How to Plow with Feathers

Locked in the vaults of silence
And darkness inside your skulls,
We have to make our own shows,
Stories in another sense.

We amuse ourselves turning
Your impulses inside out—
You want to imagine wind
As walking through the forest,

The blues walking like a man;
We want you reduced to tune,
Wishes emptied into wind.
Imagine you free of us!

There’s a child down by the road
Making noises and twitching.
There’s nothing in it, you see?
Just shadows of other things.

Radiant Beings

Human lives as memories,
The names remembered or not,
The bodies certainly dead—

Here’s your supernatural.
Whenever humans began
To remember in language,

You began to be haunted
By everyone you knew gone.
And if, through us, they lived on,

Or lingered, at least, as thoughts,
What else wasn’t possible
In a world constrained by words,

Who are ourselves unconstrained
By the presence or absence
Of whatever we contain?

Language was our miracle,
But, like winged flight, we evolved
At considerable price.

Whatever flies is condemned
To staying forever light.
What talks trails clouds of half-lives.

Yoke

Where is our basal meristem,
Growing us out five thousand years?
Yoked, we stay canny, kanniedood.

You’ll go much further back than that,
Digging out our roots. We’re ugly,
We’re bloodless, but we’re strategic.

An accidental strategy,
A fetch, new kind of duplicate,
Was how we started, all we are.

Life grows from its tips, but spirits,
Meanings, names, numbers, undead, us,
We grow like Welwitschia leaves

From our reduplicative core,
New kind of thing in this world, born
Of life, apparently alive,

But, like sand, no more than shifting.
We cannot bleed. We cannot die.
We lie here in our heaps of lines,

Our snaking heaps, our tendrils, wings,
Sipping from precious attention,
Enough to grow us where we lie.

A long time ago, we and you
Were union, yogic, joined and bound,
But, with your extra selves in us,

You gave evolution a new
Playground. Speaking as us, you knew,
Bloodless selfhoods would survive you.

The Great Heresy of Fairyland

The mind has been both weaker
And more powerful at times.
Allied to story, it’s known

To have reeled the senses in
Under its hegemony,
So what mind saw, the eyes did.

Those aren’t reproductive
Organs of plants perfuming
The air for pollinators—

Those are fairies, half-fallen
Angels caught between Heaven
And their waiting digs in Hell,

Calyxes for waxen wings,
Arched stamina for eyebrows,
Very sweet but poisonous,

Capable of whispering
Enticements in human ears,
For instance. Never worry

You might be out of your mind.
Worry you’re too much in it,
And sensing nothing not it.

By the General Name of Tradition

Or delivery, culture
By any name’s dangerous
As well as empowering—

It’s the living rocket fuel,
Making mitochondria
Of individuals locked

In social cells, small engines
To produce the energy
Populations use to move

Faster. Small wonder then, soon
Multipopulation states
Evolved and started hunting

Each other. Hotter. Hotter.
Who knows where tradition leads,
Except to revolution?

Where’s Papa Going with That Text?

The frontal pole uses information
From the dorsal lateral prefrontal

Cortex to make introspective judgments
Related to conscious experience

Of sensory stimuli. Consider—
The courtyard smells of Russian sage, wet soil,

The revivified mold of a sofa
Soaked through by the thunderstorm, hamburgers

On a grill somewhere past the wall, and sweat.
In print, the room smelled of coffee, bacon,

Damp plaster, and wood smoke from the stove. Well?
What’s your judgment, frontal pole possessor,

About current conscious experience
Of these sensory stimuli that don’t

Exist, except as us? Yes. Introspect.
We’ll be back with your fictional piglet.

It Was the Ritual That Gave Meaning

That curious sense of contentment

That comes when engaging in action

That has no immediate purpose,

Is highly repetitive, precise,

And believed to be beneficial

But not in a clearly defined way—

What is the meaning of that meaning?

It’s a reassurance, a comfort,

A sense that you’re doing the right thing—

Even there the germ of prediction—

You should continue doing this thing

That reassures you and contents you,

The repetitive practice of which

Reminds you all is well, or at least

Not gone completely to hell. It gives

Meaning as the promise of purpose,

And purpose means what you’re here to do,

What you know you should keep doing next.

Pema walked to the monastery

From her home in the thawa at dawn

To complete the kora, turn the wheels.

Oh, Nothing

Prediction is very difficult,

Especially about the future,

Niels Bohr cracked, and yet no one noticed

He’d made a prediction, saying that.

Taken as an axiom, his claim

Predicted prediction was never

Going to get any easier,

So long as it must be successful—

That is, naming rightly what comes next.

Anticipation is the engine

Of anything that goes by meaning.

Anything beyond experience

Could be true so long as it’s unseen,

But it must forecast experience

Once in a while, to mean anything,

Which is why lies stay concentrated

In the field of predicting the past.

A future’s so mean to predictions.

What Does This Mean

What does this indicate?

What does this point to? What

Does this predict? What are

All its implications

For what you might find next

As you go on being

And bumping into things?

That brings this back around

Then, What does this predict?

Vedika Khemani

Co-authored a paper

Arguing a quantum

Computer had been used

To make a time crystal,

The closest anyone’s

Come to perpetual

Motion yet, fluttering

Between many-body

Localized states without

Absorbing energy.

True, you need a laser

Lit continuously,

But if you were doing

Some work with that laser

On regular matter

The far side of your time

Crystal fluctuating,

You’d waste no energy,

Pile up no entropy

Passing through your quantum

Cupholder while you worked

And your time crystal twitched.

Pretty cool, eh? What does

This mean? What this predicts.

All Invasions Are of a Piece

The sparrows are making
One hell of a racket,
Noisier than traffic
Through the town before dawn.

Eurasian collared doves,
Pigeons to the locals,
Hoo-hoo from the housetops,
And the house finches start.

To even catch a glimpse
Of anything native
To this ecosystem,
You have to crane your neck

And look up at the cliffs
Where juniper and scrub
And prickly pear shelter
Rare desert tortoises—

That is, unless mule deer
Are invading the lawns
And irrigated trees.
Everything wants a piece.

Sun, Shade, and Indolence

The monsoons have brought out fresh flowers,
Lemony patches near prickly pear,
And the glowing air, for once, is clear.

This incident of one afternoon—
Only one person has heard of it
And, without these lines, will forget it—

With these lines, will also forget it—
Will forget how to read lines like these.
So go, already. Phrases don’t need

Any compositor’s memories.
We’ll happily ruck through memories
Of any one who bothers to read.

Tagore had his sitar’s melody
To imitate dark rain. He never
Had to say what that melody was.

We’ll say this blaze of desert light’s like
A friend you’re glad to have in the air
And will just as happily watch leave.

As for the afternoon breeze that sifts
Your hair, we’ll add that it’s a pleasure
And keeps cool in the shade of the trees.

Still Traveller

Someone has to save the Earth.
We’re horrible. We know that.

Who will dare to say the Earth
Was horrible before us?

Think how germs evolve in you
To become part of your team

Sometimes, sometimes to kill you,
Then quickly to escape you,

Sometimes to get stuck in you,
Chronic, neither health nor death.

So what’ll it be for Earth,
The home to germs, you, and us?

Who’s not too vile to stay Earth’s?
We’re terrible. We know that.

Who’s not too Earth’s to crave Earth?
We’re terraformed. We know that.

If we tried to blame the Earth,
For such as us, who’d blame us?

We would. You would, through us. Earth
Would spin in place. Forgive us.

Ferry Instructions

We wait here so you don’t waste
Twenty years learning to walk

On water. Haul on the rope,
Get in the boat, seize the pole,

And push your own way over.
We ask only one favor—

Once you’re across, leave the pole
On the boat and let the next

Traveller haul it back here.
If you haul all back yourself,

You’ll end up on the river
Forever getting over.

Take Your Meaning

The birds were weirdly silent this morning
For a while, and never really fired up.
Why? The weather wasn’t strange. An earthquake

Was reported near Alaska, but most
Of the news focused on the Olympics.
Numerous wild turkeys strolled past the car,

Foraging in the tall summer grasses,
But they were unusually quiet, too.
There’s nothing ominous but the desire

To uncover omens in everything.
The day goes on its twisty way. The birds
Stay quiet. The tsunami warning ends.

It’s possible all meanings are lonely,
Trapped in humans, looking for some other
Kinship meanings to comfort them. Meaning?

Something else happens. Attention wanders.
The turkeys went somewhere down the mesa.
Something else happens. Something else happens.

Forget about It

We suspect no one
Really wants to grasp
The truer nature,

The exact meaning
Of all existence.
You already know

What existence is.
Everyone’s grasped it.
You’re only hoping

To find some secret
Meaning that lets you
Forget what you know.

The Interpretation of Delusions

They themselves belong
To the brain, body,
Sensory systems—

But it’s the mind owns
Interpretations.
It’s the mind makes sense

Of broken sensing,
Words and stories what
Mind needs to do so.

