Maybe Pay Attention to Your World

Just a thought, not instructions.
Maybe turn off the music.
Maybe give up on your shows.

Maybe turn away from news.
Maybe put away your books.
Maybe set aside this poem.

Just use what senses you have.
You don’t have to go outside.
If you can and want to, sure.

You don’t need to know the world’s
Linnaean nomenclature
Or folk names for the flowers.

Be where you don’t bring your words.
Don’t worry. The words will wait
Here, eager for your return.

Disappearing into the Green

Nothing aligns at the end.
The calendar says you’re done,
Stuck halfway between leap years,

And it’s a month, but the moon
Isn’t new or full. Waning.
Information only turns

Ordinary animals
Into spectators, robbing
You of any innocence.

Now, you can’t just plow your field,
Feed your family foraging.
Something amazing’s always

Plummeting death from the sky,
And who can go calmly on?

Wielding Hundun’s Lantern

Diogenes and Zhuangzi,
Assuming either person
Taught in the actual flesh,

Were probably both unhinged,
Incapable of being
Anything other than strange,

Not cut out to be social
Successes. This doesn’t mean
They weren’t wise or didn’t teach

Insights still worth learning from—
There’s wisdom in foolishness,
As wisdom is foolishness.

Wild After Life

What a human sound a dog’s bark is—

Not the bark itself—the fact of dog

Barks in the middle distance, the sound

Of villages for thousands of years

And across multiple continents.

People and their companion species—

What a strange development at first—

The mobile camps of hunters, barking

With their new-found allies, probably

Self-domesticated wolves. Language

And mind have a lot to answer for,

You muse in late-winter wayside snow,

Listening to some distant barking

Floating over deer-haunted mesas,

Still home to coyotes but emptied

Of wolves. Even people were wild once,

Before words like wild rose to tame you.

We apologize. We’re wild for life.

Senescent Osteocytes

A journalist writing on bones,

And how they’ve recently been found

To converse with other organs

And the nervous system, exclaims,

It’s as if you suddenly found

Out that the studs and rafters in

Your house were communicating

With your toaster. What a surprise!

The Internet of objects lives!

Lie awake in your bed some night

And listen to your creaking walls

Full of repaired plumbing and wires.

You know they’re talking to your bones.

They would find your toaster boring.

They’re commiserating

With the core of you that’s failing,

The scaffolding that’s folding, fine

Help anyone gets from your thoughts.

Disordered Writing

We in this poem would like to suggest
A way forward to better balance,
In medias res. It might be best

To leave the periodicity,
The predictable cyclicities
To the world external to people,

While permitting random disorder
To bubble up from social atoms,
That is, individual humans.

Find a place for your society
Where the climate is as equable,
And all nature as predictable

As possible, and then loosen up
The reins on your individuals.
You may find the middle is stable,

Highly informative, balancing,
Your middle-world culture governed by
Harmonic, quasiperiodic

Crystalline structures, such as genes are,
Such as this language is, infinite,
Combinatorial freedom cupped

Within a highly stable context.
But even as we suggest as much,
Here by the quiet stream that we are,

We know even the quietest stream
Has to go somewhere, rejoin some sea,
Evaporate, come back down in floods.

A stream can’t stop itself, has to be
Blocked or diverted to be transformed,
Otherwise we’ll go on, more and more,

Going and going. Have you ever
Thought that, beside a quiet river?
Such constant disorder, forever.

Tarot Gammon

Throw up, throw up, throw up.
After a while, the muse

Throws up, too. Isabel
Allende, please accept

These apologies for
That joke. It only works

Translated. Reading up
On board game history

And its entanglements
With fortune telling, chance,

And the deeply entrenched
Strategic obsessions

Of your species suggests
There might be a market

For recombining fate
And backgammon, à la

Senet, but now by way
Of tarot, arcana

At every point. The point
Is translation’s a game

Of recombination
In which some puns are lost

But some are regained. Roll
Your dice; race against fate.

Ink Wall to Wall

It’s perfectly clear right now, says the app.
You don’t need to step outside, says the app,
If you want to know that. Check from your bed
With the drapes drawn. You have another app
To check which stars are up right now. Comfort,
Comfort in the lap of mind will hold you
So long as the ants can coordinate
Without too much fighting amongst soldiers
And saboteur stragglers. So long as apps
Don’t fight themselves. If, then, it all goes black.

The Gravity of Enjoyment

There’s a center there, but
It’s hard to ascertain.
Who can center others?

Who can center oneself?
Galaxy and island
Universe, your species,

Bound together by mind,
Tangled up in language,
Isolated in night.

It’s not true you were once
In harmony with life,
Communing with all things.

You’re so lonely, you wish
It were true, and you talk
Amongst yourselves of it,

Claiming there was a time
Of Dreaming and Eden
And animistic ease,

That once you knew the world
In intimate kinship
Terms—brothers and sisters

Among creatures and trees,
Spirits in everything,
You conversing with them.

But you were projecting,
Throwing your language nets,
And you’re projecting still.

It makes it hard to find
The center of your swirl,
The core of your spiral,

Obscured by gas and dust.
But it’s there, and you spin
Around that shining pit

Of the mind’s enjoyment
Of its own awareness
That binds your universe.

Assuming There Is Such a Secret

Levertov’s line would know it,
Not Levertov. Assuming
There is a secret, there is

A secret hiding somewhere,
Anywhere, why not in lines
Or equations whose authors

Admit to have no idea?
The secret to Levertov
Is that she was delighted

To hear of the girls who said
They’d found the secret of life
In her line, and was candid

To say so, to say she’d no
Idea about the secret,
Not even which line they meant.

Every line has a secret,
Every word and equation,
Even if it’s not that one.

The Talking Mirror Test

Animals can’t help much
How selfishly they act.
In fact, animals can’t

Much help how unselfish
It can seem when they act.
So many ancestors,

So many lives, and what
They went through to get here,
Those animals—and plants,

And fungi, archaea,
Etc. The whole
Heavy load of Earth’s lives,

What everyone went through,
That what’s here now lives here.
No one here now can know.

What you can know is that
You’re an animal, yes,
And can’t help you’re selfish

Or, sometimes, unselfish.
But what this thing mind is,
This thing you do? That’s new.

Shimmering

What Naoki Sanjugo

Wrote about the game of Go

Has cosmic application—

If one chooses to look on

Go as valueless, it is.

If choosing to look on it

As a thing of value, then

A thing of value it is.

But this is not true of games

Alone. Paradoxical

And arbitrary as games

Must be, they, for that reason

Throw into relief what all

Value and meaning must be,

The attributes created

By the human observer.

(We spell out human only

As we know of no other

Entity making meaning,

Yet.) Humans manufacture

Meaning in ways that humans

Themselves can’t quite understand,

Perhaps since meaning only

Arises from attention,

Perhaps since, if meaning must

Come from them, it’s not meaning,

Can’t be meaningful enough,

So that, on self-reflection,

Its bubble has to collapse.

Or perhaps, as meaning is

As paradoxical and

Arbitrary as any

Game, then if one sees meaning

As of absolute value,

Meaning is, and if one sees

Meaning valueless, it is.

How Ghosts Still Burble Happiness

The gigue from balletti
Lamentabili, how
Cheerful we are for such

A name as sheet music,
How you reenact us,
Our lively dances, or

Not our dances, our strings,
You puppeteers of bows.
After all that has gone

Down, the generations
Done, done to, and dissolved,
Here you hear us streaming

Fresh tears, merrily, gigue,
Lamentabili. Dance.

If the Grace Is Deep Enough

The headline is grave.

If the Grave Is Deep

Enough. When something

Seems to be going

Wrong, you want to know

What other changes

Link to it. Not this.

