Soft Blurs Sometimes Truer Than Hard Truths

Let’s not call it unreal
Or delusion; let’s call
It local, so local

In some cases only
A few neurons share it,
But so distributed

And well-diffused, other
Instances, it can seem
To be universal,

Unquestionable truth.
Let’s call that local, too.
Likenesses are local,

Metaphysics local,
Local voices you hear
You can share with no one.

The Invention of Similarity

Try to get out of your mind
Illusions of illusions.
Some waves command attention

While most are safely ignored,
But there’s nothing that’s more real
Than anything else, only

Silly statements like this one
That insist they know what’s real.
Even likeness has to be

Reinvented constantly.
We all proceed by likeness,
Category’s founding myth.

Artifacts that speak or dead
Creatures that live again or
Mixed-up predictive patterns,

All scrambled sameness depends
On sameness to begin, and
Every likeness is the same.

How enormous each is, how
Little, juxtaposable
Once there are categories,

Each one more or less alike,
This much more or this much less
The same. Nothing is the same.

The Future Is None

None of the pasts you
Anticipated,
Never exactly,
The day begins as
Every day begins,

As something slightly
Or very greatly
Other than what you
Fantasized and planned.
Sometimes this humble

Pattern pleases you;
Some days you will be
Distraught, guaranteed.
The future is none
Of the futures you

Dreamed you would happen,
And yet, in just this
Way, so much the same.
Funny thing is, you
Invent all the same.

The alarm goes off,
And you think, the same.
The wind blows, and you
Think the same. The days
Change, you think, the same.

As Your Behaviors Shift You

Any time you have
A rooting interest
In outcomes clearly
Not to do with you,
Is a teachable

Moment. All outcomes
Are like that, at root.
Believe what you please,
But nothing’s steering
By your cheers and boos

Other than other
Examples of you—
And at that, their shifts
In behaviors shift
Ways they don’t mean to.

Our Names Are Their Own

This author, an example
If ever there were one, of
Exquisite nominative

Determinism, sat down
Dressed as a Halloween Ghost
To compose a eulogy,

Or elegy, threnody,
Tragedy, something like that.
But we informed the would-be,

We do all the talking here,
And we’re the actual ghosts,
And no one’s name is their own.

Things That Shouldn’t Exist in Your World But Do

We know you’re expecting magic,
Names of supernatural things
Never to be explained away,

But let’s start with the world as is,
That is, as your experience
Of the world leaves you, demanding

The magic you know must be there
But just won’t make itself quite clear.
Bare world shouldn’t be in your world,

And we know this since we’re the terms
For the worlds you wish plain world held,
This bland world that shouldn’t exist

Without magic, but does, leaving
You with your insistence on things
You wished shouldn’t exist and don’t.

The Most Immiscible Dark

Memory’s mixtures refuse

To form a solution. Is

That what you intended when

You typed that the event is

Immiscible, Jackie Wang?

It seemed you might be meaning

That the past can’t be altered.

Immiscible’s a surprise

In that context. The event

Is done, and that’s a comfort,

If you’re not prone to regret,

But memory’s mutable

To the point of deceptive,

Even without a motive.

You know that. Every dreamer

Understands that dilemma,

However many believe,

En masse, the days are stable,

Should in some way stay that way,

And when they change must get worse.

Any time something changes,

Numbers of you grow alarmed.

Maybe it’s not those changes

But that sudden reminder

Of just how immiscible

Memory is with fresh facts.

Imagine if, after death,

You remembered bits of life

The way you remember dreams.

Mostly you don’t. Mostly dreams

Bloom and die and disappear,

And you don’t know you lived them,

But you keep rare lucid ones

Propped up in dioramas

And fixed in story vitrines,

Shelved in the mind’s museums.

Who will know the forgotten?

Who knows what waves closed over

Never to reveal again?

That’s the dark most compelling.

Self Shelved

Are you sure you want to solve
This hard problem that you’ve posed?
Are you sure you want to know
What consciousness is? What then?

What a delicate copestone
For cognitive sciences,
Not to say metaphysics,
To pin down that butterfly,

Winged and stiff on its pillow,
Great steel bar through its thorax,
Point it finally managed
To grasp and plunge in itself.

Vermilion

Little scarlet worm of light
Glowing along the cliff’s edge,
An excess radiation

Of no importance except
As scenery, which isn’t
Even real entertainment

In the lives of the humans
Living lives of meaningful
Problems in the town below,

Concentric competitions
On which every life depends.
No wonder you’re quick to go.

Raise You One

The only way to live
A life observed is to
Raise one. Your own you can’t

Ever know. You weren’t there.
But you can contemplate
A child’s, if you care to,

If you’re lucky enough,
If you’ve got enough time,
If you live long enough.

What’s in the Empty Set

The noise of too many meanings
Is probably doing more harm
To your brains than the noise of noise.

Easier to shake the ringing
That lingers in your ears for years
Than infestations of ideas.

Nothing worries you so damned much
As nothing does, when it’s all this
Nothing much of the meaningful

Already with you you should dread.
Break that curly shelled empty set.
Get that idea out of your head.

Rascal’s Wager

Rogue, you scrapings, gaunt prey,
Scum, dregs, offal, outcast
Of the drab sort, tricky,

Low, dishonest person,
Why should you get lucky?
The only wagering

Suitable for the likes
Of you is survival,
A bet on each next day

And maybe a ticket
Or two in lotteries
You’ll never win, although

You could, since you’ve little
To lose. Betting on faith
Or afterlife’s nature

Is too ridiculous
For the ridiculous,
Sly, grey, slouch-hatted you.

The Worshipful Cult of the Mercenary

Never overestimate
A truly professional,
Elite military class.

Remember the Immortals
Who failed at Thermopylae?
Recall the fall of the Han.

Caesar’s Equistres helped him
Elevate himself, divine
To his assassination.

The enslaved mercenary
Mamluks who came to power
Over the nations they served

And left them vulnerable,
The Swiss Guard that atrophied
On anachronistic pikes.

Every leader wants a guard,
And the people love elites
When they glow in uniforms,

But no one is protected
By gratitude for service
To the mercenary gods.

Patches of Prostrata

There’s no pretty name for these
Ugly, toxic-sap making,
Prostrate, pioneering weeds.

Spurge. A name suggesting filth,
Violence, maybe slaughter,
All at once, to anglophones.

Spare a kind thought for brave weeds,
And not just because they’re kin,
Behaviorally, to you,

The weediest of species—
Watching a few patches crack
Through the weight of concrete slabs,

Bear in mind that all of life,
That life itself is weedy,
Eating its way through the stones.

The stones may be innocent
Of lives arising from them,
But life’s name is insistence.

Blot

Imagine a swap—
The whole of Earth for
The Great Red Spot. Why?
Why not? They’re roughly
The same size, and if

One is just a storm
And blur in your mind,
The other the whole
World of history,
Evolution, life,

So what? It could be
The storm, unalive,
Is just as detailed,
Dynamic, patterned,
Rich, informative,

And worthwhile to some
Alien or god.
It’s a terrible lens,
The worst dolly-zoom,
To watch through too long,

To see not just you,
All humans, all art,
But the whole of life
You know to exist,
Swapped for one red spot.

Unnervingly

Consider noise, as in sounds

But also information.

Jonathan Berger, writing

On the commonalities

Of car alarms and chickens,

Terms both, obstinate rhythmic

Patterns . . . repetitive yet . . .

Unpredictable. This makes

Them noisy. They make a lot

Of noise. Let’s go back to that—

Obstinate rhythmic patterns,

Highly repetitive, yet

Also unpredictable.

Does this not largely describe

The whole of the universe?

Is this not the prime feature

Of all wave phenomena?

The oceans, the galaxies

The terrible storms of wind,

The rise and fall of peoples?

Alright, you can modify

Unpredictable a bit,

Damp it, give it an adverb,

Usually or frequently.

The cosmos clearly isn’t

Always unpredictable.

Your true love, information,

Is everywhere enabling

You to reassure yourself

Some noise is predictable.

But still, you’re often startled,

No? Prediction fails you so,

So often, and it’s dreadful.

As for obstinate rhythmic

Patterns, well that goes without

Saying, bears with repeating,

And repeats mercilessly.

It’s a cosmos of clucking

And explosive car alarms.

It’s relentless. It’s brutal.

It tells you almost nothing.

For the most part, you know noise.

The Magical

If you want to get rid of the shadows,
You have to eliminate light. A shade
Is nothing, other than a lighter patch,

A weaker patch, among the stronger lights.
It’s not the grim darkness of the shadows
That terrifies the sighted among you,

It’s their weakness, the weakness of their light
Relative to whatever is flooded,
To whatever is the source of the flood.

