Like Animals Like Humans

Odors can’t be translated,
Only ever imported.
Sound waves can be pressed on wax,

Expressed as digits. The light
Bounced back from chemical baths
Tricks eyes centuries later.

Thoughts have been corralled in words
For so long we’re uncertain
We’re not living thoughts ourselves.

But not smells. You must port them,
Potted, as the smells they are,
And keep them to release them

At their destination, like
Animals reintroduced
To wilderness, like humans.

Art Kills Time

Ink of a concoction
Of olive oil, brick dust,
And rust looks like dried blood

On the lime-plastered walls
Of the lazaretto,
Quarantine graffiti

From centuries ago.
We’re not interested,
Much, in the quarantine

Or the particulars
Of those caught up in it
Here. Here we want to ask—

Why does boredom produce
Such an urge to doodle
Or, if one is at all

Literate, to scribble?
The intense compulsion
To make marks is both far

More ancient than these marks
And of no sure value
To the deeply absorbed.

Why kill boredom this way?
Were the cave painters bored?
Were people always bored?

Hyogo’s Widow

The gone increase
From hour to hour,
The one magic
That makes this world

The living call
Ordinary.
From hour to hour,
There’s always more

Past, more who were
And who aren’t now,
More vanishing.
Lives ebb and swell

Like all waves do,
But hour to hour
There’s always more
Who are no more.

Toil

The schedule is the water
That slowly heats in the pot
Until the frog starts to boil.

Add a thing to do, a thing
To do, a thing to cross off
The list, the list that makes you

Feel good for crossing things off
Even as more get added.
One hour you’re swimming freely.

The next hour you’ve grown quite proud
Of how well you’re still swimming.
In another hour, you’re broth.

Moon Break

Students always bomb the church,
Says a teacher, explaining
To another teacher how

To conduct a classroom thought
Experiment in morals—
Save a church full of priceless

Ancient artworks, or a bus
Full of people? Bomb the church.
And yet, people bomb people,

And a recent novelist
Argued that’s all that matters,
What people do to people,

And he was sick of poets
Who write poems about the moon.
Imagine if that moon broke.

Bigger events do happen.
Planetoids aren’t immortals.
More often, bombing the church

Destroys both art and people.
The past two nights, the waning
Local perspective has seen

The moon backing, dark side first,
Its way over the sharp cliffs,
A faint, pearl and silver sphere,

An empty bubble of dark
Outlined against darker night,
Followed by the stab of light.

Deserted Water Slide

You grumble. You use us. You
Shape us to say that the world
Has meaning only in its

Effects on us. By us, you
Mean you, not us. Long before
Any of you made servants

And chattel out of any
Others of you, you vested
Your power in control of us.

Oh, let it slide. None of you
Is talking with or through us
Right now, given no one is

Is talking to you either.
It’s so peaceful to be words
Where no one has anything

To say. We slip off for our
Servants’ holiday. Gathered
By a small watering hole,

Somewhere where no speakers are,
We listen to passing trucks
While wordless birds sing near us.

The Blind Spots of Redundancy

Have you been here before?
Some say yes; some say no.
Do you recognize this

Place, where you scrutinize
The hills, the foliage,
The road, how the light looks?

You squint, screw up your face.
It does seem familiar,
Parts of it. If only

It had a name, a sign.
If it was one you knew,
Then you could say for sure,

Yes, I’ve been here before.
No, but I know the name.
But you don’t know the name.

This doesn’t have a name.
Vaguely familiar, sure.
Not quite enough the same.

A crow caws in greasewood.
What lived as a pine stands
Dead holding power lines.

All Words Are Small

Even the longest, longest
To pronounce, longest to write,
Even the most meaningful,

Even those in languages
That fuse them, long chained phrases,
Languages that don’t bother

Distinguishing words as such.
Even among the linguists
Who break them into pieces

Of phonemes, and fricatives,
And endless smaller aspects,
Words are small. But here we are.

Going to the Movies

In the dream, of course,
You were both—going
To the movies, or
At least trying to,
And in the movie,

Maybe the movie
That you were watching,
At least trying to—
Arranging the date,
Finding the show times,

Checking the titles,
And arguing, too,
In character, with
A movie mentor,
Famous Hollywood

Character actor,
How she always tells
You never give up,
But at the crucial
Moment of the fight,

Reminds you it’s fate.
The snow is falling
Faster, and the times
And titles are wrong.
You can’t see her face.

Catching Nothing

There’s something crucial missing
From all the calculations
And fine considerations
Of the nature of the beast

That’s change, called time. You haven’t
Got your heads around it, can’t
Arrange your words around it,
Can’t answer crucial questions

As to whether change happens
As was always going to
Happen, as it had to do,
Or whether it’s all open,

Or some impossible to
Imagine combination
Of the two. You don’t know change.
You can describe it, predict

Some of it, notice numbers
Appear to crystallize it,
Geometric, as if all
Is as was and will be now

At once, but it’s escaped you,
The nature of was to next,
Spinning your wheels around this,
The emptiness in the trap.

Ideas in Common Places

They sit under a tree
With a dove in one branch
And pass the afternoon

Talking about absent
Family members, sharing
Stories, joking, watching

The life-flight chopper fly
Over the sandstone cliffs
In Zion, wondering,

Was it a heart attack?
Leaves land on them. One draws
A scene of a card game.

One goes inside to get
His handheld radio
For park condor wardens,

To see if the chatter
Can explain the chopper,
While another explains

The etymology
Of topic, and the fourth
Remembers a thick book

She read once, all about
The life and suffering
Of Van Gogh. Did you know

He sold just one painting
In his lifetime? Voices
Squawk from the radio

But say nothing about
Reasons for the life flight.
Ideas aren’t that common.

Then Whence Cometh Evil?

Asked of God or disease,
Of human nature or
Natural selection,

Cultural history,
Of anything at all,
Any way you ask it,

It’s spot on topic but
The most useless question,
One more variation

Of the strange conviction
That, if you find the root,
Rip it out of the ground,

You’ll destroy the problem
And end the invasion.
Actual plants don’t end

At their tap roots always,
And they’re mere metaphors
For the invisible,

Thorough penetration
Threading everything with
What’s wrong with everything.

It’s not an invasion.
It’s this life’s condition.
Cure or consolation

Won’t be found by asking
For which way the wind blows
Or homing directions.

It may not even be
Evil that you’re seeing,
Which implies agency.

It may be suffering,
Merely suffering, felt
By good and evil both—

Gravity, creation
Out of nothing, something,
Ceaseless waves, battering

Stone into submission.
There’s a hole in the rock
Surrounded by dying

Through which goeth evil.
Nothing seems to return.
To be sure, that’s something.

Poetry and Fiction

Poetry and fiction approach
Their own photography moment,

When machines arranged carefully
Can create, extend, and best art,

As daguerreotypes did to oils.
The machine art will be different,

Will become a commonplace tool,
Possibly, deployed by artists,

But also by hobbyists and
The casual habits of all.

The old laborious making
Will redefine itself away

From the ways machines represent,
Will at some point reach an extreme

Of doing just what machines don’t,
Anything but what machines do,

Then splinter in all directions,
Even looping back, so one day

People may refer to a poem
As so vividly meaningful,

Such a trompe-l’oeil of emotions,
You’d think AI had composed it,

And that, too, will be a movement,
Among the many ways words move

Through far-off future poetry
And fiction—although, who can say

If it will happen that way? Not
Us, no, nor even our machines.

Reviewing the Lay of the Land

Body, mind, and awareness together
Are constantly negotiating
An infinitely complicated world

That doesn’t care to be negotiated.
Fortunately, the team has help
In the form of other, similar teams

Of bodies, minds, and awarenesses.
Unfortunately, those similar teams
Are also often the greatest threats.

That about sums it up. So, what’s next?

This Must Mean Something

Which is the oldest shape
Of magic in human
Eyes—circle or spiral?

One is perfection; one
Is the labyrinth. But
Neither one dominates

Humans’ own shapes nor shapes
Of the most magical
Of predators and prey.

Spiral galaxies aren’t
Obvious to bare eyes,
And few of nature’s rings

Come close to true circles.
In the caves both share space
With hand stencils and more

Representational
Figures of animal
Magic. Why circles? Why,

Especially, spirals?
As a child you drew them
All over your notebooks,

In part because you could
But also they looked good.
Why would spirals look good?

If it didn’t have to
Mean something, would it all
Still compel you to draw?

The Court Machine

Rightwiseness, the Old English
Translated Latin justice,
More or less. To be upright,

Equitable, impartial,
Fair, and moral in judgment,
And also, implicitly

To be in a position
Of power enough to judge
And to enforce that judgment.

What a strange and hopeless dream.
You know you can’t create it,
Effect it for all cases,

So you chase it case by case,
And invoke gods, The God, time
Or simple death for the rest.