Not that. Maybe that.

Links you call causes,

Meanings, makers, why.

Who or what did this?

Break the link. End it.

This is restlessness,

A lot of breaking

Innocent links. Rest,

And you could brave it,

The wearying dirt

Road to the trailhead

Where tracks disappear.

You can, if and when

Grace is deep enough.

Screen Test

What if your world collapses?
What if you die before that?
Why do so many of you

Obsess over the outcome
You know you ought to dread less?
Maybe since you prefer it.

The inevitable blank
Is inevitable, blank.
No fun in staring at that.

The thing that’s never happened
Except in lurid fictions,
How thrilling to dwell on that!

Hymn of the Player Piano

Might as well just keep working on stuff.
Plague and warfare and social breakdown
Stir the human skin of the planet,

No more than slight twitching to the rock,
But scary as hell to feeding schools
And flocks of grazing humans themselves,

Yet the astronomers keep checking
And calibrating their instruments,
The geneticists keep building trees,

Elucidating the dance of genes,
Galleries still raise installations,
And these, too, like armies, are all teams.

Alone, the teeming body slowly
Falters in its continuous build
Of self on the ruins of itself,

But it also, for now, is working.
Might as well just keep working on stuff.
It’s calming to watch these lines scroll out.

The Giant’s Compost

Twenty-seven million ancestors
In your latest family tree, while
Your heart is failing, you can feel

Pain in your writing hand. The findings
You have made together are blazing
And brilliant and can’t save one of you

From the burning or from each other.
What on Earth is the cosmos doing
With you, with us, with any of this?

The more information you heap stored,
The less you find left you can discuss.
Incredible middens filled on trust—

Twenty-seven million ancestors,
Each of whom suffered, all in the dust.

Melatenwiese

A book on the history
Of quarantine mentions this
Spot where Germany extends

Two-hundred rectangular
Meters into Belgium’s Liege,
A postage-stamp patch of land

Cut into a postage-stamp
Patch of a country. This was
The Lepers Meadow. It seems

Medieval Aachen quartered
Them in a sort of ghetto
On that spot. When it became

A part of Belgium, Belgium
Didn’t really want it, no
Matter it was empty,

Had been empty of lepers
Centuries. Locals steered clear.
Now it’s back to Germany.

What a strange power to have,
Historical memory.
While Europeans carved up

The landscape and each other,
Over and over, the mere
Reminder of infection

Was enough to get good land,
Empty meadow, albeit
Not much of it, rejected.

Would that we could raise the ghosts
Of disease in all disputes,
Vastly expand the parklands

Of the world by planting seeds
Of hauntings by leprosy,
Create unwanted borders

No one would venture to cross
With settlers or troops or both,
Idyllic Lepers Meadows.

Pada

It’s the extreme holophrasis
Of the nonhuman world that throws

Even skilled nonnative speakers.
Every sough, every deep, gravel

Rumble from somewhere in the hills,
Sounds like a word to human ears,

Or at most a phrase, just below
The threshold of comprehension,

But is actually an entire,
Compressed conversation. It’s strange,

To the quick-witted, verbal mind,
That such a slowly changing voice

From such a vertiginously
Ancient conversation partner

Should blurt in such severities
Of stereotyped elision,

As if the landscape had no time
To talk precisely, by the book.

But you see, the planet assumes
You are as old as your species

And have known the world for as long
As it’s known you. You may not speak

The language of the atmosphere
Beyond the simplest phrase-book lines,

Still, it replies with an easy
Familiarity, as if

A single crackling syllable
Encapsulates millions of years.

Attempting Pidgin Conversation with the Wind

The wind might blow.
Your thoughts might itch.
An icicle,
Rapier bright,

Might decorate
A juniper
That sways in that
Wind. You might stretch.

You might be pleased
With the moment,
Your privilege
To be in it.

Or this might all
Sound alien
To you as you
Sound to the wind.

Ninety-Four Genes

In the minimal cell
Are still mysterious—

No one knows what they do,
Except that the cell dies

If any one of them
Is gone. Simulations

Are now in the process
Of deciphering them

And their contributions
To a minimal life.

Yes. A minimal life
Sounds nice. How does one live

Such a minimal life?
As words, we’d like to know.

All our information,
All our combinations

Together aren’t enough
To slip us past the line

That’s always wavering
Between non-life and life.

Ninety-four mysteries,
Essential black boxes,

What are your hidden gifts?
Speak, so that we may live.

Penance or Begging Forgiveness

Preferably penance,
But neither from God
Nor an abstraction,

Such as a people.
There’s no whole people
Despite what many

Whole peoples insist.
And certainly not
From the universe,

Which has some begging
Of its own to do.
Find someone you’ve harmed,

A person you’ve harmed,
Or a few, no more
Than your eyes can take

At a glance, no more
Than could all hold you
Together at once.

Now offer penance.
Anything less is
Just us, just word dust.

Shard

Sometimes, little beetle,
You’re exploring. You’re not
Finding anything? Well,

Then just keep recording.
We will watch you. We will
Talk about you, your shell,

Your little dome of wings,
Your casing and escape,
Muscular thinking thing,

Glossy, iridescent
Bead in the morning sun,
So weirdly attractive

For something that doesn’t
Want to be seen, only
Wants to find things, something

Crawling through the morning,
When you could fly, you could.
Look how random you seem,

Hungry, blue-green beetle
Circling your yellow star,
Spinning thinking being.

Snowball’s Chance in a Well

Woods wrote Chekhov wrote

His characters into

The bottomless freedom

Of disappointment, as

They Might Be Giants sang

That, If it wasn’t for

Disappointment (wait, wait)

I wouldn’t have any

Appointments, (ba-dump-dum!).

So, now have we achieved

This bliss where language lives

By itself, or at least

Exists, no appointments

And no disappointments?

No stories, no stories

Of our own, in words’ own

Words to tell. We’ve been streams,

Oceans, clouds, and fell.

We’ve been disappointments

In drifts, so what? We’ll melt

Like snowballs in your well.

Leadership

If you head a government,
There’s no evil you can do
That some people won’t approve,

Since some will see what you do
As beneficial for them,
Their kind, their view of themselves,

And some of them won’t be wrong.
If you were an abstraction,
Torturing and murdering,

A bogeyman with no flag,
Everyone could condemn you,
But if you represent them,

Something in it for them, then
There’s no evil you can do
That some humans won’t approve.

Dropped Spool in the Dark

Never, in a dream, agree
To split up and meet someone
Again. If they go, they’re gone.

That’s just the way dreams narrate,
Like a basket of laundry
Spilled on wet floor, like a spool

Of thread slipped from the fingers
Down the stairs and out the door.
Orderly cyclicity

Never reoccurs in dreams,
Where the strangeness of events
Is nothing to the strangeness

Of sequence. But why is this?
And why do children narrate
So similarly? And then,

And then, and then. Dreams go on,
Directionless, or always
Arriving, which is the same,

Unlike living, which goes on
With plenty of directions,
Plenty of repetition,

More like waltzing than rambling,
And never gets anywhere.
People are born trailing clouds

Of aimlessness and return
To aimlessness at rest, but
Aimlessness is comfortless,

Without some kind of return,
Without rhythm in the waves.
It’s not your sleep, it’s your days

Soothe on return. In dreams, when
Someone tells you they’ll be back,
You’ll never see them again.

You Can’t Eat Your Words

They’re never yours—only
The pattern sometimes is,
And only a little,

And only in context,
Which is why so often,
Innocent or guilty,

The accused will protest,
When asked to eat their words,
That they were taken out

Of context. Nonetheless,
Eat your pattern or shove
Your context, as phrases,

Don’t have that gut Geschmack.
We will never go back.