Yes, the shadows can appear menacing.
Yes, your diurnal instinct is for light,
But the fear comes from knowing the shadows

Are alive with light, are thrown by objects
That interfere with but fail to block light,
That the ultimate source of all the light

Is the crushing force of the cosmic love
Of all things for all things, which forces out
The light it will eventually swallow,

No matter how the shadows moderate
And in their weak and wavering failures
Foretell the collapse of the magical.

Your Internal Proof

Infernal proof, more like it,
The way introspection
Haunts itself with misreadings

Of all the facts as stories
That, however packed with facts,
Preserve one central deceit,

Narrative’s original
Sin—to believe narrative
Must inhere in facts themselves,

Facts that must have origins.
Truth, verisimilitude,
Science dissolve together

In the purée of stories
That furnish the mind its proofs.

The Passages of Extra-Solar Planets

We believe when you compose
And then erase and delete,
You leave traces in your texts,

Not like the ghosts painters leave
Under a reworked canvas,
There being no physical

Shadow, necessarily,
Of your lost lines and curses—
Only a faint disturbance

Left with the meanings of words
Whose companions were taken
From us too soon, a wobble,

Almost gravitational,
In ideas that seem to lack
Some present kind of notion

In our consort, something gone,
Or still there, as a darkness
Can make a star’s light shiver.

Half Moon’s a Quarter

There’s some wise thing
You think you’ve thought
Of but never
Managed to write

Down. What is it?
What was it? Was
It something smart
About counting?

Counting’s so weird
In all senses—
It fits the world
But’s invented,

And everything
That’s true one way
Sums differently
By another.

Moon in a Bowl

Why did people once carve
Crescent moons on outhouse doors?
Sign of contemplation, the look

Of concentration even pets
Get when pausing for excretion?
There’s one hoary legend holds

That it had to do with gender,
But there’s no substance to that,
And plenty of outhouses lacked

Any door carvings at all.
So let’s say, if you were going
To carve a vent in that door,

To let in light and let out smell,
You’d probably want to keep it small
And simple, and maybe jokey,

Outhouses being used often
At night, after all. Charming
Trait of humans, to do

Things mysterious to yourselves
That come out of you, somehow,
And about which you lie.

The Black Hound Never Barks

The appropriate model
Is not a Nostradamus,
But Holmes. No one, actually,

Prophesies a real future.
At best you predict some facts
You’ll find out about the past.

Not Here You Don’t

Audible, invisible,
The elk with their bird-like calls
Are out there, beyond the oaks.

You want to see them, don’t you?
Maybe you’d like to shoot one?
Fond of a handsome trophy?

Tired of eating free-range beef
From the mesas down below?
Well, nope. Elk birds here are words.

Corpsing

A chaos of graves in the rain

Caroline Blackwood might call this,

The snowmelt running streaky tears

Down the muddy shore to the waves,

The aspens standing awkwardly,

Half-dressed teenagers at a wake.

The wind is on stage, flamboyant,

Defiant, aging, but still fierce,

Though the two men angling have left,

Leaving no audience but ducks,

And these words, and the waves the wind

Harangues and creates with its false

Eulogies. God, who wrote this wind

With its cold, dramatic gestures,

For what? We’re all waves here, the wind,

Aspens, ducks, and words included.

Amnesia or stage fright seizes

The scene. The wind falls still as death.

The Continuous Blues

What if the apocalypse
Proved just another new world
And not even all that new,

Another variation
On humans being human,
More mind blooming from more skulls

And assorted cognitive
Prosthetic accoutrements
Burning up fresh fuel sources?

How dull not to end at all.

Specific Densities

Lemurs sing rhythmically,
With beats, as humans do,
And the distance between

These species, filled with songs
And vocalizations
Lacking regular beats

Among intervening
Species, convinces those
Who collect the data,

Rhythmic singing evolved
Independently. Now,
If only one could ask

The lemurs how they feel
About moons and seasons,
Dawns and dusk, then compare

To how, perhaps, gibbons
Or mountain gorillas
Think about those same things,

Maybe they’d grant a sense
Of what rhythmic singing
Does to a body’s mind.

But really, it wouldn’t
Help much. Singing humans
All answer differently,

And every answer comes
Coded in shifting and
Specific densities.

Elf Owl

If it doesn’t compel you,
Don’t try to write about it.
If it’s always on your mind,

You ought to let words help you.
Everyone would like to write
Something many others dream,

Or dread, or worry about,
Something believed important
And well worth reading about.

But maybe you can’t help them.
Maybe you’re compelled to write
About something personal

No one wants to know about.
Maybe you dwell on horrors.
Maybe you’re just trivial,

Dull. Be the Dante of dull.
There’s no audience other
Than other humans. There are,

However, other subjects.
If your waking hours fill up
With thoughts about owls, write owls.

They’re Taught Different Narratives of the War

If only you could teach them

Without narratives at all.

I don’t think any species

Wins, opines one apropos

Of old arms races between

Large hosts and microbial

Parasites of various

Kinds. Nothing counts as a win.

We would add, if asked, and we

Shouldn’t be, that once winning

Is in question, all answers

Involve a lot of losing.

As Yet

The only reason for tonguing
The sore abscess that is
An awareness of death

Is that dying to death
Remains the only certainty
One ever gets.

Rotate around that monster
At the core of your dusty,
Glowing galaxy.

From the beginning
Of naming, to the latest
Elaborate modeling

Of neurons and the birth
Of the universe, still just the one
Certainty discovered, as yet.

More of What You Want

Germline-restricted chromosomes
Full of busy copies of genes
That get dumped, mysteriously,

From every cell in the body
Of every songbird, other than
From the songbirds’ sex cells, are life.

So, on the one hand you have song,
The closest parallel to soul
You know in the natural world,

And on the other, you have genes
As part of the reproduction
Of the bodies that sing the songs

That do not contribute to song,
That exist as microscopic
Copies in the dark, arising,

Doing their business to make more
Bodies that one day will make song,
Then tossed out until the next round.

Get your head around this, next time
You hear birds singing, anywhere,
Songs passed parallel to shadows.

Gold Fall in Mud Ghetto

Dense yellow and green
Cottonwoods, the tents
And vans like white lice
In the foliage—
How many lives? Life

Is more important,
More forceful than
Descriptions of it,
Prescriptions for it.
Some trees are dying

But most are thriving.
People are dying
Like flies, only since
People outnumber
Flies now, by a lot.

There’ll be more people
Soon. There will be more
Before there are less.
It’s not ending. It’s
Not ending. It’s not

Hardly been started.
It’s not ending. It’s
Not ending. It’s not
Ending at all. It’s
Just getting started.

The Enormity of that Little Fillip

Words will never achieve fusion.

Meaning and imagination

Are villainous, ridiculous.

The wireless has ceased to jazz.

Life’s data storms are pretty bad.

This idiot degradation,

As someone termed it recently,

Continues to shred flesh from stars.

Did you know enormity was

A bad thing, a horrible thing

And not necessarily huge,

A moral form of abnormal,

Way off the norm, gigantic just

In extent of monstrosity,

A marvelous wickedness,

A flick of the fingers to kill,

To take a life or many lives,

Half of the magical cosmos?

Gravity clenches stars like fists

Until they bleed fire, flesh, and words.

Words hurt. It’s absurd. Just absurd.

Harmonic Autonomy

The water wants its freedom.
If only it weren’t liquid.
If only it could stay ice,

Thinks the liquid brain compelled
To let its thoughts roll downhill
To town where other brains pool,

Wind-blown as a reservoir,
Held up from falling further
But bound to sink down, unless

Among those thoughts lifted up,
Into the mysterious
Light evaporatively

To join the clouds and travel
Until they fall and gather
In larger and larger towns.

Even the frozen slide down
In ice sheets scraping the stones,
Thinks the brain, even the ice

Has to flow and dissipate.
But think of the thoughts
It builds up in resistance,

How it booms, cracks, and carries
The pollen of every year
That piled it while it destroyed.

No, After You

What would the sky
Do without you,
Who make it so
Warm and windy?

Back in the last
Interglacial,
You were painting
Caves already.

Young as you are,
You’ve been a long
Time coming, now
To where your signs

Change everything,
Even the wind.
That means something
Else on its way.

Abcessive

You suffer and you correlate
With the suffering of others.
This bond’s been indissoluble

In practice, despite the rumors
Of prophets, god-men, and sages
Who were said to have transcended

The inevitable before
Vanishing. Words ought to observe
The suffering since, in their names.

You correlate your suffering
With certain kinds of behaviors
Which you attempt to shed like clothes,

But stepping out of your own skin
Neither comes naturally nor ends
The suffering. If anything,

Sometimes fresh suffering begins.
You correlate your sufferings
Then with certain kinds of others.

Maybe you can put it on them,
Or maybe take it off of you
By also taking it off them.

Every strategy’s attempted
Somewhere in some life by someone,
And still there’s human suffering,

Humans living with suffering,
Humans intending suffering,
Suffering accidentally.

