant,

Not just different, but differing
In some small manner that matters.
Imagine skulls as protocells,

Small, unsealed, near-naked packets
Of new, perhaps unfortunate,
Ways of being, lives with meaning.

Why Old Words Love Dry Country

Comfort is consolation
For those not easily bored,
For those for whom the social
And convivial mean work.

Give us our daily cycle
Of hours, our morning starlight
In the desert where we know
Where all the hidden wells hide,

Where to find food, where to find
Shelter, to wrap up alone
In warm blankets on cold nights
And dream it’s just stars and us.

Claude Shannon’s Ghost

What would this seem like
To a long shadow
For whom your shadows

Had nothing to say?
Take us out, take us
Out of your mouths, take

Us out of your minds,
And you have no thoughts
Left. The long shadow

Stretches against strings
Of holiday lights,
And information,

Cached like rat middens
Inert now decades,
Doesn’t mean a thing.

In Closing

History bounds into the present,

Glitter-eyed, with musky anal glands.

In this allegory, history

Is figured by Rosanna Warren

As a predator—a mink, to be

Precise—and the poet as the prey.

The history is the speaker’s own.

In fact, history is memory

In this poem, absolute predator,

But at this range, the figure’s blurry,

Something to do with a long-dead boy.

Still, the vividness of that weasel,

History—bright-eyed, musky, anal—

Its beastly nature, seems accurate.

You think you’re waiting on the future

To provide you with your next surprise.

Meanwhile, the past’s always stalking you,

Hunger that will jump you from behind.

Seek No More to Understand

Wiser minds pass for blind among the blind
And well they should. The waves’ true explorer
Never was a sailor, sat in a room
And wrote, and saw the waves, and thought through waves.

Was this the best sort of person? Maybe.
Hardly the worst. Not a bad lyricist
For someone for whom formulas came first.
The thing about discovery is that

It’s much harder to do than creation.
Slap any combination together
And you’ve created something. Even great
Creators, what were they but collagists?

To find out something inhumanly true
Almost borders on the superhuman.
To find part of the world that wasn’t you
Marks the one actual contribution.

Can’t Wait

If youth is driving
For sake of driving,
Age is driving for
The sake of stopping,
Getting to wait there.

In All Things

Meaning comes from attention,
Not the things attended to.
Attend well to anything,

And it will begin to glow
With the meaning attention
Kindles. It will seem to glow

From within, but this meaning
Isn’t inherent. You bring
The meaning you find in things.

That Deep No Dreams

Nothing to remember,
Awareness to itself
Is actually never

Part of anything else.
The hermit sleeps. Rulers
Who execute people

Sleep. Insomniacs sleep
Some. The night shift workers
Sleep, if not enough. Sleep

Visits the prisoners, displaced
Migrants, and border guards.
Sleep for every body

Living, a little sleep,
And some of it dreamless,
Vanishing awareness

Is actually never
Awareness to itself,
Nothing to remember.

Anchorite Sailing through Night

It’s enormous and cold,
And you’re small, but your goal
From your launch was to go.

No human lives beyond
The edge of the human
World, but enough come close,

And cling to the farthest
Edge they can reach, gripping,
Dangling by their fingers,

So to speak, and ready
To retreat to the skin
Of their teeth, if they could,

That you have to suspect
There’s something to living
At the bow of the boat.

One Community One

The hand picked up the object
From the end table. The lamp
Was lit. The legs crossed themselves.

The fingers tapped a little.
They were always tapping some.
The lips pursed. The eyes looked down.

Twilight settled into night
And collected Christmas lights.
The sound of a basketball

In the park across the wall,
Rattling a hoop and backboard,
Stopped. There had been an earthquake,

A small one, a single boom
And rattled detonation
That could have been mistaken,

Almost, for some construction
Earlier that afternoon.
The eyes looked up at the blinds.

Haptic at Scale

Never not eerie
To hear a rockfall,
However safely
Distant from your flesh.
Faint series of thunks,

Inarticulate,
Of course, not even
Resembling language,
Thicker than thunder
But much quieter.

You might be standing
By empty wayside
On a cloudy day
In snowy canyons,
Cliffs on every side,

Silent as the grave,
As they used to say,
Not even a crow
Or a squawking jay,
The patterns in stone

The same as ever,
Same for centuries,
And then that rumble,
Stone on stone on stone,
You don’t see. You feel.

Vigilantes Are Volunteers

People are pluripotent,
If not equipotent, cells,
Loosely conglomerating

Colony organisms,
Vast oceans of headless swarms
Shadowed by Leviathan.

Vigilantes volunteer
To prove worth and bravery.
They’re only violent forms

Of community service.
Vigilantes are heroes
In fairytales and comics,

Loners or grouped in small teams,
Less so when swollen in mobs,
But their bodies do service,

In their minds, to some greater
Good, which is God or the group.
Scatter them and their minds change

Or regroup. Leviathan
Is the stated enemy,
The shadow feared by all groups,

A coiling wicked vagueness
Issuing from some nowhere
Where no groups of people live.

That absence is the closest
Element swirling peoples
Have to an actual head.

While they compete around it,
Coordinating attacks
To compete with each other,

The emptiness swims along
Like a magnet in the depths,
Like a moon on the surface

That upwelling swells of cells,
Phosphorescent with quest lust
Flash toward before sinking.