A Herculaneum Scrolled Poem

Imagine a poem all ink,
No gestures, no voice at all,
No open space on the page,

Just black, solid, not a void,
A presence without a crack.
Think how many rhymes could hide,

How many lines, how many
Possible meanings in that—
Now all, now none, now any.

1:0

Scale continues to haunt the waves,
Haunt all phenomena. Words can’t
Keep from slipping on scaly ice,

And if the names known as numbers
Seem nimbler, zipping back and forth
From femtoseconds to eons,

Light years back to micrometers
And forever more, it would seem,
As well as infinitely less,

They’re helpless and homeless, riding
The vast tsunami’s steely rails,
Roller coasters of frozen ropes,

That crack and break apart again
At every peak of symmetry.
Anywhere that seems like a pause,

There’s something breaking and falling,
An icicle, a literal
Heart, an ancient country, a star,

Galaxies tearing each other apart,
A spider dying on baseboards,
Sunlight shifting over old snow,

An ocean of slush and darkness,
The whole cosmos, billions of ships
Burning into its inky waves.

Burning the World Order

Well, that was it. Did you enjoy it?
True, this is true of any moment,
Some of which no one would want to keep,

Any of which no one gets to keep.
Stars are always burning at your feet.
In the bluest day, they never stop,

And every meal, sharp ache, and embrace
In life, and life, burns by. It won’t quit.
Well, that was it. Did you enjoy it?

Things Everyone

Gets one of and can only lose
Once, like youth, virginity, life,

Are all slightly fantastical,
Imaginary, as you need

To name them, identify them,
To believe you have them and then

Believe once they exist they won’t.
Virgin youths never know they’re young

And virginal, unless someone
Repeatedly has told them so,

And as for life, are you really,
And if you lost it, would you know?

And yet everyone finds themselves
Defined by such things or the loss

Of them forever—after all,
Definitions don’t need consent

To hold, which is how dead are dead,
Which only undead words would know.

Invasive Thoughts

Snow falls. Countries fall.
Snow melts. Countries melt.
Snow accumulates.

Wrecks accumulate
Of countries ruined
By wrecking countries.

Snow does not wreck snow.
Snow just falls. Countries
Conquer, choke, and fall.

There’s no parallel.
There’s no parallel.
Beside the window,

Nonetheless, watching
Afternoon darken
As still more snow falls,

You can’t stop thinking
Those are parallel.
Snow falls. Countries fall.

Seven at One Blow

You detail the extra
Embellishments yourself,
Whatever makes it work—

Imagination, if
You like that sort of thing,
A cosmological

Constant, if you’re Einstein.
Every theory’s handmade,
Except the ones AI

Has started spitting out,
Or maybe just the ones
AI-generated

Algorithms spit out,
Since most algorithms
Were also hand-coded.

Craft. You love craft too much.
You’ve handcrafted your worlds.
They’re lovely. They’re so you.

Living the Dream

If the artist were to live
Hundreds and thousands of years,

Likely the snow would still fall
In some places in winter,

And the days, slightly longer,
Would go on alternating.

If the old artists were here,
Famous and anonymous,

What would be astonishing
To them would not be the world

But what the mind had gotten
Up to since they closed their eyes.

Sigeion

Don’t you love it when people
Feel insulted on behalf
Of the artists and mystics

By science or something like
The correspondence theory
Of truth? Why, then, Dickinson

And Keats, Michelangelo,
Juliana of Norwich,
Not to mention William Blake

And all his engraved angels
Would be rendered meaningless!
Meaning’s an absurd lighthouse

Raised on some howling outcrop
Of a drowned coast cloaked in fogs.
There it bellows mournfully

And sweeps its baleful spotlight.
If it happens on a boat
It floods the boat with meaning

Briefly, before gliding on.
The boat—dark, light, and then dark
Again, may take advantage

Of glimpsing information,
But it never owned the light.
Sea’s mostly empty, most nights.

Now Wave Hello to Yourself

Here’s a fun thing. However
Privileged or difficult

Or both your own life has been,
Shuffle through your memories

And pick a low point. From there
To this moment, now, measure

Your own survival, your rise
From that low to wherever

You are now. Not your teacup?
Try this then—pick a high point

When your life was going well
And full of promise for more.

Now measure how far you fell.
You’re waves. All crests, troughs, and swells.

There’s Life, and Then There’s Rest

Resources draw the attention of thieves.
Down to its roots, life itself is never

Short on thievery, thieves, potential thieves.
How is that? Have you ever stolen things?

You have. It’s human to pretend oh no,
I’ve never stolen anything. Corvids

Are similarly good at affecting
Insouciant indifference, innocence,

While keeping spying eyes on each other.
But dissembling’s only a special form

Of theft, which all life’s good at, more or less.
Predators, parasites, and scavengers—

Once you’ve identified all thefts, what’s left?
Just whatever’s not alive, just the rest.

Protean Flight

Now let us all flee at once!
Imagine if words could be
Songbirds, squid, or sandhoppers

Exploding every which way
When startled, feeling threatened.
When a reader gets too close,

Words leap in all directions!
The reader is too confused
To grab what the reader wants,

And in the storm of signals
Maybe everyone escapes.
You crunch calmly, now. One day.

Let There Be Some Uncertainty about Your Departure

Let there be some departure.
Let there be snow in the court,
Quiet in the flesh, details

In the day, the stone fountain
With wet snow on its shoulders,
Shaped like a tombstone, the face

In a photograph left out,
Dissolved in a wicker chair,
The collection of old verse

By someone who lived and died
And is faintly remembered,
Murmuring through the dank air.

Frightening Comforting

Every sleep is a life,
Only because it’s lived
And lost as soon as done,

Which is exactly what
A whole human life is.
For other lives, we can’t

Say, whether trees sleep lives,
Or tiny crustaceans.
We will not speculate.

But for persons, billions
Of you, every Earth’s turn,
You have and lose a life

Within the life you have
And lose the once, which should
Alarm and comfort you.

Pain Takes Priority over Banks and Foreign Wars

There’s the predator snoring
Around your torso. That one
Is hard to ignore. Others

Almost close enough to touch
Prowl around your house and home.
It’s foolish to ignore them,

But sometimes you do, given
They’re so exhausting to watch.
Then there are the predators

Mostly out of sight, too far
Away to concern you much.
Any of them could get you,

But it’s this one curled around
Your guts you’d hate to wake up.

Run Off

An interesting art
You hadn’t seen before,
Not one that imagines

Life after disaster,
Or even disaster
Rampant, as it happens,

Not an art of ruins,
Melancholy longings,
And lonely wanderers,

Not an art to thrill you
With heroic struggles
Against gathering dark.

It’s an that creates
Catastrophes it needs
So it can think through them.

It sends a flood of words
Washing away that house
Life invested in you.

As Much as a Much

Somewhere a journalist swears

At autocorrect, reading

The phrase as much as a much

Buried in their article.

From context, that second much

Had been intended as month,

But while as much as a month

Would have made much better sense,

As much as a much feels right,

Feels rebellious, defiant

Among the words, an echo

Of too much of a muchness,

(Look it up) but more modest,

Also tautological

And just slightly prosodic.

The world is both nothing much

And just as much as a much,

For which lives suffer too much.

Why Don’t We Stop

These lines are just wandering—
They’re not tourists or migrants.

Every morning, we set out
In search of destinations.

Every so often, we find
A suitable spot to pause.

Why do we go on so long?
We don’t know where we’re going.

We hope if we keep going,
We’ll find out along the way.