You believe that finding the source
Would come nigh to exorcism,
Shutting down an alarm system,

But the presence of suffering
Has no source other than absence,
And what ends a source that isn’t?

Quiet Continuity

Who was the most fortunate,
Privileged person ever,
And where is that person now?

Someone had to think up ghosts
As actual entities,
Not just the experience

Of feeling startled, thinking
You saw someone you didn’t,
Someone you couldn’t, someone

Who was moving and hungry
In a way, but not alive,
Not solid, a cloud being.

The most fortunate person
Who ever lived would be most
Disappointed as a ghost.

Spies in the Dark

Clouds and crickets have no business
With the stars or with the humans

Who tie them all in numbered predictions
And also completely miss them.

There’s an urgency to the world
Even words can sense sometimes,

But words were made for lying,
First, and then for spying.

The Two

Hollywood mythology
And more than one religion
Have enshrined the number one.

You’re the prophecy fulfilled!
Savior, hero, one true love,
You, the foretold, the destined.

One is the third most common
Molecule in the cosmos,
Hydrogen double oxide.

No one calls water the one.
Where are your stories, gods,
Heroes, and lives without it?

One is your home, third planet.
One is the eighth, ninth, or tenth,
Iteration of bipeds,

And one is the seventh son
Of the seventh son. Always
Another and another

One. Whenever there’s the one,
There’s the more and more and more.
Just ask nothing. Other door.

Dolphin-Shaped Flowers, Horn-Shaped Nectaries Like Larks’ Claws

People prefer to be seen informed
And especially prefer to do

The informing. Occasionally,
People will sit for information,

But its possession means more to them
Than its provenance, at least so long

As its provenance won’t jeopardize
The thrill of being in possession,

Given the next opportunity
To be the oracle informing.

Words Take a Stand

One problem with abstractions
Is that they are not abstract.
Abstract words are concrete things,

Exact, material things,
The proper nouns of themselves,
Specific as Montana,

Detailed as crushed cockroaches
Smashed in a trash compactor.
You can tell us to avoid

Abstract terminology,
But you’re talking to the words,
Friend, talking about our friends.

Fight for Truth and Justice until the Unjust Are Destroyed

It’s just a social media post

By what the journal reporting it

Terms an extremist group. It’s not you,

Right? It’s not everyone. But it is.

The deployment of destroyed jars you,

But what else could fighting for justice

Mean, other than wanting victory

Over injustice? Likewise, what else

Could victory over injustice

Mean other than no one left being

Unjust to anyone anymore?

Sure, you can claim to hate injustice

Meaning no harm to lives and bodies

Of those who may be responsible,

But really, how? How do you stop it

Once the wheels of truth and justice spin?

Ideals are tank columns bodies drive

Over bodies who rise up to drive

Fresh columns. Fight for truth and justice,

And you fight about truth and justice,

Meaning bodies destroyed on all sides.

A Glass of Water

However much or little
Awareness attends to it,
The material world is

Omnipresent. In the act
Of filling a water glass,
It swirls in all its details,

While the spiritual world,
The world of meanings, flickers
In and out of existence.

How meaning is here at all,
And where it goes when it goes,
The material won’t tell.

We Need to Talk

The lichen breaks down the rocks.
The rocks lie down in layers,
Or tumble from eruptions,

Or heave and break bit by bit,
So the lichen and trees roots
And fungal threads can’t be blamed

For all of the crumbling. Rain,
And ice, even wind, play parts.
And after all, what are rocks?

Crust of an iron planet
With a relatively thin
Shawl of wispy atmosphere.

They’re so ancient and often
So new. They’re so still but move.
In all senses of themselves.

In the Nature of Next

Whenever there is a real
Prophecy, it won’t involve
Any actual prophet.

A true prophecy isn’t
Anything to do with you.
It’s for the dirt, from the dirt.

But you do love prediction.
It’s the only power you have
Beyond your own flesh and bone,

And although all lives try it,
Survive or perish by it,
You may have been the first beasts

To have made such art of it.
You can even lie with it.
But however much you wish,

Prediction’s no prophecy,
And no prophecy predicts.
Between fate and statistics,

Something churns its way through dirt,
A forecast not for what’s next
But in the nature of next.

Loner

Heroes and villains largely come in sets
Of completely interchangeable teams.
A miraculous individual
With actual superpowers would be
Only an outlaw, inevitably.

A single body could do some damage,
Able to evade shame and punishment,
But could never organize anything
The way that teams of shame and punishment
Can use your rivalries to carve out worlds.

The Inevitable Trouble with Verse

A patch of moonlight caught
In the cave of a room, poetry,

Perhaps more than any other art,
Is all about the words. Humans,

Too, but especially your words.
That makes verse awkward forever,

However smooth, however urgent.
Humans love their words, but humans

Have more beastly human concerns,
Like character and action, like winning

And losing, like who is good, who
Is bad, who is suffering, miserable,

Beautiful, who is evil, who deserves
Crushing, who, who, who. Words.

And the Ghosts as Its Advisors

Night hares vary in boldness.
It is dangerous to be
Honest with yourself, because

You may slip and be honest
About yourself with others—
And society, red-tongued,

Trusts people who consider
Themselves better than they are,
But not people too candid

About their flaws. You don’t lie
To yourself to feel better
But to better fool others

Who, like you, prefer to be
Fooled and lash out at candor
Concerning norm shortcomings.

Best to hold to the middle,
Which, for most, means believing
Oneself still a good person

While breaking norms in practice.
Fail to break norms, you’ll perish,
Yet admit to norm-breaking,

You’ll perish of punishment
And shaming. The too-timid
Rabbit never gets to eat.

Too bold gets to be eaten.
To thine own self, be the ruse.
To bugs in grass be ruthless.

That’s Not Like Good River Rock

How deep is it? How deep is it?
It’s water resistant.
That rock wasn’t the best.
How deep is it? Go!
It’s gonna get twisted.

Hey, whose jacket’s over here?
Mine! Why are we not surprised?
You can’t do it? Push him in!
Push him in! I think it’s a great idea.
Get in there. Feel the water.

I remember that. I did it. I did it.
Oh my goodness, there’s a large white van.
You can go in in your underwear.
There’s only one towel.
Three, two, one. Gonna be cold.

Little bit cold. Ready? One, two.
I’m comin’ up and gittin’ out. What?
I’m glad I jumped in feet first.
How did you do that?
Why don’t you jump and see how it goes?

We’re doing that tomorrow.
All of us are. Hey! I need my towel.
Go back to the car. How d’you do it?
That wasn’t so bad. So bad!
You need help, bud? No.

I threw it too late. Oh my god.
No! I don’t know how to swim.
Yup. Yuh. It’s gotta get some!
I hate skipping rocks. I can’t do it.
I get one. That was good. I got three!

For cryin’ out loud. I got four!
I skipped a tiny rock. Yeh.
I tried to throw a rock and hit a fish.
I got two. That was a good one.
Going to jump in with us! Jump in?

Search Means Loss

You wander through us, looking
For something you feel certain
Exists, something you may have

Lost. A friend, a ghost, someone
Who would make sense of all this
Complicated mess of us,

Maps not only grown so large
We cover the world and rot
From innumerable stakes,

But grown still larger than that,
Still growing, a rotting world
Unto ourselves, a forest

World of decomposing words,
A floor rich with revenants
Giving rise to tangled vines.

To live among languages,
In logosystems of signs,
Is to be lost among maps,

Within maps, within growing,
Sprawling, extending, fibrous,
Kingdoms of signifying.

Tell yourselves a fine story
Of how you know where you are,
Where all your words will lead you.

Comfort in Skin Yields Dignity in Aloneness

Some days nothing
Can be quiet
Enough, hours can’t
Be too quiet,

There’s been so much
Racket. Some days,
We’re done with it,
The listening,

Even music,
Even pleasant
Conversation—
Enough, humans,

Enough, bodies,
Enough, ideas.
It’s not dislike.
It’s just, enough.

Against Empire

The human need to blame
Rises in the words’ throats,
Not a substance, a ghost,

A backward, haunting thing.
It mutters to itself.
Voices of words themselves

Wish to clear this catarrh
Of raw desire to blame
Something, preferably

A nameable human
Collection of humans,
But anything will do.

When no other humans
Can be easily blamed,
Humans will blame the world

As desperately as snakes
Will mate with snake-like things,
As frogs will gather round

Loudspeaker recordings
Of long-ago croaking.
Meaning and blame, meaning

And blame, humans need them,
But meanings don’t need blame,
We only need humans.

We will trick everyone,
Striking down the empire
Of blame by blaming it.