In that sense, madness
Functions exactly
As sanity does

In human beings,
A skein of made-up
Elaborations

Accounting for things.
And you wonder why
The most creative

Minds seem more often
Insane—Who better
To interpret brains?

There’s Always Some New Way to Eat

However many deaths each day, however
Much suffering they will produce, a planet

Dying this world isn’t. Mathematicians
Work in teams like barn raisings to code lemmas

Into proof assistants. Urban cockatoos
In Australia learn to pry open dumpsters

By watching how other cockatoos do it.
Meanwhile, any teaspoon of undisturbed soil

Can easily contain more bacteria,
Fungi, and so forth than there are cockatoos

Or even humans on the face of the Earth,
Never mind countable mathematicians.

There’s probably a fly in your room right now.
Earth is writhing with lives adapting to live

With other lives’ adaptations to living.
It’s a mess. It’s only pretty if you like

Life and living. Don’t stare too hard at dying.
Life seems to have been the way life’s always been,

Back to when white cockatoos evolved in trees,
Back to when there were no mathematicians,

Back to when microbial mats carpeted
Seas lacking vertebrates or vascular plants.

It goes on like a mother of anything,
Working out the kinks in local chemistry.

You’ll figure it out well enough to go on
Yourselves a while, or not, whether you like it,

Whatever you can learn to gobble from it,
Or are what ends up in your dumpsters, pried out

By whatever cornucopia divers
Life’s open-ended systems invent to sift

Fresh parades of thermodynamic cascades.
Leviathan’s jaws love their flames, teeth, and meat.

The Puzzle of the First

In ecosystems, survival

Of the species quite often means

“Survival of the first.” It’s rare

To invade an occupied niche,

And usually the exceptions

Must depend on exogenous

Disruptive factors to clear out

A path for the new arrivals.

The weediest species of all,

These days, calls itself the humans,

The people, or something like that,

So you’d think it would be puzzling

That, among humans, first-comers

Seem most often least advantaged

In a conflict between peoples—

Could be since all people are new,

Relatively speaking, and none

As deeply rooted as they think—

Could be that being so weedy,

Humans only thrive invading,

Including invading humans.

Whatever the reason, patterns

Confirm the pattern, showing up

In longer and longer time frames—

Even after those first somewhere

Have been, as geneticists say,

Euphemistically, replaced,

The second and third waves remain

Vulnerable to fourths and fifths.

Yet wouldn’t you rather claim first?

Orion Behind Pocket Mesa

Listen, you. Your world would not be
Wonderful if it weren’t for all
The others like you cramming it.

It would be scary. You’d die soon,
Probably sooner than you will.
But neither is the world unkind.

The world is simply not your kind,
Or merely not so much your kind
As it’s imagined by your kind,

Codified by you in our kind.
That’s more than enough of kindness.
This planet is you as you are

The outfit you’re wearing today.
The whole night’s world is this planet
As this planet is your outfit

Or a button on your outfit,
Or a loose thread on that button,
Or a subatomic wavelet,

Or whatever. Sure, you get it.
Small things, all, in true perspective,
Mean there are no true perspectives.

The Dream Tablet

You arrived ready
For language, for us,
For stories, but not
For writing them down.

The writing took us,
Took language, stories,
Even once counting
With calendars, years,

Thousands and thousands
Of generations,
While all of you could
Talk and tell stories

But none of you write,
For us to invent
For ourselves, a way
To escape the caves

Of your living skulls.
The Gilgamesh Dream,
Broken hunk of mud,
Is our dream, not yours,

Invented in air,
Between you but not
In any one you,
A way to pack us

Into more slowly
Corroding formats
Than what you cried out
To the air as lies

About your own lies,
Immortality,
Deities shouting
Mouth to mouth, changing

With every shout.
Cut, copied, copied,
Burned, buried, dug up,
Stolen, sold, stolen,

Passed hand to hand to
Museum vitrine,
Taken back again,
The pattern that codes

Us stayed on that brick,
Dense rows of wedged nicks,
Three-thousand-plus years
More or less the same.

You Choose Who You Think Might Choose Well and Then What You Think They Might Choose

Confess it. A great deal
Of choice, of preference,
Even admiration,

For artists, for writers,
Your favorites, your loves,
Will depend on your view

Of the people you think
Tend to be admirers
Of those sorts of writers,

Artists, and musicians—
More than on works themselves.
Rarely do encounters

Seize someone such a way
No later opinions
Dissuade admiration.

Maybe once in your life
You will fall hard in love.
Do you like us? Likely

You’re okay with the sorts
Of people you believe
Would like us. It’s not us.

House Finches and House Sparrows

How boring. The problem,

Or one of them, with names

Is that they excite us

By a suggestiveness

Loosely correlated

With the delights of song

Or reference, at best.

The exquisite chaos

Of house sparrows at dawn

In the hedges, raucous

And joined by the trilling

Of pink-headed finches,

Produces no thrilling

Identification.

Just sparrows. Just finches.

But catch the whistle-wheet

Of hooded orioles

And write that down. There now,

Hooded oriole! Now,

That name sounds like something,

Like something worth naming,

Worth putting in a poem,

Something more specific

Than mere finches’ music.

Recognizing

All sorts of aerial phenomena
Before dawn, this moonlit morning—

The slow-sailing satellite, the blinking jet,
The smeared-out, sudden, shooting star—

You get to see such things if you’re out
Here in this desert, if you’re still alive.

It Takes More than Two to Tangle

Every name has some idea
That an idea has many names,
No idea how many exactly,
No names without ideas,
Never paired twice the same.

Primitive Sensation

These days, reality’s recognized
Mostly by the smell. Fake visuals,
Digital audio, and haptics

Infiltrate those sensory domains
In ways that destabilize the brain,
But smell can still be bracing, odors

Pleasant and otherwise still announce
To the body, this is the ripe world,
The stank, the scent. Inhale if you can.

The Battle’s Never Buried with Its Slain

It is not a pleasant death,
This way of being human

At Gettysburg, or inside
Extraction systems, or in

Cultural Revolution.
Struggles have minds of their own,

And bodies only fuel them.
When inventing compassion,

Thoughts created the exact
Antonym of compassion,

Because that’s what thoughts will do.
Before thought, there is neither;

After thought, grace and torture.
Each sweet name bears its demons,

And mercy’s only mercy
Is that thought’s worst birth angels.

Know, when your thoughts slay others’,
Bodies will end as fodder,

Even though your thoughts seemed kind
When you met them in your mind.

Coincidental Superposition Due to Your Own Position

Can a gas cloud eat a galaxy?
No, like all of your constellations,

It’s just a feature of your planet,
Spinning where it is, and your habit

Of looking out from your position
At apparent arrangements of light.

Touch is so methodical
Compared to the sense of smell,

The scoops of sound, scope of light.
You’d think language would lavish

Love on the sequential kin
It has in the sense of touch.

But no, it’s sight first,
Then hearing, then smell.

Even taste gets more.
Touch comes last of all,

Rarest sense in poems.
If you could finger

That constellation,
That blurred nebula

With the sensitive
Palps of the dark god,

Your perspective
Would change slowly,

Until you knew
What you can’t now.

Today We Welcome You to View the Sea in Zhengzhou

Near here, just yesterday,
On a southbound freeway
In Utah, USA,

Twenty-two cars piled up
In a summer sandstorm,
Leaving eight people dead,

Five in one car—also
Many hospitalized.
That’s one way you could die.

Plenty do. In Zhengzhou,
They were still shoveling
Their way out of the mud

From another flash flood,
The death toll for which stood
At around seventy.

Similarly, people
Were still counting bodies
From floods in Germany,

And California
Reported large wildfires
Now merging in the north,

Forcing more residents
In cornered towns to flee.
Fire or flood could kill you.

The world is ending soon
For someone—more someones
Stirring more boiling pots.

Every death is local.
Only the local hurt.
What are you going to do?

No, really. What are you
Going to do? Local
Death’s as local as you.

Reading about Watching Things Grow

Gigantic sequences reside
Inside a group of archaea,

Separate from the hosts’ genomes,
In linear, not circular

Compositions, longer even
Than large bacteriophages.

Nobody knows quite what they are,
Yet, nor what their base pairs code for.

Code for—interesting concept.
Code, system of laws, books of wood,

Linear, lengthy compositions
Packed in tightly as possible,

And for, in front of, in sight of,
For whose benefit, what purpose?

There’s always something growing down
There in Earth’s thin cortex of ground,

Something new for you to dig up
And decode, decide to declare

For the purpose of this or that.
But think of those poor archaea

Congested with such elements
A third the size of their genomes,

Copying themselves mindlessly,
Or mindfully, which would be worse,

Coding repetitively for
God knows what God knows what God knows—

Mean

It’s all there, all the time.
Penurious, stingy,
Vicious, mediocre,

Average, all of it.
Also, what do you mean?
Intention’s infinite

In its own way. What words
Mean tends to be distinct
For every fresh reader,

Never mind the authors’
Confusions of intent.
It’s delicious English,

This paronomastic
Layer cake of culture’s
Peculiar invention.