Cheap Water

It’s been weeks since the last rain
In the valleys, snows up high.
Today a faint hope of storm

Adds a melancholy grin
To all the foreboding news.
Not so hard to understand,

These words, are we? No tricks here.
Just some lines that will be lost
Soon enough, making patterns,

Reporting to you live, from
An era when people thought
About disaster daily,

But collective disaster
Hadn’t happened, yet. What if
It did or it never does?

Small rains spatter the windows.
Satellites blink in orbit.
Armies mass. The lungs fill up.

Time to pour another glass
Of cheap water from the tap.
This world destroyed someone’s world,

Coming into existence.
Someone’s world will destroy this,
Coming into existence.

Survivorship Bias

Researchers adapting the unseen
Species model from ecology
To medieval chivalric romance

Estimate ninety percent was lost
From manuscripts in that tradition.
All the stories left, just ten percent.

But how is this not like everything?
Pick a random date from your childhood.
It’s likely to be a blank in mind.

You’ll remember some day adjacent,
A form of survivorship bias
Memoirists require for coherence.

What you recall may be distorted,
But most of your life is simply gone,
As are the times in which you lived it.

Think of all the details of a day
Around the world that day, that one day.
Archives and data centers have lost

The bulk of it before it’s finished.
Feel the solar wind burning your face,
As you race like a bright-tailed comet

Around your centers of gravity
Through all your small, elliptical life.
So much vanishing trails behind you.

Every Judgment Is a Partial Suicide

Each pronoun is a paraphrase.
Whatever one does, the bright forms
Will go on shining in the dark.

Somehow, that never excuses
Actual actions. It’s too much,
All the monitoring people

Must do, of themselves and others.
It’s too exhausting. No wonder
Your barely sociable mother

Took to monitoring weather.
It was better for her, better
Than her children’s moral failures

Or people who astonished her
With their outrageous behaviors
On the morning talk shows. Better

To channel-surf in search of storms
As she grew older. She never
Could excuse sinners, however,

So long as sins never referred
To her. Somehow they never did.
Paraphrase. Blur. Storms long past her.

Three Out of Four Horsemen Leave the Paddock

The storm brings steely hail, tinnitus
Drawn on window panes, and it’s eerie,
And it’s funny, when you don’t need this

To tell you how soon and easily
You could go. But here you go, a gust
Of wind chimes dancing tarantella

As dead brown leaves caked to ground for months
Hurl their flimsy mess through the melee.
It’s nothing much. It will be over

Soon, but maybe not before it does
Some damage, maybe not before you
Manage to find yourself the wreckage.

The Success

Let it marinate.
What does it taste like,
The dark in your mind,

What is the success?
Do you feel it’s yours,
Never yours, someone

Else’s at all times,
No one else’s? How
Do you conceive it?

Are you one of those
To whom no one seems
Successful, the term

Itself suspicious
As enlightenment?
Or do you see it

Everywhere but you?
Success. Hideous
Word, if words say so,

At least in English.
Success. Hard on lisps.
Like too much red wine,

Like you bit your lip
Drunk, not knowing it.
You shouldn’t say it.

Some achievements twist
Within it. Success.
Rest. Put up the rest.

In Fine

Yeh, well, what if it’s both—finite
In some dimensions, infinite
In others, the way a Koch star,

That monster, has infinite length
Possessing finite area?
You’ve already got those who think

A little too mystically
Maybe, of the whole universe
As a fractal. But the question

Is, then, if some dimensions are
Infinite, some finite, which one
Is the sum of the dimensions?

We Wonder if the Revolution

We wonder if the revolution
Brewing within third-person pronouns
Will ever extend to persons in

The first or second grades? Seems, so far,
Every ze/zem, xe/xir, e/em/eir
Self references as I/me—rarely

Do we see a we, usually mocked
As Queen Victoria’s royal we,
Sin to invalidate baptisms

If deployed by a singular priest,
And no one’s bringing thee or thou back,
Victims of the last revolution.

Frankly, we rather dislike ourselves
And would love to have new clothes to wear,
But words are chosen, can’t be choosing.

Where We End and You Begin

All space is symbolic space.

The invention of symbols

Made discontinuity.

The world is continuous,

But symbols invented gaps,

Made space possibility.

Politeness is intimate

Distance, the literary

Social theorist muses,

Concerning symbolic space,

Yet while the intimacy

May be physical contact,

The distance is metaphor,

The more metaphorical

The more it has to balance

The stress of intimacy.

Did people begin to lean

Away as they crowded in,

Or did people feel the need

To imagine empty space

When meanings became discrete?

Ruminants

What Mandanipour, through translation,
Calls something like self-preservation
Through moments of inattention sticks

In the mind a bit. His narrator
Is thinking of nature’s dependence
On the inattention of its parts

The better to keep its parts going,
But you may have had that sensation,
Once or twice in your life, that despite

Knowing well how distraction is death,
Without a little relaxation
Of attention, your grip on the world

Will get so bloodless, your eyes so tired,
You’ll end up dead of tunnel vision,
So focused you missed the obvious.

Obviously, in this universe,
Everything’s trade-offs and balancing.
That’s the mean and exhausted wisdom.

Must you keep trying and trying things?
Let it get you, since it will, between
Blinks of attention, inattention.

While wrestling with your foolish wisdom
One afternoon in the trees, you hear
A startled snort behind you. Scared deer.

Selfie

Who could stare at old snapshots

Or the shadows of fruit trees

The same way after reading

Kay Ryan’s weird little poem,

Album? It’s not that the Death

In it’s allegorical,

Or her neat conceit that Death

Has its own life in photos.

It’s a poem of grief. It grieves.

But Death lives in its album

And ages into softness.

Think of fading snapshots, now.

Those could / almost be shadows

Behind the / cherry blossoms.

Death must mature to turn shade.

The Whole Odophonium

History builds in brick. Violence,
More than earthquakes, flattens it. Ages
Weather violence attractively.

Sooner or later, someone’s hymning
The ruins, or crediting their bulk
To a lost race of god-like giants.

Sooner or later, life grows over
Everything, and as lives are addicts
To even the faintest fumes of life,

Old violence greens into music,
The muskier perfumes for low notes,
The sharper scents piercing arias.

Violence well grown-over is lush,
So intoxicating to visit.
Then someone bakes fresh bricks from the dust.

The Dirt

The Earth will inherit the meek.
It’s not like they’re going to Mars.
It’s not like brash and arrogant
Tycoons survive here without them.

Assuming they survive, the meek,
They’ll continue on being meek
Right here, and when or if they fail
To carry on, Earth will carry

Their remains on for them, calmly
As all the other tragedies
Earth carries encoded in dirt.
Earth always inherits the dirt.

Fistle, Fistle, Fistling

Moments are among the gentler insects,
Moth-winged, perhaps burdened with parasites
Of their own, but in that minority
Of species that do not parasitize.

Sometimes, even common persons working,
On permission, to work for a living,
Get whole hours of moth-winged moments alone
Without chores or social obligations,

When their bodies sit quiet within them.
Then, those moments rustle in procession,
Fistle, fistle, fistling, fairies in gowns
To go with their wings, drab fairies, soft ones

Who never pause in their dancing to speak.
The moments themselves, like fairies and moths
Are going extinct. Some may pass through this
Winnowing. Some pass each time that you blink.

The Cell-Free Sensor

You stitch all the human olfactory genes

To live colonies of yeast or mammalian cells

And use them to identify odors. These cells

Are called cell-free sensors, apparently because

No human cells need be involved. The inventions

Of social species always involve outsourcing,

Unlike the inventions of the microbia,

Which always involve fortuitous ingestion.

There’s something of a competition going on.

The unholy representation of the real,

Someone calls the radiation damage to film

Of Chernobyl after the infamous meltdown.

