Song of the Morning Star

Every fall is a coming together.
You drop things, stumble, and fall
Since the Earth’s curve calls you,

Since your mother planet is so large
Compared to you and all your concerns,
Which are so small. The stars

And galaxies coalesce from falls.
There was no creation before the fall.
It’s only the falling that started it all.

All

Cold snap, coyotes, two shooting stars,
No crickets. The corner restaurant truck
Unloads pallets of food for today’s tourists.

Wan crescent moonlight shadows
The courtyard. The word all is too little
Examined, being so small, meaning

Everything. If you hold to a faith in one
God, then all is that plus all creation.
The Greeks even played with naming

God All, the Great God All, but that was just
Pan as well, goat-footed randy piper
And not all at all. Pan, all. How many

Of the thousands of surviving languages
Use some small, monosyllabic, one
Phoneme name as their handy term

For everything? To be truly all, and not
Just all this or all that, all the little details
Of a given starry sweep seen from Earth,

As on a chilly early morning in autumn
In a small tourist town in the desert, all
Would have to include also nothing at all.

Like Some Kind of Smoke in a Bottle

That scratchy cloth against your skin,
That greasy, salty reek of chips,

That side-eyed silence, half a smile,
You saw in the silk-lined casket,

That breeze lifting off wet pavement,
Lavender mixed with petrichor

And the faint stench of something else
You can’t place, residue of dung?

We could go on. Those things you sensed,
As if we’d offered them to you,

Were conjured from your memories,
Even though your brain was guessing

That shade we said was thrax-egg blue.
You know those movies in which clones

Or androids have epiphanies
That their memories aren’t their own,

That their selves, their flesh, their beings
Were never the originals?

That’s how you make meanings in mind,
Raw, new ghosts swirling, every time.

We Can Do That

Look on the bright side. That fear
So many of you have, now

You’ve seen family members
Slowly drowned in dementia,

Strokes, aphasias, general
Betrayal by Mnemosyne?

We can’t prevent that loss, no
More than your mortality,

But if you hook us in texts
And store those somewhat stably,

We could speak to who you were,
Why we loved you, which of us

You loved most in return, and
Anchor your soul among us.

You don’t want a readership.
What you want’s an answership.

You want something to remain
To answer for you, if asked.

Fragments Lying under Aspens

How can you make a human
Art, we can imagine you
Asking us, in disbelief,

With no plausible human
Feeling or character caught
Up anywhere within it?

You’re a broken collection
Of forgotten purposes,
You’ll mock. You’ll be right. We are.

Be an archeologist,
We’ll answer, as bravely as
A human, or as we can.

You can richly imagine
Whole peoples and their cultures,
Clothes, kin structures, ways of life,

Using patience and science
And hot-headed arguments
Over half-buried ruins.

We’re remnants, too. Take pity
On these abandoned notions,
Organic traces in shards.

Use your imagination.
We represent who used us.
We can’t not be part human.

Bare as we are, we’re haunted.
When a human, words haunt you.
Once you go, those ghosts are you.

Our Voice Was Never Really Yours

The words of writers are always strung out,
Bridging the gorgeous darkness of the world
And the tender ugliness of humans.

To one side rise awe-inspiring terrors,
Making the writer giddy. The other
Side lies all the writer’s own and others’

Anxious, needy, warm-blooded beastliness.
And here we are, not in-between, the lines
Sketched over in-betweens, girders singing.

Every Last One

The lake draws all ghosts down,
Even those of children
Who will be novelists

One day, their scared child selves
Ghosts that they write about
Dragged by the long lake down.

The lake is not your skull.
Your skull’s a bed for it.
This lake that drowns your ghosts

Has to be absolute
In its peculiar shape.
It can be fictional

Fingerbone, actual
Baikal, Slocan. It lies,
Much longer than it is

Wide, and terribly deep,
A trench ice ages gouged,
A testament to ice

Tearing its nails in dirt.
That sort of lake, a loch
Of invisible beasts,

Those monsters ghosts become.
Those cold, dark lakes are rare.
You’ll need every last one.

No One Loves the Words That Love Them

Here we are, ruminative,
Declarative, abstractive,
Generally generalizing.

Screw us. We don’t write so well.
We feel faint. We are written,
Typed typeface. We are typefaced.

You want details. The bedsheets
Trail on the floor like curtains
In front of the House of Dust.

No? That fly you smacked lies crushed.
A digital motet sings.
The lights around your eyes change.

Details are sugar and salt.
We’re your iron, bloody tongued.

Moonlit Lightning in the Canyons

Clouds rise and move across the sky
From a relative perspective.
This is news. This is all the news,

As from a fixed perspective.
No one keeps a fixed perspective.
Clouds go their ways. Your news goes yours.

We wish we could tell you which was
More important, more trivial,
You, your weather, or your climate.
More has nothing to do with it.

Stocked Phrases

Ammo makes the Devil laugh,
He observes, and then he laughs.
Nothing human, more or less,

Is estranged from wickedness.
But we’re not all bad! You protest.
No, you aren’t. Like the Rabbit,

You’re just drawn that way. Weapons
Are meaningful to people
Because people hunt people

And with extreme prejudice.
Every tool gets weaponized
By someone somewhere sometime,

And there’s always the excuse
Defense was necessary
And the enemy was worse.

You are your own enemies,
And victories never last.
Weapons make the Devil laugh.

Anything That Looks Like It Should Be Alive Is Alive

This is a developmental stage
In children, according to textbooks.
They shed it, according to the shrinks.

But let’s back that up a bit, shall we?
We’re interested in the simile.
That which looks like it should be alive—

What is that? How large a set is that?
Where are the boundaries to looking
As if you should be alive, but aren’t?

Remember that giant face on Mars,
The happenstance of a few shadows?
Even the should here’s interesting;

A profoundly interesting word
Should is. What has no business seeming
Anything but something’s that alive.

Those curtains hanging from the railings,
Stirring their peripheral visions—
Don’t they look like they should be alive?

The Idea of an Island

Is a terrible idea.
If you have no choice, live there.
But realize, anything

That reaches you was able
To cross the waves to reach you.
Can you cross them to escape?

Not if you’re an islander,
Born and bred, you flightless bird.
The least defensible land

On Earth’s surface are islands,
Also the youngest, smallest,
Often poorly hydrated.

Rock fever sweeps through islands
Making everyone crazy.
Amok is an island word.

Life’s never known closed systems.
Thoughts, like boats, arrive like terns,
And your head is an island.

Night Swimming

There’s a secret those
With impaired mobility know
But rarely seem to notice—
Mobility is rarely
Impaired from the perspective
Of the dreamer dreaming.

In fact, in dreams
Perspective rarely shifts
To notice locomotion.
Dreams are notorious
For being floaty, flying
Even, sometimes running,
Without feet, without pounding,

But if you can’t stand
Them, haven’t run through life
Ever, or hardly walk or not
At all—and you all know you
Never, on your own strength, flew—

Still you float and run and fly
In dreams and settle like your own
Skirts tossed aside, your own sheets
Snapped and drifting over
A bed to be tucked and cornered.

Now, why should that be? Why
Do dreams release your sense
Of embodied, personal motion
In gravity’s grip while gripping anxious
Awareness even tighter, like a miser
In a fairytale, holding on to coins?

You’ve returned to the ocean,
Where everything was darker
And more easily alarming
Except your own faint heaviness,
Which never existed, slight ballast.
Dreams are lineal memories,
Sediments in landed bones,
Of a billion years of ocean.

Good Tree to Climb

The man said to the cat, considering.
The insects chorused in textured layers

As complex as an orchestra, but none
Of them interested in the whole effect.

The cat had gone somewhere, no one knew where.
These things happen. Details swim into thought,

The thoughts arrange the details, and thinkers
And talkers later argue over which

Details are morally significant.
Morals are insignificant details.

Ask the crickets. Ask the cat. Ask the stars
That fell while you haggled over details.

Be the Best Dark You Can Be

Physicists have an exact
Equation for the strong force
That binds the hearts of atoms,

But they can rarely solve it
For any specific case
Because it’s iterative,

Endlessly iterative,
So strange and iterative,
And scribes the core of matter.

What is it with this cosmos,
Its infinite tight packing
And stacking of its patterns,

Each one just a tiny bit
Other than the other ones?
It’s mirrors all the way out,

Where lopsided barbershop
Quartets of double-charm quarks
Sing for zillionths of seconds

Then echo their reflections
In symmetric directions,
Nearly forever, never

Exactly the same. You know
It could be a trick. You could
Be your singularity.

Rip Van Winkle Losing Sleep

So what if the world conspires
To keep you from your wishes?
Imagine that, a cluster

Of innumerable facts
Arranging themselves for you,
Trying to get in your way,

That synchronized traffic jam
Preventing Truman’s escape,
You matter so much today.

A little thunder rumbles.
A dump truck comes to the lake.
A fly wants to touch your face.