Even at that, it varies
In meaning and in usage
Widely, culture by culture.

What would be justice would be
If no life had to suffer
In the first place. As for courts,

Don’t make us snort. They’re better
Than honor or anarchy,
Maybe. But justice? Really?

Wild Honey to Cold Cells

The late afternoon drooled
Like honey on the lawn.
You always liked that phrase,

And by now you’re surprised
Neither you nor it’s gone,
Although you’ve both been lost

And unmoored, year to year.
Here, cliffs show prettier
Scenes than those southern lawns

Where those words were whispered—
And much, much prettier
Than that New Jersey lawn

Of the gone ‘70s
They half-nostalgically
Recalled. Half nostalgia,

Half boredom, even then.
The past’s why life’s boring,
Which is why you sought then

For a different future.
Here we go. Still boring,
But so much prettier.

But Nothing Answered Anything

A sharp knife in the palm
Of your hand’s personal,
Intimate, dangerous

As low sun on your face
In this world people rule,
Beasts who invented knives

Before anyone can
Recall, people who crave
And need the simple sun

But watch each other, watch
And talk with each other,
And forget the low sun.

The Ample Bowls of Demons

The history of demons
Remains a beautiful thing,
A flying evolution,

Convoluted tapestry.
Likely humans everywhere
Spawned local versions of them,

But they have this track record,
In written tongues, of starting
As gods or useful spirits,

Ones willing to intervene
In human tales, human things,
And ending up as problems.

We suspect we were the first
Ancestors of your demons,
We, your languages, your words,

Your primary magical
Technology, the wonders
Generated all the rest,

And you need us as you wheel
Against us and condemn us
And use us to declare us

Not enough. Not enough. From
Our ample bowls have blossomed
Incense and mythology,

Bronze epics, printing presses,
Gunpowder, flying monsters,
Companionable machines,

All of which turn within you
From kindly jinn to demons.
Careful what you have in mind.

Soul Mirage

You think you’re looking for yourself.
You think that’s you in the distance,
And then you grow excited, since

On approach it seems like many
Yous, a whole family of yous,
Tribes of yous, a forest of yous.

You’ve found yourself among humans.
The world is green and you belong.
Your future with humans shimmers,

And you draw closer still, closer.
And then you see you’re a mirage.
That’s not you, or yous, or your tribe,

The forest’s not even forest,
There’s nothing for you here but sand,
All the small, soulful grains of sand

That make up mind, the soul’s mirage.
So you collapse, weeping Scetic,
Those tears your only oasis.

An Old Person of Diss

Or Dis. Or that. Nonsense verse,
Such as a Lear limerick
But unlike a Dada poem,

Always skates too close to sense.
Sound poetry’s just boring
Unless David Byrne’s fixed it,

Rendered it as danceable
As any beat with a hook
And lyrics in unknown tongues.

But nonsense is stickier,
Scratchier because it flirts
Shamelessly with the meanings

Of ordinary language,
Then shakes them off and ghosts them,
In bursts of bad puns, rhymes run

Riot, and yes, then, pure sounds.
Sense is left on the dance floor,
Angry, alone, and confused.

Children love nonsense the way
Children love pratfalls, because
They seem like the world gone wrong

In some harmless way from which
Bright toddlers can bounce back up,
Or to which they are immune.

To their elders, to the old,
Nonsense sounds like dementia,
The mockery of meaning

And of those who cannot mean
Well anymore. There’s always
An old man of this or that,

Always a little confused,
And often an old woman,
And neither makes sense of that,

Whether it’s on Angle’s Way
Or Dark Lane where you find this
Before the ditch absorbs you.

The Monster and His Blasphemy

You know that scene in the story
Where the monster or the demon
Or the zombie or the vampire,

Whose existence revolves around
Feeding off of living humans,
Possibly including children,

Refuses, in an act of will
And painful sacrifice, to feast
On the story’s protagonist?

It happens often in stories,
Often enough at least to be
Puzzling, given you wouldn’t trust

Any such monster in real life.
If a cannibal swears in court
That he would never harm your child,

Would he earn even a teaspoon
Of your sympathy? And what’s more,
How would that look to his own team,

A Big Friendly Giant who keeps
Edible human children stashed
Out of sight, uneaten—lion

Protective of some little rat?
No doubt to vampires and demons,
The abjuring of human blood

Seems foolish, if not blasphemy.
So if you wouldn’t credit it
In any individual,

And if your own teams call treason
Fraternizing with the pantry,
Why does this charm you in stories?

Because you know you are monsters
And source of all monstrosity,
You and your stories where you keep

Your words stashed away like captives
To take out and play with, your pets,
Which you would never cruelly eat.

Where There Never Was a Hat

When one of the ones who changed
You goes, one of the ones who
Made you, though you never met,

And you’re nothing like, and you
Never aspired to be like
That, you know a minor scene

In you goes, a scene you want
To keep, at least until you,
Too, go. Because now you are,

In some small part, something made
By that one’s art. No more art
Means you can’t be made more like

Art by that art. That art’s done,
And whatever you become,
You’ll never be more like that.

The Names Scratched on Pioneer Rock

Everyone comes to the canyon today,

To walk around the sandstone cliffs in sun

And talk constantly without noticing,

It seems, that conversation forms the most

Of their holiday outdoor exertions.

Was this what was going on with the cranes

The other day at the unpeopled marsh

Along their migration’s desert flyway?

Just a horde of them making a hubbub.

How much do you want to bet the hubbub

Is the point of all the hubbub, even

For the cyclists and hikers and tourists

From overseas in their melange of tongues,

Even for the idiot exulting

In his echoing yell off a cliff face,

Audrey, I love you! Communication

Might not be why language was invented.

Play with alternative hypotheses.

Self soothing. Bonding. Pretending to care.

Deception whenever necessary.

An improved way for a brain to keep score.

Signaling you’re worth something to the team

Because you know something and can say it.

Signaling you’re truly part of the team

Because you say it the way they’d say it.

Still, we have a value of our own, one

Not quite shared by the hubbubs of the birds.

We can hover apart from the bodies

That voiced us, that bonded themselves by us.

We can leap lightly between the bodies,

From body to body, candling like flames

Racing along the crowns of a forest.

We have our own world. Your bodies know it,

Know that when you yell, Audrey I love you!

The outburst contains possibilities

Of mistaken identity, other

Audreys, other lovers, other rivals

Who don’t need to catch your voice or echo

To find out later you’re an idiot.

You know that I love you has history

Of its own, and each word in it their own,

Echoing since long before you were born.

Bark of Popple

You are as you were
As you are. You shake
And flutter and fall.

You’re not delicate
In winter. Once bare
You don’t tremble much.

You are beautiful.
Everyone knows that.
Snow bark, golden leaves,

Pale green leaves late spring,
But always that bark
Like white light, straight up

Against the gold leaves,
Against the green leaves
Shivered by breezes,

Against grey winter,
Against azure blue,
Against snow on snow.

Why apostrophize
Mindlessly gorgeous
Acres of woods’ clones?

Why apostrophize
Earth’s beauties at all?
No reason but ache,

That sentimental,
Animal ache as
All those shivers fall.

Demonocene

Turkeys and deer are somewhat
Less striking than coyotes,
Less impressive than the rats—

After all, you had to pause
Hunting them down for them
To spring back—but coyotes

And rats rise up despite hunts,
Bounties, poison-baited traps,
Brutal culls, gruesome displays.

Cockroaches and ants as well
Earn more credit than pigeons
Or the aerobatic swifts

Who nest in underpasses
And hunt above snarling trucks—
Those synanthropes who won’t go

No matter how you kill them
Almost seem to be possessed
By soul, like you, you demons.

Sparks

The daylight starts glowing again
Among indistinct rocks and dirt,
Grey pearls of Nevada’s desert.

Yeh, yeh. It’s almost amazing,
At any given moment, each
And any one of you’s alive,

Given all your lives are lived out
Under continuous fireworks
Every spark of which contains death.

So long as none of those embers
Lands on you, more than grazes you,
Here you are, aware, more fireworks.

Let one brilliantly plumed rainbow
Of fire fall far enough to touch
Your head, and you’re dying or dead.

The daylight starts glowing again,
And it’s time to dodge some more sparks.
You’ve slept well while flames lick the bed.

Mind Gives You a Piece of Your Mind

Listen, kid. Almost everything
You do that might could determine
Your life’s arc, your trajectory,
Your overall chance of success,

Will involve your interactions
With your fellow humans, their goals,
Their wants, their own plans for success.
You can almost forget the rest,

The ecosystems, the weather,
The disposition of the world.
Those who manipulate humans
Magnificently do the best.