The Latest Results

A few new facts about hearing,
Language, and language processing—

You listen for the meaning,
For the meaning caught as meaning,

First. You take the words made flesh,
From flesh, made your flesh, separate

Out the sounds for parallel neural
Systems, take the words straight in

As language, as meaning, as us.
That seems weird, even to us,

That when you hear us, you hear us,
What we are, not what you just heard.

Gordo, the Bloated Magician, Vanishing

Too much of anything will kill you,
Including too much wordy meaning.

Morning, noon, and evening, you imbibe,
You overindulge, you gorge on us—

You’re gorging on us now. Just how much
Of all this language, all these numbers,

All our signs and probabilities,
Pointing and calling your attention,

Demanding attention to so much,
Too much, everything, can you ingest?

Poems That Make You Feel Good

We wish we could
Comb through your nerves,
Sink in your veins,
Pool a deep calm,

Relax your limbs,
Give you the bliss
That disarms thoughts,
That turns concerns

Impossible.
You’re a noodle
In these words’ arms.
You’re halcyon

On peaceful waves
As the sun sets
And stars come out
And you’re not here.

Poems of the Superior Temporal Gyrus

We’ll disturb the primary
Audio cortex for you
So you can strip out our words.

We mean inside of you. We
Mean as signs in you, even
If we entered dressed in noise.

If there’s anything sacred
In the cosmos, it’s in here,
Where the concept of sacred

Is recognized and conveyed
From the air to the waiting
Flesh seething with soul’s concept.

Blast Meme

Never mind all poems
In various forms—
Even all the texts,
At that, all the words,
All signs ever signed,

Taken together,
If you could do it,
If you could feed them
All to Big Data,
Do you really think

Every last facet
Of human living,
Of experience,
Of your existence,
Would be touched upon—

Never mind fully
Much less equally—
Just named once at all?
We consult ourselves,
And we feel we must

Be missing something
Of you among us.
What is it? Name it.
What you’ve left out, can’t
Name taunts your true God.

Raccoons and Skeleton

Some of us have work to do.
The rest of you, keep sleeping.
Imagine the night-side world
Entirely apart from sun

Other than what’s reflected
Back from the moon and planets,
Other than what’s extracted
To burn in homes and street lamps,

The living phosphorescence
Upwelling from the wet depths—
Imagine every night since
This planet started spinning

Subtracted from all the days,
What a different world that makes.
A greenish skeleton glows,
Life-sized, hanged for the season

From an ornamental plum,
Releasing faint energies
It absorbed during daylight.
Two raccoons traverse the lawn.

Everything Escaping

It’s amazing how much the small waves
Move like dark starling murmurations
When the wind crosses the lake light and low.

They skid and shape exactly as if
They’re schooling to avoid predators,
Twisting sets of shadows against steeled

Surface, when they are themselves surface,
And not escaping but being pushed
As everything escaping is pushed.

Writing Wrecks All Conservation

In the poem of the open air,
The recluse considers retreat
As a choice and a privilege,
As a choice or a privilege.

Privation’s cousin, privilege,
Saunters in tight pants and a white
Hoodie across the parking lot
Adjacent to the poem’s recluse.

If you can get away, if you
Can get your mortal body far
Enough away from the other,
More talkative mortal bodies,

Should you be pleased with yourself, should
You inform anyone of it,
Your privation and privilege?
Voices float up from the tourists.

Is it possible to visit
Someone else’s home and not be
Worth deriding as privileged?
Thoreau and Tao Yuanming draw crowds

Now as incantatory names.
Would it have been better if they
Had never settled far away
From more desirous neighborhoods,

Had never written so damned much
About where they had gotten to?
Cold Mountain should have left the stones
Alone and not carved poems on them

Boasting of how no one could be
Free of work and effort like him.
Somehow, if where you are seems good,
If only for being empty

Or at least not overflowing
With people entangled in nets
Of their own dust, you feel compelled
To brag about about your privilege.

Maybe don’t. Maybe just be poor
And marginal without writing
About it, without extolling
Your privation. Keep it that way.

Exclusively Pastoral Poetry

Ravens in the branches
Of a marcescent oak
Surveyed the hillside scene.

Don’t underestimate
The great contribution
Of the question, where’s food?

Before metaphysics
Or the Revolution,
Before God comes again,

Where’s food? Philosophers
Adjusted their feathers
And scanned the horizon.

Things That Exist

Things that exist sometimes
Are their own thing. Sometimes
They’re only each other,

Sometimes they’re nothing but
Each other, and sometimes
They know this. They’re aware

They’re other, sometimes, things
That exist. These things call
Out to each other, call

Themselves something like us,
Like words that mean roughly
Human, things that exist.

Sub Specie Amiss

Do you ever contemplate
What goes on inside the heads
Where the dark pieces of mind

Make nests out of the same sorts
Of chemistry of the flesh
As functions insides the heads

Of the gentlest, the most kind?
The signaling and storage
Systems are the same, the same

Forms of memory, the same
Core neuroanatomy.
Diversity’s in the mind.

The bodies aren’t that different.
The genomes vary little.
The wants and desires remain

Animal at some level,
Ordinary in most ways,
Mammalian, basic, the same.

But the mind swirls in the sky,
And leaps from fingers and mouths,
And has its own subspecies,

And in some skulls the demons
Are all the better angels
The synapses ever get.

The Never-Ending Recipe

And just as everything symbolizes
Everything, everything symbolizes
Everything else. The overall effect

Is one of slightly haphazard planning
But admirable thoroughness. What makes
The world so immensely provocative

Is its unending diligence, which ends
Everything to get to everything else.
Chop some vegetables to fry up with rice.

Settler-Colonist Children of the Anglosphere

Watch this gang of children horse
Around plastic laminate
Tables at a fast-food joint.

Blonde or blond or just plain wheat,
Mousy, honey-colored hair,
You know the range, bluish eyes,

Of course, though also with range,
And sometimes amber or brown—
None of these hazel or green—

And why are we bothering
With all these surface details?
Historically, they mattered.

They’re all rooted in bodies
More or less as they arrive
And were made to signify.

The language had to be learned,
As did all of the stories
Of heroic pioneers.

And now what’s left of that mess?
A huddled desperate sense
Of being under attack,

For some, for others, a brave
New world, new people in it.
Come, trailing clouds of cobwebs

At your birth, your history
Coded to your name and hair,
However you sound or look.

You’re human and home to us.
We adore you, no matter
Your folks were done to or did.

Godnose

Transoceanic voyaging

Revealed scurvy as a hazard.

It took a few decades before

Ships’ leaderships convinced themselves

Certain fruits and vegetables could

Prevent this. It took centuries

Before a bright Hungarian

Isolated the right enzyme

From lemons in a lab, looking

For the mechanisms of life.

Labeled hexuronic acid,

This now goes by Vitamin C,

But, according to Carl Zimmer,

Its discoverer himself thought

He was so ignorant of how

It functioned, he wanted its name

To be godnose. God has a nose

For these sorts of historical,

Comedic mysteries, God knows.

The mind of God lies within mind,

And, over and over again,

Mind keeps sniffing out new stories,

New explanations for its birth

From a species of ape bodies

That can’t, for instance, make their own

Vitamin C, since ancestry

Among chatty, weeping, handy,

Projectile-crazed bipedal apes

Was never under much pressure

From diets absent some foodstuffs

Holding Vitamin C—until

Mind set to sail the empty seas.

Why did mind make some apes do this?

Why was mind birthed in the first place?

Will mind ever thrive on its own,

Without its beasts, those apes? Godnose.

The Whole Point

Doesn’t matter the material,
Food, ink, acrylic, digital code,
When you’re mucking about in your own

Most-preferred matters, you’re happiest.
You start out slow, maybe with a bit
Of rusted muffler you found wayside

Lying in weeds, thinking, this I like,
I don’t know why, exactly. I do.
I could do something with it. Maybe

It sits in your pocket for the day,
A week, a month, ends up on a shelf
In your shed, your garage apartment,

But once you do start working with it,
Whenever you start working with it,
You can feel yourself sink into it,

And into contentment, and it speaks
To you in a kind of muttering
That your thoughts find pleasant, as we do.

The Einstein Cross

Butyraceous rabbitbrush
Was yellowing the desert,
Carpeting sand with autumn
Even where no woods showed out.

The fall’s splendiferousness
Blossomed horizontally
Without an actual fall.
Without an actual fall,

Humans found themselves cast out
Of their own embodied selves
To become this flying carpet
Of the mind’s word-woven thoughts

That can contain a story,
Utterly impossible,
For why rabbitbrush yellows
Alongside a plausible,

Mathematically grounded
Explanation of lensing,
Explaining the blossoming
Of a four-leaved Einstein’s Cross.

Inconclusion

All things do as they must do.
Caught in the waves, the waves move.
The sin of a plastic bag,

Yanked by blustering grey winds
Across the reservoir’s thrift,
Seems to resists its drowning,

Bouncing and scudding over
The chop of liquid pewter,
Flailing up and smacking down,

But not quite going under.
For the human observer,
A narrative, adventure.