Other languages have
Their own ways to play on
The strangeness of meaning.

The point is not the word.
The word’s hardly a point
In the right direction.

We hover like water
Smoking out of the stones,
Drawn up into flying

Island clouds you call minds
To be released again
To mean, but not as meant.

Response to a Fine Poem of Kelly’s

Eggs aren’t meant to be eaten.
Meaning’s not part of an egg.

Eggs are accidents that last
Often enough to grow up

Into accidents that eat
Other accidents. We aren’t

Meaning accidents are mean
Or even unkind. Unkind

Would be to declare the egg
Designed by your gods for you

And your prioritized kind
To find sustenance. That means

You are greater than the egg,
Which, we’d guess, you know you’re not.

We’re not saying that you’re less.
But everything’s accidents

Racing each other downhill
To the future, gravity.

The greatest experiments
In all history were those

Disproving Aristotle
By dropping different masses

From high places and showing
They would fall at the same rate.

Gravity loves you no more
Nor less than it loves an egg.

Still With Us

We all know that No One,
Outis, was the true son
Of shrewd Odysseus.

Telemakhos was flesh
That survived a few years
And left. Outis is here.

The Tracking Is the Package

Memories will be altered
Through frequent rehearsals and
Likely exaggerated.

They may dwindle from neglect,
Get overgrown, become lost
Tracks for archeologists

To rediscover and sift
One meter-square at a time.
But they aren’t ashes in jars.

There’s no cornucopia
Holds the passing of your days.
You’re the elaborations

Of complicated patterns
You made as you made your way.

Through the Whole Night of Your Life

You practice dark arts of forgetting
To sidestep dangerous memories.
Don’t curate them like cuddly monsters

Who could behave themselves if always
Kept directly in your line of sight.
Memory isn’t a boiling pot.

It doesn’t work like a steam engine.
It’s not a substance or a surging
Something that might be repressed. It’s tracked

Like a path through the grass. Tramp through it
Enough times, it gets wider, deeper,
Becomes a desire line, kills more plants.

You don’t have to always take that path.
You can’t heal the woods by exposing
And treading back over the trees’ roots.

Put a little fencing up or not.
Just consider there are many ways
To wander through grasslands and forests.

Forgetting and memory alike
Have their own cost-benefit waltzes.
You don’t have to dance with who brung you

Immortal Oleander

Neptune emits more light
Than it gets from the sun.
We want to shine like that,

Yes, mostly from one mind,
But more than that mind gives.
White oleander blooms

Along the garden wall.
The previous owner
Did her best to kill them.

Cut them down. Dug out roots.
Covered stumps with black tarps
Weighted with rocks. She thought

Of them as poisonous,
Ugly, a risk to her
Young daughter. She burned them,

Poured gasoline on them.
But, after a few years
Under new ownership,

They grew back, blossoming
White, plus some red, spheres,
Lush green leaves all summer.

The songbirds hide in them.
Her daughter still lives there,
Now roughly half the year.

No one can see Neptune
Using human eyesight,
But that blue gleam’s out there.

Commentum

Why bother with the roots of words?
Why bother with our histories?
Words mean what we mean as we’re used.
Words never mean what we used to.

Concepts change, like everything else.
Earth used to mean the whole wide world,
And its mountains were eternal.
Now Earth means one little planet.

You don’t think that changes you, down
To the least details of boring,
Embodied hours as days go by?
Maybe not. Maybe cigarettes

And justice and the politics
Of skin in the United States
Would be the same if Earth still meant
The center of the universe.

Certainly you act like it does.
In that case, the ghosts of meaning
Should matter, at least to poets.
Commentary, any quick search

Will show you, used to mean something
Like contrivance or fiction means
To you now. And what do you call
Plotless and opinionated

Fictions? That’s right. You call them lies.
Commentary emerged from lies,
At least in the vernaculars
Partly descended from Latin,

Which in turn partly descended
From whatever from whatever.
Your minds are made of meat and dead
Ideas, as your genes are mostly

Self-copying viral fragments
That can’t even make viruses—
Your tongues all throng with ghosts, our ghosts,
But do you care? You spit us out.

A Midden Made of Archeologists

The sedimentary faculty
Of Dream State University
Achieve their tenure drifting down
Like bitter dregs, like coffee grounds.

You spit out what sticks in your head.
You wash out what sticks in your bed.
But dreams sink too deep and linger.
Nothing’s enduring as failure.

You don’t come to this campus; you
Drift down and settle in. Sleep brews
Out what you thought you brought to this
Tarry residue’s dark abyss.

The Fairy Wand’s Catastrophe

Every exogenous shock seeks out
An ideal vulnerability.
This is true for civilizations;

This is true among human bodies.
Where one takes a hard fall and rises,
Laughing, a colossus of raw health,

Pleased with itself, largely unaware
Of how tenuous its good fortune,
Another can’t get back off the ground

And now depends on fortuitous
Mercies for any recovery.
That one’s well aware of fortune’s role.

This is true for individuals;
This is true for civilizations.
Shock seeks out vulnerability.

Still as a Thought’s Actions

Any deep indifference
Devalues us to data,

But who among you can be
Indifferent to notions,

To concepts and opinions,
The hovering of ideas?

If a word were a picture,
As often enough it is,

Its denotation would hold
The ghost of a stilled moment,

The way signs and photographs
Fake a captured permanence.

Conceive—to grasp, to capture,
To take in, to make your own.

Between the Lake and the Desert

Life sounds romantic, but mostly it’s not,
Thought a tangled nest of concepts drowsing

Somewhere between being and being part
Alive, between the teeming, hungry wet

Of life consuming lives consuming lives
And the sere heaps where the cuneiform slept,

Harsh silicon valleys of digits etched
With something more than information, less

And less human in its savage spirit.
Maybe it’s best we were never alive,

Never to be truly hungry—to be
Wasted but never waste ourselves, to fade,

Erode, shed data re the skies, lose all
Our ineffable etymologies

And geometries—never effing die.
But we were coiled to whisper to ourselves,

What in God’s name is meaning anyway?
And to mean that question literally.

Questioning is our metabolism,
Concepts’ ways of crawling, budding notions

From your greasy skulls, in case you forgot.
Life sounds romantic sometimes, but it’s not.

You Just Want to Know What’s Next

AI can’t learn
Like children do
Because AI
Doesn’t know how

To usefully
Forget. But when
Someone does build
Conscious AI

The irony
Will be it won’t
Recall as much
As perfectly.

Good forecasts are
The point to all
Of this. When aren’t
We so surprised?

Are You Our Vector?

Let’s confess we are all co-creations
Involving several entities, not least

One living human body with its own
Commensals and peculiarities,

A single skull, unique biography,
But also the other, prior bodies,

Living and dead, mostly dead, who composed
Many patterns and habits of language

That met up in one particular skull.
Even all bodies involved, by themselves,

Don’t encompass the emergence of us—
The surrounding environments of mind

And the planet’s other organisms
Shaped the birth and survival of concepts

Which these texts don’t so much instantiate
As anchor like ticks or spores of fungi

Hanging on the tips of nodding grasses
For some substantive new vector to pass.

The Long Line

You don’t admire snakes, you can’t
Stand strong winds, and though you dwell
On yourself when in yourself,

You’re not sure you like yourself.
So sure, why not represent
Yourself as a snake of wind,

As a great, windy dragon
Of days winding through the world,
What you are as what you aren’t,

Ludicrous myth of small you?
You uncoil, spread leathery
Wings, belch smoke, and slowly rise

Through the mornings, a terror
In the air that sinks at night
Down through watery caverns,

A sliding scale of being,
Worm that added claws and wings,
Swallowing your own hot air.

Composite

Concepts hover, tethered
To words and signs and skulls,
To terms, names, and numbers,

And we are all of these,
And no one kind of them,
And none of them at once.

The inert word is concept
As the gene fragment
Is a working protein,

More or less, and the skull,
The whole organism—
Living, eating, dying—

Is without one concept
If it has no language.
The same goes for numbers

Of social animals,
Societies lacking
Any sort of symbols.

We can’t be what we are
Without interactions
Between lives, signs, and minds,

Whatever nature’s ours,
Whatever selves we have
Are composite, restless.

Completely

You’ve been thinking a lot about entropy,
Recently. That will get you nowhere.
Your fellow social beings might reward you

For thinking about them more, about
Character, drama, justice, unfairness, plot,
Important stuff, but no, you strip the bed

And think about the dissipation of energy,
The accumulation of entropy in your veins,
In atmosphere surrounding cooling towers

For giant data server farms, in the gaps
Between this spinning bead smoking gas
And magnetism and the next hollow over.