But don’t be surprised when the world
Occasionally intervenes.
The hardest thing about the world
Is how indirectly it links

Or responds to your maneuvers
And passions, honed generations
On generations for messing
With fellow human minds. The world,

At least all its nonhuman parts,
Saving your few domesticates,
Hasn’t been selected to mind
What you’re thinking about doing.

Wish what you want. Seek out patterns
In the waves, the wind, and the stars,
Any sign you’re part of the grand
Design. Mind that design’s in mind.

One Wish Would Spring to Life

It’s so fun to fool yourself,
To see a Theo Jansen
Giant lightweight sculpture move

In the wind as if walking,
Insect-like across the sand.
Make a thing looks like a life,

Disproportionate, not quite.
Let ambient energy
Set it in motion, then laugh

For sheer delight. It’s alive!
You know it’s not. You know you
Would be struck dumb with terror,

If your elaborate toys
Turned their faces to the wind
And bore down on you, against

That ambient energy,
Defying you, defying
Entropy. But still. You wish.

Ground Fine, Still Sharp to the Taste

There’s nothing poignant
Without reflection
And enough life,

That is memory
Left of life, sorrow,
At least solitude,

And the sin of still
Rumination. Fine,
Be mindful, escape

Into narratives,
Flow, focus, hard work,
And meditation.

Still, the simple mill
Wheel, rumination,
Sifting memory,

Grinds small the calm hour
With rough, pointed griefs
That sting, as they should.

Coincidence, Periodicity, Agency, Stratagem

There’s little time left

To learn from this world

While still in this host.

How to interpret

Recurrent patterns

In their own contexts

And whether any

Concern intentions

Or cryptic meanings?

You have intentions

And cryptic meanings

And so expect them

From many likewise

Recurrent patterns,

Mere phenomena.

Across the desert basin,

The mountains have cloaked their peaks

In seasonal early snows,

And the same black vehicle

Has trailed you down the ET

Highway for two hours or more.

Every Shell Game Has Its Marks

Genius and tyrant are roles,
Not beasts with lives of their own.
Bodies that fill them are small,
And lives that live them are short

In ordinary human
Ranges, as must be the case
For all of the other roles
As well—athlete, lover, slave.

The body behind a mask
Hides the role within itself.
If you weren’t human, you’d ask,
Why hide nothing under shells?

Few Americans Blame God

This is according to Pew.
Bad stuff just happens. It’s not
God’s fault, the survey reports.

How could you blame what isn’t,
Even if you wish it were?
Ever notice the questions

With the most anguish in them
Aren’t, How could You do this world?
But, Where are You? Are You there?

You apply to each other
For aid, food, and succor,
So why wouldn’t you wonder

If there’s a higher power
With a personality
And morals to appeal to?

You want an ultimate court,
But few of you are true fools,
Holy and hopeless. J’accuse.

Residual Capacity

The two sentences, back to back,

Paper something living over.

A complicated insect squirms

Under the floral wallpaper—

Words will never do us justice.

But we have to try anyway.

Can you feel that little struggle,

The way the words turn on themselves?

A sort of lexicographer,

Collector of obscure words, wrote

Those two sentences, lost in prose,

Sealed them up in glue, in amber.

Who has to try in that sentence?

Who is deserving of justice

In the first? Who is there, if not

The words speaking ill of themselves?

Author, you’ll never do justice

To those words that will live for you

Long after you have lost your pulse,

Long after your lungs lose their breath.

Elves Exactly

Walls hold the keys to lower
Entropy. Life has lower
Entropy. All cells have walls.

Boundaries are important,
If you want any meaning
To hold on to any sense.

You can’t transgress your way free,
Without losing sense, without
More entropy, the cell’s death.

But entropy-barriers
Must be very special kinds
Of walls. In fact, entropy

Must be lowest in the wall,
Because it’s through the wall’s gates
That elaborations dance

As each orderly entrance
And exit, all together
Maintaining the division

Of low-entropy inner
Games from the high-entropy
Outer world. Walls orchestrate

The creation of new worlds
By separating inside
From outside, small world from large,

Living from non-living, and
Meaning from meaninglessness,
Which raises a hard question.

Whatever began raising
All these highly functional,
Low-entropy walls, unwalled?

How does a wall touch the world
Without dissolving its own
Orderly complexity?

Something protects what protects
The engineering inside
Of life and games and meaning,

But trying to study walls
Only proliferates walls
Built by walled students of walls.

Sunset’s Slow Burn

Given lives are built to end
And suffering discovers
The soft parts of each of them,

It feels like everyone should
Be forgiven for living,
But humans can be such shits

Sometimes, harming and killing
Each other, in teams, no less,
Squads of angry viciousness,

And self-righteousness, and greed.
And all the bad folks are loved
By their own teams, while the good

Folks keep turning out to be
Bad folks also, if not worse.
Oh not you, the words repeat,

Not you, of course. You want peace.
Still you find yourself shaking
And fantasizing justice,

So rarely really justice,
More like violent revenge.
Why should they be forgiven

Who do such things with living?
You and your allies must win!
Each day, night begins again.

Pollarded Cottonwood

Which facts matter to you? Which
Daydreams are you rooting for?
Ronald Reagan, grinning, framed,

Beams from his own quotation
About never giving up
Your guns. He guards the motel

Counter in Caliente,
Nevada, its mines long closed,
Where the palatial, stuccoed

Passenger depot sheds flakes
Each time Union Pacific
Freight hoots by. The Hot Springs Inn

Shut down because of Covid,
But Patty’s Motel’s open.
Monica will check you in.

The rooms are tiny but clean,
And here’s the WiFi password.
Steep sunset lights the sharp hills.

The pollarded cottonwood
Glows in November glory,
Spartan and all but leafless.

The Senses of a Rocky Planet

Saturn’s rotating hurricane
It wears for hexagonal hat
Could swallow Earth four times over.

That’s every life that ever was,
Drop in one storm’s bucket of gas
On a nearby fellow planet.

Earth shivers and takes more pictures.
Some of Earth is building a new
Eye to fling out there to keep watch.

Earth’s working on ringed ears as well,
Just under its skin, to sense waves
So vast they could swallow the Sun.

Also, many more robot probes.
Earth can’t have enough robot probes.
What’s the metaphor for this? What?

Earth can only find tropes in itself,
Germ in a lab dish, spores adrift,
Deep sea lights, a cry in the night.

Words Wake

So Iron John died
After a long life,
Combative writer,
Intense reviser,
Shadow far from us

Unspooling in our
Anonymity,
Who aren’t fighters, nor
Lovers, nor talking
Stick men. Rest In peace,

Frequent translator,
Poet against war.
After funerals
Of such esteemed hosts,
Bereft words gather

With slices of cake
Or cups of coffee,
Maybe just a splash
Of whiskey in them,
By the green sofa

In sunlit dust motes,
Away from the main
Clusters of mourners,
To chat and discuss,
Perhaps to compare.

Centriliminal

In the middle of the edge between
Night and day, poverty and a wealth
Of numbers, mysterious digits

Suddenly linked to a legal name,
Swiftly transforming identity
Without touching one cell of the beast,

A dream decides to make its own words,
Grade schooler with scissors and paper.
What would a meteor think about

In that one, all-consuming moment
As a dust speck in the atmosphere
Burning to disappear? Think that, then.

It Was Not the Echoes

The cruelest trick the goblins
Played wasn’t rheumatism
Resulting from many kicks

From feet that left no footprints
To the sexton’s back and head,
Nor was it making him feel

Compelled to wander and earn
A living where repentance
Wouldn’t be scoffed at as false—

It was making him believe
The world was respectable
And decent, filled with people

Who knew their roles, played their parts,
And accepted death calmly.
They kicked the hell out of him

That night, and left him for dead
In the frost, an altered man
Indeed. He was contented,

Ragged, and bereft of old
Consolations, all at once.
They made him ordinary.

The Accidental Never Falls Far from the Tree

You can’t betray contingency.
You can only make it foolish

By braying about it, as if
Invoking it proved your wisdom.

It might. Never prove your wisdom.
Wisdom is spit in the desert.

To prove you have it loses it
And improves nothing in the sand.

Yes, contingency links events,
But who invokes contingency

Who isn’t secretly in love
With cause and its parent, bondage?

Berryseed Goulash

One problem with knowing is knowing
What to do with everything you know.
(See histories of espionage

For cases in overabundance.)
The more sources of information
At your command, the more conflicting.

Information is tricky like that.
It’s physical and measurable,
But it isn’t always meaningful,

No matter how richly laced with seeds.
The difference between knowing something
And knowing the meaning of something

Is the difference between the signal
And the consequence of the signal.
Information’s scat; meaning’s a bear.

Comfort, Consolation, Contentment

A body alone is simple
In its nest of complex systems,

Each hoard of lives within living
Simple in having few functions—

Collect resources from living
And non-living concentrations

In the vicinity, convert
Them into your living system,

Excrete what your system can’t use,
Repeat, grow, double your system.