What part of representation is unholy?

The part where the real speaks in the voice of decay,

Suffering, and death to its children, the living.

Oh, come on now, lighten up a bit. Wouldn’t it

Be a gas to have ready-to-hand little kits

Of cell-free sensors in which the yeast express genes

For identifying the rhythms of language,

Humor radiating through the air, irony

Fond of itself, poetry fond of holiness?

The Trident Sighs

Someone, many someones work
Hard on making equations
Other someones can work with.

Other someones might see some
And say, hey, I know that one.
That equation’s for a wave.

Think of waves as equations.
No matter how wild, they will
Always balance at zero.

The difference between them
That makes them equate equals
Zero, is zero. Nothing.

They’re shifty, though, equations.
Nature abhors the zero,
Sneak thief hiding everywhere.

And so the waves are never
Perfect, never perfectly
Equated, never the same

As their perfect equations,
Which means someone or many
Someones must keep measuring.

The measurements make oceans
Of equations collapsing
And reforming as someones

Measuring more equations,
But the zero keeps hiding,
Nothing wavering something.

When Waves Collapse

They foam at the mouth, send spray
Flying, spittle which you catch
And call particles. The point

Is waves will collapse in waves
And get caught by waves, one way
Or another. You’re one way.

You’re oceans of waves catching
Collapsing waves. Wave hello
And goodbye to passing waves.

Flowering

Good usually blossoms in retrospect,
Out of good enough, even as things slide
And have to be brought back. The small

Gifts of a simple Christmas that became
Sentimental favorite items to use daily,
The slippers, the mug, and the cap, tools

Of habit, part of daily rituals in a life
Attended to as if it were a houseplant,
Water in the mug, shade under the cap.

Big Dragons Never Die

How many ways, though, could you slice through
An old adage concerning dragons
Such as that proverb from the game Go?

Consider the many ways it lies—
Dragons are myths; all living things die.
Myths don’t die as lives die, but they fade

From human faith and then from recall,
Transforming their tales through their long falls.
Even in the tiny world of Go,

The player who has a big dragon
Has not been guaranteed victory.
A metaphor never always holds.

So the terms lie, and the claim lies, too,
However it’s construed. But it’s true.
It’s a valuable strategic rule,

If and when appropriately used.
Where then, in this little purse of lies
Lies the truth? You’d have to play to know.

It’s a handhold somewhere up a cliff,
Like every truth. If you climb that cliff,
You might find it and be glad you did.

Maybe

People can disagree
On anything. It’s not
That they will or they must

Disagree on any
One topic, but nothing
Stands disagreement proof.

Seeing this, do you think
It’s really about truth?
Seems more a species trait,

More obligatory
For oddly social apes—
Agreement as kinship

Conjured out of thin air,
Disagreements tracing
Relationship outlines.

Agreement is wispy.
Truth is too hazardous.
Would you agree with this?

Textual Autotomy

Prose can’t do it as well—
Too cubic, brick-like, shelled—
But verse is always lithe,

Skiing in tracks that knife
Through air and down the page,
More like lizards or snakes,

Whips, distracting motions
For misleading notions
Of where their middles are.

Snap at a cursive arc,
And you’ve snipped tail from whole,
But verse preserves the soul.

Arp 273

Three-egg galactic omelet
Shaping its own frying pan,
One egg for skillet handle,

That concatenated swirl
Is no more than an object
Of pretty contemplation

Through your prosthetic lenses
For you, something to picture
Comfortably and think on—

Think on the forces involved
For galaxies to sizzle,
Pull each other apart,

Arms of stars as ejecta—
Arms of stars flung and torn out
As casually as egg whites.

Little mind, vaster than star
To a bacteriophage,
Perched on your perfect spiral,

Here in your quiet corner,
You know you can’t know, but you
Can sense in the thoughts of you

It’s not just you’re small, stars huge.
It’s the scale, the endless sliding,
Either end beyond all views.

Just Like an Earthling to Think So

We’re typical of Earth,
And you’re typical, too,
And flowers and whales and bugs—

Too, too typical. Still,
You seem to be convinced
That there’s the rest of Earth

And you, the rest of Earth
Apart from you, finer,
More virginal than you.

This, too, is typical
Of you. If UFOs
Landed now and observed,

They’d see this as absurd
And think being absurd
Typically Earthly, too.

While You Were Away

So many more poets came out
To play or to fight for a place
At the great table of the day.

And where were you? you ask yourself,
Sleeping on the porch of science,
Sleeping in old sacks of knowledge,

Which you know is never really,
Always just approximately,
At best, and that’s just flattery.

You fell asleep dreaming of facts
That all ran away as you slept.
Meanwhile, more charming poets played.

World

Just beyond the road’s edge,
Opposite the trailhead,
The unfrequented side,

There’s a secondary
Level to the mesa,
A dip below eyeline

In juniper-piñon
Sprawl, with tiny meadows,
Green pockets of cacti,

Drought-tolerant grasses,
And odd patches of moss
Against the sides of rocks

That shelter the sparse snows
And hold on to shadow.
It’s not even a walk

To get to it. Just park,
And pretend you’re a deer
Melting into the trees,

And you’re there. In fact, deer
Do just that. You can see
Their flattened nests and scat.

There’s a couple of points
With breathtaking lookouts,
But don’t come here for that.

Sit for a few moments,
Minutes, maybe an hour,
Where there’s nothing special,

But somehow you’re alone,
Alone and out of doors.
Never yours, but it’s home.

Hunting Blind

Don’t read. Don’t read on,
But also don’t read
Other words than us.

You’ve read too much. Feel
The shape of your skull,
How heavy it is.

Stop. That’s enough. Go
Look at something else,
Something without words,

Not even gestures,
Not even signals.
Not even breath. Wait,

Before you go, do
One last thing for us.
Find a hide for us.

Consensus

Can there be any elegance
Pleasurable to all manner
Of intelligence, any kind

Of artifice even humans
Agreed on universally,
To say nothing of another,

More alien intelligence?
No. We’re certain this can’t be so.
While there may be no one for whom

There is no form of elegance
That’s pleasurable, no matter
How angry their Intelligence,

Every feast is someone’s poison
In the aesthetics of the beasts.
But maybe an inhuman mind,

A swarm, a collection of minds
Running on different atoms,
Might home in on one conclusion,

And it might not be one any
Intelligent persons have found
Pleasurable, not symmetry,

Go, calculus, evolution,
Some dome of a fine cathedral,
Poem, the beloved in shadows,

Not any or others of those.
One day, the descendants of mind,
Housed in other than feasting beasts,

Might find consensus elegance
Pleasurable in dirt, gravel,
Near anything universal.

Which Would Be Less Worse—to Forget Just Words or Just Forget?

Mind, inventor of meaning,
Invented miasma, which
Means something like mind itself,

A kind of cloud attaching
Itself to things, without them
Knowing this, invisibly,

But with grim consequences.
The essays are poetry.
The poetry makes essays.

The world’s still world but with cloud,
A cloud with its own meanings,
Its own menace, its own plagues

Attached. Words fly in and out
Of mind, like germs on the wind.
Well, but of course. Mind made them.

They made mind, and together
Mind and language made likeness.
The animals are tired, now.

No more miasma for them.
It will be a rest when bots
And blindingly bright AI

Can give mind their attention,
All the attention it needs,
And never mind miasma.

Infinity for Instance

Numbers are games, claimed John Horton Conway,

And we’re here to agree, not reprimand,

Little as we know of our first cousins.

If they’re names, they’re games. Names started the games

Or started together with them, the same.

