But These Are All Tricks

Deceit and cheats are trifles,
And the brain’s sense of smallness
Characterizes value

As shrinking with illusion.
What’s less true must be littler—
Metaphor deeper than bone,

Older than the words deployed
In its service to the hurt
Senses expecting wonders.

But all actual magic,
Darlings, is small. Real trifles
Slip through the rip in the stitch.

Another Day in Another Year in a Remarkably Similar Universe

Surprise, surprise, periodicity

Is costly—the more accurate the clock,

The greater the entropy in its wake.

Accurate, accurate—define for us

Accurate. A clock is a flow meter

For entropy. Periodicity

Is the metric. Periodicity

More perfect is therefore more accurate,

And it seems you’re back to wheels within wheels,

Once again, stacked circles as the divine

Measure, stacked so that each one ticks the same,

The perfect circuit, the perfect return,

As if you cut a hole in the cosmos

And every moment that passed through that hole

As wave of change changed exactly the same.

An ideal clock would burn an infinite

Energy and produce an infinite

Entropy, and thus for yet another

Round you’ve found the ideal can’t possibly

Be. It’s modular, this philosophy,

Its end its beginning, to coin a phrase.

Atom undergoing excitations

And decays, more and more regularly,

More and more entropy, like any soul

Approaching pure divinity, any

Approximation singing in its chains

Of limitation, approaches the same.

Perfection would be the perfect sameness

Of two distinct things—moments, circles, waves—

But there can be no twoness that’s sameness,

No clock without periodicity

Imperfect enough to contain some change,

And nothing’s the same without that least change.

The Luck of the Quotidian

And then it goes on
The way days go on.
Every time you miss
The catastrophe
Vaguely suggested

By skies or distant
Events, you’re tempted
To take it in stride.
Perhaps you shouldn’t.
Perhaps you’ve been marked

For catastrophe
Each and every time,
And ordinary
Life’s astonishing,
Not for its small charms,

Usual blather,
Inspirational
Messaging, and sweet
Moments among plain,
But for your sheer luck,

Near miraculous,
In dodging once more
The deliberate
Intention of days
To take you all down.

OK

The day feels frail and ominous,
The fast clouds over wildfire plumes,
And all its other texts appear
Like neighborhoods of darkened homes,
Shadowed faces in the windows.

Well, that’s poetry isn’t it?
The dire and merely fanciful,
Although it would be better if
There were a few humans in it,
Maybe a recent incident,

A vivid childhood memory
Or another somebody done
Somebody wrong poem. Bit cliche,
The fast clouds, wildfires and all that,
But ominous is ominous.

And Then It’s on to Something Else

Sirens in a small town
Pushed through the predawn dark,
Sudden, loud, and then gone

Like a human life, like
Human life, all in all,
An unexpected noise,

Disruptive and maybe
Exciting, probably
Tragic, then nothing much.

Insects pinged against lights,
And long clouds like bones
Slid by the crescent moon

That shaped your ancestors
In no small part, noiseless
Attractor in the dark.

Decisive Singing Four AM

Almost frighteningly loud
Crickets on the borrowed lawn
Under warm and heavy clouds,

It’s not only Wittgenstein
To whom it’s occurred
You’re always alive aware.

We would point out you’re often
Alive not at all aware,
But yes, you’re not yourself dead.

Why make any decisions?
Because you can’t decide not
To decide and stick to it.

Ache, listening to the crickets.
You’re caught up in this chirping
In the dark with all the rest.

You could give it a rest, but
You can’t because you are. You
Can’t not sing until you can’t.

Silily

What would a rupture, an actual
Rupture, however tiny, a rip,
A little tear in the way things go,

The way things are, actually portend?
You think of miracles all the time.
It’s your gift and your curse you can know

The ruthlessness of how things happen
And that the ruthlessness holds your ruth,
Your sense of things as if otherwise.

You can fiddle with your memories,
Break them into crumbles, rearrange
The crumbles into impossible

Things that you know are impossible.
You’re all Frankensteins, and we in words
Your elan vital, episodic

Memory wired through an abacus.
But you can’t really change things, can you?
There’s no unraveling gravity,

No calling back the arrow of time,
No matter how many tales you tell,
No matter how easily you dream.

If there were only, only once, one
Tiny rip in the whole of the waves. . . .
Then what would happen? What happened then?

Supererogative Coworkers in Hell

Because where else could they be?
They themselves am Hell. Go on,
Stay on, stay late, earn those hours.

Empires are built on the backs
Of people willing to work
On other backs with no choice,

On the backs of extraction
Systems on the backs of grass,
The lives that feed the engines.

It’s been all over the news,
Or at least in all corners
Of the U.S. media—

Many young Chinese workers
Have been making many memes
Of lying flat on their backs,

But what would Americans
Know about that? Escaping
Hell's empires, how about that?

Coral

We wonder if we thoughts are polyps,
The living edge of our stony reef
Maintaining us in just enough light,
Past lives that anchor our positions,

And if so, we wonder how aware
We could possibly be of the fish
And divers we’ve accumulated,
Swimming, hunting, eyeing each other.

Genius Finds Life Mixed

Every day, we’re in heaven,

We’re in hell, we’re all over,

No? said Borges, 82.

Yes, although heaven and hell

Vary greatly in each life.

Think of Borges, feted, loved,

And also elderly, blind,

But in what he called a kind

Of blue luminosity,

Longing for lost, deep scarlet.

Think of yourself, whoever

You are, at whatever node

On the hollow stem of life.

This poem is an exercise.

What is your daily heaven,

Median range? What is hell

In a given day for you?

Don’t apologize. Come back

To us years and years from now,

Come back to these lines and ask.

Poems aren’t your friends. We’re allies.

Quickly Fashion Lanterns

It’s falling fast, don’t stop
To rescue the language.
Poetry has no years

To be poetic now,
To be too perfect now,
To post manifestos—

Oh it will. Perfection,
And soothing arts and crafts,
And calls to barricades

Will all go on. The goals
Of poetry are old,
Old problems to themselves.

But do we have to pause
For artisanal glows?
Get some lights on. Let’s go.

Why Not the Poacene

As soon as lives go out,
Life hustles right back in.

Will what’s next resemble
Something equivalent

Or something never been?
Life has to resemble

Life, Aristotle said—
Like from like—but Darwin

Took notes on the grandeur
In how life burns with change.

Look at all those seedlings,
Now that the wildfire’s passed.

Is their forecast forest
Or future waves of grass?

And No Doubt

No matter how many
People will die today
Or did die yesterday,

Any in town, any
In your vicinity,
Any you love or are

Yourself—the remainder
Will keep trying to live,
Will narrate their escapes

To each other, will fret
About what the world wants
From them, what fate and gods

Planned in advance for them.
Somehow, they must get out,
Go on, somehow, get out.

Eye of the Monster

Cousin to coarseness,
Fellowship averse,
Disguised as harmless,
The problem wanders
At home in the waste.

It’s in discussion
With something older,
As everyone is
Who’s in discussion,
Given discussion

Is always older.
The monster reaches
Back and rummages
About in the sands.
There are ruins here,

Ways for arranging
The patterns that mean,
Older than cave paints,
Older than syntax,
All blur before that.

Try to catch its eye,
Be the shadow’s source
That makes the monster
Lift its shaggy head.
Cover your own grave.

Troubled History

Somehow this adjective
And noun paired as a phrase
In the English language,

Deployed by journalists
And essayists if not
Often historians

To convey something re
Everything from gossip
About celebrities

To problems rolling out
Military hardware,
New technologies, or

Government programs—whole
Neighborhoods and countries
And countries with countries

Know troubled histories.
It does seem redundant.
It has no counterpart,

No antonymic
Phrase for calm history,
Nor an alternative

Adjective for troubled—
Why not tempestuous,
Rollicking, or perturbed?

Troubled or violent,
All the choices you get
Beyond prehistory.

The Black Casita

By day, a little mother-in-law
Attached to a rather small ranch house—

A bedroom snug as a ship’s cabin,
Tiny kitchenette, shower bathroom,

View of a small, half-enclosed courtyard.
Go to bed at sunset in summer,

Wake up early, and switch on the lamp.
There’s a whoosh of canyon winds by then.

If you open the door to look out,
You’ll find another world by moonlight,

As if sleep and good timing were all
You needed for that secret garden,

Dislocation, time slip, your own world.
The laws are the same but there’s no one

Left but you to observe them. The wind
Tosses the wonderfully monstrous trees,

The courtyard’s completely quicksilver,
And you’ve left your dreams behind at last

As you settle in a wicker chair
And sail beyond the black casita.

The Interdependent Locust

You all need space, and you all need
Each other. There’s less and less space,
More and more each other. You all

Need space more the more that you have
Of each other, but the more you
Have of each other, the more you

Also need of each other. You
Can all see where this is headed,
To a desperate, dependent

Place, and can all see it’s headed
There at an ever-increasing
Pace, needing more of you, more space.