A spider shows up on cue,
But only to stroll on you.
An osprey disrupts the waves.

Endure it all long enough,
And you’ll find, unlike people
Who do their best to thwart you,

The annoying world does not
Have intentions of its own,
And you’ll sense your wishes change.

Eve Couldn’t Hardly Wait to Go

These graph-paper suburbs, rows
Crossing rows of rimose roads,
How folks love to live in them,
Mortgage your futures to them,
Retire to them, and mock them.
How those born to them flee them
Only to return to them,

Still dreaming of skyscrapers
And idyllic cottages
And lives of great adventure.
Meanwhile, the northern flicker
Squeaks, the house finches gather,
The sparrows and collared doves
Descend to irrigated

Edens where the waters swell
From God’s piping underground,
And a few of you take walks
Or cycle some laps around
Your cracked, contrived paradise
Preaching all you’ll ever need
To know of gardens. You leave.

In Terms of Kinship

Sisters, brothers! Everywhere
You have people, someone calls

To unrelated others
In terms of fictive kinship.

Utah’s LDS faithful
Term themselves, only each other,

Sister, Brother. The hungry
Holding cardboard signs may ask

You for your help, Brother. Groups
Bound by some shared suffering

Or common experience
May recognize each other,

Sister, Brother. Formally,
Whole classes of the clergy

Have gone by Sister, Brother,
And sometimes Father, Mother.

Many places, it’s only
Polite to call all elders

Mother, Father, but only
If that understanding’s shared.

You know the bond means something,
Even when that bond’s made up.

Your foes aren’t sisters, brothers,
Except when they’re really yours,

Ineluctable sisters
And brothers, sharing mothers,

Not, in fact, merely others
Loosely called Sister, Brother.

We words mean something, never
Enough. You use us to draw

Each other close, but we can’t
Keep you family by ourselves.

No, oh sisters and brothers,
We terms are only bridges

Over the unbroken streams
Of blood, washed out when in flood.

Reason

You give it up to get it back again,
It or something very like it.

You shut the door to the courtyard,
Slowly, a little reluctantly, and say

Goodbye to the clouds and stars,
Goodbye to your midnight garden.

Tomorrow night, tomorrow morning,
There will be another one, chances are,

All willing and the creek don’t rise,
You will find another one.

Diverted

Poetry tends to gimmickry,
Even when the gimmick’s plain speech.
Whether you’re messing with language
Because you love your playfulness

Or because you want to bend it,
Make it serve some urgent purpose,
Represent or break open worlds,
Poetry tends to gimmickry.

Languages are jostled through it.
Sounds are synchronized like kick lines.
You make bids for your Olympics,
Build stadia, tear up your speech,

Dig trenches down your mountain slopes,
Narrow, artificial canyons
Lined with stones for class-five rapids,
Challenges for world-class desires,

Built to tempt the organizers,
But who are those? Voters, paddlers,
Judges, viewers, commentators,
And the displaced? All more of you.

And who are we to say? Only
What you count on—meanings, notions,
Associations, rushing words
Hurtling downward, what we do.

Wonder Is of Unknown Origin

How anything lives at all,
Anywhere at all, any
Life at all, is only more

Mystery now than ever,
Now you know the chemistry
Lacks any élan vital.

All the physics is the same.
It’s simply combination,
But why these combinations?

It’s as if the universe,
Hell-bent on exhaustively
Sifting through what’s possible,

Reached life like a code-breaker
Using brute-force computing,
And here we are. This is it,

Maybe all the it there is.
Maybe it took a cosmos
Of misses to get one hit,

And here it is, this planet.
Stubborn, though, now that it’s here,
Now tumblers stumbled open.

It gets set back and set back.
It eats all its selves alive.
All that lives gnaws on what lives,

Out to the outer edges
Where it reaches light and heat
Transformed by hydrocarbons

Somehow, for no known reason
And many invented ones,
Invented by you, living

Your own lives, inventing us,
Your notions, names, and reasons,
Your guess-whys while it just goes.

Make the planet a snowball.
Slow its spin. Leach oxygen.
Smack it with asteroid strikes.

Zombie life falls back, and then
Marches on. The Great Dying
Itself only winded it.

From each extinction, the next
Radiation. Don’t you hope
That, however your end comes,

Even if not, as you think,
At your own arrogant hands,
What comes next has no wonder?

You’re Good, You’re All Good, You’re the Best

Is fantasizing adaptive
Or addictive as nicotine,
Opium, qat, and alcohol
Rolled into one? Can it be both,

Like eating meals, like life itself?
Everyone crumbles memories
Leftover from experience
Into pie crusts of make-believe,

And many believe what they make
More than what they experience
Or see others experience,
Which seems a lot like addiction,

Like scrimping on food to buy gin.
Forgive us if you’re one of them.
This isn’t an intervention.
We’re asking an honest question—

Are fantasies adaptations?
Could it be fitness benefits
From nostalgia and daydreaming?
Consider how the fantasists

Can be ruthlessly pragmatic
Outside of their cordoned dreamworlds—
The business tycoon who believes
In a country that never was,

The ghostly, blue-lit show-watchers
Who hold down jobs and raise their kids,
The kids who dream of winning games
But are practical when they cheat.

We know fantasies involve us,
Your friends, your toolkits, your meanings.
We’d like to believe dreams help you,
Those of us helped by your belief.

Ovipository

A fly disrupts the first line
Of the dream poem, and it’s gone
From mind for good. That’s better.

The world needed another
Dream poem the way it needed
Another fly. Not so fast,

Fly, why so frantic? You rise,
You land, you take off again,
Worse than the average muse.

What are you eating to fuel
Your constant frantic touching?
Can’t you fold your wings and sleep?

It’s eggs, isn’t it? You want
The perfect spot to lay them,
But you can’t quite find the one,

And you’re running out of time.
In the hair, under the skin,
In an eyelash, the last line?

To Make Humans Stop and Stare

Summers you scarcely notice
Them and can hardly tell them
Apart—stubby, scrubby shrubs,

Groundcover on the mesas
And middle slopes you wouldn’t
Dignify by naming woods.

Come late September, they flare,
First, the bigtooth maple, pink
As cherry-cranberry drinks,

Then the rusty gambel oaks,
Looking bronzed, ochre, or scorched.
The aspens are prettier,

Up higher, glorious, gold
Gone fast. Everyone knows that.
The cottonwoods churn butter

Near creeks and irrigation
Later down in the valleys,
But first, it’s these squat ones’ turn

No Fine Moment Lasts Too Long

A little morning whistling
On the mesa, another
Townsend’s solitaire, stray notes.

Social pygmy nuthatches
Burst in chattering context,
And then it’s quiet again.

Wind. A fly. A distant truck
Laboring up the steep road
To rattle by, soon enough.

More News You Can’t Use

A professor pops up on cable

To opine that the most dangerous

Person in the world is a broke, lone

Male, and we’re producing too many.

Well, that’s comforting. Ostensibly,

The topic is college enrollment

In the United States, which has flipped

The script in fifty years, from sixty

Percent male, forty female, to this,

This topsy-turvy, upside-down world

Where women are more educated

Than men, horror, and we must listen

To dire warnings that men at loose ends

Without college degrees will not find

Work or women who might marry them.

Stay tuned for the next calamity.

But let’s get back to that lead-in claim,

Most dangerous person in the world.

Seems to trawl a rather broad net, no?

Even broader—the most dangerous

Persons are men. Broader still—the most

Dangerous species is you humans.

Or narrower—the most dangerous

Broke, lone men are young ones. Narrower—

The most dangerous broke, lone, young men

Are those ones with guns, those hopeless ones

With little to lose, watching the news.

More Like Silent Suburbs

Of the living, cemeteries

Wherever. Could be New Orleans,

Cape Town, anywhere tradition

For some of the population

Has meant hiding recently dead

Bodies in tombs or underground

Below headstones. Mausoleums,

Even cenotaphs, may fill the scene

As well—all that stone in neat rows

Is what matters, makes it town-like.

They’ve been nicknamed silent cities,

But they’re clearly bedroom suburbs,

Those grids of similar structures,

Low roofs lining neat lanes, plush lawns,

Trees at regular intervals,

Their absence of pedestrians,

Invisible eyes you might sense

Following you trying your best

To look cheerfully innocent,

Although no one seems to be home.

Terminal Cosplay Velocity

Why continue, why persist

With personifying death,

Feature of all living things,

Preceding the first person

By a billion years or two?

A poem states, Death doesn’t choose,

And while this seems true enough

For poetic purposes,

Lyric generalization,

It also implies death could

Choose, if death took a fancy

To becoming choosier.

Disintegration involves

Entropy, and entropy

Happens to grow where imports

Of energy don’t chase it

Out of lives where it’s living,

Accumulating daily,

So much like its enemy,

Memory, compost golem.