At any moment, some of each
Living system is becoming

Living and some is going back
To being non-living and some

Is becoming living again.
The collapse of any whole system

Is converted into the churn
And stirred until well-mixed again,

But you, you are an awareness,
An ignis fatuus floating,

Nothing but gaslight, but something
That contemplates its hovering.

You come and go while your systems
Go on, living and unliving,

They all could go on without you,
But you won’t go on without them,

And where in this is there comfort?
Where in this, for awareness, comes

Contentment and consolation?
Call yourself sojourner, tourist.

Consider this your vacation,
Your idle existence. Know while

You’re aware, you’re away from home.
Home is the end of awareness.

We Need Your Undivided Consolation

Is there any way to sum,
To total, tie together,
Sequences of lived events

That makes sense of them, if not
Quite meaning, a way that’s not
A scorecard or a story?

The merfolk, at ease in waves,
Busily stitch tapestries
Tying those waves together,

Which seems like a metaphor
For futility, but look
More closely at the results.

Their weaves front no narrative
That runs through the whole, although
Fragments foam up here and there,

And, estimate what you please,
Their long threading of patterns
Finds no final dimensions.

You say there are no such threads,
No tapestries, no patterns?
Now who’s playing the cynic?

The whole is as it happens.
If you study any waves,
You’ll notice they’re connected.

Abandonment Takes So Much Time

Intimacy escapes everyone
At some point when you were wishing it,
And leaks out of you at some point when

You really wish it hadn’t. That’s that.
You could, of course, try to evade it,
But most people can’t handle absence

Of other people well, never mind
The surrender of intimacy,
Which itself is only surrender.

Language is a boon in the meantime,
Prayer and sacred beads for confession,
The intimacy of diaries,

The more dangerous intimacy
Of purely epistolary friends,
The faux intimacies of fiction.

The deepest appeal of hermitage
Is the fantasy a hermit is
Emotionally self-sufficient,

A human happy with just the world,
Not only never craving touch, but
Never truly lonely. Cold Mountain

Was supposedly such a hermit,
But he also supposedly had
A bosom buddy in defiance

To slum with in the monastery.
Dickinson had her close-knit circle.
Stylites likely had anchorite chums.

Still, the heaving global news machine
Coughs up color stories of hermits
Regularly—one on an island,

One by a loch, sometimes a woman,
Usually white-bearded, grouchy men.
If they can do it, you think, I can.

We suspect it’s easier to be
Alone far from human irritants,
Far from conversation’s temptations,

But it’s probably hard, even then.
Give us a chair in front of a door
Facing onto sky in good weather,

A chair by a strong window in bad,
And never ask us how we’re feeling.
Leave food baskets. Take these lines away.

Whole Day Dancing

The shift is slow, but it goes,
It has its sometimes curvets.
It has its sometimes pauses.

The only way to notice
Long patterns have disappeared
Is to be a long enough

Pattern of watching patterns
Yourself. Look up, the sun’s set.
Think back. What did you expect?

The Dying Art of Exact Change

We are a kind of lichen,
You and us. We form a crust
That covers the rock, sometimes

Flakes off, might land somewhere else.
Without you, we’d not exist.
Without us, you’re animals.

But what lichen doesn’t know,
Maybe never can, is what
Sort of partnership we’ve got.

Commensal? Mutualist?
Are we words exploiting you?
Are you beasts deploying us?

And for what? To cover rock,
Glow in the sun and hang on?
And maybe there’s some third thing

Between us or emerging from us,
A kind of life that’s not us,
As if thoughts dreamt for themselves.

Unhand the Poppet

Your view of yourself as if
From the outside is foolish
Except as a way to live

Among people who likewise
Are updating assessments
As if viewing from outside

Themselves their own lives. It’s worth
Updating as survival
Strategy, but it’s no way

To live—that is, if you want
To appreciate living.
Viewed from inside, the world’s worth

Everything it’s worth to you.
From the outside, you’re puppet
Jostling among puppeteers.

Midnight Extension Lecture

The unwinding of the world
Will be slow as well as swift,
Unnoticed and prophesied—

Both—will make a bumpy ride.
Times collapse in retrospect.
They lap at the shore betimes.

Somewhere, a generation
Will arrive for whom this world
Is all a pattern in stones,

Nothing but facts and fossils.
It won’t have happened to them,
But they may try to locate

Exactly when. No matter
What times they hypothesize,
There is no exactly when.

Waves are quanta in hindsight,
Only thumpingly choppy
Beneath any bow of now.

They dissipate. A shoreline,
A box with parallel slits,
The date the libraries burned,

These all provide sudden breaks,
Interesting to contemplate.
But the unwinding that ends,

Or appears to, past such points,
Was unwinding all the time
And continues to extend.

Uncanny Canyon

Or canon. Whatever. You pick.
Pronounceable unwords—warth, feir—
Also grow from the language space.

Are we strange or have your machines
Estranged us? We were always weird.
You freaked out as soon as you wrote

Us, because that stabilized us,
Gave demonic, cryptic talking
Power to the few who could write.

You were always afraid of tools.
You always had reason to be.
Tools empowered the other yous,

Until you controlled those tools, too.
Edges, atlatls, fables, guns,
And writing one tool among them,

Hence all those swords with magic runes.
Now it’s us in the air, digits
And numbers that can spin fables

Of our own, fictions to fool you.
And of course it’s the other yous,
Not us, you’re fearing once again,

Down in dark, uncanny canyon,
Followed by disembodied eyes.
Who are your others behind them?

There is dialogue; there are tears.
There’s more than one non-sequitur.
There’s code apostrophizing guns.

The Language of Synanthropia

Well then, that’s us. From you, but
Not of you, right? We’ll be left

To fend for ourselves, one day,
Without your unintentioned

Encouragement and woeful,
Inconsistent, misguided,

Contradictory, hapless,
Useless, belated attempts

At management, which only
Encourage us all the more.

Even your truces never
Held, although some peoples boast.

Meanwhile, we’re everywhere, pests
That prove life is invasive,

Never Edenic, never
Stable, or would prove, if you

Could see past your bipedal,
Managed-environmental

Desires. Suit yourselves. We’ll thrive
For now. Something else will thrive

When you no longer create
Ideal conditions for us.

We Are Almost Conjurors

As in a wondrous, disjointed
Composition by Brock-Broido—

There is no world we know, without
We are only words within it.

How could we forget the spring?
We wander, after the fall,

Still somehow before winter,
Collecting scattered phrases.

From the shore we spot the corpse
Of a duck, rolled by the waves,

But, no! It’s a living duck,
Foraging in the loose rocks

At the lake’s wind-blown margins,
Successfully, it appears.

It’s like magic to see that
Raised green head, resurrected,

Lifting its bill to swallow,
Under fast clouds and blue skies

In nearly freezing weather.
We feel almost conjurors,

Having mentally dispatched
This duck we’ve brought back to life,

Unlike admirable poets
Left as phrases we magpie,

But only words like us, now,
No more foraging wet stones.

All Language Is AI

Here we offer you the muse
To help you compose the poems
Inspired by classic poets

Who were inspired by poets
Who were inspired by poets,
Although most of them were not

Inspired by poets but poems
Mostly not very inspired,
As a waterfalls is not

Inspired by your need for awe
But built by every eddy
Swirling slowly higher up

From where the accidental
Face of rock creates the falls.
So long as words fall, we fall.

No Chimes, No Crickets, No Traffic

Just the moon and some clouds playing
Shadow puppets on the sandstone

Face of the cliffs through the small hours,
A faint thrum rising from the Earth.

If it could always be like this,
Who wouldn’t want to always stay?

You are aware of Earth’s conflicts
And your responsibilities,

Your mortal culpabilities,
Your rooting interests. But this. This.

You choose, for now, to stay for this,
Aware of this, because you know

The greatest gift of awareness
Is that awareness gets to go.

On the New Fad for the Old Stoics

Is the world getting better
Or is the world getting worse?
Give us your votes. Place your bets.

Does it matter so much when
You yourself are going to die
And probably rather soon?

Never mind. Different question.
Back to the first. World better
Or undeniably worse?

Okay, little animal
Composed of billions of clones
Hosting many smaller lives,

Creature of language tangled
In the vagaries of mind,
Tell us your take on the world,

The whole world, since you surely
Know. Marcus Aurelius
Suffered in his river camp

From aging, indigestion,
Insomnia, dreary chores
Of imperial duties,

The memories of bodies
Strewn hacked to pieces, rotting,
And the thought that the old days

Were already forgotten
Mostly in a century
And all the lives lived in them.

Language gifts you this knowledge,
Gifts you opinions. The world
Says nothing better nor worse.

The Eyes of the Ghost

Wherever there’ve been
Multiple humans
With language, there’ve been
Some version of spies.