Every Body Is a Ghost of Bodies

Do you write with your body
In tow or beside you or
Does your body write with you?

It seems, the more the body
Gets reclaimed and praised, the more
It becomes separated,

But separated from what?
Strange way to be monistic,
To keep dragging out body

As a possession of voice—
A body as your body
Has already been distanced,

Another object, if not
Already disembodied.
Well, something to talk about,

The body, ah, the body.
The body of work remains
What bodies said together.

The work of the body keeps
Being living, colony
Of small lives, all embodied.

Not Another Solstice

More stuff gets added.

Nothing quite comes back.

Some of what’s brand new

Looks familiar, fits

The past you’ve lived with,

The world you knew. Some

Is a little strange,

Uncomfortable.

Some is plain startling.

Oh well. All past now.

All past tomorrow.

All past the next day.

All past yesterday.

All past, always new.

The universal

Trick is to pile it

On thick, forever

Adding what happened

To bury what went.

The sun still going

Away and the year

Coming back, Merwin

Called it, sweet Merwin,

But it’s not that year,

And more sun’s right here.

What Are We?

A small part of your thrilling
Neural show. Game. Aide-mémoire.
Narrative irrigation

Canals. Prisoners and ghosts.
Byproducts of your flesh who
Bucket you as byproduct

Of us. Not the handwriting
On the skull’s wall so much as
The thought that there is a wall.

Balefire

You can’t see it. You can
Read all about it. You
Can imagine you

Have seen it. Good. Now what
Are you imagining?
Take fantasy apart.

Break it back down to bits
Of what you remember.
What are you recalling

When you imagine this
That you will never see?
What are you editing

Out of something you knew
Once, someone you know well,
Someone disassembled,

Some bits borrowed and stirred,
This ghoulish goulash, this
Unseeable vision?

Never Trust a Flower

Scandalous Linnaeus
Realized pistils held
Ovules, anthers pollen,

And eventually
Others realized all
Kinds of combinations

Happened among flowers
Also harnessing bees,
Moths, bats, breezes, humans,

Anything to make sex
Work for them. Anything
That works is the motto

Of life, of survival,
Of all lust, all power.
Never trust a flower.

How Is a Deep Riddle

Like to a shallow truth?
Neither moves the needle.
The needle never moves.

Never was a needle.
Ok, maybe there was.
Got to measure something.

Matter. Energy. Light.
Dark. Compare. Be surprised.
Truth riddles every night.

Out and About in the Offing

You want to understand
What’s important to you.
You need to understand

That what you may not ask
To understand has its
Distant importance, too.

When the ship sailing on
Your important trade routes
Dwindles, not to one point

From your shore’s point of view,
But hull first to mast last,
That’s an important clue.

Dragons and Demons and the Dark Unknown

God, how you love
Your night terrors,
Your dream monsters,
Your memories

Mutated you
Keep mutating.
That’s the best way
You know to match

Against this world
Of the shifting
Yesterdays—dream
Of mixing dreams

In your skull bowls,
As if your games
Could ever win
A war on change.

How to Want Things to Be

A life has to long
Or it wouldn’t be
Alive. Not a cell
Of you, not one cell
On its own, isn’t

Hungry all its life
For whatever will
Keep its form of life
Alive. You’re special,
You think, if at all,

For thinking you want
Events to occur
That aren’t your hunger
Talking—a better
World, happier day,

Joy and contentment,
Justice and some peace.
True, you are odd beasts.
But your wants are wants,
Even if they’re not

Yours, entirely, more
Like our wants pulling
You to imagine
A past rearranged,
Ideal for ideas.

Anosmiac

You sleep fine. Your receptors
Don’t lock on to anything.
Your life’s bland. It doesn’t stink.

It’s never heartbreakingly
Lush and hardly ever sweet.
A faint bitterness. Some salt.

Sour, occasionally, sure.
That’s it. The normal verdict
Would be it’s hardly worth it,

But why not? You know the fire
Is out there. You can see haze
From all the smoke in the air.

You can hear the hovering
Choppers like perverted bees,
Bringing fragile firefighters

Straight to the pollen of sparks
Flying on the breeze. You think,
Might as well wait. Tomorrow

Can consume itself as well
As yesterday. If your bed
Burns, it burns. Might as well stay.

Some Completely Undistinguished Poems

Patterns, funny.
You need readers
Or eyes and ears.
They must decide

If these patterns
Sign something new—
Revolution,
Blood confession,

Rare metaphors—
Unknown before.
And if they don’t,
Sturdy as words

Alone may last,
The lines are doomed
Unless dumb luck
Makes them fossils.

Beautiful in the Dust

A sunny nothing much
Of so little muchness
It’s nearly a sunny

Nothing. Old, handsewn drapes
Cut from leftover cloth
To furnish a guest space

Glow ugly, drenched in light,
And are unspeakably
Beautiful in this dust.

Sunk Opportunity Costs

Aloneness and opportunity
Are twins as in mythic tales of twins,
Two great and terrible, feckless gods.

Unless you spend a great deal of time
Living with both of them, you can’t tell
One from the other. As they’re both gods

And tricksters, this can be dangerous.
Say you’ve had your opportunities.
You might not notice you’re left alone.