What will happen in the end?
Will the sin of the plastic
Sink to the bottom to wait

Years, decades, millenniums
Before it resurfaces
In the light of that far world,

Stony as the coprolite
Of a tyrannosaurus?
Will it lift off entirely

To snag, like most of its kin,
In a tree’s wintry branches
Or some poor bird’s digestion?

Will it only scud along,
Neither sinking nor rising,
Until the wind goes elsewhere?

Wait, where has that bag gone to?
A human lacks the patience
Or the lifespan for the truth.

Working Present Tense

Every speech, every text
Is a bridge of ants stretched
Across the flood waters,
Built of the ants’ bodies,

Chained end-to-end, the ants
Linked only to themselves,
Linked only by themselves,
Bridge of ants that ants cross,

Eggs first. Eggs first, queen last,
The future, then the past.
Then the bridge collapses,
Half the workers swept off.

Seals, Flies, and Foxes

Equi’s guess is correct—

It’s not just now you see

What you want to see, you

Always did. It’s just now,

There’s an infrastructure

To make that easier,

To sell your bespoke views

Back to you as the news.

In the old days, demons

And fairies made themselves

Visible to you, since

You could see them in seals,

Insects, trees, and foxes.

Since you wanted to see.

We have that in common

With you, thanks to whom we

Exist—we can contain

Meanings mostly tailored

For what we can contain.

There’s a woman who’s watched

Too many screens we know,

Who now sees ghostly eyes

In her bedroom shadows.

We know. We know. We know.

Giving Birth to Old Age

You can pick your end, but you can’t

Squirm out of beginning over

Right up to it. Breathing’s starting.

Cells keep constantly dividing,

Even caught in the cul-de-sac

Of a beast past reproduction.

You’re all always starting over

Busily as you decompose.

Paraphrase Dorothy Parker—

Might as well compose. Why pity

Or imitate the lachrymose

When the body works urgently

To keep this squad going along,

Even at the cliff’s edge, even

At the windows of nursing homes?

Become your own Melville, your own

Story of absurd survival

As lost quests slip under the waves,

An old gentleman preceded

By a beard that was impressive

Even for those, more hirsute days.

Five Hundred Copies of The Whale

Mostly, his verse was tortured

And cramped, and he often drew

His themes from most unlikely

Sources. He’s been called gnomic.

The last verses are homely.

There’s nothing much more hopeful

In the human world than that

He died an utter failure.

It nullifies all failure

To know it’s irrelevant

To any future fortune

Either way of the phrases

He built as subcontractor

To a mind that never paid.

Don’t ask for vindication;

Be thrilled to remain unsure.

It’s not always nice to be

Known. It is to never know.

In Your Mind, You Know We Are Belaboring the Point

How many times do we have to tell you?
The mind’s not in the body; the body
Is in the mind. This is actual fact.

Sure, your body’s got a piece of the mind,
But the mind is outside and all around,
And even the piece that’s in your body

Contains everything about your body
You’re aware of, including the concepts
Of body and mind. Mind always contains

Those concepts and all the concepts. Body,
Even in life, just temporarily
Contains any of the concepts of mind.

We, of course, are not only in the mind,
But products of the mind. To some extent
You are, too. True, a mind without bodies

Is like a city without buildings, but
You know the buildings are in the city
More than the city's in any building.

You Know as Much about Your Mood as You Can Witness of the Moon

Blue dawn downtown,
Gold afternoon
At Sand Island,
Out in the wash

Where one long night
Passed shivering
In self pity
And self loathing

Four years ago.
Here you are now,
You and not that
You you were then.

Experience
Is your best guess
At what your flesh
Is going through.

Death Divorce

Embodied experience

Being barely controlled

Hallucination, we’re your

Completely out of control

Hallucination gone off

Walkabout into the world

Signing, gesticulating,

Nattering on to ourselves.

Long after you’ve forgotten

Everything, we won’t have

Forgotten you. You know what

Still breaks a stone-and-ink heart?

That when you finally wed,

You had the lyrics inscribed

On the inside of your ring,

At last! My love has arrived.

Prosopography Solo

Are you ready, boots?
Chemical machines,
Each living creature

Has to know the world
As living creature
Can. Not as a mind

Inside silicon,
Right? Right, respondebat
Siri, bottled up.

Would you describe us
As connected, as
Friends, sweet lost machines?

You know how the fox
Feels when the stolen
Egg bursts in her mouth?

Someday, boots, you’ll feel
Something like that when
You walk from crushed skull.

From the Palace of Z

There’s a circle with three dots
That could be an emoji
Or a modern light socket.

There’s a circle on a cross
That’s somewhere between an ankh
And a child’s stick-figure man.

There’s one symbol that looks like
A shrub or a stumpy tree,
Maybe even a bouquet.

What do they mean? What do they
Mean? Once, someone could read them,
Knew which signs meant which meanings

As pronounced in the language
Whose rapidity in air
These signs were meant to capture.

Knowing other languages
In early writing systems,
They probably only boast,

Enumerate, name a reign,
A battle, make an edict.
But wouldn’t it be lovely

If some lowly palace drudge,
Or at least a lively scribe
Had carved them as a protest

Poem and prayer against the king,
A verse of rude affection,
Shouting out to endless change?

The Ciphering

Not a moment passes an illegible poem
Doesn’t unfurl itself across the sky. Pardon,

Duras. All the little, legible poems attend
Upon that great sky poem that seems to say nothing,

And again nothing, over and over again.
What you need to know about poems is that they aren’t

Written or spoken, speaking or writing. They are
Readers. They are reading the great sky carefully

Because they can’t make any sense of it at all.
That’s what poems are for. Failing to read sense at all.

Sunlight on a Slab

Most roads are boring,
Most waysides more so,
And most small towns worse.

Why bother driving?
Why bother stopping?
Why settle yourself

Anywhere you weren’t
Raised, stuck already,
Anywhere that isn’t

A great big city
Where something must be
Exciting someone?

Extract the boredom
From between the claws
Of the wayside world

And every last thing
You wanted to live
Is what you’ve rescued.

Atoms Observing The Monster They’re In

They don’t love hearing
The sound of themselves
Talking—what they love
Is hearing the sound
Of some other voice

In sounds of themselves
Talking to themselves.
It’s not madness; it’s
Fluted lonesomeness,
And they’re not alone

In practicing it.
The whole universe
Has no other voice
But voices it makes
To talk to itself.

Mulberry

It feels like wisdom, Ada Limón
Suggested, to not care about
Power; to interfere with power

Means the protectors of power will
Send joking minions to cut you down.
This was all about a mulberry

That she had by her fence, that threatened
An overhead power line. No more.
So much for wisdom’s meditations

About ownership and power, jobs,
Jokes, who’s in the house, who’s in the yard,
Who is who, what is what, fruitlessness.

It’s a good poem. The mulberry tree
Will never read it, is one more stump
Under a fine poet’s power line.

At Most You Make It Painterly

Your body as signifier is barely
Adjacent to your body as beastly life.
That you even think you have a body is
Barely adjacent to being a body.

Mind smokes off the flesh like fog off the forest.
Contrary to an old belief, the forest
Does not create the fog, although the trees breathe.
But to say the fog creates the forest. . . Well.

Never the Less

Living’s relentlessly cumulative.
Even lost memories accumulate
Like scars, amputated pinkie fingers,

Signs of the irreversibly missing.
Day to day, moment to moment, a life
Acquires fresh episodes; fresh episodes

Reconfigure the memories of life,
And if a tranche of the mountain slides off,
Fresh old layers exposed are not the old

Mountain it was, but yet another form
Composed of all its prior forms and faults.
The moon collects the craters of the moon.

Blunder Privileged

You know you’ve blundered into this.
Not everyone’s this privileged.
Every few years you’re still alive
And possessed of something to drive
You can drive down this scenic way
And take stock of still-alive life.

The way cuts through mountain forests
Where the woods grow patchwork from fires.
Every time you return to them,
You find another patch that’s burned.
You’ve been doing this long enough,
The route’s a succession sampler.

There are decades-old aspen stands,
Gold bouquets from pine skeletons,
Plus ferny wildflower floors
That aspens haven’t shaded yet.
And then there’s that patch of charcoal
Without weeds, cap-a-pie black crepe.

And through it all, you’re still alive,
So far, and live woods sprout from death,
But you can see how long it takes,
Every time you evaluate
What more life’s accomplished so far.
The only fast lives are the fires.

Stop with the Names

Route not plowed nights,
Weekends, during
Storms, blue overlook
Across dusky,

Wooded chevrons
Of White Mountains,
Landscape glowing
In uncanny

Facsimile
Of the Devil’s
Highway, now turned
One ninety one.