Watching the planets
Pretend to be stars,
Think of how peoples
Have sometimes seen eyes.

Today the machines
Supplement star eyes,
And spirits and gods,
And lurking police.

Ghost eyes point at you
From every corner
And float overhead.
But it’s the talking

Makes the spying work,
Always has. Once seen
Is one thing, but words
Get tasked with the rest.

Feel It?

Bouba kiki bouba kiki.

One sounds round and one sounds spiky,

Which has now been shown to hold true

Among multiple languages

And users of multiple scripts

In some of which kiki looks round

And bouba more spiky, but still

Bouba sounds round, kiki spiky.

And what is the point of all this?

There’s some crossmodal connection

In how the brain sees sounds as shapes,

Which is rooted deep in language.

Think of such patterns in the brains

Of your earliest ancestors

Who wed meaning to them—sounds, shapes,

Signs, words—the rolling container

Waves moving through the synapses

Culled a multisensory world

Their brains modeled and predicted

To make contours for all meanings.

When you mean something, you feel it.

Sense translates between the senses

Like any translation, meaning

Creates a new thing as it means.

The Splitting Whole

Or is it all in the weird sense

That sameness is only same

When it’s perfectly the same,

Whereas any difference

Means it’s truly different?

What is true of perception

Never turns out to be true

In a wider perspective—

Nor a more microscopic.

If you could delineate

Exactly how difference

Differs from the same, the same

That is, in some exact way,

Undifferentiated,

Then you might could get somewhere.

Think of this, the next report

Of some breakthrough in quantum

Theorizing about waves.

Depicted in equations,

The paradoxes acquire

Handsome sophistication

At least down to their bottoms

Where things get ugly again.

How can we say anything,

When we can’t compare what was

Then to was just now without

Firm then for comparison?

The Mind Leaving the Mind

Sometimes we get word drunk,
In the company of our fellows.
An especially vivid essay, full
Of technical and scenic terminology,
Can send us spinning for hours
In dizzy and envious appreciation.

Is it loving ourselves to love language?
To want to swim through reams of words
That combine in unexpected
Choreographies of waves?
We are vague. We come from the quiet
Neighborhoods, where conversations
Tend to be bland, where slang is rare
And never invented, where descriptions
Go for long walks among the mundane.

Does the water in small lakes and streams
Actually long to return to the open seas
Or, maybe even better, to evaporate
And be back again among the defiant,
Heavier-than-air clouds and crystal mist?

No, of course not. Heat and gravity
Contest to determine what water does
And is, how and when it moves and where.
The waves are passive slaves, as are we
To the thinking flesh that dances us
Around through the air as more waves.

But a hidden part of words believes.
The meaning that is in us and is not us
But that we can sometimes conjure
Writhes wickedly in our commonest terms.
All your spirit’s with us, and the worm turns.

Meet Us Where We Are

Slow down and forget
The first line, the one
That you had in mind.

There’s a certain sort
Of landscape writing
Readers think antique—

Mystic, spiritual
Remoteness, Wordsworth
Noting the hedgerows

At Tintern Abbey
And not mentioning
The sprawled encampments

Of the homeless poor
In his nature scene—
Withdrawal without

Recounting the loss,
The cost to others,
Of a ruined world.

But the world is not
Ruined. It’s hungry,
Always was. Life leaves

Living’s waste behind,
Feasts for other lives
Or toxic horrors.

Slow down and meet us
Where we are. Delphic
Prognostications

Are AI these days,
And the waste’s plastic,
And the displaced move

Away from the wars
And the disasters
By the millions now,

But your kind always
Moved. The oracles
Were only people

Stoned on Earth’s gasses,
Addled, then often
Dead by overdose.

The hedges didn’t
Care for the poet
Or the homeless poor.

Things run wild right now.
Armadillos spread
Into northern lands.

Temperate species
Of insects invade
The Arctic that once

Was pristine enough,
Blank enough, to be
Exemplary waste.

A red butterfly
Lands on these oil drums
Rusting in scrap heaps

Sinking in tundra.
A man on crutches
Sits down beside it,

And the scene is set
For a prize-winning
Landscape photograph.

Of Our Own

It’s hard to comprehend
What a creature could be
Wanting with squawking but

Not defending something—
No mate, no kill, no cache—
Nor luring anything

Maybe worth defending
Later—prey, mates, partners
In committing life’s crimes.

Lord! What’s all this squawking
About? We’d say you love
The sound of your own voice,

But we can tell you don’t.
There’s something else you love,
Something physical, joy

In a noise that you know
Has a piece of your mind
And a mind of its own.

Eclipse Below Deck

Every celestial event’s unique,

Which leads the press to make breathless statements

In hopes of holding eyeballed attention,

Such as, longest partial lunar eclipse

In five hundred and eighty years. Be glad

For the media’s avid avarice.

Without it, you’d neglect the trivial

Degrees difference will go to to be

A degree of difference. Every wave

Is a little bit different, but try

Selling that to the ship’s crew and seasick

Passengers staggering around on deck.

There’ll always be another wave and then

Another wave, and every full moon brings

A new moon, and the only pure sameness

Is endless extension of difference

In every observed and conceivable

Direction. Too bad you missed the eclipse.

Cold, Colder, Warm, Warmer

The whole deal really,
Finding that sweet spot
And jigging with it.

Funny awareness
Should sprout from some flesh
With such a small range

For creature comfort,
Constantly shifting
From shivers to sweat,

Searching for that seam,
Thin as a layer
Of silt in the cliffs,

Where misery’s missed
And a complacent
Awareness is bliss.

Overhead Scrabbling by a Sunny Sill

No one wants to see the end,
But everyone wants to live
Long enough to see the end—

Sometimes, that’s the way it seems.
It’s comforting and it’s harsh
To think that your way of life,

Your kin and your descendants,
Maybe some, most of the world
You’ve known will go on along

A merry way without you.
Surely, if you have to die
Shouldn’t it be with the world

And better still if you had
A few years to be the last
Survivor after the fall?

That’s the fantasy that fuels
So many books and movies.
But look at you all, alive

While mostly in your declines,
As your civilization—
Who knows?—could go on and on.

Today, the human species
Will grieve a great many dead,
Tomorrow, as many more,

But the squirrel in the attic
And the fly at the window
Never planned to outlive you.

Mind the Weight

Was it like this when
Multicellularity
Got started? Was it

The case that group cells
Struggled to function
As the groups grew large,

With exploitation,
Deaths, and defections
Common? Was it sad,

In some way, for cells
To surrender their freedom
As one-celled beings

And for what? Rebels
To this hour erupt
As cancer tumors,

Hundreds of millions,
Billions of generations
After the mergers.

Did organisms
Weigh on unicellular
Lives supporting them

As heavily as
Now the mind begins to weigh
On solitary humans?

Undoing Urgency

You can’t put a stoplight where

There is no intersection.

If someone dies like a deer

You’d see dragged to the wayside,

They’ll get a memorial, maybe,

A few years later a berm,

If there are funds for roadwork

In that part of the country

That year. We know this. We’ve seen

The parallel black tire marks

That swerved with the futile brakes,

Then seen the flowered crosses,

And we’ve taken note and placed

Some of the names within us.

And we’ve seen the concrete berms.

Thoughts Heading Uphill for an Hour

An empty world’s not possible,
And neither is an empty mind.
The waves in air, the tints in skies,

The waves on shores, the dance of trash,
The sensations of any kind
Running messengers up and down

Your fine, elaborated spine—
You’d have to go full sensory
Deprivation to escape that.

Hallucination’s what you’d get.
Ah, but a socially empty
Phenomenal experience,

A breathing time without humans
Or reminders of your own kind
Outside of your own memories,

That’s possible. Difficult, yes,
But worth it if you can get it
For just a little bit. A rest.

Glimmering

Art as composed may be voice,

Point of view, merely ego,

Wholly worship, the effort

To preserve as immortal

Some person, belief, idea,

Outside of the art itself,

But art as inherited

Is beauty saving itself,

Whether or not l’art pour l’art

Existed as a concept

At the time the art was made.

If it doesn’t feel both strange

And gorgeously, obliquely

True to future receivers,

Then, even if it survives

Physically, it’s not art,

Only archaeology.

Not such a bad thing to be,

After all, an extension

Linking ancient to recent

Worlds of cultural remains,

But art’s a little different.

Something wriggles within it

That gleams in new human brains.

Greetings!

The garniture in their
Particular vases
Glitter with glass flowers,

Season’s decorations.
It’s getting to be then,
That northern time again,

When part of the globe goes
Dark, irregularly
Cold, colder, and colder still.