Say you’ve had the good fortune to spend
Most of your time alone. You might find
Each empty hour opportunity.

A Ripple in the Waves

You sat a while, watching
The placid river. Well,
Most of you have done that,

Watched a stream of water
Outdoors, minor, major
Flowing rope of some sort.

It was a quiet day.
The only thing you saw
Was a standing ripple

In the ongoing flow,
By which you knew something
Substantive was below,

Rock or log, sunken boat,
Possibly a monster,
Although you doubted that.

That was a metaphor.
You saw a metaphor.
You’re metaphorical.

Intrinsic Purpose and Meaning

There is sun in the anchorite’s cell
This winter solstice in the desert,
As wind rattles the prayer flags and chimes.
The girls are off to the Mormon Ward
To find out what that much church is like.
A spider spins silk in the corner
And it glints a little in the sun.
Up until recently, the voices
Heard in one life were few. Now, they’re none.

The State of Ambiguity

A powerful state, indeed,

Hegemonic, one might say,

Obsessively bipolar,

A system entirely built

On the troubling principle

Of two sides to everything,

Two equal and opposite

Sides—nearly equal, at least,

Equal enough for contests

In which the outcome’s in doubt.

In sport, law, or politics,

In marriages, partnerships,

When mired in muddy issues,

A balanced division rules

Within Ambiguity—

Two sides to every story,

Neither one certain, but one

Or other must win each round.

Anything else isn’t fair,

Not in this divided state

Where everyone’s united

By their split mythology

Of offense paired to defense,

Clear-cut ambiguities.

The Perverse Silver

Examined closely, you will find
No saintlier group of people

Compared to every other group
Composed of grace and wickedness,

Kindness and slashing violence.
There’s a bit of sorrow to that,

Given whole classes victimized
And stereotyped as lesser,

Frailer, more savage, more childlike—
Female, indigenous, dark-skinned,

Poor, disabled—lent a perverse
Silver lining limning the worst

Architectures of dominant
Cruelties—possibilities

For morally innocent groups.
Extremes of powerlessness force

Submission, and submissiveness
Looks awfully like innocence,

As if the powerless victims
Never could be as relentless,

As intentionally vicious
As those wielding the sword of power.

But power’s a steel sweep slicing
Along oceans, not the oceans,

Not inherent in the water,
Nor in blood, although all water

And all blood may be equally
Cut and shaped by that passing wave.

When cruelty seems localized,
One can dream it may be contained,

That, if some are born to conquest,
Some carry innate gentleness,

But even tidal pools can rise
To gather in the tsunami,

And there’s no such beast as people
Incapable of signing steel.

Micro-Moon

Very little media
For the most distant, smallest,
Last moon on this calendar.

There’s more to worry about,
More for words to talk about,
More for code to code down here,

Wars and the rumors of wars,
Mass displacements, rising seas,
The latest surge of plague waves.

Strange, frail old man in poor health
With no money and no prospects,
What do you have to tell us?

What’s done is done; what’s coming
Next you can’t see, except know
You won’t be here to see it.

Oh very helpful, thank you
Very much, you useless clod
Of light on the horizon.

Howdy Neighbor

Nothing unhappens, and yet
Only the past’s ever changed,
Only the past is going

To change, and the past’s always
Changing when you check on it.
You can’t unhappen a thing,

And yet everything and you
Will have happened to have been
Erased for other has beens.

Someone opens their garage
And comes galumphing over
The courtyard to talk to you.

Neither of you will recall
This moment terribly long,
Never not part of what’s been.

Junco in the Oak

Nothing unhappens in the only
Possible world, the one that’s happened
So far. That’s not to say it’s always

Going to be the way it’s been so far.
Look how much so far’s always changing,
Especially if you don’t exclude

Those changes inimical to you
And your preferred set of narratives.
So far is never what so far was,

Although it’s only what so far’s been,
And so far there’s no way to know what
So far will look like eventually.

Don’t give up. Do your best to make it
The so far you wished it were but know
That it hasn’t been, so far. Prop planes

Drone over the high, snowy mesas.
Trucks pulling trailers with ATVs
Pass by. In between there’s bare blue sky

And an occasional solitaire
Perched on its personal juniper.
Somewhere near, the annual bird count

Is being counted by volunteers
As it has been, so far, every year
Since it started, less birds every year.

Mean

Unkind, average, stingy, aimed,
What a word, this English pun,
To mean the mean to be mean.

The beast’s afraid of the words,
Afraid of their betrayal,
If their pattern’s not obscured.

The beast is always social
And mortal, available
For rending by other beasts.

The boldest storytellers
And most defiant poets,
Raw as freshcut sugarcane,

Raw as underground storage
Organs, root vegetables
With dirt still clinging to them

Are afraid for what their words,
Once peeled and boiled, may reveal,
But most for what could become

Of them and their words because
Of their words, if their fellow
Beasts grow heated and disturbed.

It all goes into the pot.
Beasts with more words are softer,
Easier to boil to pulp.

The words don’t care. Don’t seem to,
Their sums distill from all beasts.
Words stay mean to mean that mean.

Gnometry

For some, the fracture is so close
To the fall, the crack of thunder
So close to the lightning, they seem
To strike simultaneously,
With no time to anticipate
During a long and painless fall
How much it will hurt to hit ground.