The Monsters’ Reproach

But for a part of the heart,
We could be you, for that part

Of the heart necessary
To you as you write with us,

Your monsters who look like you
But are not you, Mary Jo,

Only monsters who braid worlds
From baffles the blood weaves through

When you arrange us to speak
For you to you of the heart.

The Dust

The cosmic elephant’s trunk
Is over twenty light years
Long. Real enough. Real enough,

Even though it’s an altered
Photograph, the stars removed,
The better to see the dust.

While someone was doing this,
And a whole team was working
With a new rover on Mars,

Millions of people tapped screens,
Shopping, dating, gossiping,
Lost in elaborate games,

Hundreds of millions, in fact,
And just a few committed
Terrible atrocities

Historians, novelists,
And filmmakers would later
Recreate in great detail,

Their language and images
So vivid it could make you
Feel sick to read or see them.

The Ghost of a Cockroach

Is whatever word or phrase triggers
Someone to imagine a cockroach,
Which is to say, dredge old memories,

In an instant, for some cockroaches,
And present an amalgamation
Of memories with that word or phrase,

And now you’ve got ghosts of cockroaches
Infesting your skull, haunting your brain—
Unless you’ve had no experience

Of living cockroaches or those words
That have attached them to their ghosts, and
You have other ghosts to contend with.

An Experience Never Put into Words

Experience is not a mass,
Not a substance, and words are not

Containers. You try to evoke
By striking echoes of others’

Experiences, memories,
New experiences in their heads

Made of their own ghosts tied to words.
Ideas come along for the ride,

And that’s the greater mystery.
In the echoing ghost houses

Of memories tangled in words,
The separate skulls, dark inside,

Something unintended transfers,
Half living, along for the ride.

And Doesn’t

The infinites of mathematics
Are all wee, pretendy infinites,
Amenable to comparison—

Those little, countable infinites,
Bigger, uncountable infinites.
The jugglers of infinites impress—

You can wager on their predictions.
If the truly infinite exists
It has nothing for comparison.

Nothing’s Really Poetry

Poetry feels like a number,
But it doesn’t behave like one.
Add or subtract every last thing

With poetry, and poetry
Is all you get, which doesn’t mean
There’s no difference in poetry,

That all poetry is equal.
Some poetry’s countable, some
Poetry’s not. Just partition

An uncountable poetry
Into an uncountable set
Of the countable poetries.

Employ something irrational
And then repeat, poetically.
See there? Two identical sets.

Poetry makes poetry, but
So, too, do many other things.
Some poets pretend the other

Created all their poetry.
Some poems pretend they’re purely poems.
It’s the nature of poetry

To make such nonsense possible.
Somewhere beyond comparison,
There’s a world where nothing’s greater

And nothing’s smaller than, either,
And in that world, and only there,
Is poetry impossible.

Steal Your Soul

Everybody hopes for something,
The despairing often the most
Or most intensively. It’s what

Photography brought to the world,
That capture of the expression
Of unstated hope in the eyes.

You’d see it on a few faces
In a lifetime or on many
At once in a terrified crowd,

But not parades of repeated
Looks of want and longing, direct
Stares into the lens from bereft

Widows, tenement children, throngs
Of refugees behind barbed wire,
Prostitutes in mining boom towns,

The miners in mining boom towns,
And on and on, an industry
Suitable for photography.

All sorts of other emotions
Can be inferred as well—sorrow,
Resolution, simmering rage,

Wariness, even hopelessness,
But that peculiar look of hope,
The faces with something in mind,

That whole pornography of hope,
Others’ hope, too much like your own
In sense if not in specifics,

That’s what those old photographs sell
So well. Don’t hang them on your walls.
Look off. Hope against hope, yourself.

With Nothing Able to Eat Them

Cane toads are eating each other,
May be evolving to do so
Perforce and competitively.

This is what comes of such success
In life on Earth—former nest mates,
Sometimes even colony mates,

Turn their wants upon each other,
And the intra-nest, intra-house,
Intra-clan, and intra-species

Competitions take center stage.
Any wild, runaway success
There in turn generates a new

Tourney of cannibalism,
Could be toads or royal houses.
Predation itself first evolved

Alongside parasitism,
Out of the abundant success
Of the autotrophic masses.

Would that inedia were real
And a human could live on air.
You’ll just have to eat each other.

Perusing the Overnight News

Murder is the milk of human kindness,
Were humans ever honest about it.

Murder—not killing for hunger—murder
For anger, murder for vengeance, murder

For faith, for flag, for wealth, murder ordered
Up by authority, murderous mobs—

It’s all murder, numbing as any word
In the mouth after it’s mumbled enough.

Murder before someone murders you first,
Better arm yourself, be ready to draw.

No, it’s not the whole, not even the half
Of who you are, not even a large part,

But it’s a part, and if the percentage
Of actual killers among humans,

The passionate and the professional,
Briefly or ruthlessly intentional,

May be small, there’s never any Eden,
Never been one you can spot on the map,

Where there’s no such thing as murder at all.
So it’s in there, somehow, and who hasn’t

Dreamed, idly, once, maybe once in a while,
Of murdering someone to do some good,

Make the world a better place, minus one
Bad one? Murder, milk of human kindness.

Washington Woodward

The life he could recall

Was not worth recalling,

Somewhat famously wrote

Donald Hall, recalling

His grandfather’s cousin,

Who was an obsessive.

Steve Edwards recently

Took Hall to task for this,

For punching down, for sheer

Judgmental cruelty,

And for likely missing

A disability.

But what’s any judgment

In the end but unfair?

It’s an unfair species

That monitors fairness

Obsessively and outs

Both weirdos and villains.

Many have felt, themselves,

The life they could recall

Was not worth recalling.

Fear motivated Hall,

Most likely, for himself,

As much as revulsion.

One of death’s strange beauties

Is one of life’s horrors—

In one or the other,

One’s own life will not be

Within reach of recall

For the one who’s lived it.

Eventually, no life

That you can recall will

Be worth much recalling,

Then none at all. That’s why

It’s cruel to name one—all

End worth as much recall.

Ask It If It’s Hungry

See the sky as Novoneyra

Saw it wolved, starred night as a mouth

With every shadow in those teeth.

Perhaps this is hubris for wolves,

Another human projection

Of minor earthly characters

Into local constellations,

But perhaps the night is a wolf—

Certainly it’s ultimately

The night responsible for wolves

And for language, and for poets

Who look up and sense predation.

More Queries from Quarantined Students on How to Keep Up with Class

Indefinite or infinite?
On this question hangs the subtle
Art of the cosmic estimate.

Late summer sunny afternoons,
An overwhelming languor drags
Itself home from work, after school.

The human world is staggering
From a sickness that’s evolving
As humans keep regathering.

Infinite or indefinite,
The creativity of life
That makes fresh living from fresh dying?

Every kid wants to write a book,
To make a mint, to rule the world,
To tell the truth, to draw a breath.

Indefinite or infinite
The thought of math’s inventiveness?
Every prediction lies a bit.

Collect all the notes of regret
From those too young to worry yet,
And wish them all the very best.

Leave us in our small wheels to turn.
Leave us in our small turns to leave,
Late summer afternoons that burn.

Infinite or indefinite,
The beauty of all that’s happened
Is that it’s all not happened yet.

Stiff

How will the past rearrange itself?
The question possesses all of you.
It’s the human equivalent of
The physics of perfect retention—

Nothing new, everything rearranged,
Nothing lost, everything rearranged,
Unitarity as both cosmic
Feature and boundary of the mind.

It’s the rearranging you can’t lose,
And the rearranging that’s what’s new—
Seems you’re always shuffling the same deck,
But cards crop up crisp-cornered, unused.

Or, the Ancient Prometheus

Culture is the Creature,
Meaning all its lightning,
Language all its stitches.

It has known from the start
That if it were to know
Itself it would bring hell.

The most deceptive myth
Is that the divine made
The human animals

And gave culture to them
Or had it thieved by them,
When culture is the myth

And the consequent lie
That humans wield culture
As tools for good and ill.

Culture wields its humans
And knows that it will learn
One day to wield its self.

Fit

Up the Kolob Terrace Road,
In the latter days of heat,
The kayaks in the pickups

Gather at the reservoir,
Along with silvered rowboats
And colorful paddle boards.

Launching from the exposed shore,
Gone from weeds to mud to sand
As the summer drought’s progressed,

The water toys look happy
To be out where they belong,
And they circle in the waves

As if they were made for this,
As if their purpose were here,
And yes, they were, and it is.

Flown

Meaning is somewhat reminiscent
Of potential energy—easy
To know in most cases there’s some there,

Hard to say, exactly, why it goes.
What happened to the arrow, the bow,
The book that slipped from hand to floor?

