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.