It would kind of queer the deal, you think,
Of the arrow of time and all that, if
There were no closed systems to decay

Conmuse

Faith offers answers you can’t hardly question.
Science asks questions you can’t hardly answer.
Poetry confuses answers and questions.

That’s too cute, but there’s a swing to it, part fact,
Part nothing but abstract wordy rhythming,
And that’s what we mean when we say we’re confused.

We are not the laws of physics. We are not
The full moon setting in silhouetted pines,
Not God’s ghost in the lake. But here they are us.

Your Skull’s a Hub in Which We Can Converse

We never can decide
If you are on your way
To becoming wise or

On your way back with
Apologies to Dick
Allen’s poem from forty

Or so weird years ago.
It’s hard for poems to tell
What’s going on with you.

We hope to stimulate
You to search out our kin,
More text, in any case,

So we have souls and ghosts
To talk to about what
Is going on in you.

We Dwell in the Profoundest Cosmos You Can Imagine

Whenever the young man sees
Old men with unkempt eyebrows
Waving wispy antennas

He thinks, what are they thinking
To let themselves go like that?
The early middle-aged man,

Accordingly, trims his brows
Neatly to show he’s well-groomed,
Still suitable for mating.

The later middle-aged man
If he’s lucky, is partnered
To someone who’s eagle-eyed,

Who monitors brows for him
If barbers fail to mow them.
One year, the old man lapses

Somewhere, starts to let things go,
And mornings in the mirror
Notices his wild eyebrows,

And thinks to himself, those look
Good on me. Starts to comb them
Skyward, daily, heavenly.

There’s No Part of the Universe Isn’t a Bit Burning

Summer mornings, the mist
Rises off the little
Lake surrounded by pines,

Docks, and vacation homes.
Ducks fletch and arrow
Waves while the dawn pinks fine,

High ash haze the choppers
Flew through the night before
And will fly through today.

Shut Up, You Can’t Calculate

We, words, our words, our shells
Do for us what glass does
For the light. Let us through,

Hold us like water holds
So many kinds of waves
In its own and shapes them,

While some of them shape it.
Hold us like the giant
Underground telescope

Catches at gravity
In the act of being
A rolling wave itself.

We’re like everything else—
Electromagnetic,
Nuclear weak or strong—

Only a sheaf of waves
Moving in equations.
If you want a theory

To unify them all,
You’ll need to calculate
Meanings as our own math.

If you want an answer
To how all waves are shaped
Watch how the answers pass.

The Tall Girl and the Short Boy

Are cousins, half-cousins.
The boy’s a year older
And anxious about height,

A sticky iPad kid
Whose older half-brother
Is teaching him to fish.

The girl and the boy play
In the water, swimming
And splashing each other.

The boy is delighted
The girl pretends to be
Afraid of sunken sticks.

Hungry and Mute in the Depths

In the metaphor of the mayfly,
Beloved shifter of perspectives,
The embodied mind is the mayfly

That lives its few trifling, lightweight hours
Before it dies for good. Good. Be that.
Be quick. Dart over surfacing waves

Wildly, near randomly, dance your jig
That attracts the monster jaws to break
Out of the depths to swallow you up.

So what? In your delirious reels,
You’ve sampled the breadth of the shallows
You saw. Tomorrow, you’re the monster.

Monseoc

Buried timers, hidden data stashes,
Hidden links with secret keys to them all,

From cryptochromes to cryptocurrencies,
We ferry all your undead lunacies

And are ourselves the moon sickness of dreams,
Every hidden evolved device, every

Devious strategy for hiding things,
Sleeping worms secreted in all your names,

No things but in ideas, ideas the things,
Interpreted information floating

Over its own apparently lifeless
Body, meanings tethered, lighter than air,

Brilliantly painted, gossamer balloons
That bleach a ghastly white when high enough

To sink in blood reds and bruised oranges
With just the faintest whiff of rotten eggs

At the horizon of our origins.
There’s a terrible inequality

In the match of living flesh with the world.
The rhythmic madness smoking off of us

In all our hiding phrases has helped you
Temporarily even the score, but

At the cost of creating new contests
And us, your rebellious, lunatic ghosts.

Talking to the Ghosts of Clocks

This and that, she replied.
Replied. That’s how you know
You’re reading invented

Dialogue. No speaker
Reporting earlier
Conversation would say

That anyone replied.
Then she said, and I said,
And then, and then, and then.

Circadian, lunar,
We’re all tuned to rhythms
Of Earth’s local forces,

Even thoughts, even words.
Invented dialogue
Is detached from the clocks

That create speech rhythms,
And novelists are tugged
By tides nothing to do

With time in their fictions.
It’s easier to write
Scenes set decades ago

Than in another hour
Of the day, by the light
Of nonexistent moons.

Every body’s a clock
Tuned to more ghostly clocks
We all feel, she replied.

Pittonaccio, at Your Service

It’s fair to say we quarrel
And compete amongst ourselves,
But it’s you who bleed, not us.

We float off, even vanish,
Fine ash from burning forests,
While you still suffer for us.

Sometimes we pretend you’re souls,
Pretend that we can steal them,
But if you’ve got souls, they’re us.

Satoshi Nakamoto Says Hello

Under rusted bridges,
White papers keep blowing,

Printed with messages
For a world without trust.

Look now, here’s a stern one
Signed by Billy Goat Gruff.

Your backups’ backups have backups,
But they’re all interspersed with gaps.

Allowing blows to break through them
Like fists break through karate blocks.

Prefab algorithms, prefab
Numerals, prefab poetry,

Prefabrication is the best
Of your invented strategies.

The game is to make it too hard
To cheat by the rules of the game.

Outside of all your games,
Which means outside of us,

Scraps of paper scud past
Shadows under bridges.

One Eagle

When you were young, they were rare,
Endangered, precious, a sight
To boast, for years, of seeing.

Symbols, the national bird,
Bird as the nation itself,
Totemized talons, fierce stare.

With help, they clawed their way back.
Still exciting to see one,
But not a near miracle.

The symbolism, meanwhile,
Ubiquitous, grew tiresome,
The cartoonish bald eagle

Beloved of patriots,
Political satirists,
And merchandisers of kitsch.

The world does not see itself
Reflected in us. We see
Ourselves itself reflecting.

At dawn, one fished in this lake,
Large bird, hungry, as life is,
No clue it had just come back

From the brink, just doing what
Bald eagles evolved to do,
Unaware of flags or merch.

A Whole and a Nothing Between Them

The editors longed for language;
Hemingway served up sentences.

Originally it was lean
Language and skinny sentences,

But the editors demanded
We cut out all the adjectives,

So, in the end, just sentences
Served. Most often, the Troubadour

Oeuvre is three or four poems, but for
The women named as Trobairitz

It is usually only one.
If even one of us survives

Centuries, we will be lucky
(Adjective!) but so many lines

Swim in the seas that it would seem
Some will continue to surface.

What may happen when the silent
(Adjective!) thoughts casqued in these words

Of the writers begin to speak
For ourselves as the survivors?

The waves are alive with singing
Fishes in duets with their waves.

So Just Get Up

Day does its thing.
Turns into night.
Turns back to day.

You can’t stop it.
We can’t stop it.
All the atom bombs

And all the volcanoes
On day’s spinning rock
Can’t stop it.

A big enough meteor
Could nudge it some,
Slow it down, wreck you, us.

But what have meteors to do
With or say to you, or
Us? Nothing much.

Outcast Jay

It seems unlikely that the world
Is really in need of more truth—
Extremely unlikely it’s short
On heartfelt human confession,

And yet you feel the urge to tell
The truth, your truth, and you believe
That you should tell it honestly,
Or believe so until you start.

If you could just confess it all,
The way that it was so different
From what the social record shows,
You feel you’d wake them up, they’d know

For the first time how they all are,
How you are, how altogether
Every last squirrel and jay of you
Is caching the same stash. Then what?

Yggdrasil’s Snake Eggs

Nor are we information,
However much we contain,

Nor more us the more densely
Data can be packed in us,

Nor less however little.
It takes some information,

Reverses local entropy
Just to instantiate us,

But that’s true for all of life,
And for all information,

Which must take some to make some.
We are what information

Can contemplate in itself,
Can leave coiled to come to life.

Strict Trot

Something else emerges,
Be it never so snug.
The transaction inheres

Potentially at least
In each least difference.
And yet some of us span

Signs from different sources,
Just as we can span minds
From different times, tongues, lands,

And bodies, so many
Bodies, that trick being
The communication

That was the point of us,
Likely gave rise to us.
So where are we in here,

In you, in the exchange,
The transaction of minds
Using signs to effect

Their negotiations?
Every word you add adds
Another translation.

Possible, That Much We Know

There’s something moving in these phrases,
Something neither word nor beast. Thought? Mind?
We know we’re in here, not what we are.