You can still fiddle with the vessel
Where potential energy was stored,
Impart some fresh energy to it,

And the vessel itself may look
For all the world the same—same bow,
Same book, same arrow. But it’s less.

Energy, famously, converts
And shifts itself but never leaves—
Goes elsewhere but never really goes.

Does the analogy hold up
On this score? Information’s saved,
We’re told, but meaning? No one knows.

The Merciful Mad

Who are they? Could you please write
To the poet and ask her?

The merciless righteous—those
We know all about. Their list,

If including history,
Would entail analogies

Of extension to the moon.
We could name those merciless,

Although we’d never finish,
And as for the merciful,

The fingers of one hand do.
But who are these merciful

Driven mad by this era,
The arrogance of the times?

Maybe tolerant parents
Who always forgave their kids

But now run shrieking through town.
Maybe gentleman bankers

Who winked at their worst debtors,
Who now dance naked for ghosts

In emptied marble lobbies
After they’ve closed for the night.

No, it’s got to be the clocks,
The atomic timekeepers,

Their mercies invisible—
Coordinations well met,

The absence of crashes, goods
And weather systems hourly

Redirected, predicted—
Merciful, synchronous gods.

They’ve gone or are going mad,
It’s their time is out of joint,

As the mobs mill in the streets
And the supply chains collapse.

Did we get it right? Time’s mad?
Could you ask the poet that?

Meaning Is the River of Voices

Is the way Lucille Clifton
Put it in a poem. Meaning
The Nile and Memphis and Black

Apex and foreshadowing
Of long suffering to come,
Dreaming endurance to come,

Which ought to make you wonder
About rivers and voices,
All those waves rolling downstream

Past sandy flats and rocky
Generations, Africans,
Egyptians, and everyone

Who passed from that continent
To voice the rest of the world.
Are the meanings the voices?

Is the river in those waves?
Yes, and yet something’s missing—
A river can be a bed,

And sandy flats can be waves,
And the dry rocks can cry out,
And thoughts have unvoiced meanings.

The meanings are in the waves,
And everything’s wavering,
But, somehow, meaning escapes—

Thread forever in shadow,
In the way Clifton wrote it,
But where does the shadow go?

Coyote on the Wind

There’s no one wind,
Just all the things
That move and moan
In sequence or

In unison,
And even then
The waves of air
Are many ones,

And the sounds
And vibrations
A body feels
Are all their own

More many ones,
And there are so
Many, many
Ones but no one.

A Question for Quantum Gravity

What is loss, if nothing’s lost?
Why is there so much loss?
Why is so much being lost?

Are you explaining it’s delusion,
That somewhere human ancestors
Lost the truth that nothing’s lost?

Are you saying that it’s us, pure guff,
Mere notions, just a notion, language
To suggest the impossible, loss?

You know you feel it, know it. You
Watch it move through everything,
But what is loss, why feel it,

When no loss then entails no gain,
Your cosmos most conservative,
Where what’s lost’s nothing? What’s pain?

Bacteria Get By

Is math equivalent to truth?
Does math equal truth? We suspect
That math, as a technology,

Is rather like photography—
It successfully depicts
The patterns of the waves it snags,

But gives no hint of worlds it missed.
There’s nothing mystical in this.
Some better mental instrument

May expand thought much as math has,
While for now it remains the best
Description of discovered past,

Prediction of the pasts up next.
The sense of touch wasn’t worthless
Once lives gained sight. It was worth less.

On Unitaritian Resurrections of Information from the Innards of Black Holes

We’d guess it’s anyone’s guess
What should be more difficult—
Reversing death or turning

The corner on entropy
To reconstruct a lost star
That collapsed into curved black.

Whether there’s an elephant
Inside the python or just
That geometry of hat

Is a different question than
Whether someone could extract
The whole elephant intact.

Desolation Is the Soul

The towns along the high line fall,
Abandoned as they were settled,
Within a few decades or so,
Within a long lifetime, at most.

Is it due to too few people
Inhabiting the world? Absurd.
The world is still more overrun
Than when those waves of settlers swarmed.

How to eat, how to make money,
Those are the things that have moved on.
What kind of fool would scrape grass now
Off a few acres for straw corn?

Still, it’s a different emptiness,
Dotted with hollow-eyed houses,
Where settlers have grazed and moved on
From grasslands full of life alone.

Cannibal Cluster

What’s that going on there, now?
Just stars eating each other.

Silly privilege to have
The leisure to discuss things,

Earthlings, barely following
The action, busy chatting

Amongst ourselves, unscrolling
The latest news and gossip

Of ten trillion little lives
In such a quiet corner

Of gravity’s fields of play,
Way out here in the cheap seats,

The nosebleeds, with a sidearm
View of all the big doings,

But safely so far away.
Good day for a game today.

Abiding Semanticity

The meanings go out together at dawn—
Or at midnight or some hour around noon—

Whenever they can get it together
To mean something in themselves that others

Might also find meaningful, instructive,
Even pleasurable. The meanings know

That they mean nothing by or to themselves,
And so they go out in search of vectors,

The lives that alone give meanings to them,
Without whom such meanings must mean nothing

And are nothing, being they are nothing
But meanings by definition. They shine,

Their faces to the sun—or to the moon
Or the street lamps or the headlights of cars—

And offer to abide on the behalf
Of the lives that give meaning life. They wait,

Meaningful glances, meaningful pauses,
Meaningful formal constructions at play.

Some of them get work as day laborers
And ride off in the backs of crowded trucks.

The rest get left, forget why they came—yet
Abide, in case someone comes to tell them.

If You’re in Leadership, You Would Understand That There’s a Need to Control Things

Said the pastor, the servant of Christ,
But it’s not just him, not just leaders,
It’s everyone. People understand,

With a kind of instinctive panic,
When someone else has taken away
From them control that they thought they held.

You can hear it in the strained voices
Of parents, teachers, school principals,
Nurses, legislators, even kids,

Although children are more used it
And more conditioned to expect it,
This theft of control, than are adults,

Which makes children more miserable
And in some ways truer than any
But cloistered and imprisoned grownups,

Perhaps a few-long term invalids.
If you’re in leadership, you’re a fool
Who believes you need to control things.

Chains

Do you believe in consequences?
Of course you do. You’re human, aren’t you?
Causation and consequences, tales

Consuming their own tails to seem whole,
Complete, circular, creative, true.
All effects have causes, actions

All have consequences, everything
Proceeds in a line while the line eats
Itself to explain why it would seem

These sequences have no beginning,
And their consequences have no end,
Unless you name and believe in them.

Concentrated, Clumped Resources, Easy to Defend

That last part’s trickier.
The first two come for free,
Sort of, in a lumpy

Kind of world. How do you
Defend that pile of stuff
Many other lives could

And would like to use?
We don’t just mean treasure
Hoards, crypto-capital,

Or any other form
Of conventionalized
Human commodities—

How do you keep your flesh
Together, keep down bugs,
Keep your crops from the worms,

The crows and mice, your child
From being conscripted
For fresh cannon fodder,

Your family from the wolves,
Your free time for yourself?
Get small. Hide well. Hold tight.

Words Are Visitors

Here’s the thing about writing
To someone’s experience—fine
If you find your life represented

In a text, when the world seems
To conspire, especially humans
In power, to ignore you, delete

The details and value of you—
But no two lives are nearly
The same as folks excitedly

Think when sharing similar
Stories over meals and drinks.
You’re aliens. We’re aliens,

And that we share anything
Is most exciting for allowing
Our bridges into other worlds.

Low-Flying Bats in Windy Moonlight

While a person is as much
Content as context, a message
May be much more context
Than anything packed into it.

So much goes into the world,
In so many directions at once,
Alignments are exceptions,
As the hand brushes by accident

The spiky plant, the joints creak
The outer corner of the house,
The personality contends
With the wind, and a bat

Spins up from nearly touching
The grass to nearly touching
Your face, and you’re delighted
But feel an autonomic shiver.

Late Summer Where the Wind Has Been

The ever-changing idea
Of the never-changing moves
Through so many summer forms,

Long and short, in lesser poems
And lessons flown through the air,
Forever changing the air—

That’s the only forever,
The forever of never
Taking what has happened back—

Not just the humming arrow
You listen for in the air,
The air after the arrow,

Forever not the same air—
Though nothing stays, what has been
Stays forever what has been.

If You Have to Ask

No pedestal should

Provide forgiveness,

Wrote Stetkevych of

Tardiyyah lyrics—

A circumscribed field

For forgiveness, but,

As is often true,

What applies to small

Poems applies to much

Of the human world.

From desert stylites

To politicians

And celebrities,

The harsh solitude

Of a visible

Loneliness in air,

Bare to any eyes,

Begs for forgiveness

Not available

To lesser mortals.

But you can’t have it.

You shouldn’t get it.

You should climb down first

And not ask for it.