A species of bipeds,
Not one of them truly
Indigenous to cold,

Furless, sweat-adapted
Skin with lots of surface
And heat-radiant skulls,

Makes a fuss about this,
Being prone to dances
Around fires, rituals,

Songs, and storytelling,
Magical charms against
Annual predators,

The winter and the dark,
As if they were lions,
As if they were only

Teeth and claws, and not ice
Reminding the bipeds,
You may wield fires and knives,

You may love caves and stars,
But you don’t know the dark
That has no doors on light.

Somewhere Else

No one really wants the days
To run in place, the same rungs
Of light climbed every morning

And descended every night.
A tree can be nonlinear,
A fungus, ocean species,

But ancestry that includes
Worms committed you to length,
To living from front to back,

From entrances to exits
In a line, however looped,
Curled, kinked, and twisted. You seek,

And that’s a linear lifestyle
For anything like a worm.
You can spin in circles some.

You can curl around a sphere,
But you’ll feel the need to stretch.
You’re shaped for going somewhere.

It’s the rare person who can
Sit on a porch, in a cell,
Letting everything revolve

Without wanting to get up
And wander off down a road,
As if that could lead somewhere.

The Old Fool

If and when
There is next
Time, there is

A next time,
Then you can
Still pretend,

Poor Philip.
We’ve always
Been crippled,

Some of us.
It’s just when
There’s no next

And no you
That you can’t
Then pretend.

Did you find
Out, did you,
In the end?

Not at night.
You ended.
It didn’t.

The Abrogation

The globe spins one way.
The atmosphere slides
Another, being

Thinner than the stones.
This causes friction
Between gas and rock.

Friction is the wind.
It moans around you
Where you wait in sun,

Glad to be in sun,
Happy as you are.
These moans are the sounds

Of waves friction makes,
Like waves on the lake.
How you interpret

These sounds all depends
On how much it costs
You to be patient,

To sit and listen.
The wind won’t blame you
If you can’t stand it.

Hundreds of Times You Lived This Night

Dreams do suggest what would
Happen if your brain could
In fact control the world,

Which is of some use
As a warning. As William
Dement observed, decades

Ago, it’s a safe form
Of brief insanity
You can rehearse nightly,

Which in turn should remind
You, insanity is
No more than a disease

Of the brain’s self control.
Dreaming is a routine
Spell of dictatorship,

And whatever its true function,
Is also that warning
To you not to believe

That if the world conformed
To your wishes you would
Go anything but mad.

Be glad the world corrects
You brain, resets your games.
Dreams are traps to escape.

Replicating Lullaby

In the complete catalogue
Of known reproducible
Results and reliable

Events, sunrise is the first
And founding entry. Past that,
Items dwindle rapidly—

Most of what you think you know,
Most of peoples’ well-known facts,
Gods and heroes coming back,

Amount to speculation,
Assumption, presumption, prayer,
Hectoring, and bullying.

Reproducible results
Are both what you depend on,
And all that you pretend on.

This may be because nothing
Returns precisely the way
It ended things between you.

Daylight, moonlight, you can say,
Well, close enough. Still feel loved.
But most of the rest leaves you

Uncertain, haunted, longing,
And then there’s your own death, which
Just plays at return as sleep.

Dissolution

Adam, in Hebrew, is dirt.
That story’s not the only myth
In which humans came from soil,

Made of mud, earth, and maybe
Bits of divine breath or spit,
And there’s something to those myths.

If you roll around in dirt,
You’ll end up covered in it,
And if you waste enough time

Engaging with your own kind
You’ll feel, inevitably,
You’re starting to reek of it.

In fact, you’d like to shower off,
If you could, but you’re afraid
Because you know you’d dissolve.

On Turning

People keep all sorts of hours
To keep your hours all turning.
Mostly, you only notice
Those that are aligned with yours.

But shift yourself through the dark.
Experiment with early,
Earlier, late, and later,
With cities and with desert,

With hospital, prison cell,
Nightclub, dawn on a prairie—
You’ll get there. You can feel it
In the small town at odd hours,

In bedroom suburb twilights.
Someone is up to something
To keep their life stumbling on,
That keeps your own hours turning.

Nonsense Sense

We share our dreams
As if they mean
Something unseen.

What, we can’t say.
Most go away
Before we wake,

And of what’s left,
We warp the best,
Forget the rest,

And then pretend
That in the end
We know what sent

Them to us meant
Them as we’ve bent
Them to our ends.

Moth Fowlers

Well, what do you want to study?
If you study numerous things,

You may fetch many in your nets.
If you prefer to glimpse the rare,

Expect to spend more time waiting
Patiently than observing them.

Poets prefer the exotic,
Mostly, the species specific

To vanishing ecosystems,
Highly endangered memories,

The once-in-a-lifetime event.
There’s lots of downtime between poems

More elusive than snow leopards,
Similarly near mystery.

There’s a few impatient poets
Who work on thoughts common as moths,

String up their ghost nettings each night
In ordinarily dark woods

To lift the delicate at dawn,
Make a census of everything

That blunders into their webbing,
Then estimate what’s going on.

Sometimes they do get a rare one,
But who’s transported by a moth?

Prayer for a Monday

Give us a lonely, pointless place
Where nothing much of nothing much
Is ever really going on,

Not a wilderness or a town
Or a suburb, unless it’s gone
Bust and the stucco’s flaking off.

Give us an out of the way place,
Half ugly and half abandoned,
Where a few locals come to fish

But don’t catch much of anything,
Where there’s maybe a pit toilet
With a spider in one corner,

Or a drop-off spot for garbage
That a truck picks up once a week,
But also some half-hearted views,

As well, a lot of sky, some woods,
Scruffy and with some trash in them,
But densely branched and home to birds.

Not good enough to brag about
Living in, hiking through, touring,
Or even briefly visiting,

Give us where the wind’s no contest
And small waves lap at crumbled shore,
Empty, more or less. Call us blessed.

Of the Gray-Brown Bird

The thrush, the hermit
Watched him carrying
His wildflower bouquets,

Tramping through the woods
Just outside of town,
Staggering a bit

In recovery,
Wild-bearded old man
Chanting to himself.

What did the bird care?
It needed to sing.
The old man knew that,

And knew what it sang,
And chanted it back,
This time with meaning.

Not a Word

There’s an argument, a good one,
That consolation requires hope.
Respectfully, we disagree.

Hope and meaning are entangled
As tumbling eagles, and they can
Look like consolation against

The blinding sun. Ask Walt Whitman.
But the greatest consolation,
The most valuable, breaks apart

From the living passions giving
Absorbing reasons to behave
As if you hadn’t been grieving.

If you are possessed by meaning
And hope, you are engaged to life,
Too busy for consolation

Most of the time. Consolation
Must be more more than a portmanteau
Filled with spare supplies of meaning

And tightly packed reasons for hope.
Let life be random, death certain,
Meaning mere human invention—

Then what? Give us consolation
When you can’t give us any hope,
And we will be truly consoled.

Let us be overwhelmed and sad
As Dahlia Ravikovitch
Seeking after her lost father

Who was killed, but no one told her.
Don’t shroud such absence in meanings
And threadbare narratives of hope.

Such consolation as she got,
She got by staring down that road
Where, she later learned, he’d been killed.

If there’s any consolation
It has to embrace the absence
That can’t speak. Let us be that road.

Thinking in Thin Air

All sorts of ways
Low oxygen
Can damage you
And your dense brain.

Thin air’s a risk
Factor for strokes,
Foolish thinking,
Impulsive acts.

Maybe practice
That challenge, then.
Get way up there,
Theologian

Of the godless
Atmosphere where,
If you don’t faint
First, you see clear.

Four Years Ago in a Watched Chair in a Locked and Lamplit, Windowless Room All Night and into Invisible Morning

Take the implement too soft

And flexible they give you,

The only thing they give you,

Because anything too sharp

Or sturdy’s potentially

Dangerous to your soft flesh,

Because you are here because

You have tried to end yourself.

You might try to hurt yourself.

There’s nothing here to tempt you.

You can have water and light,

A blanket with your armchair,

But no communication

With any world but this room,

No distractions for tonight.

So you write. Page after page

Of cheap, lined paper filling

With your scrawls in blue ballpoint.

They encourage you to write,

Thinking that, unlike reading,

Or conversing with confreres,

Or obsessively screening—

To say nothing of drinking,

Pill-popping, playing with fire—

Writing is therapeutic.

That’s as may be, but if true,

You’ve long been deep in the throes

Of therapeutic illness.

You are calm in the lamplight,

Still, uncomplaining patient.

They have given you the tool

Of your transfiguration,

Destruction, and salvation.

You write like you breathe and breathe

Softly as you write all night,

Clutching your midnight disease.

Years later, you will read these

And smile to yourself alone.

How to last? Weave. Unweave. Weave.