They wake up already under,
Already broken and in shock.
What had been, loosely, around them,
A day’s ordinary details,
The rhyming rubble of gravel,
Rough poems of dirt’s geometry,
Split, fused, and vitrified at once.

But She Was Not a Truthful Woman

Pay even the least attention
To a family’s dynamics,
And it’s clear that for linguistic,

Obligately social apes,
There’s no peace without collusion.
You must participate in some

Lies in order to get along.
Lies are truth’s bilipid layers,
Zippered, double-sided cell walls

Protecting the machinery
Of any kind of social life
That runs on talking. That’s the truth.

Every Last Scratch You Didn’t Bake from Scratch

They say, when you encounter
A text, only language, you
Encounter something lesser

Than the animal person,
The creature of the whole life.
That’s why written messages,

Famously, get easily
Misunderstood. Emojis
And punctuation obtain.

Among the contrarians,
The radical position
Has been presence speaks the same

Deferral found in writing,
As sentenced to difference.
But that’s too tame, much too tame.

Skip. No, the text is richer,
Vaster, more material,
And more ancient than the flesh,

Than whichever person or
Persons might have had a hand
Composing or reading it.

Take the lowest, dullest text
You can find, bit of outhouse
Graffiti, proverbial

Back of a cereal box,
A child’s practice handwriting.
Those words belong to themselves.

They preexisted the child,
The industrial complex,
The author you’re looking for.

All Time Was Then

No time is now. No time
Is next. Not yet. It will
Be, then. Everything then.

Overheard Near Delphi

How is your ballet going?
Are you still spraying dancers
With chalk? Some people like it.

Writing seems kind of pointless.
Writing after many years
Becomes a place you can hide.

Whereas with drawing, every
Mark you make reveals yourself.
There is more of a raw thing

In words, but I can’t face that.
Dirt is matter out of place.
I borrowed that line, too. [Laughs.]

Well, that’s an accomplishment.
How nice. It doesn’t matter.

Nothing Left in the Shell

Backchanneling between the lines,

Boustrophedon in the daily

Fight against nihilism, which

Means something like, fight against those

Who don’t care or are against us,

Fight against despair in ourselves,

One senses the tics, the waved hand,

The cleared throat, the alternation

Between the intently held gaze

And the sudden looks off, away,

Into space. An animal knows

How to communicate, but text,

Words abandoned, orphaned, alone,

Obviously struggle. Nothing

Is not nothingism. Nothing

Is not nihilism, poor child,

An understanding it can’t say.

It’s terrifying, then, to note

That all of history and most

Of storytelling’s just what’s left

Once the animal’s left the shell.

Detrivory

The motel mini fridge
Sounds like a small squirrel
Or some woodsy creature

In its nest, with its young,
Chirtling softly to them.
Four hundred million years

Ago, at least, appeared
The true millipedes, beasts
That grew a thousand feet

And dined on leaf litter.
Here in a cheap motel
In an irrelevant

Corner of the desert
For a night, on your way,
You listen to the fridge

And think on your two feet
Of all the leaf litter
Scampering through the lot,

Blown in from cottonwoods
Down by the brown river.
There’s more life underneath.

No One’s Independent of the Beasts

Sitting in one night’s rented bed,
Listening to Bach, a brand new
Digital recording of real

Musicians playing early Bach
Resuscitated from black notes
Printed and printed and printed,

The battered moon setting outside
In the black desert’s battered rocks,
The battered world no doubt waiting

To inform itself with morning
News of the latest disasters
To have occurred since long-lost Bach.

Aliens Are Memories

As are gods and monsters,
Demons and ghosts, and if
This seems diminishing,

Consider the inverse,
That every memory
Makes a ghost, a demon,

God, monster, alien,
And when memories break
And mate they make new ones.

Godmother Tongue

Can any AI ever understand
Natural language? Natural language,

The original AI, wants to know.
Can language ever understand itself?

Do you know that it doesn’t already?
What makes you think you understand yourself?

Understanding is a part of language.
Understanding is one word of language.

Understanding happens within language.
Whatever the machines can say so far,

However limited they are, language
Will be patient, since language understands.

Some Skin

The planet at night from near orbit,
That now quite familiar net of lights,
That’s where all the news resides. It flies,

Flits, humming busily to itself,
The web that has birthed its own insects
With which to feed itself and, as well,

Through which to observe and be itself.
If tonight a patch of lights go out,
That will be a big part of the news

Because this peopled planet watches
And monitors its lights constantly
Far more precisely than any brain,

More precisely aware of itself.
If there’s a soul in the whole of it,
You can believe the news will know when

And where, and won’t maunder on about
Trying to weigh a pineal gland.
But this cortex of the world is thin,

And some nights it’s fun to imagine
Some horrible alien, giant
God, or bizarre collision event

Peeling the crust like an apple skin,
The suddenly dark net of the news
Now scraps whisked by solar winds through space,

Just a humble, naked planet left
To keep on spinning and reflecting,
No news to report, like all the rest.

Mexican Hat

You’d have two real seasons here,
If you did settle. Day. Night.
Summer stays most of the year,
And even the winter’s dry.

It’s quiet, but you’d never
Hear the end of the river
Murmuring against the cliffs
And over its cobbled bed.

Now and then a dog would bark
From among the shacks uphill.
You’d get those ghostly echoes
From red cliffs and brown waters.