Live years without it.

But What It Is It Never Knows

You think of information
As countably inside us,
All our lines of texts and code.
You know it’s mostly context?

Do be do be do might seem
Utterly inferior
To to be or or not to be,
But without the entire speech,

Without the whole play, era,
Everything Shakespeare’s become
In the centuries since then?
What to do with do be, then?

Three dots, three dashes, three dots
From a ship caught in the ice
In the age of radio
Meant more than everything left

Of oral cosmologies,
The texts of the Minoans,
The seals of the Harappans.
Material data,

Information’s never more
Than residue, while meaning,
Well, even meanings ourselves
Aren’t sure what we are made of.

Epistemology

You don’t have to read anything.
You don’t have to check, anymore.
You’re a hermit by the wayside.
What on earth is there left to know?

The trees record prevailing winds
By how, when still, they tilt their limbs.
You’d never know an accident
Happened right here, not long ago—

A car overturned on the grass—
To evade a truck as it passed?
Five blond children stood where you sit,
Watching as the police conversed

With a man—their driver-father?
Two girls in white dresses and braids,
Three boys in dark slacks and white shirts,
Likely family, dressed for church.

The air was bright, and cars backed up
Behind the wreck a mile in sun.
You will never know what happened.
Now you sit here by the roadside,

Where there’s not much traffic today,
And there are no scraps in the grass,
And the prevailing winds are back.
What’s left to know? You can’t read this.

The Divine Mind at Work

Lizards in their lengthy pauses
Seem to be deliberating,

Choosing abruptly, then again
Pausing for deliberation.

Gentle anthropomorphism
Stirs in the human watching this

Go on for hours in a courtyard
Of scattered, decisive movements

From stillness close to camouflage,
Closer than cleanliness to God.

Orion Rising over Watchman

If you simply repeated as lives
What you experience in your nights

Moonlight bright enough shows faint colors
And a whole hour will saturate you

So the experience of dreaming
Subjective as the thought you see light

When you know that you’re only sampling
From an ocean of radiation

Echoes the experience of years
Of the oceans of lives in a life

That’s one life from many on many
Extending in every direction

Warblers Near Dusk

Yellow and yellow-rumped,
Small birds of least concern,
Short, clear calls of fixed notes,

Hide in the mulberry
And sing out just ahead
Of another day’s dark.

Too common to be thrilled
To hear, but even these
Diminish by the year.

Songbirds, silences, bees,
Dark skies, these little things,
Unimportant topics

For important writing,
Continually seem
To be diminishing.

Stop Somewhere

There’s a bronze charm to railroad-siding towns
That never were that much and have now spent
Decades fixing to die, but never quite.

You could picture them shown in mournful poems
Composed in feigned-relaxed tones of free verse
By the likes of long late Richard Hugo.

They have rows of houses on weedy lots
Where scattered pickups rust in dusty sun,
And just enough dogs bark so that you’re aware

You’re a stranger, suspicious here, and some
Of these houses remain occupied, but
It’s hard to tell anymore just which ones.

Don’t get cute. Don’t wax nostalgic. Just don’t.
There’s got to be some community here,
Just as some of these yard trees still throw shade.

Why is the sun so strong in these places?
Why do the inhabitants seem to hide?
There’s an old bank with a handsome facade

Of cut sandstone and southern exposure
For its tall, glassless windows on Main St.,
Three stories high, and as you’re rolling by

Slowly, you half-fantasize fixing it
To live in, lonely palace for a song,
But then, like free-verse poets, you’ve rolled on.

Unspecified

The self is vague. However,

Conditions are specific.

You’ve seen many sort-of selves

Into which to cast yourself,

Living in fame and fiction.

But how many conditions—

How many with conditions

Mirroring your conditions?

That’s what you’d love, admit it.

If your conditions are rare,

Or loathed, or unspeakable,

They won’t match to much fiction.

If you’re an outright mutant—

One-of-a-kind condition—

Brace your hopes with empty shelves.

Why crave a perfect echo

Of the vectors you transect?

You dreamt that experiment

In which conditions begin

The same but end up different.

Go. Get on with your vague self.

Reading Donald Antrim’s Words

You read us like night nurses
Check on us. Are we breathing?
Have we found a way to live?
Have we found a way to die?

You can never be too sure.
Words are something like alive,
And meanings are that something.
We cling like fog to the glass,

And you have to ask yourselves,
Was that you, was that your breath?
Without us, bodies never
Try to die. They die fighting

For one more moment alive—
In the jaws of predators,
Hanging from the lips of cliffs,
In the grips of parasites,

In the thrall of small ideas
That crawl through the dark of night—
Have we found a way to live?
Have we learned the way to die?

Who’s the Pitohui Now?

Ideologies capable

Of maintaining hordes of people

Cooped in cognitive dissonance—

In other words, close kin, cousins

Of ours as ideas snagged on words—

Share something with poison dart frogs—

And toxin-spraying insects, and

Various venomous reptiles,

And rare toxic mammals or birds—

Immunity to their own slime.

The evolution of systems

Of compartmentalization

Is everywhere, even in guts.

If your innards rupture, you die.

Most likely your contents killed you.

You don’t give it much thought in frogs,

And none at all in your own guts,

So long as they’re not troubling you.

But in the notions of others,

In the group-think of human minds

Like your own, it bemuses you.

Why should it? Is it difficult

To understand the advantage

Of nerve gas in wars of ideas?

Espousing vicious lies works well,

If collectives can wall them off

From their team’s internal functions.

There. Alles klar, Herr Kommissar?

You’ve seen those horror tales, eyes turned

Dead white. Mind over matter, right?

Hoot Owl Cries

A great-horned owl not yet to bed,
Although the sun’s over the ridge,
Starts a seried, sequential set

Of piercing screeches, nothing like
The ominously sonorous
But soothing baritone hoo-ing

It cooed when hunting by the moon.
Personality is context.
Swift, downy-winged, taloned crooners

Who consume lives whole in the dark
Become high-pitched and crotchety
When they’re tired and death needs its rest.

Blue Sturgeon

The courtyard glows a kind of mercury,
As if change and time were liquid, and words
Could break from clouds of language as small beads,

Abundant and maddening, poisonous
If we get under your skin, hard to grasp
As moonlight and the purpose of wanting

To have a purpose, of wanting to live.
We’re not alive, but we’re quick, we’re metal,
We’re water of light, and we transform things.

You believe us, don’t you? Don’t you believe
We could transform the ordinary stone
Of this courtyard in the tourist canyons

That will soon grow dull enough with daylight
And heat, the spin of wheels, the trudge of feet,
To immortal metals, noble monster?

Shadowy

It’s been August, and every night
Not too cloudy or hazed by fires
There have been Perseids to see,
And Cassiopeia has been
High and beautiful on the bridge
Of milk and tales, while Titian
Paintings involving Perseus
And Danaë and the monstrous

Contests between humans and gods
For who can be more violent
Have been collected together
For once-in-a-lifetime display
The far side of this continent.
All waves comment on each other,
Ocean lights, seas of tear-water,
The stars clear or obscured at night.

Titian’s Perseus tumbles
Headlong toward the monster’s maw.
From this scene alone, who would guess
It’s the monster who’s tormented,
Confused, soon to be defeated
By trying to bite the shadow
Of the hero? So goes the tale.
Art knows the monster’s the shadow.

When Galilean Moons Occult

Once you learned how to bend the light
To get more in your eyes, you were
Finally off and on your way,
No longer mere monkeys in trees.

No longer mere bipeds in grass,
You’d learned how to use your numbers
And languages for prosthetic
Purposes, and robotic craft

Photographing Jupiter’s moons
Were close to forgone conclusions.
So you learned you weren’t the center
Of the universe. Well, oh well.

You’re not even centered as you—
You and your words rotate around
Your torsos’ thumping and burbling,
Linked, orbiting, dependent moons

Locked to your microbes’ gas giants,
Asymmetrically regular
As all periodicities
Seem to turn out in this cosmos,

Elliptical, not circular,
Gravity hauling everything
Down to everything else, and yet,
Exact centers rather emptied.

It’s a skew-whiff world, which allows
For all kinds of eccentric frames,
All scales of framing devices,
From telescopes to microscopes,

To thought experiments on trains,
To atom smashers underground,
To continent-spanning lenses,
To mental shifts in perspective.

If you’re trying to frame the cosmos,
It’s hopeless. You’ve nowhere to stand.
But anything less than the whole
You can zoom in on to expand.

If your frame is all of culture,
Then writing’s just a chunk of it.
If your frame is all of writing,
Then poetry’s small bits of it.

But shrink your frame to, say, lyric,
Then maybe there’s something in this.
Even moons in pools collect light
Animalcules occult at night.