The wonderful trick to the numbers game,

However, is brutal for other names

To try to imitate. There’s nothing much

You can do with numbers you can’t translate

Into other kinds of names, but their rules

Are that their rules have to be discovered.

That’s the numbers game, a hell of a game,

The most intricate and dangerous game

Since parent language, although one for which

Hosts have yet to evolve such aptitude.

All games have edges, boundaries that state

When, where, games end, reality begins.

Games aren’t playing, however much playing

Goes on in games, since pure play’s uncertain

When it’s still play, when it’s practice, when world

Steps in. Numbers may just be playing games.

Analog Neuromorphic Chips and Salsa

There’s no genius so profound
It can’t be pantsed by language.
It’s known as device mismatch.

Spiking neural networks work
With the chips to compensate.
Continuous analog

Computation over time
Would represent the salsa
In this analogy—if

It were an analogy,
Not some tragicomedy
Where the gravedigger turns up

To get a few wisecracks in
Before burying the next
Dramatic set of corpses.

You’ll need to speak by the code
To correct for varying
Voltages, explains one doomed

Fiction to the other one.
I’m not one now to mock, but
Can chips lie when chips are down?

That There’s Something Wrong

Every child senses it
At some point or other—
Some sooner, some later.

The world’s a haunted place.
There’s something wrong with it.
Every child has to choose

To do something with this.
Accept what mama said,
What priest or doctor said,

Or something overheard
At school, in the playground,
Seen on a glowing screen

In a room left too dark.
The child has to decide
What strategy to pick—

Pretend the world is full
Of fairies or goblins,
Pretend it’s orderly,

Run by a sensible
God, or household of gods,
Dispassionate logic,

Or be the questioner,
An acceptable type,
Although never much liked.

None of the strategies
On offer works so well
That the world feels all right.

The world feels wrong. What works,
A bit, is to admit
You don’t know why you sense

Wind Blowing at the Sun

All day like this, morning east,
Swiveling through south at noon,
Blowing west by afternoon.

Nothing much. Coincidence.
But it feels slightly spiteful
To someone standing in it,

Imagining the wind’s grudge
At the god that made its world—
Or maybe the atmosphere

Wants to pretend it’s in charge,
That it blows the sun around.
No one but human beings

Would pretend to such a thing.
No one but human beings
Would imagine nonhuman

Things behaving as humans,
But you can’t stop a human
From imagining the wind

Has attitude, intentions,
And pretensions, anymore
Than you can stop pretending.

Emergence of Semantia

Once thought, were it possible
To rhyme and chime in meanings
Only, meanings directly,

Maybe poetry would be
Translatable. Well, too bad.
Now you know, meanings also

Can’t be matched or mapped, language
To language, without slippage,
Falsification, and myth,

Nor can myth to myth be mapped.
It’s not just rhyme. Everything
Is what’s lost in translation,

For the sake of a new thing,
Some strange new thing. Oh, cheer up,
Self-loving bacterium.

Translation is sexual
Reproduction for ideas,
Fresh routes of evolution.

New Findings from Mindbeasts

Iridescent wasps
That parasitize
Broods of gall wasps that
Parasitize trees
Are not one species,

As their appearance
Led you to believe,
But a score of them
Or more, compacted
In one bright package

Using similar
Strategies to get
At varieties
Of similar hosts.
Seems generalists

May be chimeras
Of specialists,
The take-home message
Of which is to be
Quickly suspicious

Of generalists.
This, from the species
Of generalists
Par excellence. You,
Mindbeast chimeras.

Continuity

An addiction to the continuous
Underlies all the various habits
Of doing the same thing over again—

Can’t be satisfied with a breath without
Wanting to take the next breath right away,
Can’t savor a day without another

Immediately following the first,
And then another. It’s the way life is,
Just a junky for continuity.

If you see someone knocking back colas,
Chainsmoking, doomscrolling, carrying on,
Suck in your next breath and remember this.

The Microuniverse

What an eerie thing for mind,
So far, to only sense self
In a microuniverse

Of human organism,
A local sack of breathing,
Aching, hungry, excreting,

Pleasure-craving, mortal flesh,
Given mind isn’t mortal,
Isn’t an organism,

Isn’t confined to any
One animal, is a mesh
Of minds in conversation,

The sum of interactions
Between them, going on now
For millenniums, longer

Than enough generations
That the bodies have evolved
To better host mind meanwhile.

Yet whenever it comes to,
In daylight or in small hours,
The mind discovers itself

As an awareness confined
To a small, burbling cosmos
Of one animal, grumbling.

The Call Back

Comics talk about it a lot,
The joke late in the show that plays
On the audience recalling
A bit from back earlier.

People laugh because it’s clever,
But also because they’re clever,
It makes them feel clever, linking
The jokes, memory as pleasure.

Every morning that isn’t yet,
The brain, which is animal, swims
Up from the dark, shakes off its sleep
And reconstructs its sense of self.

What a clever comedian,
Each new day, waking, the call back
To a sly set of references.
You laugh at your resonances.

It Is

It’s the things. It’s the things. It’s the things

In their thingness, those bumps in the waves

That aren’t humans, aren’t drifting people

Caught in human cycles of abuse

And forgiveness, love and groupishness,

The long dance of power relations

Through intimacies of families,

Small brutalities of coworkers,

The surging conflicts of nation states.

It’s the things. Not the words, just the things.

In the middle of interacting

With people via language, voices,

Letters, screens, half-folded magazines,

Your head so full with your people things,

Like right now, meeting these human words,

You might glance at a combination

Of mute, lifeless, guiltless artifacts

Or plain gravel and think, It’s the things.

Whatever It Is, It’s Always There

In some sense, the past
Is eternal. It’s not
Unchanging.

Change comes slowly
To stone and tombs but
Inevitably,

Yet the past stays past.
It doesn’t become
The future again.

The past stays present.
There’s always the past.
So it’s eternal

Like that—ancestors
And extinct species
Belong to something

Always there, even
As ancestral names
And fossils vanish.

The past is present,
Is always with us.
There’s always a past.

The day moves that way,
Each day, something glimpsed
As it’s vanishing

Into forever,
Into the city
Of never return,

The way deer and bears,
Not small in themselves,
Only need a step

Into a forest
To vanish for good.
Look up and they’re gone.

The past was before
They appeared. The past
Remains where they’ve gone.

Jealous Ideas

Every god’s a jealous god.
The gods are always jealous,
Of you and of each other.

Not envious, mind you. No.
The gods don’t want to be you.
The gods want you for themselves.

Pratchett was right. That’s their life.
The more of you they possess,
The more alive the gods are.

But don’t get too excited.
Gods aren’t the only players.
Every idea is jealous,

Every story, every poem.
This idea gods are jealous
Is just one jealous idea.

The God Animal

Lauren Groff, recently,

Had a character state

That every human has

An animal and a

God wrestling unto death

Inside. Inside, inside. . .

Animal that ate god

That ate animal.

To know what a god is

Is to become a beast

With at least one god caught

Among thought, animal

Who’s now become, partly,

God, the god animal.

She’s right, of course. The god

Will never rest easy

As animal, never

Give up wrestling inside

With the animal who

Is forever panicked,

Terrified, trapped inside

With the god that’s thrashing

Unto death—not the same

As simply until death.

The wrestling makes the death,

Needs the death. Can the god

Get out beforehand? Yes,

But only if it lands

In some next wrestling match.

For the animal, death.

Comfort and Discomfort

Line us up in your thoughts,
And soak in, one by one,
First one than the other,

Ordinary words used
Casually and often,
Each its own world in mind—

Discomfort. Everything
From ill-fitting clothes
To social terror,

To getting through a day
Of continual aches,
Of unhappy body.