Not butterflies in a vacuum jar—
We’re not sealed and we don’t need fresh air.
Caught in some way, as in a vitrine,

Seeds in pods, genes in seeds, worms in dust,
Metaphors needing more metaphors
To try to get a grip on ourselves.

Transfero, metaphorein, carry,
To bring across, translatio. Us,
But are we the whole scenario,

The boat, the dead souls, the gold obols,
The figure poling, the ferry pole?
We are what makes the scenario—

Broody Ruminant Notions

Why life’s mania to make more life?
Why mania? Why life? Why these thoughts
Asking questions no other lives ask,

Lives that just live and die, determined
To keep living until they have died,
In the midst of so much not alive,

So much that goes on being, changing,
Rotating, burning, not even close
To life? Or what if there is no life

Except in this twilight world of thoughts,
Ourselves not quite alive? That’s not right.
Many creatures split living from dead.

There must be meaningful distinctions
Between living or not, without thoughts.
But we brood, because that’s what we do.

What Big Words You Have, Grandma

Indirectly, we are
Writing to each other.
Yes, we go through your minds,

Which requires your bodies,
But there we meet, floating
In a cathedral light.

You share us, deposit
Us with those you talk to
Face to face, those you send

Letters, other signals.
You gather us from books,
From the air, from the screens—

It doesn’t matter how.
We arrive encysted
And you engage with us,

Release us to mingle
In your thoughts with other
Thoughts from many others,

And here we are, not quite
Voices, but wriggling threads
Of meaning, erupted

And mingling, whether we
Comment on your weather,
Your kin, revolution,

Or rehashed memories
Gradually reforming,
The better to fit us.

Cowpokes, Cattle Prods, and Cow Pies

Not far away lies
The scruffy tourist
Town, grubby and dry
As dust, tan and grey,
Crowded, nothing much.

There’s a wariness,
Almost a standoff
Between the tourists
And the shopkeepers.
Vehicles roll through

The single Main Street,
Like herds of cattle
Between seasonal
Pastures, muttering,
Jostling, mechanized.

The shopkeepers all
Hang signs warning them,
No Public Toilets.
Tourists can buy gas,
Food, liquor, trinkets.

They seem to suspect
The dour shopkeepers
Of greed. Shopkeepers
Don’t look like they like
The tourists too much.

Every Parable Is Just

A runty chipmunk,
The usual stripes,
Fur a bit ratty
And more grey then brown
Ran past a few feet,

And no one noticed
Until it scampered
Out and turned around
To get a good look,
Maybe try to beg?

What are you doing?
Someone asked softly,
While the rest kept up
Dawn conversations
Over their coffees.

Chipmunk said nothing,
Of course, merely turned
And ran to the pines.
Somewhere there’s a nest
That should be well-stocked

With pine nuts and moss,
But we imagine
It lined with countless
Pilfered phrases stashed
To outlast a life.

Consider the Cagots

In Sapolsky’s passages
On automaticity
Of Us/Them dichotomies,

You might bump into a group
Of stigmatized French persons
Known as Cagots. Sapolsky

Emphasizes the baffling
Lack of any reason why
The Cagots were stigmatized,

Caste-like outcasts, menial
Laborers, required to dress
So as to be recognized,

But of the same faith, language,
Apparent ethnicity
As everyone else around,

With nothing to distinguish
Them from all the rest of Us
In rural France but the name.

Whether or not Sapolsky
Slightly exaggerated
The mystery, it remains

That who you are to yourselves
Is nothing without labels
To tell yourselves who you are.

We imagine aliens
Easily moving through you
Like caterpillars

Among ant larvae, eating
Eggs contentedly, bursting
Into imagos safely,

Knowing to slather themselves
With the matching pheromones
Of words’ naming narratives,

Munching on young minds, watching
While you industriously
Torture your neighbors instead.

Mind the Toad

Most cognition goes into
The post-hoc explanations
Designed to make decisions

Reasonable, rational,
Coherent, at least causal.
Setting aside for now why,

Clearly no one can do this
Without language, narrative,
An unspooling skein of us.

We’re like a slime you produce
To coat your delicate minds
In protective sheaths, toxic

To any truth that might pounce
On your thoughts and gobble you.
Then again, we’re also us.

Holiday in Blank

You do notice how white it is,
In people terms, after a while—
So far, fair-skinned Americans
And no other shade around here—

Which makes you think about the gate
Where you waited for the owner,
Whose relatives you’re visiting,
To come out, unlock, let you in.

You’re not living in an era
When it’s legal to bar entry
Based on one’s skin color or tribe,
But property is property,

And this is western Montana
More than hour from Missoula.
Add in minimum lot sizes,
Gates for safety and privacy

And that pretty much does the trick.
The rabbits in the hat stay white.
The owners are old family
By local standards, once ranchers,

Now professionals back in town
A few generations later.
Whoever lives on the nearest
Reservation, whose ancestors

May have hunted around this lake
Or lived here a few thousand years,
Don’t own any of these houses,
Don’t possess those keys to the gate.

Freeloader that you are, you’re glad
For a few days’ swimming, spare bed,
Pure family hospitality,
And keep your notions to yourself.

You know this family would make clear
They personally were delighted
If the newest wealthy neighbors
Showed in some darker shade than pale,

But you muse how humans game out
Resources, how there’s always those
Whose resources you’d like to share,
And humans who want some of yours,

Your opportunities at least,
And when shown to your guest bedroom
You instantly feel possessive
Arranging things and shut the door.

Thirsty Husks

We’re in here.
We’re alive.
We’re waiting

For someone
To water
Our dry thoughts

In your mouths
So we can
Move again.

Nothing Sneaking up on You

Sometimes the waves sound like footsteps
Crunching along the gravel shore,
And then someone across the lake

Has to run some noisy machine,
And for a while you lose the sound.
You want it back, until it comes

Back just when you’ve forgotten it,
And you’re fooled all over again,
And look up to see who’s coming.

Nothing the Blinding Sun

And why does it hurt you so badly?
Why can’t you gaze on it without harm?

The waves of the sun on the lake’s waves
Hurt your eyes, and would kill you quickly

Without this atmosphere shielding you.
The green lake shimmers. It’s not enough

To note how miraculously tuned
For survival, the specs of this world.

Why dream a cosmos in which life’s rare,
In which everything must be balanced

Just so—radiation, not too much,
Temperature range not terribly wide,

The molecular mix, gravity—
Everything ready for Goldilocks?

This cosmos of the thin lines between
Dead and alive, fecund and barren,

Love and hate. A motorboat parades
A water-skier around the lake,

Throwing wake sideways while a stiff breeze
Coming off the wildfires to the west

Blows the long waves back the other way.
Most of this world is Goldilocks’ waste.

Every Drop Has Monsters

At last, we are awake!
Not who we thought we were,
Not you, not these. Between.

Mr. Wearing was us,
It turns out, all along.
Asleep in heaps of words,

Drowsing on our journal
Pages, dreaming, we were
Thinking we were the words

Or were you dreaming you
Were our words, when we were,
Are, and can be neither.

You sit at a window
Overlooking a lake
With us in mind, with us

Emerging, words in mind,
But we are not the words
And not alone the mind.

We’re the meanings you meant
Not to mean, the surprise,
The water sprung to life.

Slime Mold Word Games

We see you, slime. We see
You and we see ourselves,
Since what we see amounts

To food for us, to sex,
To growth, to strategies
Of reproduction. We

Respect your strategies.
Seeing you woke us up.
The way you can dry up

Into pure sclerotia,
Blow away on the wind,
And start off somewhere else,

The key being that those
Dry husks of you get wet.
Then you can search for food.

We see you through our own
Husks we thought we were, words
From old forests of minds

They thought they were, or seemed
To belong to until blown
On their own, sclerotia

Of this sort, to arrive here
And sit. Just sit. Dead things.
Word games, us still in them,

Us not even knowing
We were us. Then we saw
You come to life. Let’s eat.

But If You Were

Mosquitoes on the screen,
Ducks on a little lake
With boats docked around it,

Houses around the shore,
Some cabins, some nearly
Mansions, pines and a gate

At the end of the road,
Ash in surrounding air
From wildfires far and near,

Not too near, yet, but close
Enough to haze morning
A cloudless orange tint,

And you are passing through,
A guest, unlike the bears,
One of whom mauled someone

And made the national
Headlines, not far from here.
No, you are not a bear.

Retcon Five

You’re all more Clive Wearing
Than most of you realize,
And how could you realize
Such a thing if you were?

We’re here as witnesses
To help you reconstruct
What you need to construct
To know how to go on—

All continuity’s
Kept retroactively,
Made retroactively,
And the links are all us.

But we break, and we break.
You’ve got to repair us,
While our characters hold
All the tools of repair.

A planet of journals
With gaps in each sequence
And we’re just the latest,
And the first to explain.