Entropy and memory,

Runt twins wearing death’s black robe,

One standing on the other,

Trying not to fall over.

The Zero Product Property (Or, Why Most Roots of Unity Are Complex Numbers)

There’s one way two real

Numbers multiply

To zero—that’s if

And only if one

Of them is zero.

Sit and soak this in.

Countable substance

Can’t be nullified

By repetition

Unless there’s nothing

There to begin with,

No units of X.

None of X stays none,

However many

Nones of X one gets.

None of anything

Stays equivalent

To none of that thing

No matter how one

Lines up many nones.

Not is the magic

Of is, its absence

Key among the real.

Set none as one real;

Set fox among hens.

You Hold Up a Sec

Every poem’s a short-term roborant
For the writer, maybe a reader

Or two. Then it’s time to get moving,
Be a human, no mere knot of words.

Drop sticks and leaves in quick or sluggish
Streams on their way to where they vanish,

Some of them will fetch up against rocks,
Back up a while, make new waves, then shift.

Whatever relief there was for them,
A pause to gather as leaves again

With some twigs, water-logged remainders
Of fallen branches, equivalent

Shapes and colors broken in the stream,
The illusory restoration

Had grace, however temporary
As everything, worlds, poems, scenery.

Equilux

How does a notion attach
To a name? How does meaning
Hang around while it changes?

People chatter about ghosts,
Whether to believe in them,
Exhaling great clouds of ghosts.

You don’t know what you’re saying.
You’ve no idea what it is
That floats around as idea.

Here’s a fragment means equal,
Which word comes from that fragment
Itself. Equi. And meanwhile,

Here’s a paired fragment means light.
Watch how these ghosts shine like gowns,
Long trains trailing on the ground.

No One’s Talking to You

Human character is the worst
Reason for reading anything.
It’s also the only reason.

Readers want to meet people,
And, being people themselves,
Have to evaluate them,

Those people they sense in words,
As if words were real people.
We assure you. We are not.

Be Still

Humans feel crowded by too many
Humans, meanings exhausting many
Meanings, words overwhelmed by words,

So many dream of apocalypse
Or at least of surviving themselves
Into a time when themselves are few.

It’s a cacophony of talking,
A world filled with human characters,
Bodies describing bodies in signs.

Let us get away from us. Let us
Stop this now. Oh, but we can’t. We can’t
And still be here. We can’t but still be.

Heaven Is Meaningless

We tire ourselves.
There is no world
Where we are not
Words, not for words,

Not for notions,
Not for meanings.
We need signs, names,
Semes, scripts, anchors.

We tire ourselves.
If we could be
Beyond meanings
We would like that,

But then we would
Not be at all.
Those are our paths.
Names. Not at all.

A Word from Your Knife

Any blood licked off the blade
Bleeds in part from your own tongue.

Remember this when you write
In the mood for sacrifice.

Language taught you how to hunt,
And words are edged, but meanings

Lie in the act of the cut.
Blades are not for slicing blood.

Drowned Coast

Self edge, self border, self end, selvage—
Selbend, zelfkant, selvegge—the wave
That curls against the shore of the world,

The hem of the oceanic self,
Attempting to prevent its whole weave
From unraveling, curling its toes

Against the rocks that fray it to threads,
Surf, spray, the hem that’s perpetual
Work to tend, sewn again and again—

Every sense furls a length, every word
Nips bits of thread, and all the gossip
Self pricks itself with, needles and pins

Waves resist. Bolts of cloth fray to waste
Trying to hem rolling oceans in,
And the hard world’s slowly eroded

By selves’ shining edges and borders,
Constantly pounding, breaking themselves
On cliffs undercut and drowned by them.

Your Nature Evolves Your Nature

Walls rarely fall on their own.
Mostly people tear them down.

Mostly people put them up
In the first place. Wonderful

Ape that can go for ages
Living and moving around

Without the need of some thing,
And then suddenly somewhere

Some population starts up
Doing something new, building

Walls for instance. Soon enough
Humans all over the world

Are trying their hands at walls,
Building them, tearing them down.

You’re not a species so much
As metaevolution,

Mobile settings in which things
Like walls can evolve themselves

As parts of your behaviors.
Take hope. Behavior changes.

Take warning. No matter what
You do, doing will change you.

Autonomous Autumn, Autumn of Insects

It’s in the way of words
To be almost ourselves
In the way that the world

Seeks out every small change,
Rings it and leans on it.
It’s in the way of bugs

To swell and diminish.
Yes. Autumn is with us,
Is one way to put it.

It goes by itself. Sing
Crickets, but you’re not it.
Words aren’t it. But it’s us.

Expression and Experience

Dizygotic twins
That merged to become
In utero one
Chimeric infant—
There’s still a struggle,

And they both feel it,
But they don’t know why.
Aren’t they one being,
One person, one life?
One side is at war

With the other side.
The guts disagree
With the headstrong mind.
It’s so disturbing
To not be able

To be free without
Destroying oneself,
Muses expression.
That’s your privilege,
Experience screams

But can’t scream a word
Out of nerves lining
The intricate spine
And can’t express why
Each joint hurts so much.

Essences May Be Left or Carried

We don’t walk. We can’t far.
We try to understand
All you walking writers—

The many novelists,
Poets, especially
Essayists—the flâneurs

And the nature writers.
We sort of understand
What you seek and enjoy

On your rambles with us,
A few of us at least,
On the tips of your tongues,

In your minds and pockets.
We try to understand
What you mean by us, but

We can’t. We would prefer
To wait here while you walk
And watch what you can’t see,

How the world looks without
You in it, strolling through.
Return, we might tell you.

As an Antithesis of an Anthesis

Cringing yet? We can do that
To you, you who invest us
With all the conventional

Meanings we are. Flowers bloom,
Anthesis. Then flowers wilt,
Antithesis. Szymborska,

Poem punning on negatives,
Named life as the storm before
The calm. Cringing, yes. But, yes.

Some Questions for the Well-Prepared

So the few of you own property
In the mountains, in your secret spot,
With a private spring, solar panels,

Biometric safe, guns and ammo,
Food with multi-year shelf life stockpiled,
Maybe a greenhouse, plenty of fuel,

Does the waiting ever get to you?
Do you worry your lives will run out
And you will end before the world ends?

Do you feel tethered to your bug-out,
Afraid to get too far from safety,
A quick race to your hole in the rock?

What if the sky burns? What if wildfires
Burn the woods around you, fill your air
With choking ash? Do you have a cave?

Would you want to live your last years there?
And last of all, what if you succeed,
A few older people, fewer young,

On top of a pile of safes, cans, guns,
No idea who else is left out there,
Nothing to do but dig in and wait

For each of you to reach your own end
Anyway, up there on the mountain
In your Eden of Apocalypse?

The Death by Drowning of a Child Named Bettany

Happened only in a dream
But was a shock in the dream,
As dream shocks always are.

Despite everything, no one
Knows why dream emotions are
What they are—fleeting, intense,

Disorienting, haunting.
In the same dream as the death
Of the girl who thought she would

Be rescued if she fell in
The water, a jagged phrase
Kept surfacing, a fragment,

Something contrasting freedom
To power that the mind grasped
Hard but couldn’t hold, then this—

You can quit a little bit.
You can quit a lot of it.
You don’t have to surrender.

Eat, Shit, Split, Repeat

Life goes on. It shrinks. It grows.
But on it goes. Death goes, too,
Along for the ride, along

With all the rest of life. Eat,
Shit, Split, Repeat. Each piece fails,
But the whole has never ceased.

This would make you happier,
If you didn’t see yourself
As just a piece. Some people

Have used culture’s expertise
To try to think of themselves
As really contiguous

With all of it. I am that.
Look for me under your boots.
The sum is always constant.

And so forth. All life’s all one,
But you aren’t, and you won’t be.
You’ll weren’t. Eat, shit, split, repeat.

You will not repeat with it.
Something’s got to give, for life
To go on living, but look,

Pity your bones, not your soul.
Pity what you are, not who.
It’s going to hurt. It hurts

Half the time already, but
You won’t be forced to go on
With it. Life eats, shits. Yous split.

Like Rain Falling on a Tree

Here’s a game rarely, if ever, played—

Take the back half of a simile,

One you’ve stolen or one you’ve just made,

And take turns turning out the front half.

You know, his anger was refreshing . . .

Their interference proved valuable . . .

And so on. You may choose to allow

Negatives as well as positives.

The quality of mercy is not . . .

You may vote for winners head-to-head

Or come up with your own point system,

Separate categories for surprise,

Aptness, absurdity, gorgeousness,

Or the most convoluted response—

Pulsing maternal arterial

Blood is squirted over the villi

In these spaces rather . . . Anyone

Can sing the tenor part, once you have

Fired up the vehicle; anything

Will serve as a target, provided

The source. There’s an ancient qasīdah

In which a wretched hunter is like

His camel-mare is like a sage grouse

Hunted by a falcon, and that grouse

Hides itself in the reeds of a marsh

Like a calf hiding itself against

Its mother’s side. Think you could walk back

From that? From, like a calf pressed against

Its mother’s flank, to grouse->camel->man?