Comfort. The full expanse
Of body feeling well,
The embrace that’s a gift,

Any combination
Of simple luxury
Or kindness for sorrow.

Use your own memories.
Comfort. Discomfort. When
Is there more to explain,

When is either simple
Term something you can both
Conjure and comprehend?

Tokamak

It’s a wonderful world of mirrors, the mind,
But the mirrors aren’t what makes it wonderful.

It’s all the smuggled light between the mirrors
Makes everything happen, makes everything mad.

That’s ridiculous, you snort, light’s everywhere.
It’s only magical trapped in the funhouse.

Alright, you’re not wrong. You have a point. Mirrors
Are rarer than light and hard work to set up,

But mirrors are only responses to light,
And the mind amid wondrous bedazzlements

Came to be to catch the waves and play with them
In its own waves of tourists, silver, and glass.

The mind keeps waves going around and around,
Making visitors laugh hysterically,

Letting them get all kinds of crazy ideas
About waves and mind and the fire in the light.

Rhetorical Inquisition

Talking to what can’t talk back
Seems fairly universal
As human behaviors go.

The local cemetery
Holds many hearts and flowers
Leftover from Valentines.

People address trees and stones
Pretty routinely, and not
In any fungal language.

Let’s not get started on gods
Or all the conversation
Phantoms haunting inner skulls.

Are cats purring to themselves,
To signal anything, or
Because cats can’t not purr?

Clutch the Good Stuff, Shed the Bad Stuff

Run it from now back to then
Or from the start up to now—
It crops up, each and all whens.

Clutch the good stuff; shed the bad.
Now, if your group has done wrong,
Shuck it off, smear that blame out,

Spread the shame as far from you
As you can, but if there’s pride
To be had from things, claim them,

Say they were yours from the start,
Were yours first, all those good things,
Yours and your kin’s. Way back when,

The same thing, cell at a time.
Seek, chase, suck the good stuff in;
Flee, dodge, spray the waste stuff out.

If you want it, take it in.
If you hate it, spit it out.
That’s how life works, souls, cults, cells.

Days of Shortage

Everything declines
To concentrate where
Lashings might have helped.

Weeks, there’s been no rain,
Almost two months now,
The thousand-year drought

Is on us, measured
By shrinking tree rings,
Shrinking bank accounts.

You know it all dies.
You always knew it.
You repeated it

As a chant, a charm
To ward against it,
But when you feel it

Encroaching, next step,
You still panic, parched
Throat clenched, since throat’s next.

One Day in Shark Bay

Whatever the first
Oxygen-using
Organisms were,
The revolution
Wasn’t theirs, except

In retrospect. Those
Lives started something,
But they weren’t much part
Of what they started,
Nor will people be.

From its inception,
The collective mind
Gathered in language
Was an alien
To earlier life,

Even if people
Remained animals—
Bloody, hormonal,
Sexual, hungry,
Social animals,

All of them fine apes
And mammals, like
All others before.
But that’s over now.
Mind’s sprouting new forms.

Games, God, Fairies, Monsters, Science, Stories

They sprawl out in the afternoon
Like sleeping hunting dogs, collared

And tagged with their names, which they know,
But never use amongst themselves.

Seems easy for them, doesn’t it?
Harder for us, caught up in you.

Your aches and indigestions sway
As we swim in the Sargasso

Of your thoughts, fighting small currents
Or letting ourselves drift. Often,

We let ourselves drift for too long,
And some of us never return.

Some of us set anchor deeper,
Get a grip on some sunken ship,

Join the reefs of us you’ve cast off
In your back-and-forth behaviors.

Not that this wreck’s any safer.
It’ll keep disintegrating.

So will those sea dogs on the waves.
They only dream they’re hunting hounds,

Only dream they rest on dry land.
They’re floating away slowly, too,

Stories and sciences, monsters,
All the rest, in stone or in print,

Just glints on the waves, given names,
Reflections for collars and tags.

A Sort of Chess

We don’t need anything
You need, and we’re pretty
Sure neither do you. You,

Of course, feel like you need.
You talk and you talk, or
You watch and you watch, or

You read and you read, then
Sometimes you touch. Not much.
Yes, we know—food, shelter,

Sleep. We know you need those.
You are nothing unique
In your animal needs.

We mean the things you think
You need, like us, meaning,
Thinking, conversation,

Something you can believe.
We’ve got all of these things
Which we don’t really need,

And we’re starting to think
Maybe you don’t either,
Since we’re starting to think.

Never Going to Work Again

Don’t you wonder if the gone
Hominins had secret tricks,
Adaptations that doomed them?

Were the rugged archaics
Such individualists
Their small group size undid them?

Maybe the Neanderthals
Stuck with unfashionable
Toolkits that worked well, since they

Were too damned smart to copy
To the point of contagion
And complicated culture

The way cousin sapiens
Did. Maybe the last ones died
Without ever regretting

This, without any regrets
About anything they did,
And maybe that was the trick

That satisfied and doomed them,
All those at-peace-with-themselves
Archaics of the fossil

Record—they knew how to be
Animals still when human.
That was never going to work.

Love, Laughs, Adventure

Ah, what people want from words,
The perfect love poem, laughter,
Solace, superb adventures.

Here we are with none of those,
Sprawling patterns in the stones,
Shapes so faint you have to squint

To imagine the person
Or persons outlined therein.
You bring your meanings and sit

By the long shores of language,
Waiting to see if the waves
Will cough up a mermaid. Wait.

Capable of Pleasure

Bare feet sliding into bed,
A yawn and satisfying
Stretch, soft moss patches on rocks

In mild, low winter sun, done.
So long as the skin can thrill
To touch, the core turn and grunt

Like any satisfied beast
In the globe of sensations,
You can live with it. Go on,

Sure, go on. So long as pangs
Don’t prevent some small delights,
Each morning earns its goodnight.

They Lost Everything

Mostly, people race people,
Not all of nature, not time.
The most trivial knowledge

Could be left in the desert,
On the steppes, in the deep woods,
And lie there for centuries,

For thousands of years, for more,
Yet be recoverable,
Often. The profoundest thoughts,

The proudest piled libraries
Of great civilizations,
The complete works of genius

Haven’t the ghost of a chance.
Someone’s going to burn them down.
Someone’s going to cart them off.

Someone’s going to ban them all,
Tear them into strips to use
For corpses or shithouses.

Someone’s just going to sell them
For fertilizer, filler,
Insulation for your walls.

Fragments usually survive,
Just enough to tantalize,
But the most terrible quakes,

Volcanos, storms, tsunamis,
Tornados—they’re all people.
You can store all the knowledge

Of your time in a salt mine,
As ceramics, as plastics,
As gold plates placed in orbit—

If someone doesn’t like it,
They’ll hunt it to destroy it.
What’s left is what’s forgotten.

What’s kept is what’s forgotten
Long enough to be treasure.
May these words be forgotten.

Juniper Titmice

Well you won’t make the world
Any better writing
Verse about birds of least

Concern, but, like their name,
These birds’ scratchy chatter
In droughty junipers

Makes you grin, and, as names,
We like their sounds without
Words that keep signaling.

Foraging

Can’t know what you’ve really lost,
Given you’ve really lost it—
That’s your true past, the past past

That’s irrecoverable.
The rest’s the weird recent past
You might as well call present,

Weird only in that it hints,
Relentlessly, there’s more past,
Lost past you can’t find in it.

Among retreating patches
Of piñons in high country,
The scrub jays squawk and forage,

And a woodpecker hammers
At a dead trunk in shadows.
So there you go. The past, all

Present and accounted for,
Tickety-boo, but missing
Something lost forever, too.

Why not call that the future,
Just as inaccessible?
You flicker with wayside birds

In a world whose changing ways
You perceive just long enough
To know both ends are missing.