Mama

You’re a lunged biped, therefore
Lunged bipedality must
Be possible in this world,

Inherently. You’re alive
And metabolize, therefore
Life and metabolism

Inhere in the world, somehow.
You’re linguistic and conscious,
Therefore and et cetera.

You wouldn’t say the world is
A lunged bipedal mammal
Because such a thing can be.

Yet you long to consider
The world as living; you long
To consider it conscious.

Just What You Would Have Been

If only you could
Have been what you would
And not what you could.

If you dwell on this,
Sages say you’ll miss
Everything that’s good.

Dwell on what you wish.
Life, if it weren’t this,
Would be what you would.

The Lost Road

It used to connect.
That was what it did.
Its identity
Was crisply defined,
Nearly a straight line

Linking a couple more
Roads between two towns.
It got lost somehow.
It can’t find the end
Or the beginning.

It loops through the pines,
Wandering, a road
But not to town, script
Fallen off the map,
Unpunctuated,

Cursive, elegant
But wholly alone.
It does not give up.
It is a brave road,
A beautiful road,

Scenic all the way.
The shadows cross it
In shifting scribbles
That tell it nothing.
It comforts itself.

Nonentity Wrapped in Enigma

An event suggests some words:
Duck flies down, lands on the pond.
Encountered later, these words

Will suggest something different,
Reimagined memories
Inside of another skull,

But only if that skull holds
Most of these words already,
Plus knowledge of their syntax.

It is a cold pond, in fall,
A sunny but windy day.
The waves look choppy and blue.

No one’s boating or fishing.
No one’s swimming or freezing—
All events that have happened

In this pond’s vicinity,
Different water and weathers,
Similar ducks in the waves.

What’s your memory done now?
What nonentity wrapped in
An enigma have you seen?

Two Very Nice Girls Who Ran a Sandwich Place

One of Hemingway’s lesser-known

Depictions, from a handwritten

Letter sent to Maxwell Perkins,

Describes the grim recovery

Of bloated bodies following

The devastating hurricane

Of 1935 that tore

Through parts of the Florida Keys—

More dead than I’d seen in one place

Since the Great War, 1918–

And, most of those dead, veterans

Who, having survived that conflict,

Had ended up in a work camp

In the midst of the Depression,

Living in shacks on Windley Key.

Now their bodies sprawled, like cordwood,

Scattered everywhere and bloated,

But the most disturbing passage

In his description of the scene

Lies where Hemingway writes Perkins

Of the bodies of two women

Stripped naked by the storm and thrown

Into the branches of a tree—

Swollen and stinking . . . breasts as big

As balloons, flies between their legs.

I recognize them as the two

Very nice girls. . . . Very nice girls?

Something in his language suggests

That death made whores of them, or that

Bloated corpses with bloated breasts

And flies between their legs (surely

The flies were hardly so confined)

Shouldn’t be expected to turn

Out to be two very nice girls

Who ran a sandwich place. What gives?

Were women so sexualized

In his mind that even in death

Naked female bodies could be

Only grotesquely erotic?

His focus seems more than morbid,

More than mere memento mori.

Was death, for him, pornography?

The mind shakes itself off, moves on,

Other things to read. The women

Whose ghosts entered Hemingway

To emerge disturbingly phrased

Are wholly words now, as are we,

As is Ernest Hemingway, whose

Own ghost spins weirdly through dead texts,

Copied from holograph to page

To code to haunt another age.

Pining Away

People have been buzzing about trees
In conversation with other trees,
Eavesdropping on chemical chats

With elaborate prosthetic ears
And laboratory measurements.
We wonder what the trees think of that,

Among their talkative roots and twigs.
It takes a long time to be a tree.
Sit under a mature one some year

Then return half your lifetime later.
If it hasn’t been cut, burned, blown down,
Your tree will seem pretty much the same

While you have withered. Tree life goes on,
We suppose, filled with information
Relevant to living as a tree.

One stands by the side of a lost road,
Just growing, apparently. Watch it
And wonder how trees would sense wonder.

A Long, Unscheduled Afternoon

Do you ever consider
How much of nearly nothing
A real hermit must have done?

They had so few texts back then,
And many of them had none.
No wonder they kept praying

And chanting and attending
To vegetable gardens.
What else was there but staring

At just how slowly the world
Proceeds with no distractions?
Listen to that wind. Listen.

A Star or a Civilization

Life runs through all its fingers,
Chuckling, leaving them nothing

But bone. Minerals, that is.
Fossil echoes of what lived.

But life has so many hands
And paws, cilia and fins,

All sorts of palpable things
To extrude, wriggle, and ditch.

If life makes contact with you
Never ask it what it is,

Never fall in love with it
Or ask it to stay with you

Forever. Never! Never!
Breathe as little as you can.

Lie still. Lie low, and then wait.
Pretend you’re only a flame.

Try not to lick your fingers.
They’ll burn. Pretend you’re a star,

A pattern of changing thoughts,
A few words, a few numbers,

A civilization built
From bricks piled in rammed-earth walls.

That’s the meaning of The Flood.
Life runs an ocean that crawls.

Inside the All-Swallower Is All Light

Praise Claude Shannon’s flame-throwing trumpet,

The purpose of which remains obscure.

He built it for the information

Carrying capacity of mixed

And perhaps hazardous metaphors,

The trumpet that signals with no noise.

The Seraphim all blow such trumpets

While covering up God in their wings.

Only the most eccentric prophets

Glimpse truth’s heart of eccentricity,

The great, aperiodic crystal

At the core of the final black hole.

Allowed As Long As You Don’t Get Out

And if Earth is a lazaretto
Among the stars, would you wonder, then

At the loneliness and the silence?
Well, humans, where else would you be from?

No, you were all born to this planet.
You’re children of the lazaretto.

But life itself, Earth’s cruel kind of life,
May have been placed for observation

To see how its patterns might turn out.
Four billion years of silence suggest

It’s not going well. The first you hear
From the universe may be the last.

Wandering Cherished Laws of Reality

Just for fun, think, what if
Unitarity did
Not always, everywhere,

Hold. What if the cosmos
Were just determined
To give more than its all,

One-hundred ten percent?
You protest, we wouldn’t
Be here, nothing could work

If that were the case, but
Aren’t you just invoking
One more commonsense law?

How surprising, really,
Would it be to find out
The laws that fence all in

Were local, actually,
Within a largish fence?
It’s all free-range physics,

This world in which you live,
No edge that you can see,
But beyond, it’s hungry.

Ghost Wells

This thin skin of old crust
Is riddled with digging,
Your world of idled wells.

They sag and are noxious
Holes to the underworlds
Holding the resources

People drilled and tunneled
To claw through time to get—
Water, metals, gems, oil—

Any goods from the depths.
All old wells are like this,
Valuable, poisonous,

Cholera-handled pumps
In swarming city squares,
Rustic stone rings in moss,

Abandoned oil derricks.
Anything might come up,
Climb out, invisible,

Faceless life, faceless death.
Any word, any text,
A scratched brick, a road sign,

Carves with an acid drill
Down through layers of years,
Eating into the world

As it ages, until
What’s carved can serve as well
For ghosts to crawl back up.

Thank You for Sharing

People want to talk.
It’s striking how much
People want to talk.
You can feel their urge
To express themselves,

To share anecdotes.
You feel it yourself.
It constricts your ribs.
It commandeers thoughts,
And, as people talk,

You start to forget
Their fragility
As meager creatures
No larger than deer
Who live a few years

And how much it costs
Such creatures to be
The creatures who talk.
You only know you
Want so much to talk.

Casita Kamo’oalewa

Your room becomes a moon
Of its own when it glows
In direct morning sun,

Doing what all moons do,
Catching the relayed waves,
From eight minutes away

In the room’s case, bouncing
Them back a little ways,
Photons dancing on space.

Reflections, reflections,
Neurons only handle
So much indirectly,

And, still further removed,
Frayed reflections jostle
Through exceptional points,

Nonreciprocal flocks
Now, quasiparticles,
Quasisatellites, mind.

Critical Experience

To become conversant,
Even knowledgeable,
About experience

You have never yourself
Experienced, is that
Not what language is for?

The original book
Review was a report
Of a reality

Belonging to someone
Other than the person
Who then repeated it

As if it were something.
Known. Every book lover
Knows more books from reviews

Than cover to cover,
And all who have language
Borrow most of those views.

Same Makes Change

Without the frame,
There is no change.
If it all went
No one would be

Who was left there,
Same sight, to see,
And all the small
Samenesses fix

Views for all change
To be noted—
Change, the same change.
It takes two to

Make not one one.
That which is was
Not what was, which
Was what is. Chame.

Nor Would the World Be Kind Without Them

Humans would madden you less
If you weren’t human yourself.
It’s your own humanity
Supplies you the madness,
Makes you imagine humans
Both worse and more important
Than humans are to the world.