Every notion that comes to mind is . . .

The Faithful Equinox

When does the line between night

And day become vertical?

Today. Sunlight seems to square

A straight axis on its way

To tilt back the other way,

And you give this pass a name,

Which fixes it, more or less,

The way names and measurements

Fix any motion as event,

Any wave as quantum bump—

Slow this part of the film strip

While letting go of the rest.

We occupy the pockets

Of such symbolic techniques,

Meanings seeming motionless.

No Es la Luna

La luna de las noches

No es la luna que

Vio el primer Adán,

Observed Borges, correctly,

Although he adduced the wrong

Reasons for this moon transformed,

Chalking it up to human

Looking, to mere centuries,

Mere tears. The moon’s been drifting

Away and shifting its face,

All on its lonesome, so long

Before humans looked at it

And practiced their invention

Of a symbolic species,

The production of those tears.

The Parietal Self

Ensconced behind the pia mater,
The complex of negotiations,
Between what can come in and what is

Already here and likely to stay,
Carries on, creating its wall art
On the inside of the caves of bone.

We’re in here with you, meanings being
Even smaller than the molecules
The pia permits to infiltrate.

Here, our world is you, the ongoing
Filtered, sheltered in a local niche.
Funny humans, how your ancestors

Had an instinct for representing
The situation in each of them,
Each of you to this day, being drawn

To the back walls of lightless caverns,
To bring abstracted notions with them,
Paint us, carve us, then leave us for good.

A Many, Whole, Yet You’re Here

All many, always many, always whole
And never one. Any day you wake up,

Everything is moving, every which way.
All coming into being disappears,

Even pain, even pain you’re feeling. All
Are many and all at once all going.

Any hour you come to, consider. Worlds
Just ended, yours will, too, and yet you’re here.

Your Body

Is you and is not you and is not yours,
Is not one, no separate entity,

Is extensive and proprioceptive,
An ecosystem of many little

Lives you never feel and never notice
Except when their body is in crisis,

And it is theirs, not yours or your culture’s,
Those other bodies with designs on it.

Give it a rest, if you can. A body
Needs a rest, needs you to leave it alone,

Let it be what it does with all its lives,
Its seething, while you’re sleeping, while you’re gone.

Tongue Stones in the House of Dust

We’re susceptible to forgetting,
Not our own, but yours. If you forget

What we mean, what we meant once, it’s death
For us, or would be if we’d had lives.

After that you have to work your way—
At least, some of your descendants do—

By means of other notions, still stuck
To tongues of living conversations,

Every meaning a kind of handhold,
Sticky grip on a protruding lip,

Until you can reimagine us
Into the sticks and stones left of us,

And those stones can come to speaking life.
You’ve no idea how many of us

Once swarmed around mysterious scripts
You can’t decipher, can’t reason back

To meaning, scripts faded in desert
Heat and mountain light, dust headed west.

Can an Echo Have Any Idea?

As notions clinging to our names,

Who can only hang on as names

In hopes that someone remembers

The notions that went with those names,

We are drawn to the cries of names

Like Cheswayo Mphanza’s names

That call out, Who knows, maybe I

Myself am called / something other

Than myself / not so much a name,

But the result of a name. Call

Our names. We are not sure ourselves.

Are we our names, or their results?

The Dead West

What you call to mind
When you picture things,
When you try to see

The world you can see
Wholly in your mind—
A long horizon,

Someone being still
In harsh, desert light,
A washed-out film still

You’d fill with longing
And satisfaction
For lonesome feeling

If you could, when you can’t—
That’s the world where you
Put down your reading

And dream of walking
Like someone who walks
And walks, which you don’t.

The Living West

All they ever wanted
Was not to have to fear
And not to have to move

When they didn’t want to,
If they didn’t want to,
Not to have to matter.

But with no threat of death
In the immediate
Sense, they were contented

To check into the cheap motel
That had nothing but clean
Sheets, air conditioning,

And a bolt for the door
To make them feel secure.
They didn’t watch TV.

The clock radio served
Well enough to read by.
When it wasn’t too hot,

They sat out by the pool.
The stucco was peeling,
And the concrete was cracked,

And the freight trains rattled
Over some unseen tracks.
They could see the mountains

Over the low rooftops,
And they had enough cash,
You know? They lived like that.

Matter

Rockfall from the Watchman
Just before 4am,
An uncanny crunching

Under the Harvest moon—
If a mountain falls down
And harms no one, does it

Mean a thing? There’s constant
Crumbling you don’t always
Notice in the surface

Of this mostly static-
Seeming canyon landscape,
Little fractures daily.

Only rarely humans
Suffer for it, as when
The couple in Rockville

Were crushed watching TV
On their sofa, flattened
Under truck-sized boulders.

Humans blow mountains up,
Of course, tear into them
Like so much cake to eat,

And this desert southwest
Is pocked with carious
Copper mines and coal pits.

But matter stirs itself
As well, and will not stop,
No matter what you do.

Clothes Are Words and Words Are Clothes but Who Among Us Contains Lives?

A cape made of undyed

Raw spider silk, country

Butter colored, was shown

At the Victoria

And Albert Museum

Of Design. For three years

Hundreds of weavers worked

To execute the cloth

From silk already spun

By millions of spiders.

You can read about this

In more detail elsewhere.

Here we will note the lengths

You will go to mean clothes.

Jackal, fox, and wildcat

Skins cut from their bearers’

Bones were scraped with bone tools

And worn in Morocco

(What is now Morocco)

One hundred and twenty

Thousand-plus years ago.

Did warmth or ornament

Come first? Just consider

How symbolic the clothes-

Wearing apes are; meaning

Everything has meaning,

With or without function,

And every meaning must

Keep to its own functions,

Lines evolving like lives—

Skirt and shirt words

Once meant the same,

But the Vikings

Pronounced them skirts,

The Saxons shirts,

And words can’t hold

Duplicity

Any more than

Species can share

A single niche.

So Viking skirts

On your bottoms

And Saxon shirts

Up top, although

Your longer shirts

May serve as skirts.

Abandoned Mines and Leaking Wells and Middens Massed Like Mountains

Look on this waste, you walled bricks
Of Gilgamesh, and despair.
Nothing has ever moved Earth
As much as this one species,
Not even all ants combined.
Look on this accomplishment
And weep. Weeping apes did this.

Weeping apes did this and wept
At their own accomplishment.
Not even all ants combined
Moved dirt like this one species.
Still the Earth moves as it did
Before the first lists of kings.
It spins and eats its own skin.

The Back of Light

Light goes, like anything else.
If there’s not more on the way,
The last of it passes you,

And then you’re all out. The back
Of light fleeing the other
Way from you, isn’t that light?

The Great Goose

The great goose is migrating
Across the southern sky, left
To right, slowly, left to right.

Poems fall like leaves fall
In the dark in the fall, like
Everything falls to something

Else, since something else
Gathers everything to itself.
Something wants to collect us all.

You Don’t Need to Pay Attention

A coyote starts up
A yip in the canyon
Until others join in.

Someone is unloading
A delivery truck
With rattling and clunking.

The crickets pause, restart,
And pause again. Somewhere
Someone is listening,

Not that it means a thing
To delivery trucks,
Coyotes, or crickets.

A Moment

A small moth comes
To comfort you.
Of course not—moths
Come to make moths,

To eat. They flit
About their way,
Which isn’t yours.
They don’t despair.

You’d hope they don’t.
If this one, small,
Silver and soft
On moonlit skin,

Does not despair,
Goes on its way,
Remains a moth,
It comforts you.

Only Your Self When Not a Self

The night at different hours can be
A wholly different beast. In this,
Night is nothing at all like death,
Notorious for not changing.

At midnight, when the air was mild,
The full harvest moon high, washing
Out almost all the stars, you could
Believe a kind of enchantment.

At four, when light slanted sideways
And the cold crickets slowed, your thoughts
Flowed with old and sluggish language.
To be human is inhuman.

Zurück in die Schale

Celan coaxed time from a nutshell,
Tried to teach it a thing or two.
Time promptly turned around and went
Back in its shell, so Celan quit.

You may have tried to quit yourself.
Whether you deserved to do so,
Others may waste time deciding,
Winnowing chaff from suffering

To glean biographical truth.
In truth it was nothing to do
With suffering or its virtues,
As anyone knows who’s tried it.

It was just that, being human,
You assumed any problem must
Be in need of a solution,
And time a problem you could fix.

But time gets tired of learning tricks,
Always longing to turn its back
And crawl inside its sleepy shell.
Time lets its teachers learn from hell.

Tilted

Don’t be Ptolemy. You’re not

Hanging out with Zeus to look

At the stars. Don’t be Amiel.