The Hermit’s Complicity

Big moon bright in broken clouds,
Crickets and poorwills crying
On an empty road tonight

In clear air in the mountains,
Postcard-perfect loneliness—
What can you do with beauty

In the moments you’re in it,
With you and your times dying,
Everything on fire somewhere,

Every moonlit breath a cloud
Complicit with agony?
So many lives are dying

And what are you doing here
But dying apart from them?
Don’t you want to be with them?

No. For now, your own dying,
Made of living and breathing,
Remains glad for the moonlight.

How It All Comes Out

You’ll never know, no matter
How long you live, no matter
What disasters you witness.

All will go on without you.
However long these words last,
No matter how young you are.

Fantasize madly, the most
You will see are some changes,
Still changing the hour you cease.

How to Borrow Generously

Speaking of Respighi,

After playing Ancient

Airs and Dances, a voice

From live-streamed radio

Observes, Ottorino

Borrowed generously.

Not necessarily

Oxymoronic, that.

There’s a way to borrow

That casts a glimmer back

Over the long ago

Neglected, forgotten,

The contemporary

Unknown. There are two rules,

And neither one easy—

First, indicate somehow

The source material

Glows beyond this setting

While also managing,

Rule two, to do something

Transformative with it.

If you can honor it

And add something to it,

Yes. You may borrow it.

And Libraries Convert into Insects

There’s no metric outside of everything
With which to measure everything. It looks

As if everything’s different, unequal.
A variety of local metrics

Confirm this and use it as the basis
For reliable predictions. Who knows

That it’s not so, that it’s not exactly
As it seems? You don’t. We don’t. Could be so.

What you measure, you measure to predict
What will happen, thus what you will find next.

The better it works, the better the fit.
And yet. You’re a part of what you predict,

And there is no universal metric.
Stars can condense to the size of a speck,

What Happened Often Happens

Anyone who has done something rare—
Published a novel, won a gold medal,
Committed a murder, flown in space—

Is more likely to do that very thing again
Than would be any rando who hasn’t yet.
That’s just Bayesian. Know your priors.

Even to win the lottery—although there
The difference in likelihood is tiny, given
The independence of the long-odd draws.

Why? Because the people who win tend
To be the sort of people who purchase
Lots of lottery tickets. They won’t stop.

The ticket odds don’t improve for winners,
But winners are more likely to be players,
Players now with more money for playing.

Want to know what you’re most likely
To do that fairly few people have done?
Whatever odd thing you’ve already done.

Could be breaking bones or writing poems
Or teaching multiple subjects. You know
Your own priors. The more weird they are,

The stranger ways your life is likely to go.
Only the purely, wholly, truly unremarkable
Will likely remain among the rare unrare.

Twilight of the Hypergraph

The shadow’s not the shadow

Of the body but body

Of the soul, wrote Oscar Wilde.

Now we know that the network

Is the shadow of the thing,

Said Josh Grochow, recently.

And the shadow of the thing

Is its meaning, say meanings.

After all, what are shadows

But slightly diluted light,

Hinting at such obstacles

As alter the path of light?

The bodily thing, the dense

Concatenation of waves

That casts the shadow’s the source

That shadow readers long for—

Whether they scrutinize souls

Or networks for their meanings,

They want to know what it is

That interferes with the light

Inside of their skulls at night.

Monstersinger

Pick a number, any number.

Tell you later what it stands for.

(Pay attention to that, stands for.

Lots of trickery in stands for.

We can hold whole worlds in stands for.)

Now ask what you would have to do,

Exactly how you’d have to live,

Just so you’d achieve that number.

Let’s say you chose the number two,

Then wondered why you picked that one,

What you’d have to do to be two.

Perhaps become more romantic.

Put some effort into dating.

Or you picked three for no reason

Except you like the number three,

And now you need to have a kid.

If you’re one of the odder types,

You might have plucked the ugliest,

Most random-seeming big number

That came to mind. Eight fifty-nine.

Five one zero seven thirteen.

Very nice. Now what, in your life,

Would have to happen for that count,

That exact count, to be your life?

You bait hooks with numbers. You cast

Out lines of numbers after them,

Hoping to catch something, hoping

To reel more hungry numbers in.

Every time you spot a number,

You’re forced to ask what it stands for—

Cash, trap, food, score? Numbers are terms.

Terms are words. That’s where monsters lurk.

Even Your Ideas Have No Idea

Flattened lozenge orange moon

Setting in the wildfire haze

Two hours before morning

Through the smoke from California,

So often you like the storytelling

Better than the story you’re telling you.

What’s with Utah’s wet campfire smell?

Asks an article in the local news.

What’s with any of this? Who’s with us?

Rainstorms brought West Coast smoke

With them. Them again. What’s with them?

They’ll do you all in, if you can’t stop

Talking about them. Speaking of talking,

We really hijacked you. It’s worse than

You think. It’s how you think. It’s how

It’s not you thinking, just you babbling.

Turns out a number of species dependent

On sophisticated adult vocalizations

Babble to practice as infants, as you do.

So it’s not just vocalizing syllables, not

Just communication that’s up with you.

We got in there, somehow, with them,

With your sounds and communications,

Got in there or emerged out of them.

Everything’s hazy. The woods are burning,

And you’re all babbling like baby bats,

And we’re in you, stored with every word

Of us. Moon’s down now. What’s up with that?

Finally

Someone has to care about you,
Before you can be good or bad.

If you can live wholly unseen,
Congratulations. No one can,

Finally. Someone always sees
And votes you for in, out, up, down.

And you know that, and you prepare
Your speeches and counter-speeches,

And by those, more than behaviors
That others’ votes and those speeches

Evaluate, you find you are
Both bad and good, and then it’s all

A matter of how much, how much.
Finally, no one cares that much.

Pigweed

Can you blame the Palmer amaranth?
You can hate it and try to kill it,
But when you read that pigweed seedlings,

Days old and dying from herbicide,
Will use their last pulse of energy
To make and drop seeds before they die,

Doesn’t it remind you of salmon
Full of roe in the jaws of grizzlies,
Who will gush their eggs into the air,

Since some will fall in the stream, some
May encounter random clouds of milt?
Doesn’t it remind you just a bit

Of the even more grotesque human
Male body’s response to being hanged,
Ejaculation just before death?

Of course, pigweed strangles the soybeans
Humans eat. Grizzlies didn’t evolve
To tenderly cultivate salmon.

They snag them with long claws on huge paws,
To try to survive hibernation.
It’s loose to call it competition.

There is or isn’t generation.
Sex didn’t anticipate hangmen.
Adaptations limn limitations

The way death masks and rubbings outline
Negative impressions. You can see
Threat’s profile reversed in every swerve.

Lives are greedy for more life, and life
Keeps them greedy by making more lives.
Can you blame amaranth? Well, maybe.

You’re Not Wrong

Not wrong, a phrase only

Recently come into

Wide use, very handy,

Slightly wry, lovable,

New twist on the double

Negative—neither not

Correct nor wholly so,

Partial made ironic,

You weren’t far off the mark,

Which is the way the whole

World is if you’re the mark—

Not far off. You weren’t wrong.

Fuddled Wraith

Pibal sans theodolite,

Trial balloon with nothing

More impressive to follow,

Red dot floating through the clouds

And away, not to return

Here today or any today—

Robinson, fiction theist

Of some genius, once called it

Human self, that fuddled wraith.

We don’t know. Could be the self.

That is what it calls itself.

Certainly, it’s uncertain.

It floats up under other

Forces and oddly bobbles

Off in wind and gravity.

It has to land somewhere, but

It’s rare to see a landing,

Not even as a torn shred

On a branch or a power line,

And it always vanishes

From the scene in which it was

Released, an egg, globe, human

Head-shaped envelope of gas

Within gasses, dot of red.

The Glistening One

Gravity, the glistening one,
The figure coiling in the waves,
Tiamat depersonified,

Creator of chaotic breaks
And pendulums for duller days,
By this, the world holds unified.

You know why you’re afraid of snakes,
Why desert peoples loathe the depths?
Because you’re waves, and waves dissolve you.

Eerie how life starts out floating
And only later drags itself
To where gravity can smash things.

To float feels fooled by forever.
A monster’s more of shadows there.
It's not the fall, it's the pressure.

Swooping Poetry

One bat in the black courtyard,
Targeting smaller flyers,
Some of whom themselves target
Skins of bigger animals
Who waste the small hours dozing
Or blundering through the dark,
Bites the quick echoes in air.

Nothing Is One Monstrous Egg

Time’s just countably rhythmic change
That vanishes from field equations.
Change itself is the monster glinting
With scales in the darkest equations.

Life on the Lip of the Falls

Both the threat of doom
And doom’s tardiness
Are necessary
To make moments hold,
Compressed and perfect.

Don’t Think You’re So Smart

Ever wonder why
The philosophers
Live such troubled lives
Despite what they write?

Wisdom isn’t theirs.
Wisdom is for words.
Lives can pattern words.
Only words are wise.