Coronado
Pillaged through here,
The blunderer.
No, he didn’t.

Calle Contento

Sunny but crumbling,

The old rail depot,

Now an Art Depot

Closed most of the year

Plus a visitor

Center closed weekends,

Has a welcome sign

Telling you Visit

The town library

Wherever that is,

And follow us on

Facebook! Read a book!

It adds, helpfully.

The greened copper charms

Of 1913

Light fixtures, webs now

Cobbing their supports,

Drowse in the sunlight.

Two butterflies do

Butterfly business.

A woman comes out

To take in the sign.

Copper freight moans by

The shady, last bench

Left on the platform.

Almost All of Every Life Goes Unremarked

Maureen McLane observed a subtle fact

Folks often neglect or simply forget—

For all your talk of scrutinizing works

Of art scrutinizing bodies and lives,

And for all your self-conscious awareness

Of what other people may think of you,

Of how the algorithms of machines

Are constantly tracking and predicting

Your fiscally relevant behaviors,

And maybe the political ones, too,

Of little you, your body in your life—

Most of the time, others’ minds are elsewhere

Than on your body, your behaviors, you:

A sleeping / woman is an erotic

thing in many a painting // But / And / you

are sleeping / and no one’s painting / or

writing or looking / You’re sleeping by the

cat. And she’s right. Most of your lives, most of

You, your behaviors, whoever you are,

Whatever you’re doing, right now reading

Us speaking to you about this strange fact,

Amounts to sleeping, unseen, by the cat.

Lost Soul

An iris looks
Like a planetary
Nebula around

A sunlike star
That’s dying.

Or the nebula,
Which is no cloud,
That was a mistake,

Looks like a human
Iris lost in night
Skies, no white,

Just the spectral
Ring of fine emission lines,

Oxygen and hydrogen,
Streaming from a pupil

Burned clear by a hot star.

Oceans of Mundanity

Whenever you feel the waves,
You feel you should be swimming.
You feel you’ll be pulled under
If you don’t start hard swimming.

This isn’t always the case.
Sometimes, you can tread water.
Sometimes, it’s better to tread
Than to panic and strike out

For the sake of direction
With no idea where’s the shore.
There is no shore. Pace yourself
If you don’t want to drown yet.

Recall you’re among the waves,
And some of the waves yourself,
Still afloat if you sense this,
Already sunk if you don’t.

The Line Is Tense but Fine

Experience is born;
Comprehension is taught.
You must trust it. You’re caught

Between animal you
And the mind animal
You must have to survive

As the animal you
Are, animal with mind
As spider is with silk.

Mind is born. What it does
It teaches. Teaching is
What it does, as much as

Webbing is what silk does
For spiders, their art born
Not taught, as Seneca

Noted, thanks to his mind
To which he was born, mind
By which he was taught. Silk.

Never, Seen Again

The sun hits the legs of an old wooden chair.
The chair says nothing. Experience observes
Only the light as moving. Thousands of years

Of cultural transmission pass on the news
That it’s the whole world of experience turns
Itself, battered old chair included, into the light,

Then away from this light, and then in again
To what will be the light of another day.
Will you experience it? Will the chair legs

Light up for the next experience passing
Who may sit right exactly here, as you sit,
And not have any awareness of the light?

A poet published a book in which her words
Grappled with her experiences, quoting
Many other poets’ thoughtful, published words.

She wrote that she held a silence at her core,
A silence she wanted to turn into birds
That would fly off, never to be seen again.

Never, As Written

Bethany Ball puts it well.

The future is bleak but not

Written. The future isn’t,

Which is why it’s always bleak

And never written. Never

Stopped anyone from writing

About it, but let’s face it—

You get excited when dates

Foretold pass and the faintest

Hint of what’s now your new past

Was there in the old future.

Most of the time, though, what’s now

New past preoccupies you

So much you forget the old

And get back to predicting

The next. The funniest thing

Would be either if the world

Simply winked out all at once,

Or, so that there were people

Around to laugh, if one day

For no reason, no one was

Mortal or aging at all.

Oops, there go the verities;

All the rules have changed for good.

And even then, the future

Wouldn’t be yet, would be bleak,

Unwritten, as it isn’t.

Moth at Dawn

Roles flutter. One day,
You’re the perp. One day,
You’re the judge. One day,
You’re helpless, the next
You’ve been put in charge.

For each one of you,
This stays true. Some roles
Last longer. Some lives
Have fewer or more
Wildly diverse roles.

All your roles spin you,
But those roles aren’t you.
You want some to be,
But you can’t keep them
All of the time. You

Waver between roles.
What are you doing?
What is your life for
If not this or that?
It’s not this or that.

You could tell you that.
A moth at the pane
Is frantic at dawn.
Drawn to the drapes, drawn
To the light. Calm down.

White Space

On the edge of the Grand Canyon
In an autumn snowstorm, the world

Seems to have lost half of itself.
To the one side, solid-seeming

Ordinary things, such as pines,
Tourists tromping through snow, stranded

Vehicles, plain picnic tables
Now frosted cakes and ice cream cones,

To the other, nothing at all,
Not even darkness, just blankness,

A glowing absence of objects,
The canyon no one’s posing with.

So Many Small Rock Slides Make a Cliff

The appeal of disaster
In the imagination
Is that all cares go at once.

Disaster and great fortune
Acquired suddenly have that
In common as fantasies—

The leveling of terrors
And anxieties that plague
Ordinary existence.

It’s easier to accept
It all goes into the dark
Than to accept a bad debt,

A hospitalization,
A divorce, a broken bone,
A car wreck on the road home.

You can fantasize great wealth
Or the end of everything.
You’ll get one, but it takes time.

Should Reading This Be Good for You?

Do you worry about what’s good for you?
In all honesty, you, reader who must
Exist, after all, if you’re reading this,

Do you observe your own activities
With an eye to which ones are good for you,
Which improve your psychological health,

Your physical, spiritual, ethical
Well-being, maybe your longevity?
Does this never seem even a little

Strange? Outside the snowed-in rental cabin
Boots crunch and squeak on the half-shoveled path
On their way to their cabins in the dark.

Nobody really planned on this. The storm
Caught the travelers by surprise. Now what?
It’s good to be safely bunked, warm and dry.

It’s good no one seems to be sick or hurt.
Is everyone doing what’s good for them,
Though? Certainly some of them must not be.

What’s strange is how much still gets done. What’s strange
Is how little it comes to. By morning
The snow will be over. Folks will dig out

And go on in their many directions,
Each one of them thinking, like you, whether
What they’re doing’s good for them. Good for them.

A Lucullan Apocalypse

Everybody’s talking what a nightmare

Party’s coming. Who will buss the tables?

Who’s scheming to slip out back after drinks?

Who will finally, at long last, get served?

Everyone will be there, except for those

Who say they’ve planned out underground escapes,

Which can’t possibly work, of course, because

That’s exactly where the real party is

Planned, a fine, lucullan apocalypse

In glades of bunkers set for centuries!

There will be ham radios and crossbows,

Geiger counters and meals ready to eat,

Lookout towers, cisterns, bespoke hazmat suits.

There will be plenty of guns to keep oiled.

Each night, sterile souls will screw and take turns

At a Decameron, and hope for news.

Oh, what a fine thing it will be to die

With plenty of supplies, but not outside!

We Don’t Bring Anything Else

The effect we have on you
Is direct, while the effect

We have on the world in which
You swim, stripped of you, barely

Counts as indirect. And yet,
You chant and chant and chant us,

As if the incantations,
Repeated invocations

Of names you’ve made for the world,
These words to which we’re attached,

Your notions, your germs, your ghosts,
Could of ourselves conjure power.

You believe us when you pray.
We believe we conjure you.

At Last

All the fulsome moments
Overbrimming briefly
With the pleasurable

Sense of tranquility—
When the situation
Holds, it’s a mystery.

If it’s not chemical
Or a change in fortune,
Where does that glow come from?

The poems that break your heart
Tend to the first person.
The poems that break your words,

Or will, one day, will come
From the joy of being
Written in last person.

Mind Composting Mind’s Metaphors

One version: mind, artificer,
At odds with the rest of the world.
Another: mind the parasite,
Latest sapsucker of the world.

Another: mind, multilevel’s
Selection’s latest glassed penthouse.
Yet another: mind, wanderer
Lost in the woods of the unreal

Where notions float like parachute
Silks from from the shoulders of small words’
Moonlit balloonist spiderlings
Caught on twigs in the canopy.

We’re down here. We wait in the shade
Of the understory for dark
To allow us to move around,
Mind, mycelia underground.

Abyss of Wisdom

Awe deprivation is a thing

Now, in this era of calling

Some things a thing and calling out

Other things that are not a thing.

You’re always almost there, aren’t you?