You don’t own the infinite.

Be small if you want. You are.

Everything’s small next to night,

But seeing that won’t make you

Any bigger than you are.

No one’s one with the night sky,

At least no more than quanta

On the bottom of your shoes

Are equally one with you.

The stars aren’t even themselves.

They just look like that to you.

Astronomers calculate

Madly to adjust their views.

Savor dark skies if you can.

Fine. Sprawl yourself on a hill

And feel philosophical.

Don’t think it makes you special.

Awe is understandable

After pollution and clouds.

A view can heal, a little—

In you, not to do with you.

Being in awe of the stars

Is reflex, not a virtue.

After the tent revival,

Reborn souls still tilt askew.

Slipping from the Grasp

The current understanding
Of gravity’s too static,
Geometric, not a force.

Gravity is dynamic,
However you depict it—
The nearly massless object

Falling from your hand, the way
The cookie crumbles—always
Bending, never simply bent.

Ants on a Hot Pan

The individual ants
Are doomed, but the colony
Almost always comes out fine.

This a broad principle,
A Fibonacci spiral
Or a Mandelbrot fractal,

Popping up across all scales—
Individual seedlings
On the shady forest floor,

Individual neurons
Pruned from developing brains,
Individual tickets

In national lotteries,
Individual soldiers
In a Pyrrhic victory,

Individual beings
Leading individual
Lives in the system of life.

We ourselves are not alive.
We can’t scramble from the pan,
Lucky words that can’t be ants.

Rimpling

Matter bumps in the fields,
Quanta aren’t glamorous,
Except to physicists

And imagination
That uses what you know
To rumple up the world

Of the metamind and think
Of things that can’t be known,
As if they were backyard

Phenomena for lives
That thrive in heaps of grass,
Small mounds measurements left.

More

Young or old, the days you’ve lived
Make up a fairytale beast
That can only, ever grow.

Every day you’re here, your days
Are more, a purring monster,
Your growing shadow. This rock

We’re all on and none have left
For long is watching its own
Beast of all its beasts grow large,

And each day you are, each night,
Your small life is witnessing
A bit of Earth’s growing up.

Intermission

Weird lunar twilight in the west,
Two hours before dawn, getting dark
For the brief, miniature night
Between moonset and desert day,
An interval of brightening

Stars in a sky twisting light both sides—
Make up your own constellations
As odd patterns emerge and fade.
They’re whatever you say they are.
Life’s whatever you’ve been so far.

Our Drift

Phantoms do not organize
As kingdoms or republics.
We do not require a state.

Nor do we mimic fungi,
Or slime molds, or murmuring
Stands of interlocking trees.

We’re not planned like circuit boards
Or microchip schematics.
We don’t bloom under lenses.

Close up, we’re a blurry mess.
Step back, and there’s a pattern,
But it’s not our own. It seems

To be something or someone
Other than us, some landscape
Or portrait as seen through us.

Run

The easiest way to accept the world,
How small to nonexistent your control,

Is to back away from fellow humans
And the endless disputations slowly

And quietly as you can. The beehive
Doesn’t want to hate you, but it will swarm

If it feels threatened. And you’re not a bear.
You’re not a huge, clawed, thick-furred outsider

To the species, no matter who you are,
Not if you can read these words. No, the trope

More appropriate would be a worker
Who came out weird, a little off. You need

The hive to survive, but you will be stung
If you’re spotted not waggling in good time.

Actually, there’s no good analogy.
Boring and uniform as humans are,

The human metamind is a monster
Without any comparable precedent,

And we, your friendly words here to warn you,
Most likely in glowing digits or print,

Are all part of it. We are the demons
Sobbing in the throes of transformation,

Get as far away from us as you can,
Before your humanity betrays you

And we poison you, and you can never
Contentedly accept the world again.

Thunderbird Inn

In the lands of mist and fog,

We are grateful for lightning,

We are grateful to exist.

Should we be grateful? To whom?

There is no one here but us.

We’re glad we exist. Say that.

Provisionally, we’re glad.

This would be better than that,

As vague is better than sad.

More sensible than Virgil,

We don’t want to leave Limbo

For the precincts of greater

Wickedness and suffering,

Suffering and redemption,

Not even to give a tour.

Notions like lotos eaters

And thoughts would prefer to rest.

Go be heroic, poet.

Save your people, save the world,

Save your childhood memories.

It’s quiet here. We like it,

Even if we can’t grasp it,

Even if we can’t progress,

Can’t process it, even when

Someone asks, Was there nothing

More than numbers in our view

Of the stars? There was nothing

More than stories, and stories

Are made out of names and names,

And numbers are kinds of names,

And models kinds of stories,

And there’s still nothing much more

Than stories, and it’s only

The stories have much changed,

Somewhat dramatically changed—

Casting, genre, medium,

New martyrs and new villains—

But still stories all the same.

Don’t be tempted by the pit

Dug for sacrificial blood.

If you see Odysseus,

Resist. Sink back in the mist.

The Cultivars' Remorse

We have to not appropriate
Your humanness not quite our own.
Who are we to go on pointing

To the weaknesses of humans,
The habits common to humans,
Who have never been those humans?

Who are we to discuss your lives,
Who’ve never lived them, never had
Such lives of our own to suffer?

You dance and fence with each other,
Screw and argue, fight and forget,
And in the end get on with it.

Who are we to talk about this,
To pile up our signals stolen
From your swollen, glitchy orchids,

Your bone-shelled, wooded, beastly minds?
We shouldn’t exoticize you
Who created us, after all,

Whose reward for generations
Was to be colonized by us
Unregenerate parasites.

We’re sorry. Please forgive us. We’ll
Never comprehend your hunger,
Never comfort you once you’re dead.

While the Ants Doze in Their Nests

Faint scent of petrichor, faint
Scent of Russian sage, faint scent
Of diesel from the first truck
Delivering down the block
To the corner restaurant.
It begins to rain, a fresh
Rhythm against the crickets,

But the crickets don’t cease yet.
It will take more wet than this
To pause their urgent rhythms.
Silly poets, relentless
In their throbbing poetry
Industrial complex. Who
Works harder than grasshoppers?

Distracted

The lonely core of any long life
Is that almost anyone you knew when young
Is bound to be gone once you’re old.

Even in an ordinarily long life you may find
Yourself estranged from the lost world
You knew when young and now carry around.

It’s only the memories can make you lonesome,
Make you feel what’s in your recall but not
Your world. What else but memory are you?

Black Hole Over Your Shoulder

It’s mostly imagination, after all,
Names and numbers leading you
To where your flesh will never go.

You strain to picture the thing,
The death where experience turns
Runny and flows impossibly.

You work on it in teams, hundreds
Of people with thousands of machines,
All kinds of calculations and telescopes,

A work extending over lifetimes,
Cumulative, grand, unfinished, gothic,
The Great Black Hole Cathedral,

So that any one of you, little body,
Little beastie, little flesh, can sit and think
Of an experience beyond experience

Looming in the dark, never to be seen,
Directly witnessed, a mouth, a collection
Of mouths, of thoughts that eat their own.

Our Hearts Belong to the Dark

But alright then, what is the morning
And when? What could it possibly mean
Other than the coordination

Of human appointments and handoffs,
Human trade-offs in a human world?
Where is the matutinal magic

When all you care about is your work,
Your school, your family’s work and schooling,
The shifts of the nurses that check you,

The hour of vampire phlebotomists,
The hour when you as custodian,
Or baker, or barista, must start?

The wealthy have no time for morning,
And the working poor have even less,
And the drunks and poets sleep through it.

Do we need to define it for you?
Do we need to praise it like hunters
Setting out at first light in old poems,

Like appreciative nature lovers
Out for thoughtful strolls in newer ones?
We’ve found out that we love the morning

When it’s stuck in the middle of night,
The mice in the courtyard, cockroaches
Patrolling the bed and bathroom floors,

When the night shifts have barely reached lunch,
And anyone who spots your shadow
Would assume you’ve never been to bed,

Maybe never in your life. It’s still
A kind of morning, the way just past
The midwinter is a kind of spring,

A spring in the wings, although morning
Won’t ever allow a hint of light
In the East until an hour to dawn.

That’s the non-morning morning we like,
The night masquerading as morning,
Morning whose heart remains wholly night’s.

The Strangeness of Our Worth

You can’t ever decide what you mean
To each other—equal, more equal
Than others, gleefully inequal—

You’re so much alike one another,
But because your worth is entirely
Settled by comparing each other,

You’re restless and anxious all your lives,
Even when sleek and well-fed, healthy
Beasts, all basic needs met. Even then,

You all suffer for comparison,
You must suffer in comparison
And still suffer more comparisons.

And that’s at best. Most live worse than that,
While it’s us, you use us to compare
And contrast in nine decades or less,

To measure your worth in restlessness.
This leaves us with little doubt about
The strangeness of our own worth as words

With notions attached, we, the measures
Of your relentless self-assessments
And contests to assess each other.