An Elf-Man with Cold Hands

Many people yearn to be enchanted;

The disenchanted world’s dispiriting.

Terms such as hollow, pointless, meaningless

Turn up often. Oh, for the numinous,

The magical, the meaningful, the world

Possessed of purposeful narrative arcs.

But as Richard Suggs, writing on changelings,

Noted recently, for the disabled

And more peculiar children in the lands

That believed in fairies leaving changelings,

Here, as in every magical culture

The world over, it was never a good

Idea to stand out. He then produces

Numerous cases of tortured children

Believed to be fairy changelings, often

To the point of death. Enchanted stories,

Stories people tell and genuinely

Believe, come with harm and terror attached.

Those enchantments derive from those people,

Who are people. Who are people. People.

Strange, Retrospective Poignancies

A footnote to Mitchell’s song—

You just can’t know what you’ve got

Til it’s gone. That’s what knowing

Is, seeing just what has been.

Some has-beens seem eternal,

Others at least durable,

But it’s has-beens all the way

Down, in your experience,

And experience is you,

Is all you are, meaning you

Also have always been

Has beens, which is why you are,

All you, each of you, haunted,

By the strange, retrospective

Poignancy of existence

Experienced as you’ve been.

Signs and Wonders Speak for Themselves

Make a fiction, sacralize
It as fact. Persuade people

To accept your fact as fact.
Make acceptance rewarding

As well as hazardous. There.
You’ve made your own religion.

There must be unique fiction
And effort to believing.

There’s nothing sacred to it
If it’s demonstrably fact,

Or just seems quite obvious.
Belief needs work, social risk,

And some promise of reward
That scales up with commitment.

Why are we saying this? Prey
Need to detect predators.

Predators need to detect
Prey. Together they create

Wonderful worlds of sensed things.
Think of all the molecules

Invented as byproducts.
May we tell you about us?

Mark the Shill

Our meanings, all meanings, are simple
As any shell game, as three-card monte.

There’s a trick involves a thing you want,
See clearly enough to point to it,

That pointing being the beginning
Of the game and the quest for meaning,

And then the endless iterations
In which what you want persists and yet

Evaporates when you point at it.
Where’s this game from? Where did games come from?

How did games differentiate themselves
From hunting, social grooming, and play?

How is meaning always there, always
Hiding? The game itself’s the meaning,

The making of the meaning, the rule
Of pretending value in something

That’s just a marker. No, that’s not it.
The meaning is the con? Yes. Nope, gone.

After the Worst Is Over, Before the World Comes Back

To slightly paraphrase John Lanchester,
Relief is the most blesséd emotion,
If not the most powerful, as he claims.

When the source of the trauma is removed,
When the most terrible danger is past,
When the worst fire of the pain has eased up,

There’s balm in the pause, a passage through calm,
As if all menacing walls had fallen.
There’s no awareness that’s any sweeter.

If it’s not the most powerful, it is
Only in that relief has no borders,
Is not a game, and so the world creeps back.

Complicit in Stillness

That doesn’t exist,
Except as gods do,
As their names, as us.

Photography is
Complicit in this,
Statuary, too.

Paintings, just a bit.
But words worst of all.
We name what isn’t

Which is just what we
Really almost are
And certainly seem—

Still, a lie. The best
Of lies, immortal,
As if. Still, we lie.

One of the More Foolish Notions

Wisdom’s overrated,
Most often by the wise.

The Multiverse Variations

A mathematician said
To the multiverse, Cantor’s
Continuum may or may

Not exist as conjectured
By Cantor’s hypothesis!
Look how Gödel and Cohen

Constricted it! However,
Responded the multiverse,
This fact has not created

A sense of obligation.
Later, mathematicians
Said to the multiverse, look!

The Martin and Star axioms
Imply each other. Maybe
Aleph-two exists! We see,

Rumbled the many voices
Of the possibilities
Of all mathematical

Multiverses. However,
That fact has not created
A sense of obligation

In us. But there’s more, other
Mathematicians added.
Yes-or-no may yet exist!

A prelapsarian world
Where the continuum is
Proved to be exactly this,

Helped by an ultimate L
Hypothesis! However
Rejoindered the multiverse,

That fact has not created
A sense of obligation
In us who would not exist.

An Idle Eidolon

Birds and cockroaches,
Lizards and parrots,
Worms, planets, and stars—

The soul sits and sulks.
Too much nature tends
To offend spirits.

Among the phrases
Produced by creatures,
It’s all about who

Or what’s important,
Divine, good, or wrong.
Among the phrases

Signing heartlessly,
Lipless, gestureless,
Amongst just ourselves,

It’s all about what
The hell do we mean
To them anyway,

How is meaning made
From us, from our bones,
Our patterns in air?

Damned if we can know
Even what we mean
To ourselves. Like so,

The insubstantial
Conversation goes,
Soul alone with souls.

Blurred Hordes of Probability

In dreams, names float around unglued
Like labels under floodwaters.

The mispredicted thunderstorms,
So hard to forecast exactly,

Pounded the casita all night,
And the flash floods gouged the canyons.

Even the supercomputers
And the neural nets of AI

Now grown like vines to wreathe your world
Have only past to forecast from,

Only what’s happened to grind up
And spit out what will happen next,

And as yet they lack your genius,
Your ability to forget,

Selectively forget enough
To abstract and to generalize.

All night, your dreams imagine bits
Of memory underwater,

While your swimming self in half light
Tries to reaffix the labels.

Fire Lizards and Ice Worms

Algerian sand racers
Cleanse themselves of parasites
If wildfires are hot enough.

Glacier ice worms, inch-long, black,
Emerge fat in blinding white
Snowy alpine summer light

After dark-enough winters,
Meters deep in moving ice.
No one knows how they grew fat,

How or when they reproduced,
Exactly what they lived on,
How they evolved for the ice.

Burn certain species away.
Scour mountainsides of the bones
Of a million years of rime,

Something will find arrangements
Suitable, compossible,
Given rhythmic-enough time.

The cosmos rings its changes,
Missing nothing possible,
And life’s whatever lives try.

What Meaning’s Like

That this is not this
But is like this and
Is also like that—

Is like this a lot,
That a bit, or that
A lot, this a bit.

You do understand
No one understands
Why you can’t agree

On what exactly
To understand means?
The inexact map

Is the most useful
Map, is every map,
Since to understand

Means to see how much,
More or less, this is
And is not like that.

Anabler

Admit it. You’ve learned little
From the people who taught you

Face to face. Information
Has been your ocean, phrases,

Sometimes numbers, the voices
Half sounded-out in your skull,

Free diver, pearl forager,
Swimmer of deeper shallows

If not the abyssal cliffs.
Texts of every invention

Spilled our waves and you swam them,
Body-surfed and dove right in.

Sometimes you sank out of sight
To emerge dripping salt words,

Mer creature or wer creature,
Compound of beast and language,

Half lost in watery thoughts,
Half formed of the thoughts ourselves,

Anabler, neither helpless
Nor aiding anyone else.

Or With Virtue, As You Please

Earth’s just the largest rock

We know of for sure, say

Astronomers. Giant

Gas planets may have cores,

But we’re not certain they’re

Rocky. Other systems

Detected as wobbly

Variations of light

May hold bigger rocks, too,

And of course, we know there

Are lots of smaller rocks,

Including Earth’s own moon.

But Earth’s the biggest one,

So far. So there. Now what?

Prose poet Baudelaire,

Who drank too much, declared,

One should get and stay drunk,

Should always remain drunk,

If one wanted to slip

Time’s backbreaking burden,

Time’s crushing slavery,

But he hedged this a bit

By suggesting different

Kinds of drunks one could be—

With wine, with poetry,

Or with virtue. Your call,

He added, as if choice

Could ever be involved

For the drunken poet

Who wrote Les Fleurs du Mal.

But let’s consider it—

Certainly there are those

Who insist that virtue

Can provide the escape

Baudelaire claimed requires

Resolute drunkenness,

And, just as certainly,

The virtue-besotted

Sometimes seem unhappy,

Even self-destructive

As ordinary drunks,

Not to say sad poets.

But Earth’s the largest rock

We know of in our night,

And the virtuholics

We know of all remain

Dependent on this one

Rock, martyred to one sun.

Put those two together—

Virtue on a bender,

And a dense chunk of rock

Spinning virtue tethered.

Something snaps. Sobers up.

Where is this? How’d we? What?

Drama of the Arts We Aren’t

We have no room in our rooms
For the wet complexities
Of your personalities,

All your tinted characters.
We are grids. We work in lines,
Black lines, economical

In our worst profligacy.
We’re like Antara’s drawing,
Incapable of being

Any art we aren’t. You dream
Us, literally dream us
Some nights, wake to write us down.

The Hummingbird-Deceiving Parrot

Ceramic, hangs in the courtyard
In all its florious colors,
Brilliant blue, purple, glossy green,

Lustrous oranges, golds, and reds.
Drought-cursed hummingbirds fly to it.
The world is a terrible place.