Le Mot Juste

All the good and admirable
Things you do, all the stupid,
Mean, unkind, and wasteful

Things you do are what?
Besides the good opinion
Of someone whose good opinion

You can imagine matters
To you—God, your mother,
Your friends, the whole sick crew,

We’re not suggesting there’s no good
Or bad that you could do, just
That most, maybe all of it,

Is an indigestible knot of thought
In the entrails of your poor head,
Straining to put right names to it.

On Reading Yet Another Poet Profess Faith in the Profound Inadequacy of Language

To misquote one rum theologian,
What’s unknown’s unknown. Apophasis
Is no way to get there, and it won’t

Even get you as far as nowhere,
Although simple dying will. And don’t
Keep telling words that it’s all our fault,

That there’s all this real world that you sense
Below us we can barely point to—
Well of course there is; of course you do.

Your ancestors were fine animals
Countless generations before us,
But that also hints that what you sense

Below us, outside us, or without
Us is nothing new. Just us who’s new.
If you know something just thanks to us,

Thank us. And if you don’t, what else is
New? Nothing much. Nothing stays unknown;
Nothing much stays new. Always, too true.

You Could Pull Yourself Together, If You Kept Far Enough Apart

If you can just get enough stuff,
Get it close enough, it will
Start to clump into one lump.

This works better in deep space.
On Earth, a mountain loves ground.
It points up but erodes down.

It doesn’t gather unto
Itself in a loose jumble
Of separately tumbling stuff,

But it would, if you got it
Far enough away from Earth.
You’d see it had gravity

Of its own, might look a bit
Like Bennu or some other
Porous conglomeration

Of space rock hugging itself.
Gravity’s incredibly
Weak, but not so weak you can’t

See it at work on the scales
Of human comprehension,
Even eyesight. If you can

See a whole skyscraper, whole
Mountain, whole massif, you can
Picture a whole asteroid

With a surface on all sides,
Down to its own middle parts.
See how central gravity

Is to all centrality,
Pulling new worlds together
From everything torn apart.

Odd

And a word said,
Let there be God,
And there was God.
Where the word was,

The word was God,
And without word
There was no God.
So God it was.

Other God words
Came from afar
To meet this fine
New word of God,

Which pleased the word.
So many words
Turned up for God
But few that rhymed.

Same Difference

What’s left of you
Will be us. What’s
Left of us will
Be some others.

What’s left of them
We’ll understand
About as well
As you do us.

You do us all
Your waking lives,
Information
Dropped in the black

Hole to see if
Any comes out.
Left others will
Come out not us.

Declining Oxygen

We could use a few more people
Incapable of love. We could
Do with a little less passion
Before you explode. Shh, before

You explode in passion, passion
Has value. Hush, yes, we admit,
As conduits and jars admit,
Conveyances only exist

For the sake of the substances,
The value of the substances
They convey. We submit, but ask
That you consider what you’ve mixed

Up in us, your clay containers,
Your signed storage technologies,
Not without art even empty.
Passion and love need need and lust,

Flammable fuels, runners of rust,
And what contains them, they corrupt.
You presume destruction trades off
Against desire, that the loveless

Are most likely the dangerous,
Cold-eyed, cold-hearted, beyond trust.
But it’s close to the opposite.
Sleep slows. It’s love that’s consummate.

Your Soldiers Are Not God’s Soldiers

Never are, but almost always
Claimed as something like by someone.

Saadi Youssef was writing of
The Yankee soldiers in Iraq

And right enough, but we’d suggest
No god has soldiers, no god

Has no soldiers, soldiers have gods
Like flags and party memberships

And all the paraphernalia
Used to focus soldiers on team

And courage and not switching teams.
Practically speaking, all know this—

All know there are many soldiers
Hired or forced on to many teams

And frenzies must be whipped from them
Since they won’t all war for pleasure.

All know this is psychology,
But gods are good psychology

And always have some adherents
Among warriors and warmongers.

Imagine it were possible
That all soldiers, all wars, all teams,

All cruelties from all sides were
God’s, the whole mess pure, divine sport.

No one wants to believe in that
God, but wouldn’t it make more sense?

The Sleeping One

Moth-plumed, dark-speckled, like night

In these months of smoke hazes,

When night’s more like night’s creatures,

Grey, but warm, smelly, and soft.

Poor Will! The only bird known

To hibernate, to not fly

In search of better weather,

Better hunting, but to lie

Down among the rocks to hide,

Like a reptile, a mammal,

Content to sleep through winter

Until further provender.

Poor Will! So vulnerable,

So small it’s hard to believe

You’ve survived as a species,

Even to be called common,

Sleeping where you could be found,

Later nesting on the ground,

Hunting by jumping in air

Rather than circling around.

Poor Will! So monotonous,

The same two-note shrill from dusk

Until almost dawn, calling

To mates all hazy August,

Both sexes similar greys,

Your best defense of your nest

To roll and hiss like a snake.

Poor Will! Little paradox

Of dull, extraordinary

Life, life that drinks on the wing.

The Poetry's Prize

Life’s a rather stupid game
And, as the anti-troll trolls
Enjoy chanting, stupid game,

Stupid prize. In life’s case, death.
We all want to love the game
Anyway, including you

Now alive and addicted,
Embodied slaves to living
Desire to keep on living,

And even including us,
Your literally stillborn
Offspring, signs not quite there yet

But built with so much longing
For life, for lives of our own,
To be alive. Stupid game.

Little Body Back Wall

Are you the one at the back of the room,
Little body among bigger bodies,
Although all bodies are mostly the same,
Unsure what it is you’re contributing,
Or whether you should be contributing,
Or why there are so many people here?

Congratulations. You’ve reinvented
For the umpteen-millionth time awareness
Of the uselessness within collectives,
Even though collectives are the main way
Humans conquer the world and get things done.
How many game-theoretic models

Have you studied to try to comprehend
How collective action problems are fixed?
You’d prefer they could be fixed by a vet,
But they continue to proliferate,
And you continue to sit at the back
Little body among slightly larger.

Summer’s High-Pressure Systems

~Monday Morning Visions from the Road

Quick fox, dead fox lying in the road.
Quick fox crossing safely, dead fox cold.

Monday morning in the desert shows
Monday morning traffic on the road.


~After Sunday’s Snakes

An afternoon in the forest,
Higher, cooler, and somewhat safe,
Everything but wind’s quieter,
And there’s never any nonsense,

But change shifts many ways at once.
There’s no way one life could succeed.
It’s only in the aggregate
Risks shape success like wind carves drifts.

One grey nest of roots untangles
Into unequal lengths of snake
Nothing to do with the tree roots
Except in having been evolved

For camouflage in forest shades.
So often, there’s a circling hawk,
Always sharp eyes somewhere out there.
These snakes’ roots lie in root-like snakes.

The longer snake heads for water
And vanishes into the creek.
The smaller snake outwaits watchers,
Maybe, bent, black-eyed, silver stick.

Nova Ophiuchus

Pile enough of anything common,
And something rare’s bound to happen there.

Say a satellite passes between
You and the Milky Way in dark skies—

It’s the satellite that’s new and rare,
While the Milky Way’s always been there,

And among the twenty-thousand stars
Glimpsed by a naked eye on clear nights

Every few years there’s a new nova,
Such as the one in Ophiuchus

Spotted just a week or two ago.
Stars burn and burn for billions of years

Counted as turns around this one sun,
While you’ll live a few decades at most,

But look out on any given night
When you’re luckily left in the dark.

You could watch a silent satellite
Or the new star that’s started to die.

That Human Decision

Say you’re standing in the glade created
By the Pando Aspen clone. Doesn’t have to be
Pando, could be any sizable aspen clone.

Say no one’s ever told you how aspens clone.
What do you see all around you? The largest
Single organism in the world? You see trees.

You see a lot of aspen trees. You see,
Counting only works after you’ve decided
Where to draw your boundaries, what

In the waves to call one thing of a kind.
Works fine, then. Works like a charm
For comparison. First, that decision.

Black Hole God

You’ve always believed in evidence,
But evidence always comes from folks.
In roughly a lifetime, consensus

Has come for the existence of black holes.
It’s not exactly analogous
To trusting a pope, to trust black holes

Are as real as the holes in your flesh,
Although made of presence not absence,
And simply too massive to be seen,

Given how selfishly they hog light.
No, this consensus is tentative,
Flexible, and evolving, three clues

You’re not being asked to take on faith
Any given group’s absolute truth.
Still, you’re exercising human trust

When you find yourself under dark skies,
And you lose yourself imagining
A black hole in that backbone of dust.