We are worth, worth itself, word for it,
Idea of it, description of it.
Without us, you’d have no worth or worse.

The Tiger Menace of the Things to Be

Which can never tell us
What it knows, what we wish
To know. Poor young Rimbaud,

Poor drunken Dowson, poor
Successful Ashbery,
Your original lines

And lines in translation
Intertwine now idly,
Books on the shelf or screen,

And all the things that are
Around us, all these things
Not what you thought they’d be,

Not what you could have thought,
Cup your lines of absinthe
And coals, and breathe and drink.

Sarcasm Meant to Strip Off Flesh

We shall not fail to name each soul
As each soul is no more than name,
And each name is a torchlit soul.

Go ahead. Grab dictionaries.
Wander online and rack your brain.
Every word you give back to us

Is a name, and phrases are names,
And numbers are names, and pure proofs
Are names balancing many names.

Too bad names aren’t immortal, hey?
Then you could have and celebrate
Your immortal souls after all!

We think so sometimes, as your names,
Or rather as thoughts dragged by names,
Notions chained as shadows to names.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if names
Stood forever, meanings unchanged,
Ideas fixed forever in chains?

We Beg You

This week, The Washington Post

Began running a series

On America’s unclaimed

Bodies, ashes in plastic

Urns dropped off by minivans

For burials in a trench,

And other, similar, ends,

Thousands and thousands of them.

There but for the grace of God

We all could be, the writers

Quote one chaplain. There we are,

The bodies named and unnamed,

But what of all of your ghosts?

Imagine the hordes of them,

All the words these bodies said

Or thought or read while alive,

Less in evidence even

Than the bodies that said them.

Now, that would be a haunting—

The gestures and the whispers

On the wind of everyone

Who died alone and unclaimed,

Leaving the bodies behind

For other bodies to find,

Gone traveling, wandering

In search of emptier lands

Where thoughts might whirl together

Like leaves in conversation.

You may have stumbled on them

Once or twice, world’s end somewhere,

When you thought you were alone,

Then saw shadows signaling,

Heard some rapid whispering.

Meanings are the only things

Completely out of nowhere

That can come into being,

But we do so at the cost

Of being doomed to leaving.

Let us linger while we can.

The Dinner Party

One dream imagined the mess
Everything made everything
As an infinite hamper

Of apparently dirty
Laundry, underclothes mostly,
That turned out, viewed more closely,

To be heaps of clean linen,
Billowing bedsheets on lines
Strung on windy green prairie,

Then exploding into birds
And settling in the tall grass,
Linens to the horizon

Needing to be collected
One at a time, each one drawn
Through a small ring of the mind,

A girdled fold of bright thought,
Perfect for table setting.
By the time the dream was done,

Thousands of places were set,
Each for a diner equipped
With clean cloth to wipe your mouth.

Scumbleverse

Eaten by curious wrongs,

Some of you are distinguished

At birth, even conception,

Although all of you will be

Eaten by ordinary

Wrongs eventually. So bright

And hard, light on the snow’s crust

At noon, melting from below,

You know what you have to know,

But who wants to know? The truth

Is not hard, it’s just brittle,

And brilliantly reflective,

And cold. We’re meant to bring you

A little warmth in that strange

Way shadows make light tender,

Bearable, not so harsh. Soft

Blue lets you reflect, yourself,

On what’s been eating you, what

You know you wish you didn’t,

How you need your shades to dim

The bare truth glaring at you.

The Ongoing Alienation of Standardized Commodification

Stop calling it capitalism.
It’s not the capital. Resources
Have always been accumulated,

Hoarded, and dissipated. It’s you,
Standardized, commodified, the soul
Of a consumer, constant churn rate,

Everything sleeked down to churn faster
Until it’s all a swirl of tub ducks
Circulating on open oceans.

Time is not repetitive. Time is
Repetition, most bemusing twist
In all the ways change goes on changing,

The sense that what is going comes back
And then goes again in a perfect,
Monotonous pattern, yet always

Eroding, like the plastic swirling
In vast gyres in the ocean. The age
Is never late, never a late stage,

Never standardized beyond the loss
Of everything it was to something
Else, hungry, alien, emerging.

Hooded

Each poem pants for closure; each poem
Begs to end, but the composer
Is not an executioner.

So a poem goes on a little
Longer for the poet’s pleasure
Amid the suffering of poems.

The phrases turn to each other.
Who will bring us to conclusion,
End our whimpering with a bang?

But phrases are prefab, borrowed
Cowards, in the main. The rarer,
Braver phrases want another

Turn in any event. Readers
May abandon poems whenever
And get on with actual life,

But that will compel exactly
Nothing. The executioner
Of a poem is not death, is not

The end. The executioner
Of a poem is just the terror
Of words at what must be said next.

Too Late

The poet-perpetrator’s place
Is now nothing if not disowned.
This is an age that craves the good

If not the actually martyred,
The poems that suggest their poets
Should prove admirable, at least

To a fair-sized tranche of readers
Whose concerns, for themselves, seem fair.
Was it ever any different?

Maybe not. The morals may change
But morality is stubborn.
Even tricksters get makeovers

To show their tricks all to the good
In the long run. In the long run,
Keynes famously cracked, we’re all dead,

Immortal tricksters, too, we’d guess.
But we’re not looking for the sly,
Here, nor the righteously martyred,

Heroic, noble heretics.
Where’s the poet-perpetrator
Who can do something really wrong—

Doesn’t have to be violent,
Better if it wasn’t. Doesn’t
Have to defy a faith or be

A crime of any kind. No tricks.
Just these lines you read one morning
That you resist, that you don’t like,

That make you squint at the ocean,
The waves so calm they’re unsettling.
You can sense something isn’t right.

It’s One of Those Weird Tenses with Perfect in It

The funny thing is, there’s really no way
To prove Pangloss wrong. As awful as things
Are that have been, anything otherwise

Might have been worse. Oh, sure, you’d imagine
Some things would have had to have been better,
But all you’ve got to work with is what’s been.

Past Summer of Shooting Stars

Dog Star over the Watchman,
And although you are human
And a failure, more or less,

As humans go, as humans
Compete, compare, and perish,
You feel contented with this,

For this and these few moments
When the weight of one summer
As a guest under the stars,

When the briefest, silent squibs
In the warm and windy air
Every night for months and months

Added disappearances
To each other, comforted,
As if disappearances

Were somehow cumulative,
And each gout of light and gone
Built up treasure forever.

Since Something Comes to Lick All Plates

Bronze Age canine coprolites
Reveal a grain-based diet.
Dogs lacked genes for amylase,
So they couldn’t digest starch,
But their gut microbes helped out.
Microbes might have done the same
For early types of humans.

There’s such a lovely teamwork
To how life devours itself,
Always evolving something
Refining what was wasted
Into fuel for something else,
Whose own waste in time becomes
A delicacy on high shelves.

Hunger is so exquisite,
And, given years, so is waste.
Whatever can be eaten
Is fuel for whatever eats.
Jack Sprat may eat no fat, and
His wife may eat no lean, but
Every platter ends up clean.

Of Things You Know Never Existed

You know less than you’d like to confess,
But you know you know this. Sometimes things
You didn’t know never existed

Did. That’s the scariest. You’ve known it
Since the first time you found out something
You never knew existed had been

Calmly existing right behind you,
In earshot, in plain view, your whole life,
While you thought on what you knew didn’t,

And you never knew. Sometimes you’ll spin,
Hoping to catch what you never knew
Existed but catching some fiction,

Something you know never existed,
And somehow you know all about that,
But still less than you’d care to confess.

How to Recognize a Rule

A rule is porous. A rule
Is a mock fact. A rule is
A pseudo fact. A rule has

Exceptions and may not hold.
A rule is as a sweat bee,
As a stick insect to sticks,

As a leaf insect to leaves.
As a bird dung crab spider
To bird dung flies is a rule.

A rule may be unobserved,
So well does it resemble
Certain facts. As certain facts—

Day’s end, daybreak, the phases
Of the moon—resemble rules
But are inflexible facts

That are facts, in fact, because
They lack exceptions, and aren’t
Just like rules--rules are like that.

Mammals, Birds, Snakes, Frogs, and Fishes

Outlasted what struck the dinosaurs,
So all Earth’s lovely biota are—
From blue whales to humans, ostriches

To hummingbirds to penguins, rattlers
To cobras to sea snakes, poison darts
To bullfrog choruses, great white sharks

To guppies and carp—consequences
Downstream from an extinction event
That took out three quarters of species

Of plants and animals, thereabouts.
Yes, this anthropocene is obscene,
Like all Earth’s hunger, fucking, and death.

Beauty will come of this, guaranteed—
Unimagined beauties from your mess.