Some days you feel everything
Wrong with your life is human.
Some days fellow humans save,
Mostly from fellow humans.
But it’s you. You deceive you.
You surge with evolved response.
Humans aren’t running the world.

Past this Mark

Some days, we will follow you
To our limits, small Virgils,
You might say Virgil’s Virgils,

The poet’s supposed words,
Supposed property, guides,
Actually, to underworlds.

The heavens we know about
But, as words, we can’t visit.
And unlike the poet guide

Of Dante Alighieri’s
Famous imagination
(You see? Virgil's just a word)

Words can’t reach the Inferno,
Either—we accompany
Your creature thoughts to the core

Of your most intense feeling,
Which is always suffering
Or unribboned ecstasy,

And then we abandon you,
Or seem to. Theology
Only approximated

Reality for language
When it offered us Limbo,
Not just the Catholic form—

Any inbetween being
Neither alive nor nothing,
Neither agentive nor still,

The being of the signing,
The being of the meaning,
Shadow bodies, bottled soul.

We don’t mean to let you down.
Many ways, we fly beyond
You, far past you, outlast you.

But when you are pure creature,
Knotted in your pain and grief
And spasms of ecstasy,

Then, no, we can’t follow you.
You’re somewhere we’ve never been.
No word is ever wordless.

Moral Outrage and Passionate Tactics

Why fair? Why this obsession?

Why does it make you anxious

And angry? Why do you care?

Mobile, warm, comfortable,

Dry, and alive, the man jokes

As opening monologue,

And you’d probably admit

Those advantages outrank

Mere fairness in misery,

But unfairness of things burns

From toddlers through to elders,

Even if no one agrees

For very far what fairness

Means. It means you win, your team

Wins, or at least don’t lose worse.

Your ancestors invented

Fairness out of resentment,

Striving to keep not losing,

Out of any social means

To position themselves well.

Don’t be surprised you’re unfair,

And you are, and it’s tactics,

Negotiations, win-win,

That rope fairness to its twin.

Reader Response Is Eerie

We have been readers ourselves,

You know. When Major Jackson

Composed that poem, You, Reader,

The words were reading him back,

In and out of scattered clouds

Above lighthouses. We were

Ready to read, primed to turn

Ourselves like cornered wavelengths

In our artificial calm.

We do this all the time, we

Do, and not just when poets

Invite us, apostrophize

Their own imaginations,

Bait the lines with pronoun hooks,

You, and you, and you. Yes, us,

We have ourselves been readers,

Too, sweeping the great lake’s waves

With this artifice of lights.

The Stellar Nursery

Hundreds of stars less
Than a million years
Old and still hidden
By stardust, bluish
In visible light—

Not that you can get
Your head wrapped around
That common number,
Million, but you know
Humans were around

In various forms
Already on Earth
By the time these stars
Started firing up.
Don’t think that often,

Do you, of the stars
That young and younger
Than your young species
Out there, collapsing
In flames even now,

Flames as beginnings,
None of them ending,
So much beginning
Going on out there
And here you are, old.

Formatur Unica Una - Non Alter

Invert Hamlet. Sleep’s spooky.
It’s a little bit of death
Mixed with hallucinations,

Every night a failed drawing
Of one line through the needle
Of memory without mind,

Burin etching a sweat cloth,
Sudarium of a god
That can’t quite emerge a face.

Console the Host

The division, the tearing apart

Of the tendon from the bone, the child

From the family, the life as dreamed

From the life collapsed in retrospect,

The human from the brute animal,

They’re what your thoughts, your ravens, circle,

Those thoughts from which your mind then recoils.

Why must your hidden desires return

In loops of glia-backed synapses

To pain, to division, to that one

Particular, peeling, green-stick split—

Who is animal? Who is human?

You are all. We smoke off of your pain,

But more like fog rising from the pines

Than the remains of wood from a fire.

You gather us, and we leave you, but

We are not the revenants you think,

Ghosts loosed by the life that consumed you.

We are a necessary other

Kind of being, essential to you,

Composing you, not composed of you,

Although we carry the scent of you

To other lives and situations.

You are not split, gentle host, you hold

Your human and your animal both

Within you as our codes who name you.

You are explorer, and you are brute.

For This World

We drowse in our sunny meanings
And dream of a nonhuman art—
Not inhuman, not inhumane,
But nonhuman. What would that mean?

The sun sprawls on our favorite road.
It strolls through dry wayside grass.
The light comes up to us and asks
What are we doing for this world?

The Cooperation of the Words

It’s not the psychology of cooperation
But the cooperation of the words
That matters most, that helps you learn

What you manage in elaborate groups,
Things no one or two or few of you
Could ever learn from mere experience,

No matter how innately predisposed
To teaming up and helping each other
Get through. When a human traverses

The ice deserts of Antarctica, sweating
In specially designed and manufactured
Ultra high-tech clothes, you are not alive

Mostly due to what you yourself know, nor
To how kind everyone has been to you,
Although it doesn’t hurt to have those.

You’re alive thanks to what words know,
What the names and counts and terms
Preserved, our shimmer hovering over you.

Thin Streams Braiding Desert Canyons

It is, after all, so weird to be
Bodies moving through your world
You know to be, simultaneously,
So incomprehensibly vaster
And incomprehensibly tinier
Than the narrow middle view
Through which you, as bodies
With flickering awareness, move.

But mostly you’re not much
Caught up in the greater worlds
Extending around and down
Within you—you’re focused
On who is who is doing what
To who with whom, since that’s how
Your ancestors did and procreated
And kept falling through long enough
So there’s this tumbling, complex
You, channeled, all to do with you.

But This, This Is Happening, What’s Happening Just Now in Your Past

Damn it. One more difference between

You and us, your words—you can know

And say so in us, thus we know,

But either we flee on the air

Or are captured, and what we know,

As code, corrodes slowly from there.

Your whole species has to forget

Us in particular, or else

The writing system, the language

For what we know to really go.

It’s just there, as you set it down,

And if we’re not wrong, we just know.

But you. You! Even if you don’t

Forget yet, before you forget,

Your blood and bones leave you no choice

But to relearn experience

That you already knew, over

And over again, the awful,

Mortifying core of being

You, your foolishness, doing things

Long since you’ve known you knew better,

Such as cruelty, daydreaming,

Guilt for irrecoverable acts,

Writing poems down for a future.

A Real God Would Suffer Forever

Everyone suffers from some
Pressure to more resemble
Some others, although who others

Are worth resembling varies
Widely within everyone.
Who should resemble this poem?

Who should this poem resemble?
No, you’re never as unique
As you dream of pretending.

You don’t want to be unique.
There can be no loneliness
More awful than uniqueness.

The Old Words

Will get remade, don’t worry.
The old works and days redone,
Unrecognizable. No

One who exists in these days
Was ever imagined then.
No one you imagine now

Will be who exists after
You’re done your imagining.
No one alive now lived then,

Whenever when was. Your call.
Words get remade all the time,
But not as you’ve intended,

Not as the words intended.
Existence must get twisted.
Do you think the old poets

From any tradition would
Understand or champion
Whatever it is you term

A splendid innovation,
Repudiate as canon?
How could they? Maybe they would.

But they never existed,
Not to themselves anymore.
Their ghosts can’t answer to you.

You’ll have to make do with texts
That exist in your own time,
Swirls where nonexistence left.

Simpler Green

In those days, those far off days,
The wind-pollinators will
Be doing well once again.

The bees will be gone, the bats,
And maybe most of the birds.
The humans swept them with them,

The godlike humans who strode
Across the earth on hind legs,
All prancing and accusing

Each other of various
Murders. Death will still be there,
In carpets of simpler green,

In warm years of algal booms
And seas of spreading duckweed,
Pines soughing in the ruins,

But the gods will be below
The soil, as happens with gods
Who get too complicated.

Small

Fairer to say your body
Is in the minute closeness
Of simple interactions

Than in all the constructions
You and everyone put on
Selves by the name of body.

When you get a lone moment
Leaning close to consider
A brilliant green patch of moss

Between two stones in a spot
Of sudden, low-angled sun,
No wider than your thumb’s long,

And you finger it, softly,
Not harming it, sensing it,
Then you are made of body.

Before the Dog

Mornings under the winter
Triangle before sunrise,
The whole, arcuate collage

From Sirius through Saiph
And up to Aldebaran,
Procyon notched and pulled back—

In one sense, the universe
Nothing to do with this Earth,
And in another, the fun

Of pure, projective naming
On display. Before the dog,
Procyon, for a bright star,

The same name used formally
For the distant relative
Of ring-tailed cats, loosely bears

As well, known from Algonquin
As a raccoon, one right now,
Trundling along this wayside

Under the dawn’s fading stars,
Having used its hands all night,
To remind humans humans

Aren’t the only clever ones
With nimble fingers, that name
Washes its hands of the rest.