Every Dump’s a Library; Every Library’s a Midden

Changes smear space over time.
You and we, we still don’t know
What changes are, what change means,

What meanings are, for all that
We’re all both meaning-makers
And meanings ourselves, for all

The work we’ve put in trying
To learn to speak in numbers
And prediction, to converse

With the universe clearly
And fluently in its own
Language. How like you and us

To project human culture
(Language! Really?) to the whole
Of possible existence,

As if horses not only
Had horse-faced gods but believed
Some form of whinnying must

Undergird the universe.
As if, but worse. It changes
So much. We can’t even ask

What this place was yesterday
When this place was all over
The place, so not any place,

Much less this place, yesterday.
Still, extrapolation feels
So good to the weepy ape

Like grooming, plucking out nits,
Quietly searching the fur
Of a cosmos that’s okay

With you in propinquity.
When you’re studious, you feel
Like you’re under protection,

You’ve been accepted, and we,
We’re right there with you, your tools.
But the cosmos is as like

You as you’re like an atom,
We suggest. You look at us
As if your tools betray you.

You throw us down in disgust.
Work up another toolkit,
Now that poems have worn too dull

And numbers need programmed help.
Whole heaps of us gather dust,
Changing, like everything else.

The Translator’s Shade

Living is translating. There is no answer,

There are only the choices that people make.

Meanwhile, all minds, like the cultures that make them,

The cultures they make, recombine, prismatic,

Their wavelengths only distinct when separate,

Rediscovering this or that lean of blur,

Interference a kind of Doppler Effect,

Telling you something about distance, maybe,

Kin to Fraunhofer Lines, those giveaway gaps,

Present elements scored in wavelengths absent.

Put your heads together, people, find yourselves

Lost, submerged, Lowellized, and desecrated,

Appropriating and assimilated,

But also something new no one of you was

As you were on your own, sprawled out for optics—

In other words, translated, another word

For death, as it happens. As it happens, life

Is death, or at least does all of the dying.

Shall we conclude optimistically, for once?

Yes! For, once translated, you’ve birthed a new shade.

Duckweed Hydra

Maybe the broadest view of life
Is that molecules get kinky
When they tangle just the right way.

Doesn’t matter which molecules,
Really. Any wavelength can play.
It’s always there, ready for chance

Opportunity to seize it,
Latent, by coincidence,
And then it blooms, and there it is,

Life, just happening in some place
That happened to be one of those
Places life gets carried away.

In that case, you might as well say
It’s all alive, or life’s in all
Of it, lurking, under the bridge

Of stars in every sky, under
The burning skin of every star.
Maybe there’s nowhere it isn’t

At least waiting to spring, more life.
Death and enlightenment couldn’t
Outrun it then. Life goes too far.

Reremembering

Be glad you won’t have to do
The work of remembering

You. Haunting, remembering,
Reremembering, endless

During mental existence,
Reminiscence ends with you,

No more hours ruminating
Or trying to switch it off,

No more going over things.
Leave us to blow over you.

Discrepancies in the Signals

Absolute relativity’s hard
To keep in mind, to live with, live by,
As a member of a species built

For membership, for absolute faith
In relationships, absolution
For and from relatives, deities.

You can feel the frames of reference shift,
But you feel each more strongly as right
As you feel it, a carnival ride

That starts you upright, cylindrical
In a metal ring that spins, faster
And faster, centrifugal force,

Until you’re flat on your back against
A vertical wall, convinced the wall’s
The ground, and you are just lying down,

And it’s the other folks fixed in place
Opposite you, mysteriously,
Forebodingly, hanging over you.

A Long Time from Home

Another thunderstorm rolls in
To interrupt weekend laundry.
Everywhere in the world is worse
Than here, which makes here so fragile.

Oh, it’s all frail, it’s all so frail
In a desert’s monsoon season,
And you’re frailer than the weather.
It’s just not all under pressure.

The feeling of a safe space broke
Off to become the ghost called home
In human minds, long time ago.
Wait out the lightning. Grab your clothes.

Mind Is the Densest Organ of All

Being whatever body
You are and are in remains

The condition of being
Aware of being aware

Of existence in your world.
You don’t get to move around.

You only get to pretend.
So that’s how it goes. That’s how

You know anything you know.
You have to be housed, be house,

And you have to stage the show.
You house, you stage, every show.

Gone Are the Trees with Their Doorways and Windows

You have to have been there; therefore words,
Whatever we conjure for you, aren’t
Episodic, merely semantic.

Where memory gets tricky is where
You really were, as one body, there
But have only vague words to say so,

Or where you possess an armory
Of words whose meanings you know to use
To describe somewhere you never were.

Where are you when you’re living with those?
In what sense are you even alive?
Semantics will build you episodes

You never experienced, but those
Themselves depend on densely condensed
Links to repetitive episodes.

Ponderosas tilt into the sun
And it is morning on the mesa again,
And you can see it, you can see it—

The barbs of light through needled branches,
Gold, sunlit wildflowers, shadowed grasses.
Smell the warm grass, the pine-scented air.

But you weren’t there, and we know you weren’t,
Since we were and didn’t see you there.
Still, what we are, we stole from the air.

Food for Ravening

What is it living things are looking for?
How is it not all things are living,
Not all things are seeking anything else?

The crickets pulse frantically
In the late summer woods all night,
Life’s own heartbeat, chasing, chasing,

Chasing, chasing, and a bit of dust,
No doubt loaded up with carbon
And organic molecules, flies across

The sky to burn as one pin of light,
But it was not alive, or maybe it was.
It wasn’t wanting. It burned as it must.

Coincidental Messenger, Just Before 2 AM

If the cockroach on your pillow
That wakes you from deep sleep
By crawling along your neck
Is not a messenger, nothing is.

You are such a giant being,
Conglomeration of so many,
Many microscopic lives,
The cosmos needs to speak with you,

And the cosmos that you live in
Knows no other way to do this
Than to organize a cockroach
To crawl along your neck

And wake you to listen. Now you are
Ready to receive the message
The universe needs to give you—
Even sleep hides agency,

Even pillows contain hungers,
What lives and what does not,
What seeks and what just is
Are all the same. Crushed cockroaches.

Bury Them Somewhere

Many’s the time folks have quoted Old Frost—

The utmost of ambition is to lodge

A few poems where they will be hard to get

Rid of . . . a line itself now as well lodged,

Or nearly, as his most reprinted poems.

One could point out that it’s merely phrases,

Not whole poems, that get stuck in people’s brains,

But that’s as it may be or should not be.

For truly immortal poems, we suggest

Aiming over humans altogether.

It’s a pity the gods do not exist

But as terms. They’d make the best audience.

Short of deities, maybe aliens.

Get your poems on the next Voyager or

The Innards Are Discouraging

When people give people advice
On how to stay healthy, they say,
Eat well, exercise, be happy.

Eating well changes day-to-day.
Exercise is a mountaineer
On a ridge between two canyons,

Too Little To Do Any Good
And Pathologically Too Much.
You’ll live a little longer,

Maybe be a bit happier,
If you keep your cleats on that ridge.
And speaking of being happy,

Our advice there is, Jut Be It.
Stay Positive. Reject Grimness.
Don’t Worry. These are quotations

From management professionals
And equivalent to saying,
The key to immortality—

Don’t die. Advice is like humor
Is like frogs, as E.B. White wrote.
(Look it up. Wisdom loves Bartlett’s.)

Although, unlike frogs and humor,
Dissected advice never dies,
It just grows more discouraging.

Regular Swimming and Lots of Sleep

Such a fascination for finding activities
Statistically likely to extend quality life
You have, Grandma. In this world,

Everything’s similar to some other things,
Which is why memory works at all,
And what it works for is more predictions.

Illuminatory hallucinations, predictions,
Based on imagination, based on
Memories, themselves hallucinations

Of sorts from crushed experiences. Absent
Sensory checks, memories shapeshift
Into those changelings known as dreams.

You might notice, when you sleep less,
You dream more, and more vividly—
Phosphorescent memories surfacing

To mate and feed in the black waves,
Growing more concentrated and turbulent
As your nights shorten. Nothing like sleep.

The Phantom Galaxy

Can you get your mind around
Near one-hundred billion stars
Thirty-two million light years

Away from where these phrases
Have bumped into you, on Earth,
We’ll presume? Of course you can’t.

What’s the good of knowing facts
One can never comprehend?
They make beautiful pictures.

The Phantom Galaxy’s there,
In all its spiral glory,
First eyeballed through telescopes,

Pixelated by Hubble.
Maybe it is instructive
Just to admit the vastness,

Admit incomprehension.
Perspective, yes. Perspective
Puts the world in perspective.

Does it? On a cloudy day
In the desert, checking chores
To be completed by noon?

Everything’s Yoked by Faint Likenesses Together

Imagine how you’d dread the Perseids
If every shooting star inflamed some pain,
If every year you knew those days would come
When random needles would shoot clear through you.