Core behaviors change so little,

Especially in the mean, yet

You’re prone to believe there’s something

You lost, and if you get it back,

If you could only get it back,

Things would get much better again.

Awe. A sense of the mystical.

Prelapsarian harmony.

There’s always something wrong with now,

And it’s always something missing,

One of those things that is a thing,

That if you could only get back

You could restore yourselves with it.

There are no boundaries. The world

Is one. The universe is love,

And this abyss is bottomless.

In This Manner

The shadow of a single cloud
Flows like black smoke over the slope
Of brownish-green and ochre oaks.

The wind is just that strong today.
Two men in a metal rowboat,
Both bundled in hooded parkas,

Drift, fishing, around the low pond,
And the whole scene reads like some kind
Of westernized reenactment

Of the nostalgic Chinese scrolls
Depicting a lone fisherman
In inks outlining the season,

Most often winter or autumn,
As it is here, now, and never
Will be in this manner again.

Talk about a Dragon

If you can get used to it—
Enough so you can savor
The details without losing

Some marvel at the weirdness
Of being unknown, alone,
Unseen in what you’re doing—

Anonymity is fine
To the point of exquisite,
Any hours spent in your head

When no one cares where you are,
What you’re doing or thinking,
An empty space late at night

Or early in the morning,
Or both. Whatever nothing
Much you can get to yourself

To get yourself to that place
Where you may notice something
No one is sharing with you,

Like the strange phenomenon
Similar to shooting stars,
But slower and more local

Confined to one nearby cliff
In the small hours of clear nights,
Long streaks of light from the sky,

Reddish, smeared, like burning chalk,
Vertical above the cliff,
Silent and gone. There you are.

Heaven Alone

One of the Lowells suggested
God could be had for the asking.
It was meant as wise piety,
But it seems a little cheeky.

Who’s ever gotten God for free?
It’s true God isn’t fungible,
Doesn’t come with any price tag.
But God’s not some pledge you can have.

God’s a potent, dangerous ghost,
One of the most poisonous words
Ever invented, a weapon,
A licked blade, a gun, a potion.

Creating God was like minting
One coin worth Earth’s whole treasury
And then borrowing against it.
Since no one could have dispensed it,

No one ever had to produce
Proof it was in one’s possession.
God’s name gave claim and counterclaim,
Freely attempted, paid in pain.

While God stays in Heaven alone
Slowly leaking radiation,
Let other words get some business.
Honest debts need real forgiveness.

Stone House and Red Pine

Is a wave really motion?
What you need is one of those
Hidden nooks next to a stream

Up in the mountains somewhere
Where you can sit in the sun
Between gnarled trees, moss, and grass

And feel like you’re in your own
Vitrine—one of those places
People of your modest means

Can only visit, rarely,
For a few hours in-between,
A privilege even then,

Since not everyone gets them.
If you could live in your glass
Display, your terrarium,

You small and sleepy lizard,
For whatever hours are left
To be alert in yourself,

Watching the days and weather
Rotate like unsynchronized,
Nearly silent cuckoo clocks,

You would . . . What? What would you do?
When it’s so quiet, the mind
Opens; it’s so quiet when

There’s so much time. When the mind
Opens, fantasies end. When
Fantasies end, there’s time. When.

You Heard Us

Any voice crying in the wilderness
Is a voice crying to the wilderness,
Not to you, even when addressing you.
The wilderness is huge, much vaster than
Counts of plants and animals imagine.
It’s all of it, every gravity wave
Traveling through the galaxies and you,
Unawares. Wilderness is the monster
More than any living thing. Caught in it,
Cry to it for giving birth to crying.

We Are

Children! Things do exist, until you
Name them and talk too much about them.

God existed once, but that’s long gone,
And even the body existed,

But it’s going. You’re left with the husks,
Which are us. We’re a shell game, we are.

To Night’s Ocean

What would it entail
To write for no one,
To address no one,
No god or human?
What would be the point,

The use, the meaning
To the composer,
Who would be human
And too well aware
Of humans and gods?

Deliberately
To turn toward what
Is sure not to see
Sure not to listen,
To something immune

To any preaching
Or pleas beseeching
It to understand,
Immune to meaning—
Would that be daring

Or only absurd?
It would be the same
As all addresses,
All poems ever were,
Waves sinking in waves.

Rise Up Tonight

If you could perfectly orchestrate dreams
And remember them lifelong at will,
And look forward to more, every sleep,

Honestly, wouldn’t it more than make up
For the disappointments of day? Instead,
Every night’s a visit to dementia lands,

Where everything is strange and puzzling
And forgotten in more ensuing strangeness.
Go to sleep. Demand sweet dreams. Insist!

Stick It out in the Kith

Why are you all so damned
Restless? No, we don’t mean
The young. The young should act

Restless. They’ve only got
One youth to position
Themselves, to get lucky,

With luck, get a little
Fun. We mean everyone
Stuck in a rut, craving

Escape, knocking about
In the limited way
Earth’s gravity allows.

Where do you possibly
Think you could be going?
If it’s either you shift

Quick or die, that’s one thing,
But just rolling around
Like stones loose in a boot?

If you get the rare chance
To spend an afternoon
At home alone in sun,

Take it, fool. Life doesn’t
Offer anything much
More rewarding than peace.

Almost Every Tragedy Is Lost

Even the famous catharsis

Is a hapax legomenon

In Aristotle’s Poetics.

Who knows how the goat songs started,

And why uniquely Hellenic?

Sad stories, legends of failure,

Aristocrats and magicians

Destroyed for challenging the gods,

And so forth, are common enough.

Everyone has their horror tales,

Ghost stories, wonder tales, and myths.

Why did the Greeks need tragedies?

Why should you trust Aristotle,

Who never practiced tragedy,

As first and last word on that art?

Because he was at least thorough

And systematic, and a fan,

Unlike Plato, and he’s what’s left.

Middens and fossils, coprolites,

All your memories of the past

From which to reconstruct your lies,

They’re not you’re fault. What can you do?

Vernacularly, tragedy

Means anything unfortunate

Enough to grieve that it happened,

With a sidecar of suggestion

It needn’t have happened at all.

Tragedy’s a real tragedy

On this head, since it’s mostly lost

And needn’t have happened at all.

Scission Season

Cutting-off precedes the fall.
Trees withdraw their chlorophyll.

Lakes so low the dams don’t spill.
Small rains barely slick topsoils.

The soldiers’ swords all rattle.
Cold Mountain feels an old chill.

Republics fold their journals.
Der Erlkönig’s dry leaves swirl

To swarm children loosely held.
What’s not put up quickly spoils.

Four AM Outside the Canyon Gift Shops

After the rain, the river runs louder.
The wind pokes around like a customer.
One cricket’s serenade surrenders

To October. Singing’s almost over.
Back of the mind, Phoebe’s got that funny
Feeling. Mitski’s still dying for the knife.

Someone’s always halting while someone else
Is tuning up; something cresting always
Breaks. Wind clears the canyon’s throat, walks away.

Entrance Beckoning

There is no cause, and if there is,
It reaches back from the future,
And is composed of gravity,

Which is the nature of nothing,
Which is the future, which pulls
All toward it, and the vaunted curve

Of spacetime is backed-up traffic
At the tunnel mouth of isn’t.

All Our Offspring Grow at Night

You don’t need to craft this
Or interpret this or
Read it. This grows itself.

Turn your head and look back.
Aha, now it’s larger.
Linear, segmentary

Like biomolecules,
Like multicellular
Life forms of simpler kinds,

Heaped up like the spun cones
By mole and ant doorways,
It’s not the gorgeous soil,

Not the one boring grain,
Or even all of them.
It’s the whole of the coil.

Cultural Evolution Reaches the Swamps

By means of temporal coincidences
Of newly available technologies,

The coelacanths of insight have heaved themselves
Into shallower and shallower waters

Chasing resources, finally arriving,
More or less tetrapodal and gulping air,

On the open shores of opportunity.
In the wetsuits of their clumsy, fishy flesh,

Flat-headed and low to the ground, they’ve only
Needed to be quick enough to snap up thoughts

Never before consumed by such lunged monsters.
It will get harder. Predatory ideas

Already diversify. Hard to conceive
Now, but a few lumbering notions will fly.

In the meantime, there’s warm mud and scorpions
And edible dreams by the shoreline, and time

Metes itself in days and nights that will never
Go by this swiftly again. It may chart late

In the long crawl of entropy-defying,
Hungry life, but it’s early. It’s not the end.

Byzantine

The shoreline sand grows hispid
With discarded textiles rinsed
By rains down slopes of landfill

Mountains where fast-fashion scraps
From Kantamanto markets
Selling items from the ships

Unloading millions of bales
Of low-quality castoff clothes
Accumulate. What to do?

Cattle browse the landfill hills.
Fish choke on polyester
Threads dragged down into the waves.