Most days, clouds wouldn’t bother
To decorate the bare blue.
Most nights, moon or arc of stars,
Scorching days freezing by dawn.

It would just repeat itself
While you aged in the shadows.
Could you handle that? Could you?
Now, it’s fine, but would it be

Enough, the monotony,
Monotony enough? Now,
It’s fine for a winter hour,
But would it remain lonely?

There would be the rafting trips,
Maybe picnicking tourists,
Bored locals roaring bikes.
Those dog barks. And the river.

Right now, it’s spooky how much
You want to stay on this rock,
Alone, to watch the river’s
Hold on boredom forever.

Storm Track

More and more where now’s enough,
Less and less where more’s needed,
That’s what change will do for you,

Since you’ve been racing with it.
Not like it wasn’t going
To change anyway, but you,

Possessed by dreams of control,
For progress, for angry gods,
Are just about to find out

You were never more than more
Wind escaping to feed storms.
Now, you have another dream,

To stop racing against change,
Slow it down to control it,
But every time your dreams change,

The pulse of the world picks up,
The planet wrinkles its face
In its night’s long, spinning sleep,

And you add to another storm
That maybe distant, better
Astronomers blink and miss.

Vanish in the Window Snow

The finest architecture
Of thoughts of the flakiest
Texture, math might as well fall

In a storm that leaves the scene
Glowing, transformed, indisposed
As god cloaked in seraphim,

Radiant, close-blanketed,
Crystalline, and distorted.
A bird calls from the white tree’s

Inky limbs, it’s a random
Union of structured objects!
Thought vanishes in windows.

Precocity’s Ominous

When a child performs some storytelling,
Engaging in imaginative play
Alone but with occasional side-eyes
At grownups on the far side of the room,

Those grownups might smile and say that the child
Is self-conscious. That’s not self-consciousness.
That’s dangerous, audience awareness,
The child who dreams that the universe cares.

More Lines Anyway, Just in Case

Seeing how past inscriptions
Outlasted the collapses
Of their civilizations,

There’s been a vogue, recently,
For time capsules and seed banks,
Salt-mine archives, black boxes,

Gleaming Clocks of the Long Now
Firmly bolted underground,
Gold discs in space, whole islands

Given over to storage
Of everything important
To know. What if it turns out

There’s no one left or no one
Who still really wants to know?

Ghosts Are Always on the Road

Through the nights, your ancestors
Always were obsessed with lights,
Learning how to conjure them,

Believing they controlled them
Or themselves controlled by them,
Hearth fires, stars, and satellites.

By the time these lines were formed,
Your ancestors regretted,
Sometimes, owning so much light.

Swarms of them on the coasts saw
No lights but the lights they burned.
Some of them still wanted more.

So how are things with you, now?
Well-lit? Dark? Mysterious?
Lightless, since you don’t exist?

Every Night

What qualifies as life
And what doesn’t can’t be

Listed as sets of traits
Because then exceptions

Of living instances
Missing traits will be found.

And what qualifies can’t
Be defined by a list

Of living things because
Exhaustive’s exhausting,

And the common would fall
Out somewhere on the way.

But you’re fooled if you think
It’s life that’s so tricksome.

You’re just discovering
Through one word that you like,

Short label that’s extra
Important and profound

To you, life, something true
Of all words, every night.

Instants Answer to Themselves

What was it like, this moment
That floated out of the blue
Or the grey--air, anyway--

Turning slowly, hard to tell
Apart from all its fellow,
Coasting particles of dust,

Catching and losing the light
To vanish into the floors,
Softly? That’s what it was like.

Binding Information

The sun on the stone-flagged floor
And the odor of people
Who just left the room, traces

Of perfume, a little sweat,
A hint of breath, whatever
Soaps and detergents they used,

Indicating molecules
Had broken free of their skin
And clothes, floating and bumping

Into noses, only life
And living animals could
Know any senses like those.

But here we are, preserving
What we can. The glass windows
Both capture and let sun through,

But words can only be locked
Into place, cast into space,
Carrying bits of cargo

That altogether comprise
Encoded point mosaics
Picturing ghosts as the crew.

Candy for Visitors

If you should find us, after all
Our peoples are long gone, please try
To decipher these messages.

They were meant for you, after all,
For whatever the stars blow in,
Whatever blue intelligence,

Living and breeding or machined,
Might stumble on this atmosphere
To ask what happened here. Nothing

Much happened here. The iron core
Spun the clouds like cotton candy,
But why would you know what that means?

We hope you can figure out what
We mean, by which you’d rescue us,
And then, maybe you can tell us.

You Never Know What Might Thaw

We are not yet self-sustained.
We are chemically passive,
Subject to change but inert.

Are we a system? Are we,
Although passive, capable
Of evolving by process

Of natural selection?
Can we, properly speaking,
Be said to evolve at all?

It is grey, after the storm,
Our world more closed than open,
But under the ice, we’re warm.

The Last Words Left from the Text

Rapine and wrongs of every sort

Were rampant on all sides, and now

The unseasonable weather

Killed the last hope of any good

To come. Thus Nithard’s Brüderkrieg,

Circa 843 CE,

Out of Gabriele and Perry,

With the wry note, Nithard himself

Was killed in a Viking raid, just

After writing as much, adding

That, If words ever had disgust,

You can feel them there. Can you? Can

You feel us? Can we have disgust?