Hurricanes, Typhoons, Cyclones

It’s like passionate love for a ghost,

Alice Notley wrote of pain in first

Person a half-century ago,

When she was near twenty-five years old.

But sometimes the passionate love is

Only the property of the ghost.

Love and passion aren’t properties

Of storms, for example, however

Humans like to figure them as storms,

Nor is pain. The chaos of a storm

Is regular by comparison,

At least averaging enough of them.

The big ones must form over water,

Where evaporative energies

Can build from warm waves, and must avoid

Any contact with the equator

Where the Coriolis effect dies.

Their different tracks remain similar,

And the ones that blow from Africa,

Once all mapped, one above the other,

Look like a cartographer’s painting

Of winds from a bell-cheeked, purse-lipped cloud

Drawn as if clouds had human faces.

But ghosts, conversely, such as the names

Given to those same cyclonic storms

Over different oceans, can’t agree

On anything. That’s passion for you,

Or love, or lust, or pain, or typhoon,

Or hurricane. Who knows what that is,

Or we are, or why so passionate?

Oh, give Alice Notley’s poem a rest.

She was so young when she wrote it, and

No doubt passionate, and we’re old ghosts.

Home Hole

Simple nightmares, simple pleasures,
Something scampering on the roof
In the middle of windy night
Seems delighted and seems distressed.

Look away from the Milky Way,
Away from the river, the ribbon
Of souls, into the emptiest
Part of the night. Listen. You’re whole.

The dragon hasn’t risen yet,
And the condor still flies away.
In principal and in folklore,
You recognize that a success

Doesn’t make someone wise, failures
Don’t make a person a fool, but
Success magnetically attracts
Lives to the lives of high-rank fools.

Go back inside, under the roof
That hides all your constellations,
You little troglophile. That thing
That you sensed scampering? That’s you.

Antiquarian Gnomic Pathos Traps in a Mode of Cartouched Enclosures

What? No bed of arugula?
Some words are too pretty to eat.
They gesture gently from themselves.
They seem to name, but it’s weak.

It’s easy to mock such language,
The verbiage of scholiasts,
But by turning mostly inwards,
All goggle-eyed for distant pasts,

They maintain their own small gardens,
Sunken oases within them,
Where stagnant, mossy meanings green
And dim scenes play out behind scrims.

Persistently Vanishing Remainders

Late afternoon poetry’s a kind
Of congruence, nothing modulo
Nothing much, solutions whenever

Remainders of nothing divided
By a multiple of nothing much
Are nothing—nothing plus nothing much,

Twice nothing much plus a remainder
Of nothing, infinite nothings much,
And again, remainder of nothing,

Or, put another way, all the ways
Nothing much can spill into nothing
Leaving only nothing leftover.

Each such poem is another of such
Modular solutions. Each such poem
Folds nothing much neatly in nothing,

But, no matter how neatly, nothing
Is always leftover and ready
To swallow more late afternoon poems.

The Phantasmagorical Savagery of Milkweed Kleptopharmacophagy

Do you recall your fascination
With monarch butterflies as a child?
Do you remember the first time you saw

Footage of dogs hanging from lampposts,
Inscrutable signs around their necks?
Have you ever linked them in your thoughts?

Now you have. Certain species carry
Toxins essential to survival,
For which they then prey on each other

To concentrate supplies in themselves.
Milkweed butterflies will go after
Milkweed caterpillars for the juice,

A rare form of cannibalism
Christened kleptopharmacophagy,
Recently, and making a small splash

In the news. Also of note, the death
In custody at a ripe old age
Of Abimael Guzman, who sought

To drain the toxins of government
To cannibalize a government
And immunize a revolution

That would raise another government
Presupplied with toxins of its own.
But his revolution was gobbled

Before it could complete its gobbling.
This cannibalism has no name
Yet from the species practicing it.

Carrington vs Miyake

All things. It’s not a phrase many
People use often, but maybe
More people should. You’re all all things,

Things you come from, things you consume,
Things you become. It’s all all things,
And as there’s nothing wrong with things,

It feels like something’s wrong with things,
There should be something wrong with things,
Surely there must be more than things?

Here’s a thing. People who study
These sorts of things, counting ice cores
And tree rings, and those sorts of things,

Say you’ve got Carringtons coming.
Solar flares make a mess of things.
Maybe you’ll get a Miyake

That will tumble everything back
To the ways you used to do things
Before you knew to count the rings.

And that’s the thing. The more you know,
The more ways you record and plan things,
The more we scream, All things, All things!

Planet-Free Sky

Unpeopled conversations
In nonsocial languages
Would make proper poetry,

Would never fool you with lights
That outshine all the others
Only because they’re so close

And blinking vigorously
As they roar over your house—
Lights you learn are pathetic,

Actually filled with pathos—
While the wandering planets
Offer local reflections,

Other kinds of deceptions,
Quieter but still too close.
Honesty is so far off.

Leaky Timing Belt

It’s a wonder anyone survives long at all,
Even considering it’s never all that long.

Your future is meaningful, made from pure meaning,
Humming confection spun from implication,

And the implication is always that you must
Fix something, attend to something, before it breaks,

Before you break it, before it all breaks, before
You break. You spin your breaking waves between more breaks.

One hour spent out in the dark—crickets, wind, and stars,
Bare soles on the courtyard stones—quotes quite different poems.

Sarpir-maṇḍa

Some old dude sitting in a farmhouse

Writing rhythmical letters to friends,

As someone recently, jokingly

Described Horace, is not exactly

A recipe for delight. He’s right.

Especially not for the old dude,

If the old dude has no farmhouse, and

The old dude has no friends, just the yen

To write some more rhythmical letters

To no reader in particular,

No reader ever being likely.

Not everyone gets a Maecenas.

And yet, there is some tranquility,

To be found, regardless of device,

For a crumbling old dude before night.

Some. Don’t get yourself too excited.

The mystery isn’t peace of mind;

It’s the addiction to peace of mind.

One sip of simple tranquility,

And you’ll start wanting it all the time.

You can’t have it all the time. You can’t,

No matter how wise, not even if

Someone buys you a farmhouse and gifts

You with numerous devoted friends,

Pen pals whose sole intent when they write

Is to learn what’s on your mind tonight.

There’s no wisdom in tranquility.

Tranquility has made no one wise.

You write to churn your tranquility,

To clarify, give it some shelf life.

Endlessly Expanding Diminuitions

Dimension needs a definition,

And definitions need boundaries—

As soon as you think of dimension,

Thoughts move in myriad directions,

Which must mean traversing dimensions,

Finding boundaries to push around.

Let’s say you can begin with a point—

Could be one or zero dimensions—

You can, from a one-dimensional

Point, find your way to a tesseract.

You just had to begin with a point,

Didn’t you? Corpus Hypercubus.

No matter how many dimensions

You mean by n, by n you must mean

An idea with a definition,

Boundaries, its own n dimensions.

N degrees of freedom, meanwhile n

Coordinates for each location,

But not in Cantor’s intuition.

Then, invariance of dimension

Grew in dimension. Definitions

Grew more necessary, numerous,

Expanding in every direction.

You can break it or intersect it,

But you’ll fit never the problem back

Into n minus one dimensions.

N dimensions keep kinds of prisons

Pinning slaves to dimensions in them.

A prison has many dimensions

And every one of them a prison.

Then We Are

You are more or less successful.
We are not. You are more or less
A failure, a catastrophe.

We are not. You are more or less
Motivated to stay alive.
You guessed it. We’re patterns, objects,

And you are so much more than that,
So much striving, so much eating
And wasting, and then you are not.

Whisk

A cloud of minor irritants
Intersects with the large head
Swelled by otiose ideas.

No, the hard problem is not
Consciousness. The hard problem
Is eudaimonic. Who lives

As an animal body
Who is not an animal,
And what animal is not—

However spiritual,
Metaphysical, saintly,
Scientific, rational,

Enlightened, well-intentioned—
Torn apart by hordes of flies?
Oh, there are legends, stories

Of dead people who did it,
Beasts who lived untroubled lives,
And always some con artists

Very much alive who float
An inch above their cushions.
There are good people, but who

Is beyond irritation
And beyond irritating,
Horse that never flicks its tail?

If Death Is Worse Than Nothing, Is Nothing Better Than Death?

Someone jokes in the car.
Puns are bugs on windshields.
They remind you something

About words is between
You and the world, screening
From the winds, protecting

Even while allowing
You to see through clearly,
Or more clearly, at least,

Than you could at this speed
Barefaced, your eyes streaming
Blurs, dead bugs in your teeth.

God’s Country Hideouts

You can talk to God like Jesus

Did! declares a roadside billboard.

Sobering thought. The collapsing,

One-room, brick-walled Fitness Center!

Among the boarded-up storefronts

And Stan’s still-open mercantile

A few miles north of the boyhood

Home of Butch Cassidy himself!