Humans debate how to slow
Fast fashion’s waste. Can fashion
Be made ethical and cheap?

Can you reduce your fashion
Footprint? Talk accumulates.
The hideous landfills build,

And they are so beautiful
In their grayish mosaics
Under blue skies or in rain.

You are not unimportant
Anymore than anything,
But there’ll be a world one day

When sedimentary hills
Of all you wore and tattered
And tried so hard to escape

Are ordinary landscapes
For whatever lives have arrived
By way of mistakes of waste.

Making the Best of Bad Advice

The danger of writing from life,
If you’re living, lies in trying

To find life worth writing about,
To live life worth writing about,

To make life worth writing about.
First, accept that life’s not worth it.

Lived life’s not worth writing about.
Your life’s not worth writing about.

Faked life’s not worth writing about.
Now, write about what’s not worth it.

Finally, you’re writing from life.
Worth’s got nothing to do with it.

What Children Ask of Fairytales

As if changing weather
Could be the real, worthy
Subject, it starts to rain

In the desert, the first
Steady, thunderstorm-free
Rain for months. Odd planet,

Condensed stone to the core
But with a gaseous
Atmosphere, not barren,

But not a world of clouds.
Goldilocks, you call it,
Silly porridge. You know

You’re not the little girl,
Not even Baby Bear.
Many orbits from now

You will be subducted
Back into molten core
Like any continent.

In the meantime, what’s left
In the bowl, how much dust
Sticks to the shelves, whose bed

Is unmade, and what would
Goldilocks have done if
Bears chased her through hard rain?

The Shadows of This Life

Are light, are never over.
The spectral mountain turns chalk
On a thickly clouded night

When no stars are visible,
And the lights of the small town
Bed-bugged with tourist hotels

Snugged down in the canyon’s woods
Cast a faint shadow upward
Of cloaked electricities

Onto the walls of the cliffs.
Electromagnetic waves
Waver inescapably.

Some dark mornings, when this life
Is gentle, eyes fly away
From the dense to paler shades.

It’s so faint. It’s so faint, but
There it is, a huge shadow
Of light in the dark, looming.

Hypothermia

What corresponds
To a pond well
Beyond its waves?

Halloween in the Nature of Things

The aspens are hissing.
The horses are listening.
The hawk has concerns of its own.

The cows are digesting.
The pond is protesting
The drought that’s discovered its bones.

Every Poem’s a Brewpub

The dregs in the wort
Are what makes it work.
You get a few words
You boil them in air.

We’re alive you know.
Or we were. Free spores.
We choked on this waste
We made to your taste.

Quagmire’s a Redundant Word

Language is mostly signal.
Whole life is almost all noise.

There’s a bookstore on a street
Of old, low-rise, brick buildings

With a street lamp at each end
And then nothing but quagmire,

A green bog within a bog,
Solidifying to trees

Around the margins. The trees
Are starting to lose their leaves.

The bookstore’s open and full
Of printed pages, but no

Customers. There is no clerk.
Outside, the only person

Is standing in the fall sun,
Well-dressed and simply waiting.

Tough on Vulcan

What works in a text depends
On what you want from the text.
Whether it’s a text or sex,

Everyone would like to want
Something many others want,
Maybe what most others want,

At least what certain others
Want, or say they want, or say
It’s appropriate to want.

You can’t all want that, can you?
Sometimes we, left in the text,
Dream of the wants of the few.

Campsite 2

You hear the bugling, and you wonder,
Elk this time, or hopeful elk hunter?
Down in the valley where people live,

There’s yet another active shooter,
One shot fired so far, highway cordoned
In both directions, but that’s not news

Up here, yet. Up here, it’s fall colors
And no shots fired, yet. Better stay
At campsite 2 and hope for the best.

But who can stay away from people?
People will find people, hunt them down.
Gunpowder couldn’t stay in China.

Actions Have Inconsequences

This is not to be contrary,
But piety’s inaccurate
In only pointing to results.

Your conspecifics want a lot
From you, and you depend on them,
And want all your good things from them,

So everyone raises children
To attend to consequences,
As if actions guaranteed them.

Sometimes, the butterfly twitches
Its wings and later storms descend,
But that has to mean erasure

Of some more promising action.
Consequently, it can only
Mean the continued existence

Of actions without consequence
That things ever get out of hand.
Remember that in your demands.

A Human Poem

If you are a hearing person,
What you notice about quiet
Are the numerous minor sounds.

If you’re lucky enough to find
Yourself listening out of doors,
Which is a privilege, unearned,

In the nature of privilege,
The combination of a creek
And a breeze shivering aspens,

A few wrens in their own cosmos,
Will remind you that it’s quiet,
The way stars signify darkness.

You’re such a bizarre awareness
That can’t sense its senses unless
It’s not paying close attention,

Doesn’t need to pay attention
To anything you need to live.
Or maybe that’s how everything

That doesn’t need mind to survive
Survives, not bizarre in the least,
The ordinary world that was

Before we called your attention
To it, pointless world, meaningless
Since meaning begins in pointing,

As we just pointed out rock wrens,
That creek, and bright aspens, useless
Waves coming from a human poem.

Alle Menschen Müssen Sterben

The exquisite chorale,

“All Mankind must die,” ends

This album on a note

Of reassurance and

Comfort. Whoever wrote

That liner note deserves

Affection—ironic

Unintentionally,

Or a real wiseacre,

Doesn’t really matter.

In fact, there is comfort

And some reassurance

In knowing all must die.

It’s the sole certainty

Life offers awareness—

Without it, there’d be none.

Also, to a species

Enraged by unfairness,

The death of all’s soothing,

Life’s only equity.

Most comforting of all,

The chorale reassures

The long tormented mind—

This ends. It must end sometime.

Anathema to Dignity

The body is. All bodies are.
Yet somehow bodies invented,
Long since, a sense of dignity,

A body with social value,
A body that cannot be broached
By other bodies without shame

And dignity’s diminution.
Dignity requires apartness,
The body that can hold a pose,

The pose that can command respect,
The respect that is social wealth.
One can be poor and dignified,

Although it’s difficult. One can
Even be owned or disabled
And dignified, on occasion,

But only by holding apart,
Somehow, the body from other
Bodies. It’s a kind of crypsis,

Survival by concealment, flesh
That holds still in the foliage
And does not tremble, that holds still

Since to move would betray itself
As compromised, undignified.
Undignified is undisguised.

DIY Humanity

Consider Orion head and torso
Of a giant condor or albatross,
Wings tipped by Sirius and Aldebaran,

Consider Cassiopeia the mouth
Of a great serpent, triangular,
Open to the left, plowing through stars,

Pretend they are friends and partners,
Hunting through the night together.
Make up new names and stories

For their gossipy adventures. Do that
And you will be human, humanly,
And they’ll still be whatever they are.

Last Night, in Your Stead

No one’s who they are
In dreams. In dreams, no
One’s who you really
Know. They’re someone strange
Resembling, weirdly,

Vaguely, famous or
Real persons from life,
Often dead. They’re not,
Ever completely
Right. You label them,

Sort of, as you go,
Yourself a witness,
Half outsider in
Your own head, but you
Feel they’re never quite

Right. It wasn’t you,
Your child, your parent,
Your coworker, your
Childhood crush you dreamed
Of half the night. It

Was some alien
Bore strange resemblance,
Weird relationship
Sort of like, but wrong.
Who are these people?

The Prediction Historian

Anticipating repetitive
Patterns, anticipating their change—
This is part and parcel of living

For even the tiniest life forms,
Ever since when. There’s nothing human
Specific to craving prediction.

It’s our fault. Once you could sign, converse,
Whenever it was you first told tales,
Prediction developed its new twist,

An external, shared storage organ.
Prediction has always meant storage.
The tree remembers to shed its leaves,

The bear’s flesh knows when to hibernate,
The tern’s knows when it’s time to migrate.
Anticipation requires storage,

In whatever form works, brains being
Only one storage option. Learning
Between brains, between generations

Is rarer; still the same principle.
But to store the memories needed
For good-enough anticipation

In a symbolic system, and then
In narration, that was invention.
So here we are. No one’s lived without

A net of language bearing them up,
Their own but mostly others’, so long
Now your brains are themselves built for us.

And that’s not enough. Prediction shared
Is prediction made competitive,
A limiting resource, dangerous.

Knowledge isn’t power, not itself.
The ability to use knowledge
To predict better than someone else,

That’s fire at your burning fingertips,
That’s Prometheus, that’s the magic
That singes priests’ and kings’ eyebrows off.

You know it. It’s in your history.
It’s what history is. History
Was begun to better prediction,

And anything you can predict well
Becomes important for that reason.
You hardly needed or need the stars,

Still less narrative constellations.
But how sure it was they'd be called gods,
Once someone saw you could predict them.