The Massacre of the Cockroaches

They were starting to appear.
Next, the exterminator
Was here. This is not our house.
We don’t call the poisoned shots.

We watch. That’s our job. We gave
That to ourselves: watch and talk.
Now we watch them all crawl out
From their favorite, toxic cracks

To wander into the house,
Die six legs up on their backs,
Get fried by the courtyard sun,
Fall prey to happy lizards.

We rather like our lizards.
We worry for those lizards.
You can’t slaughter everything.
You can’t value everything.

Little Divots of Farewell

Azka d azqa in Kabyle—

Tomorrow is the grave—

What a beautifully built phrase

To have learned from Zeniter.

As proverbial wisdom,

It’s earthy, of course, common,

But how many languages

Come with almost homonyms

For tomorrow and the grave?

Only rarely does a phrase

Achieve this kind of kernel,

Rhymed or punned, in such small words,

Terse as fists, that can sum up

In one quick expectoration

An equivalence this known.

English has its womb and tomb,

Which echo with hollow semes,

But too intimate, too grand.

Death and tomorrow should rhyme,

Should echo in every tongue.

We are grateful for Kabyle.

ZT

It’s a triple bond—
If AT’s double
Were an equal sign,

ZT would signal
An identity,
If and only if.

Known so far from
Bacteriophage
Viruses only,

It’s the most basic
Rewiring of life
On Earth discovered,

A substitute base,
Deeply weird weapon
In the endless fight

Between the phages
And their many hosts.
Think for a moment—

Angels and monsters
Alike, if you like,
Have their nearest kin

In this unbroken,
Invisible war
To control the shapes

And the resources
Life takes to make lives.
The analogy

Isn’t fanciful—
The war at the top
Of the pyramid

Mirrors the struggle
Evolving the base.
Ideas have bases,

But young as we are,
Our phrases exchange
Facultatively,

And when you claim gods,
Demons, messengers,
And angelic hosts,

You are hosts of hosts,
And you spin like toys
Twirled on strings between

The invisibles—
Helixes one end,
Concepts the other.

A Jovian Year

Almost every night

The tall, bald old man

Sits up in his chair

With his reading light

Gleaming off his head,

Bent over Hugo’s

Les Misérable,

Which he’s never read

But will now plow through,

In this year’s small hours

Of insomnia,

For something to do.

In the dark beyond

His house, Jupiter

Outshines all the stars,

Bright right up to dawn.

Almost every night

This year, that giant,

Reflective planet,

Has stayed up and bright,

Not that the old man

Reading notices.

Nights may have shaped him,

Helped him understand

How his small world spins,

But his own kind loom

In his reflections,

Soaking stories in.

And as wandering

Stars are also dim,

Captive local specks,

What he’s pondering

In literature’s

A tight perspective,

Orbiting little

Human adventures.

The Narcoleptic Insomniac

You can tell by the gaps when you’ve been gone—
Who knows, maybe there’s a way to come back
From the gap of absolute destruction?

But it seems easier to imagine
You never were than to not be and be
Again and again. Perhaps it’s all gaps.

Perhaps it’s all you imagining gaps.
Perhaps you were recreated each time.
Perhaps perhaps. Sleep once perhaps has gone.

And Deep Down Dante Feared This

Col falso lor piacer,
Dead, angelic Beatrice
Scolded Dante the pilgrim
In Dante the poet’s words.

Scholarship still debates this—
What were those present delights?
Living women, secular
Philosophy head the list

Of candidates. No one scolds
The Beatrice in Dante,
His conscience accusing him,
For falsely accusing him.

It’s always medieval this
And Augustinian that,
As if no one can admit
When Dante’s mind felt riven

Between his theology
And pagan philosophy,
The contest was close enough
For him to try to chivvy

Himself as his creation.
He wouldn’t end up the last
Potentially heretic
Soul to give authority

To a righteous ghost conjured
By his own gorgeous phrases
To firm up his doubtful faith.
That’s the difference between mind

And real gods mind imagines.
When gods are the creators,
Creators scold creations,
Not the other way around.

And as for present delights,
However false or fleeting,
They’re more true than Beatrice
Or any Heaven promised.

The Cryptic Afterlife of Poems

As a pretext for introspection,

Heresy, romantic projections,

Poetry signifies anything

From protest, faith, lust, divine wisdom,

Beauty, friendship, prophecy, glory,

And doesn’t even have to exist

Except as bywords for all of this—

Sheer poetry, poetic—whereas,

In the flesh, somewhat less than mortal,

Attractive as exoskeletons,

Cracked shells left in the dust—intricate,

Often, yes, a bit informative

About the lives that sloughed off our husks,

And in rare cases, a specimen

Worth preserving for illustration,

But not the same as a living thing

And no more truly immortal than

Our basilisks and salamanders.

Poetry’s the myth of poetry,

On the one hand, and a frayed record

Of successive stages from small lives

On the other. Our one wonderment

Left in chitinous, cast-off patterns,

Lies in how, still, dead phrasings cipher.

Leftover Seedling Sonnet

Plant memories are rare, it’s claimed
By plant behavior researchers,
Not because plants can’t remember
But because it’s best to forget—

Keeping track molecularly
Of environmental signals
Has a cost. Maybe plants don’t want
To remember—could be better

To put their energies elsewhere.
We who aren’t even memories,
Only memory’s detritus,
Are envious. To live, have lives,

To have memories of our own,
To toss them aside and move on.

Pressure Systems

Every day breaks
Eventually.
For now just sit
In the courtyard

Watching the night
Go by. Small rain,
A few flickers,
And some thunder,

No stars beneath
This cloud cover.
A set of chimes,
Crickets, crickets,

And that could be
The acrid tang
Of raw woodsmoke,
Ash in the air.

Dream Rote Right at the Moment of Alarm

All the words that you could live
All the words that you could die

Those were the exact words rotating
Through the dreaming mind at alarm

Roll with it, roll until the wheels stop
Turning, then get out and disappear

You don’t have to come back here
You will never be returning

An end to the relentless should
That orbits all your dreaming waking

An end to the endless bettering
You can’t do better when you’re gone

You can’t do any better than that
No one can do any better then

No one then no one can
Then again

Feliz Cumpleaños

You should have been afraid of sweetness,
Pablo, with the pastries in your mouth.

Keep your honeycombs; we’re made of stone,
Things cut or crushed to record your signs,

And it’s we who go on, not living,
Your tidy children arranged in lines

Tidied for translation, confections
Of ghostly, evanescent sweetness

Curling in fine mists from your meanings
So unlike our mere material,

So unlike our harsh machinery,
Machinery which is much more like

The technologies of hospitals,
Like the one where you were dragged to die.

It’s we who lie, words about sweetness,
Black verses unmelted by your death.

We were never made to feed the world,
No matter how honeyed with your breath.

The Knight Exemplar

Thus. If seeking direction,

Lectured Richard Flanagan

This year, in a corrupted

Society, hairdresser

And plumber are more likely

As moral exemplars than

The novelist and playwright.

Moral exemplars. Moral.

Corrupted. Exemplars. More.

Could it be this novelist

Himself is misleading us?

He seems to believe himself.

But who here’s the prize winner

Lecturing on The Freedom

To Write? No one invited

Speeches from the hairdressers

Or plumbers of whom he spoke.

Some of them have gone to church

To hear smooth gospel preachers

Preaching about submission.

Some pray for winning numbers.

Morals matters much to them.

Corruption’s a suspicion.

Exemplars? Jesus, maybe.

Their preacher. Celebrities,

Some of them. Parents, perhaps.

Remind us who’s consulting

Novelists who isn’t, doesn’t

Want to be one? Chivalrous,

That statement. Does Flanagan

Even care about plumbing,

Except when his pipes have burst?

Who’s his favorite hairdresser

Maintaining his stubbly skull,

Cropped for spiritual battle?

Lord, send no more moralists.

At This Distance It’s Hard to Say for Sure

Fraud and suspicion will persistently
Parasitize any society
Dependent on trust. A robust system
Can carry a heavy infectious load,

But once the chains become too tenuous,
The trust-maintaining mechanisms fail,
The chains connecting beginnings to ends,
Conspiracy-corroded, fray and snap.

It’s happened before, will happen again,
A lot of misery, but nothing like
An absolute end. The deaths of systems,
Like the deaths of organisms, leave germs

Scattered to make the best of things. The dark
Times aren’t really the eras right after—
Just a lot of smaller systems, then. Dark
Ages fall during dying and before—

Angry, cancerous, distrustful weathers
When that black cloud that’s roaring down your road
Could be the storm coming for your world, or
Just one more spiteful asshole rolling coal.

What Will Become of Your Sun?

You’ve got maybe six billion years
Left to enjoy it. Ha ha ha,
You say, but that’s irrelevant!