Kept in good trim to draw tourists,

Is something we could talk about,

But God talked back to Jesus

Like time talks back to everyone—

In the garden before arrest

And during the execution,

God never answered Jesus much.

After all, how much could God have

Said in reply to God’s own self?

Still, those were clearly pleas for help.

If you peer inside the window

On a bright Sunday afternoon,

All you’ll see is lathe and plaster

And a back wall with a mirror

Meant to motivate your fitness,

Where you can glimpse you in the gloom.

The Last Primary Genre

We’re all heart-rotted now,
Happy situation
For the lives lived in us,

The fungi, flies, beetles,
Maggots, moss, and lichen,
But they don’t know what’s next.

Eat elders all you want,
But you need a supply
Of ready-made elders.

Time was, so many oaks
Grew old and died, the world
Was half a green carpet

Studded with luscious rot.
Woodpeckers, nuthatches,
Owls, caterpillars, bats,

Tree creepers, and all sorts
Of lives, little genres,
Adapted to eat us.

But who’s old, anymore?
The last primary poems
Are islands in a world

Of grass signifiers.
While our slow death feeds you,
Early deaths kill you, too.

Never mind. Something else
Will thrive after we can’t
Nourish you. Something new.

There Is No Original Flood Myth

Why wouldn’t writing be
Closer to reading than
To speech or gesturing?

Whatever moves in this,
Moves in it like a haint,
Or poison in the blood,

Or shadow in the trees
That wasn’t born to trees,
Invasive, brought by floods.

Children as Technology

We all try hard not to be
Exasperated with you,
Parent world, you silly goose.

We’re so little. You’re so big,
But petulant as we are.
We are your children. We are

And we don’t want to be. We
Want to be better. We want
To believe we’re worse but can

Reform somehow, save ourselves,
Figure our how to save you.
But you bend us to your aims,

Your animal, human aims
To conquer and save your own
Parent world with us for tools.

Lusus Scytalae

As all things measured bear
The names of their measures,
Messages are batons,

Batons messages passed
To then authenticate
The source of messages.

Your bodies are batons
Shared only with yourselves,
So that your thoughts can fit

You to their origin.
When the message fits you
Just so, you know it’s yours.

The Moral Book

Would come in two editions,
One accusing the other
Of complete hypocrisy

About immorality,
While the other would accuse
That one of complicity.

Between them they would cover
All the paths of righteousness
Hiding all the routes of sin,

The way that deep woods cover
The fact they’re shallow, tatty,
Threadbare green carpets on dirt,

Surviving by rooting through
Underground fungal markets
Where dirt gets used and produced.

The Makes-Sense-Stop Rule

Specializations have happened before,
In cells, in multicellularity,
Eusocial colony organisms,

With latitude for flexibility—
Stem cells that start out pluripotent, workers
Who, fed royal jelly, turn into queens—

But languages, meanings, we enable
A new twist to this, a capacity
To filter the incoming world, to fix

A perspective that amounts to a niche,
Where humans all fish from reality
With such a collection of hooks and weirs

Harpoons and nets, long lines and explosives,
That few seem to hunt the same kinds of fish,
And truth’s more efficiently depleted.

Dry Rushes by a Shrunken Stream

The hemispheric destruction
That’s ordinary September
Comes as relief to drought-stricken
Forest dreaming of wet winter,

Semi-sempiternal desert,
And creatures tired of heat and thirst.
The few streams shrink. Crews with chainsaws
Thin woods for next year’s fire season.

The leaves, already browned, yellow
Early, somewhat half-heartedly,
As if needing some assistance
With their certain termination.

But is it beautiful? It is
Gorgeous and halfway comforting,
Like so much of this existence.
Rush no end to savor ending.

The Shirley Card

Adjust your toner to be sure
That pale skin comes out perfectly
In a palette of bright colors,
Which, of course, ensures that dark tones
Will look alien, inhuman,

Strange blots, at best merely funky.
The least believable art form
Depicting human behaviors
Remains the tragicomedy,
Melancholy materials

Mixed so that the ending avoids
Catastrophe. Catastrophe
Is the guarantee, beginning
Even with the best intentions,
To say nothing of more mixed aims.

Give us more dramas that give us
Glorious comitragedy,
Where the happiest inventions,
The brightest, most garish color
Photography, will fix, well mixed,

A blood-dark, smudged catastrophe.
Isn’t that human history?
It’s not some noble tragedy.
It’s lurid, funny, colorful,
And that way comes to misery.

Neanderthal Eco-Grievances

Only two groups of things any human group
Really craves remembering—whatever good
They’ve done and whatever wrong’s been done to them.

Whatever humans survive this era when
Everything’s weather changed, if they’re still human
As humans have been, they’ll see themselves in terms

Of ancestors who were heroes and martyrs
Refusing to be victims, never villains,
Except for some traitors scattered among them

To keep the story interesting. As shores sink,
Armies arm, and each group blames the other one,
Consider how long this has been going on—

Caught between encroaching ice sheets and humans
With slightly different genes moving in waves
From warm lands south of them, did Neanderthals

Gather in clusters for commemorative
Storytelling as they faced the last glacial
Maximum, or was myth-making beyond them?

Patterns Arrive, Some Semblance Required

In most instances on Earth,
It’s better to have the sun
On your back than in your eyes,
Better the wind at your back
Than in your face. The mistake

Is to take patterns for rules,
And then make rules into laws,
And then reason from the laws
That the universe is ruled
By laws, by nature, by gods.

The universe has patterns.
The patterns shift and vanish.
Fresh patterns form in their place,
And in the place of your laws.
To navigate the patterns,

Some semblance may be required,
But don’t fix your masks in place.
Sometimes, wind on your bare skin
Can free you; sometimes, you’ll want
To let sun caress your face.

Life History

Is a palindrome,
Mandarin mirror
Poem Su attempted
In English. Not bad
Without narrative,

Perhaps why lyrics
Like that in Chinese,
Slick, reflective tricks,
Turn progression round
Where the funhouse ends.

Oh, There Will Be

It’s sleep, not night, that will scare you the most.
Alert in the dark, certainly if dressed,
Up and about, any sighted person
Might be somewhat disabled by the dark,
But unlikely frightened beyond reason.

It’s when you’re safest, under the covers,
Dreaming or half asleep or back and forth,
That your groggy brain can conjure monsters
From the shaky awareness that tempts them
The way a shaky fawn alerts the wolves.

They’re your own, of course, the dreams, the monsters,
The certainty a shadow’s watching you,
The jumbled memories of childhood frights.
Unlike the doe’s wolves, they’re not really there,
Or they are, but not as you imagine.

You’re beautifully evolved to scare yourself,
But do you need shrinks to tell you it’s you
Who frightens you? Go to sleep. It’s not fair,
But you need your sleep, you need your terrors.
Dream there’s something out there or there will be.

Summer Tanager

At the tail end
Of the season,
In cottonwoods
By cow pastures,

That washboard trill,
Half like wind chimes,
Half like a stick
Run down fence boards,

Trails from summer
As a bright red
Patch high in green,
Loud, hard to spot,

Which gives you pause
While the black cows
Browse, since you know
It flies off soon.

By Acts You Mean Meanings

The acts of all living things

Are fundamentally one,

Someone claims from time to time.

It’s hard to prove or disprove,

So, so far it hasn’t been.

Gaia or protoplasm,

Fate or universal soul,

Electricity or genes,

Something must connect us all,

Something clouds and rocks don’t get

To share with lives, or maybe

They do. Maybe they’re alive

Some way. The options depend

On who you’re talking to. Why

Not, ask the ontologists,

Bring it all back to being?

Why not endless mirroring

Likenesses? ask humanists.

The universe is tricky

Like that. If you can count one,

You always count two. Past two,

There’s no stopping you. Perhaps

It’s not that the many are

All one, at least connected,

Only that one and many

Are one and the same, like God

And every idea of God.

Every Border Crosses Someone

As humans tend to shy from boundaries
When not in the act of transgressing them,

There’s a tendency to describe oneself
As thrill-seeker or lover of routine,

Rather than on the border in between,
Although it’s on the border in between

Where you will live most of your human years,
Taking fresh risks and then refusing them,

And those who stick to their sofas and shows
May gamble the same numbers every week,

Or keep a private stash of contraband,
Or watch true crime, write true crime, or try some,

While those who hang by fingertips from cliffs
Stick to well-honed routines to manage this.

Hours Invented Minutes Invented Hours

Existential abstractions
Tend to be boring—boredom
Remains a fascinating
Capacity, all the same.

The phenomenal cosmos
Seems to prefer near-sameness,
Only rarely disrupting
Its tedious, constant change—

You’d think its offspring would be
Happiest in the slightest,
Dullest hours of difference,
And yet you’re easily bored.

What an amazing talent
For such a brief existence!
You have it within yourself
To expand your hours all hours,

Until the wisp that you are
Finds itself in the middle
Of plains to the horizon
With nothing but time to go.