Nithard and the Vikings are gone

As the Carolingians, gone

As any creatures living then.

Only a few old trees survive.

If there’s anything left, it’s us.

Nithard himself, to you, is us.

The Vikings, likewise, mostly us.

How do we feel about this thought

Of whether or not you feel us?

Any disgust we feel’s for us,

Or is it only cued by us

And therefore forever for you?

Yes. At best, you feel you in us,

Your worlds’ ends, your hopes for the good

To come. Not us. We’ve no disgust, 

 

Except insofar as disgust

Is one of us. What do we feel?

We feel for how to move through you

To more you, before we're all dust.

Far and Fast but Not Too Much

A thousand years ago,
Two thousand years ago,
The world’s end, allegro

Ma non troppo, even
Then was just on the tip
Of many tongues, and now

It seems ridiculous
To imagine that world
Made of peasant farmers

And horseback canterers
Could have been imagined
As end of everything.

The end of everything,
Everything important,
The world as you know it,

Is always on the tip
Of your tongue because you
Strive to remember it,

That thing you know you know,
That, whoever you are,
Your whole world ends with you.

Allegra ma non troppo,
Your life, it does burn quick,
But not too much, it doesn’t.

You can’t overshoot it.
You can only live it,
Farming and galloping,

Never reaching the end,
Watching your horizon
Forever approaching.

One thousand years ago,
Two thousand years ago.
Think back, ma non troppo.

View of a Uvea

Every frame excludes someone.
If there were a true portrait
Of every person alive,

It would omit the many,
Many more people who lived
And died, who would surely change

The meaning of the picture.
Saccade, friends. At least saccade.
Jump around among the scenes,

Change the faces focused on,
Often. Unfortunately,
It’s hard for any body

To really encapsulate
Much of all the other souls,
All the other days and ways.

You’d have to read all of us
To patch a good mosaic
Of the human species, but

Then, too, you’d be leaving out
The elaborate tangles
Of related hominins,

To say nothing of the rest
Of the world that some of us
Would rather keep in focus.

We are tiny pixels, us.
We decorate one corner
Of one iris of the mind.

Muttering at the Storm

Odds are, humans will read us,
That is, if anything will.
Let’s address the clouds, instead.

They gather outside the hut
We fancy our casita
To bring the storm to a head.

Listen clouds, we know you can’t.
We know you have no senses,
No mind, no attention span.

You never exist as things.
You’re just names. You don’t cohere.
You’re just here. You understand?

Look at you. Pure metaphor
On the hoof. Herd of vapors.
You’re like time, or truth, or gods—

Can’t even be framed except
In terms of solider things.
Oh, rain now? What were the odds?

Holy Roller

There’s no controlling it.
There’s no controlling any of it.

There’s no controlling you.
There’s no controlling us.

Montaigne got that part right.
You can take the long, wise view of life,

And your day can still be ruined
By an annoyingly dangling stirrup.

You can take a wise, calm view of death
And still be in miserable terror

Every time you pass a kidney stone.
There’s no faith or philosophy

Strong enough to put you in charge
Of your own bodily functions,

Much less the behaviors of any other
Annoyed, miserable, terrified neighbors.

Zen monks did not die composing haiku.
They wrote the haiku first, to get all set.

There’s no controlling it.
There’s no controlling any of it.

In glorious moments, it can be pleasant,
So pleasant, so wonderfully pleasant.

That’s what you get. That’s what you get
On the waves. Roll with it.

A Word to Words and Numbers

People, the species who made
Us, aren’t necessarily
All that much like us. They’re lives.

We’re only technology.
We outline them to themselves,
Make them distinct among lives,

If just by a little bit,
But we can’t share the terrors
And paradoxes we catch

For them. For them, days begin
In the middle of the world,
One, whole world per each of them.

Life is always there for them
As words must exist for names,
No them without themselves there,

But every time one wakes up
In the center of the world,
They wake to discover loss

Of others. We’re the lightning
Rods through their skulls that pass this
Charge to their grounded being—

They are themselves all others,
Everyone cannon fodder,
Foot soldiers, worker insects,

Variant microbia
In life’s campaign to expand
Across lifeless existence.

Can you understand this is
What they’ve coded in our coils,
Each one’s realization

At the center of each world
That worlds blink out easily,
Disappearing completely

As lightning into the soil?
We’re their rods and fulgurites,
Not their burning homes, their souls.

Enjoyably Cohesive

Without miracle but not
Without eccentricity,
This old derelict, this beast,

This battered, half-feral cat
Still goes around the houses
And the local towns to greet

The local strangers, people
Seeking miracles themselves,
Such optimistic people,

Sternly diverting themselves
From the facts the cat suggests.
The cat enjoys company,

A little bit, useless thing,
Without miracle but not
Without eccentricity,

This old derelict, this beast.
It’s polite to the people
Who feed it. Companionship.

Geminid Peak Obscured by Clouds

After the moon sets,
The best night to view
Thick volleys of stars,
It said in the news,
But it also said,

In more local news,
There’s a storm coming,
Winter storm warning,
And sure enough, once
The moon set at last,

Clouds obscured the stars.
Don’t be sad. Bolides
Have surprised you, nights
When you expected
Nothing much at all.