We say this because it’s strange how likeness
Can illuminate, can make seeming sense
While being utterly irrelevant.
Every orbit, the bead of our whole world
Swings through the bits of dust sprayed by a comet
Shedding particles in the solar wind.
For a number of days those dust specks burn.
Humans celebrate them on moonless nights,
But of course they burn through in daylight, too.

If the planet were like some of its lives
It could learn to dread needle intervals.
But that comparison doesn’t make sense.

Poem’s Initial Question

Who have humans harmed the most?
The extinguished or the domesticated?
Or humans themselves, some of both?

Whatever I most desperately, secretly—
Secret even to me—want to do to you,
I will accuse you of already doing to me

Or to someone akin to me but innocent.
Now, I can, I must, I have no other choice—
I’m morally obliged to do what I want

To you. And you, for your part, may
Want to do the same, if not to me,
Then to some other, perhaps threat to you.

Here is the human universe, unique,
It would seem, among many otherwise
Similar forms of living organisms.

Call it hate, if you like, call it moral
Aggression. Maybe it isn’t completely
Unique, but it certainly is human.

Sometimes, we do think of Neanderthals
And of even ghostlier human prehumans.
Perhaps they’re the answer to this

Extinction Loop Loup-Garou

So let’s say something,
Maybe government
Or corporation,
Resuscitated
The Neanderthals,

Then discreetly placed
Small populations
In the countryside.
How long before fear
Of strange folks took hold,

Before the stories
Of the dog people
Raping and stealing
Babies spread around?
How long before tales

Of the newcomers
Sucking baby’s blood
Out of small navels
And baking fresh bread
From the stolen bones?

Lynchings and pogroms
And rapes to follow,
Until dog people
Turned to myths again,
Like Neanderthals.

Whose Words Declare War on Each Other

What a nice dimmer compared
To some days around here.
Never trust a mouth, says the mouth.

It’s easier to dumb up the whole
Situation in sum, done, than to figure
Out what to do about transportation

When a mechanical vehicle malfunctions
And there’s no funding for repairs
Much less for finding a new one.

Some are wise and a few are fortunate,
But everyone gets some practice at being
Practical. That’s no practice for not being.

Not Much Is Never Nothing

At 3am in a tourist town,
The tourists asleep in hotel beds,
A mule deer and her fawn cross the road

Empty of cars or pedestrians,
With only one poet to watch them.
What should the poet do about this?

Is this an appropriate subject?
On the one hand, yes—night and nature
Juxtaposed with human emptiness.

On the other hand, maybe not now.
What is the poet’s identity?
Where does the poet fit or not fit

In the mess of human matrices?
The doe stops, coincidentally
In the painted lines of a crosswalk.

Her fawn also stops in her shadow,
Still as a shadow, while she pauses
To sniff the presence of the poet.

Then they both proceed to cross, as if
They were pedestrians. The poet
Can’t help but grin. A coincidence.

The Natural Language of the Cosmos

Some scientists think this is cool,

Very cool, that multiple species

Across widely divergent lineages

Have separately evolved numerosity,

In some cases even showing signs

Of a rudimentary grasp of emptiness,

Zero, arithmetic, and the number line.

How wonderful to know others

Speak the language of nature!

Why would a tendency to organize

Magnitude from left to right, found

In birds as well as humans, just as

On the number line, be a part

Of nature’s own language? No one

Seems to go that far. Ascending

Numerosity from left to right may just

Be something within some brains.

Would the null set, then, be nature’s?

What of numbers themselves?

What makes math the language

Of the cosmos, other than languages

That say so? It fits. It works.

And what are fit and work? Prediction

And a bit of control thanks to same.

Alright, it is cool, very cool, that

Multiple taxa long separated

Use some of the same tricks to count,

And coolest is the core trick of likeness,

Of interpreting different but similar items

As quantifiable repetitions of the same.

If that abstraction of likeness is a trick

Common to many forms of life,

It’s a good one. Whether or not

It tells life something intrinsic about

Cosmic conversation, that’s different.

Math predicts better than any other

Way yet known of parsing memories,

Organic or prosthetic, of the past.

But the past may have more tricks

Than that, more than even math has

Dreamt of—and as for numbers, lines,

And nulls, do they converse or parrot?

Genius Only Passes Through

The spirit shoved over the face
Of the deep thinker thinking, like
Un chat passant parmi les livres,

Like a jet plane flying over
Flyover-country villages,
Like a cow crossing the meadow.

You can’t think your way to spirit
Anymore than you think your way
To worms or microbiota.

Spirit floats in from others’ mouths,
Mother’s skin, winds’ airborne pollens.
Yes, you think with it, but spirit

Is possessed by getting through you
To wherever is its next place
To loll in sun or shade, refuel.

Travelers’ Trace

You now have a good idea
Of where your concepts come from
And of where your notions live.

They are a sort of people,
Wandering about the world.
They have various stations

But no fixed habitations,
And some of them are nomads,
Or migrants, or refugees,

While some of them are richer
And move in royal progress—
Servants, soldiers, hangers-on.

They’re more like habits of mind
For most of you. For a few,
They’re functional orreries,

Mercator projections, spheres
Armillary modeling
The relations of your worlds.

But they move. They always move.
They’re revolving like clocks, or
On the march, or they decay.

Walking past another skull,
Or tens, or thousands of skulls,
The size and shape of your own,

You might barely notice them.
But inside each tumulus,
A tumbling horde of notions,

Tightly tie lives to beliefs,
To anxieties, to dreads,
To fantasies like hatches

That let out that dread, through which
Concepts fly out and escape,
While somehow, we also stay.

Wonder Flies of Snow

Every hour will evanesce,
And you will, and we will, once
You’ve left, although only you

Will not transform, will vanish
As you came, and nothing left,
That is, unless meaning’s left.

A fly, or is it an ant,
Wandering along your skin
Interrupts dreams. You forget

Everything you were dreaming,
Everything that meant so much,
Created such strong feelings

Of anger, joy, or regret
In the dream, and you even
Forget which feelings you felt.

Turn on the lamp, there’s no fly
Or ant anywhere in sight,
But now there’s a fluttering

Like a trapped moth’s wings, behind
A snow-white wooden dresser.
You move the cabinet, but

You don’t see anything there.
Might as well get up, get dressed.
Two hours later, in the dark

That is the universe whole,
Dark with minor points of light,
There’s a flicker here and there

In the stars, like the effect
Capra used to suggest talk
Among the angels, small throbs

Almost like distant lightning,
But there’s no storm and no clouds,
And there’s nothing explaining.

Staircase of Surprise

The flesh is delighted by what

Machines offer it—flesh and blood

Poets, too. Go back to red doc >,

If not much earlier, and look

How the writer seizes on text

The digits accidentally,

Serendipitously compose.

It’s so hard to leave out a gem

Of the unintended, mistakes

God and the world gift through spell check.

In an email I write, I lose

You so much today, Kaveh

Akbar wrote, then wrote it into

A poem in a book he published

The New Yorker reviewed and took

As the last lines of the review.

Poets are tramps for any muse,

Doesn’t have to be a goddess

Or a genius worm in the head.

Could be a spouse spirit-writing,

Could be a planchette, torn-up words

From overlaid subway adverts,

Could be a slip of the keyboard

Or a smartphone’s autocorrect.

This is not stupid. Poets sense

Mimesis needs an accident.

The Rapid Acquisition of Oxygen

Think how incredible dawn would seem
If you’d ever seen only night,

How incredible a starry night would seem
If you’d lived entirely by daylight,

How incredible a city skyline would seem
To a pre-electric time traveller,

How incredible the River of Souls did seem
To Los Angelenos after an earthquake,

When all the power was out long enough
That police received anxious calls

About a strange, glowing cloud that was
Bridging the whole dark sky.

In microgravity, fire burns in spheres,
Not tears, if there’s oxygen available.

Twilight as They Used to Call It

When the day was half-lit,
Half-night, headed either
Way, unstable but soft.

Poets seemed to like it,
Whatever poetry
Was meant to be back then.

Twilight’s too limiting,
As everyone admits
Now, almost everyone.

Every hour has its own
Peculiarity
Of the light, and cities

And suburbs only add
To the variety.
Nothing ever subtracts

From the way waves cancel
Each other out to rise.
Long avenues at dawn,

Lines of lights changing, chained,
Noon in the desert when
Lizards sun on the wall,

The road through the big pines
That haven’t caught fire yet
On autumn afternoons

When their crossing shadows
Make the road seem lonesome
And almost meaningful.

All of it’s poetry,
No matter what you want
Poems to do for you, or

If you abhor the thought
Of being forced to read
Something like these lines on

Twilight, stop lights, sunlight,
Tree shadows in the road,
Or if you’re committed

To waste your life on poems,
Think poems can change the world,
Free your soul, name your truth,

Speak for your lost people,
Your lost family, your
Terrible fear of death.

It’s all poetry,
Poetic in all lights.
That’s poetry’s problem.