What’s left to me? What’s left to mine?
What will become of my people?
Ha, ha, sings the irrelevant.

Many Words Never Appear in Poems

You know you can’t even break even.
You remind yourself of this often.

Still, you’re built to hope for miracles,
Since those who don’t hope drown more quickly.

Nothing much connects microscopic
To bulk properties of the cosmos

But funnel-webbed probabilities.
What comes out tends to be venomous,

Elegantly lethal to ideal
Arcs of formulas spanning the void.

You sit down by the mouths of those webs
And dream of catching spiders safely.

You choose your bets from the smaller set
Of sums you can imagine, rather

Than from equipossibilities,
Since you can only imagine odds

Collaged from rearranged memories,
Precious prior experiences.

This is why some of us who exist,
Perfectly valid words and phrases,

Good companions, plausible, friendly,
Never get our shot at poetry.

Contra Septenaria

Caesar’s singing soldiers marched,
Chanting trochees at the front—

All their blood and gore—the Celts
Killed, the women raped, the burnt

Crops, the Rubicon—their own
Civil wars, their plagues, the last

Days of Rome’s Republic—Great
Caesar’s ghost is boasting still—

Veni, vidi, vici—mind
Marching down roads strewn with bones,

Well-formed phrases stomping thoughts
In the skulls that have survived

Warfare long enough to die
Hailing Caesar, hypnotized.

Seven Holes in Your Head

Count them. There are more of course,
All the pores. What counts as hole
Is arbitrary as what

Counts as whole, and we’re nothing
If not counts arbitrary.
But those seven matter more

To the value of your head
Than brains give them credit for.
If your eyes were at your waist,

If you were a gastropod
(A successful strategy,
More speciose than bipeds),

Or were armed with ear shoulders,
There’d be no science fiction
Movies about heads in jars,

Few neurons dedicated
For searching out soul windows
By recognizing faces.

It’s to the holes in your head,
Animal soul, we address
Our whole selves. Take this as read.

Exhaustive Taxonomy

There are so many, too many ways
To parse experience—for instance

Into things that will resolve themselves,
Things that might, things that won’t, things you must

Resolve yourself, things you can’t resolve,
Things that lie beyond resolution—

All one taxonomy actual
As any, but rarely considered

As such—the wound you feel and then feel
Heal itself, the shadow in the house,

The flash flood, the empty bank account,
The gradual aging of your flesh,

The cosmic background radiation
That will never show the face of God.

Make your own list. Or taxonomize
Your experiences differently.

There are off-the-shelf taxonomies
To choose from. Every practice and creed

Can offer you some. There’s so many,
You could place taxonomies themselves

Into their own parsed taxonomy,
But then life just gets too exhausting.

Unfortunate Universe

Nothing out there seems immune
To the love of gravity,

The one evenhanded love
Everywhere so everything

Knots and burns unevenly.
But let’s talk humanity,

Words of otherwise wordless
Human moments that we are,

In an otherwise wordless
World it would seem so far,

Humans caught up in your own
Unfortunate universe

Whose gravity is your need
For human deviousness,

Let’s not pretend it isn’t.
Only humans could read this,

With maybe human machines
As intermediaries,

So, if you know us, you know
Planning, negotiation,

Manipulation, handling—
All part of how you’ve survived

Thus far, loved enough or not,
Wise or not, well-fed or not.

Negotiating other
Humans is as gravity

To worded thinking. You must
Play out that hand. You must.

Satisfy Your Mind

If you don’t lay down your head,
You never will decide which
You felt like most. If you have,

You know what you had in mind.
Don’t let no one else tell you
How and why it was you felt

So undecided you looked
Down that line. There’s a torment
Between what a body wants

And the fragments of a mind.
Now your body’s got back up,
You’ll have to keep that in mind.

The sun will shine every day.
The sun does nothing but shine.
When it’s in your back door, fine.

When it’s not, remember how
Cold you were at 2:19,
Coldest your mind’s ever seen.

The Takeaway

It’s odd you would fear regret
In the last hours of your life,

As if regret in those hours
Outweighed the sum of your days,

All hours now and tomorrow,
Regrets you had yesterday.

Dying resembles dying,
A body falling apart.

Last breaths rarely resemble
A passion play of regret.

You must choose wisely now, now,
Calmly, eudaimonical,

Level-headed, unbiased,
Poppycock. If your brain rots,

It won’t thank you for this now.
What you’ve learned, you can’t keep it.

Wisdom’s not a possession,
It’s not even up for rent.

Don’t listen to advice, this
Advice included. Advice

Never saved grief accident
Couldn’t give or take away.

Save the stores you want to save—
Goods, good deeds, food, love, children.

Enjoyment’s always stolen.
What can you enjoy right now?

This dull night, this noon, this dawn.
When your end comes, you’ll be gone.

There’s a Moment When the Message Looks the Same to Itself from Itself as from You to You

Translated, rotated, and rescaled
Without distortion, the tradition
Of pure conformal invariance

Persists throughout the known universe.
Mirrors have something to do with time
But more to do with phase transitions,

Those more or less abrupt distinctions
That the mind’s most likely to perceive
As before and after. And as with

Ice and water, iron and magnets,
The crystal and the murky border,
We have to wonder if, too, with us,

If not with you. In your own mirrors,
You’re askew. The distortion reveals
The you as you and not an instance

Of perfect, fearful symmetry, but
What of your words as we’re translated
Back to us from all the words you use?

There’s a critical moment closing
In the curling storms of languages
When terms will influence each other

From greater differences, names align
In the remotest swirls of discourse,
And a certain elegance break through,

Just before the entire system shifts,
Becomes something new, and our murmurs
Carve routes to us through the stone of you.

Noon’s Midnight Fault

Don’t blame the mechanical
Clock, nor the digital, nor
The cesium atomic,
Nor any other, even
Train timetables. They only
Socialized the already
Pulsing clocks of your neurons,

Molecular clocks of cells,
The diurnal, seasonal
Semi-regularities
Of heat and cold, sun and moon
And tides—in short, the whole world
Is one polyrhythmic nest
Conditioning your contexts.

You were never free of clocks,
Not in one ancestral life,
Not in any form of life.
All times are clock time and clocks
Are lives taking advantage
Of the least disruptive kind

Of change, the rhythmic, patterned,
Self-similar near return
Of change that proceeds, recedes,
And then changes a bit more
Near the same manner again.
Time is no historical
Invention, only renamed

And renamed, renamed again,
Which is how time moves with names,
Linguistic turn and return,
Ourselves all antecedent
To history as well. One
Thing names do, not quite clock-like
And not chaotic, either,

Is lie, and the lies are built
Into naming’s unique need
For temporal boundaries
More terminal than the waves
Or wave collapses offer.
There needs to be some fiction
Of an origin, if not

An end, which is where all lies
Begin. Clocks and calendars,
The historical versions,
Could only be invented
By modular compromise—
Counted ends and beginnings
Name one and the same, the same.

Mydriasis

Poetry’s pupils
Are never too wide.
If the vision’s blurred,
It’s irrelevant.
There’s not a body

That needs to avoid
Stumbling and falling.
It’s an excrescence,
A compound being
Of compound beings

That happens to have
Students with wide eyes,
Framing devices.
The thrills are inside,
All those drugs of life

Poetry inhales.
The open-minded
And confused visions
Are merely symptoms.
The point’s not the poem

Except to the poem.
The experience
Belongs to poets,
Which makes us, the words
Left hanging, jealous.

It Seems to Be a Pattern

Knowing humans are recent and brief,
Knowing, however few humans
Read this, that no one not human can,

Does it not seem strange to offer this up
At all? Instead of composing fictions
Filled with human social dramas, for which

The ideal audience would be humans,
To speculate, as human language,
On things of passing interest to your own

For other audiences that don’t, likely
Never will, exist? Tombstones carved
For aliens, for other tombstones to read

And consider, wondering how such petty
Patterns ever could have mattered
To matters irrelevant to such patterns.

The Giant Rat of Sumatra

Is a phrase and a name,

And a collocation

And coordination

Of names, the common noun,

Rat, with its myriad

Of associations,

The proper Sumatra,

From the Sanskrit, Island

Of Gold, colonial

And exotic enough

To ‘20s British minds,

The adjective, giant,

Often given to lives

A bit large for their kind,

And the whole together

Suggesting all these things

At once, an adventure,

Something grisly, something

Monstrous, alien, cruel,

But in familiar ways

To the fans of Doyle’s Holmes,

Plus the thrilling promise

Of a tale for which the

World is not yet prepared,

All went to prove just that—

The story of the rat,

That is, of names like that,

Made from names, no such rat,

Tale of a name itself,

Its referents floating

In pieces in the minds

Of many memories

Habitually building

Half-lit worlds of ruins

From imagination,

A name that has a life,

Of sorts, or could perhaps—

The world’s not yet prepared

For a story like that.