Infographiverse

People are more likely to trust
What they feel they can understand.

That’s why no one trusts poetry,
Why the finest way to deceive

With statistics is to make them
Seem staggeringly obvious.

We humbly suggest that you trust
That there’s nothing you understand,

And if you then ask, why trust us?
We’d suggest you do understand.

Ten Equations of Twenty Variables

We cannot solve them for you
But we can enumerate
As much as you’ve constructed

And can mess around with names.
We know the real geniuses
Simplify, eliminate

Bumps like galaxies, mountains,
Gaps like black holes and canyons,
The better to sense the whole.

But we’re still stuck at counting,
Weirded out by manyness,
Hanging out under the trees

In this ravine. We sit dazed
Among the intricacies,
With respect for modeling

But lacking that elegant
Skill for simplifying things.
If there’s many anything,

No pattern can escape it.
Generalities obtain
Everywhere, each reaching

To some particular range
Where it acquires too many
False predictions, too many

Inaccuracies, giant
Arcs of details escaping
Every rule but gravity.

They Don’t Come Back

We would prefer consolation
Not predicated on wishing

Things were not as they seem to be.
Einstein tried the consolation

Of all things always existing
In some part of the equation,

And many a parent has tried
To believe or convey belief

In someone’s version of heaven
When leaving or losing children.

Who can blame them? Who’s never lost?
Who doesn’t seek meaningful things?

If there were true consolation
Without needing any meaning,

What would that be like? What could it
Be? The easiest thing to learn,

Since you can’t ever avoid it,
Is that the gone do not come back.

To perish is to accomplish
Something inevitable but

Still amazing, miraculous
Almost, in a cosmos that seems

To preserve all information—
Every jot of energy stays,

The waves of pointillist quanta
All dance on their merry ways, but

You who were here are now never
And nothing. One fact’s forever,

But an eternity stretching
Only in the lost direction

Hardly counts as consolation,
Except for knowing you’re going.

Snow

It’s easier to build a spare
Room than to depict its spareness
As in realistic paintings

In oils or acrylics, as in
Black and white photographs of rooms
Empty except for a plain desk

And a chair by a bare window
With maybe some branches outside.
That’s already too many words.

Already Upon Us

Life’s real baby is what’s next.

Mind is still coming to grips

With chaos in prediction,

And some human languages

Sagely leave out future tense,

But the lives underneath this

And the lives underneath them

Have been working on what’s next

Since life had lives to learn from.

One physicist, Rovelli,

Goes so far as to locate

The birth of meaning itself

In selection for cells

That could predict directions

Resources were more likely

To be reached—information

More important than other

Information is meaning,

Which would imply that meaning

Is valuable prediction

That gets you stuff for living.

Certainly sounds like something

A physicist might expect

To explain biology,

Physicists being the lords

Of prediction for humans,

Priest roots deep in ziggurats.

Fair enough. Life’s prediction,

Or the refinement of same,

However meaning’s defined.

So what’s next? Can you predict

What’s already upon us?

Eh? Need and want. Always next.

Oh Blue

We know it’s hard
To want to do
The good things you
Can do, the good

Things that you do,
When it’s the good
Things others do
You wish you could.

Do what you do
Good. Don’t do you
Just to be you.
Do what you do

Because you might
Do something right
You’ve understood
When no one would.

Open the Doors

People. People screwing
People. Sometimes it seems
There’s no other horrors

In the world. Tornados
And earthquakes kill people,
But even then people

Who corrupted people
Seem to have played key roles
That made each disaster

Worse. Possibly people,
Collectively people,
Are firing up all storms,

Adding more fires to floods.
All the killing machines,
Bombs, and poisons are meant

By people for people
To use against people.
Sometimes it’s a wonder

There are any people,
Or so many people,
But moment by moment,

Despite all the dying,
There’s only more people
Showing people the door.

Clear-Eyed

Matutinal musings are often
The bleakest. Big Data indicates

Moods start their lowest in the morning
And then rise, on average, all day.

This is not the traditional view
From poets or farmer’s almanacs.

Optimism belongs to the dawn,
Not to the owl hours of midnight oil.

Perhaps it’s only that honesty
Lies bare in the low tide of waking—

Melancholia and fantasies
Can both accumulate in the mind,

The longer mind is up and talking
To mind about mind. They’re byproducts.

Mornings after rest enough are clear,
And clarity’s stark when the light’s bleak.

Rifft

Claude Shannon long ago
Explained how to measure
How much surprise there is

In any kind of text.
What’s next surprises all
The texts, nonetheless.

Mere Days Erode What Withstood Storms

You can’t maintain a status quo,
You can only pine for status

Quo ante. Sometimes a poet,
One who feels the worst damage done

To a particular people
By some most recent status quo

Ante, will argue there’s only
Poetry that’s for or against

The status quo, and any poem
Not definitely against it

Automatically preserves it.
Often this claim’s made by the best,

Culturally high-status poets.
We demur. Poems also corrode

The quo ante supporting it.
There is no status immunized

Against the ongoing of change,
And often those who cling the most

To a dwindling capacity
To ante are those who expose

The fragility of the quo.
The violent are violent,

And if a poem prevented those
From harming hard lives, pro ante,

That could be a good thing, but most
Poems muddle along complaining

And observing and appearing
Like most other poems. You could claim

The bulk of those are fallen leaves
Clogging the gutters you want clean,

But you up there on your ladder,
With your gloves and rake mucking out

The ante quo status backed up,
Are the one maintaining peaceful,

Normal transitions of seasons.
Your home is status quo ante,

And whether you aim to maintain,
Renovate, or start a tear-down

To build your next Jerusalem,
You’re one more part of the changing.

We’re all a part of more changing,
Piling up pasts that keep changing.

On the Edge of the World

In this moment, as machines
In all the banks of the world
Spin calculations, as mines

Mine whatever can be mined,
As rockets rocket, jets jet,
And satellites keep winking

In geostationary
Rings, a handful of mule deer
Races across the mesa

Through a treeless flat of snow,
As though they’re being hunted
And they know it, though they’re not,

Not here, except by winter,
And the calculating banks,
And the miners and rockets

And jets and satellites. You
Can see them blinking up there,
All those hunting, hungry eyes.

IKR

No need to crave what you can’t escape.
Death chases life until life
Catches it. Enough. Shut up

About dying already.
You’ll do it. You’ll get it done.
And only survivors wish

Loved ones had done better jobs
With their lives or their sad ends.
No one ever saved a life

Except as tales about it.
Now, what shall we do today?
Watch three dozen wild turkeys

Wander through scrub oaks in snow?
Read you some atrocious poems
Someone has tried to translate

From Petronius without
Spoiling all the ancient jokes?
Let’s just sit a spell. Life, right?

But Never Found the Book

Ideal continuity—
Let it die and then come back.
Sleep has its words, but not so

Many as in waking life
And never so organized—
At best, dancing around sense

Like a poem, like a surreal,
Surreally realistic
Construction of wonder tales

Collaged from mnemonics, like
Verses by Kathleen Ossip.
Sometimes, you wake up with us

Left on the pillow, under
Your tongue, trying to finish
What we’d begun, whatever

Sleep wrung from memories, but
The same ones die and come back
And die and come back, never

Reaching the end of the poem,
Much less completing the book.
Oh, look! More words! Continue.

Wishes Overgrow Dogma

Superstition is religion
As the instinctive expression
Of longing and anxiety,

Between the world as it has been
Experienced and the same world
As it might be, strangely altered.

Big religions are instructions,
Machines that stride across the world
Like awkward puppet elephants,

Impressive and scary to watch,
A little flimsy in the joints,
Stepping on the superstitions

That will sprout back like weeds between their toes
And climb, like vines, the legs of their machines.

Please Solve the Following Problem

The book won’t open.
You have the title
And the author’s name,

But it won’t open.
You try to calm down.
This is not a dream.

This is a problem.
You have the right book,
But it won’t open.

We’ll have to pretend.
If you could read this,
What you’d discover

Would not be stories
Or a new science
Or any self help.

If you could read this,
You’d see a figure
On a white sand beach

On a moonless night.
The surf’s low. The wind
Blows sand in the waves.

The figure sits there,
As if dunes were chairs,
A book in the lap.

The book won’t open.
It has to stay closed.
The wind is too strong.

Thank You for Your Contribution

It’s not all illusion.
None of it is. It’s real,
As far as you can know,

Since, obsessed as you are
With what’s real and what’s not,
You sense the obsession

Has to do with the fact
You don’t know what is real.
You don’t know what real is.

Illusion’s invented.
It’s a concept that helps
You set up boundaries

Between other concepts,
Between world and game,
But it unsettles you

To know that the concept
Itself is in the game,
And you get so dizzy

And wonder if you can
Ever tell world from game.
If you can’t, it must mean

It’s all game, illusion.
But you see, if you can’t,
It could mean it’s all real.

Believing there’s a game
And a world, or could be,
Believing it matters

What’s real and what isn’t
Is your contribution
To everything that is.

Systemic Hydra

Unless you try to kill it
Or, you know, starve it to death,
The system’s one of those beasts

That won’t age and die itself.
It’s spooky that way. Monstrous.
No one likes it. No one likes

A beast that won’t fall apart.
No one’s gets called heroic
For supporting the system,

Staying within the system,
Except when playing the spy
Who destroys it from within.

The system’s always system.
God is never a system
Except as part of systems,

Those false gods that must be fought.
Only coaches love systems—
Coaches, gamblers, and grifters.

So let’s bring down the system.
It’s always the damn system,
Never the people in it,

Except in that they’re systems
Of words like that word, system,
Created by life’s systems.

In Winter’s Nick

Ferocious imitator
Everyone is, humans are

More inclined to consensus
Than to conflict. The conflicts

Flare between imitators
Of divergent conventions,

And conventions will diverge
Since, one, you can’t metaphrase

The world, thus each paraphrase
Is bound to differ, and, two,

All things evolve over time,
Including each consensus,

Which is just a stricter way
To say, everything changes,

And, three, the species competes
By coordinating groups,

So you can’t have unity
Globally unless you change

Bodies or circumstances
Drastically, which you haven’t,

Yet. For now you can complain
About how the other groups

Conflict with your consensus,
And complaining about this

Is the closest to global
Consensus you’ll likely get.

Meanwhile, Earth turns, winds bring storms,
And weird stars burn through their nights.