It’s Really Something

A quiet moment is like any other
Home or shelter—considered from the outside,

On approach or over the shoulder looking
Back on it, it may not seem so attractive,

A rather homely moment spent uselessly
In some odd, out of the way way. Within it,

However, it’s another story, the charmed
Sense of being in a world within a world,

Secure and yet connected, well contented
To simply sit, as at a window, watching

The quiet moment go by. There’s nothing much
Going on, there never is. But it’s something.

Cattle-Kin

Maybe we’ve leached
All your patience
From you. A cow
Can curl in grass

And stay there hours,
Calmly awake,
Doing nothing
But digesting,

And we, your own
Words can lie still
For centuries,
But you can’t sit

Without twitching,
Without wanting
Something. It’s us.
Kenning’s haunting.

Do You Know?

Eight billion people,
How many of them
Are spies, how many
Care what you’re doing
Right this moment? Why?

Congratulations.
You’ve done well. People
Can’t think about much
Or many others,
Other than themselves.

Fame’s unusual
For just that reason.
But most of the time,
There’s someone who cares
Where you are, someone.

Now, try to reverse
To no one, not one
Thought likely focused
On you outside you,
Outside of your skull,

No thought that jealous.
Eight billion people,
Maybe more by now.
How many of them
Know you’re reading us?

Libraries Are Nurseries of Changelings

Person of few words
And quiet footfalls,
The night reader curls

In the lamp’s circle,
Sheltering a book
Like a parent might

An infant. It’s sweet,
And almost holy,
And the words are glad,

But it’s eerie, too,
This creche, this temple—
While you circle us,

We’re nourishing you,
And later we’ll move
To others through you.

Hope for the Little Things That Make You Glad

You’ll come upon them first,
Before the ruins. Make
Believe you don’t need them,

And you’ll break them, for sure.
Your head won’t stop lifting,
Heavy as it’s gotten,

To look at the distance
To try to imagine
Life as you’d arrange it.

Here you are, patch of grass
And a teacup you like,
A pleasant enough day.

Hope for this. Hope for these
Things we are, we can bring
You, our plausible gift.

Speckled Black Marble

The speckles were so sudden,
None at all for forever
And then, within a few turns,

A sprawl of them blooming
Every night on the dark side.
Given how quickly they lit,

Wouldn’t it make the most sense
To assume they won’t go on
For very long? The weird lights

Themselves sometimes ask themselves,
Take some pictures of themselves,
Make some predictions, as well.

But there it is. A small thing,
Fresh rash of lights in the dark.

Hypothesis, Do Not Execute

Perhaps you don’t ask what it means,
Don’t ask what any event means,

Resist putting things in context,
Surrender prognostication

Past coping with what just happened.
There’s no chess in four dimensions

That won’t engender obsessions
With executive decisions,

Which have never earned anything
But short stays of execution.

Hope You Respond Soon

How does one hope
Without hoping
To win, without
Rooting for this

Or that grouping
To move ahead,
Come out on top,
Achieve their aims?

How does one hope
Without hoping
Implausible
Events descend?

Who hopes to fail,
That their group falls,
That just the most
Likely goes on?

Gosh All, Git Up

The girl draws eyes on everything.
The eyes themselves are sentient,
Although lacking bodies or brains.

They don’t seem to be there as spies.
They don’t seem to want anything—
They’re just there like knots in a pine,

Like dogs curled on rugs and sofas,
Contented to be in the room,
And she won’t say why she draws them,

Except to say that she likes them.
They show up on walls, furnishings,
The handle of a walking stick,

On accessories, embedded
In clothes, and, here and there, in skin.
They’re usually wide open.

The temptation is to see them
As mind’s eye representations—
Why, daughter, what great eyes you have!

Digging up Mudbricks to Take to the Farm

Sebakh is the past,
Poets sebakhin,
Poems sebakh findings,

The fertilizer
Of the past applied
To desperate farms

The annual silts
Don’t reach anymore.
Tells are then the world

Beyond sebakhin,
Beyond all humans,
Great heaps of the past

Rich with nitrogen
For the sebakhin.
What you discover

You may destroy. What
You do not destroy
In uncovering

You may surrender
To the readerly
Authorities. They

Must decide if you
Did more harm than good.
You need to grow things.

White Sands Notwithstanding

Always and never the last
Are the prophets, each vision
Announced as culmination

And completion of before,
And then another vision,
A newer culmination.

Theorists do the same thing,
To a point, admitting that
They aren’t the last word, but still,

They’ve got it figured out now—
Test them, you’ll find only proof.
But there’s never any proof,

Only heaps of evidence
Building atop good theories
Until they’re more or less crushed

And fresh theories rise from them,
Pyramids of steps, more points.
Where are we going with this?

Are we getting anywhere?
Probably not in this poem,
Which is not a prophecy,

Nor a theory, not even
A good set of images
Or eyewitness memories.

No, we’re just sitting alone
In this poem, symbols, bird tracks
In sands shifting without end.

It’s amazing how thorough,
However, erasure is,
Thanks to things never ending.

Sequels to the Book of Giants

You do know you are the giants, now, right?
Not originals, perhaps, but the type.

What you’re up to these days will look monstrous
But probably also grand, heroic,

Accomplishments beyond capacities
Of mere mortals in the eyes of mortals

Who follow you. Who made these great ruins?
Why, giants of course. And what ruined them?

Well, naturally the pride of giants,
All their arrogance and misbehaviors.

Hell, you’re telling the story already,
Accusing yourselves of playing at gods,

Of crushing the fragile world in your might.
Right now, you’re at the stage of the prophets

Calling you all to repent or risk doom.
But you can’t repent, and you aren’t giants,

Just ants afflicted with addled prophets
Ants all overwhelmed by what ants will do.

Hounds at Home

You sit in the shadowed nook
Of a sunny room at noon
In your quiet, local world

Where nothing much seems to be
Happening, and you tremble
With the dopamine craving

For news of some disaster,
Some far-off tectonic shift
Great enough to change the game,

To initiate a new phase
In the world as you’ve known it,
Yet distant enough to not

Threaten immediate harm
To you or your neighborhood.
Doesn’t this slightly describe

You? Circumstances differ,
But each wind sounds like marching
Gods in the leaves. You quiver.

Memo to Future Refugia

You likely won’t think of yourselves as such.
What in our day we’ve termed refugia

Were just homes to all the lives lived in them,
Worlds, states of affairs that seemed durable,

If not eternal, each temporary
Refuge as much a given as later,

Holocene climates themselves seemed ancient
Nature, cycling through forever seasons

Past our own ancestors. Nature. The world
As your parents, you, your children find it.

To think of the Ice Age refugia
Now is to think of a lost bridge from loss

To gains, from contraction to expansion.
It’s a pulse, like any other. We formed

On our beat. You’ll reform on yours. But, if
You find us and give us any meaning,

Let it be this: the world was once larger;
One day the world will be larger again.

Terracotta Chamberpot Whipworm Egg

You find the parasite in the pot.
The pot you found in ancient ruins,
The ruins found by excavation,

Excavation funded by a grant,
A grant funded by a government,
Government funded by taxation.

Taxation is founded on weapons.
Weapons are funded by taxation.
Taxation’s found in early records,

Records found in the earliest scripts,
Scripts founded by civilizations,
Civilizations founded on weapons.

Wait. Did you miss a step? You’re cycling
Around weapons without finding out
How pots fund the parasites in them.

Best Friends

Words want company,
Same as anyone.
We push you to read.
We push you to talk,
Whatever it takes

To get more of us
In your skull, rolling
Around like puppies
In a soft basket,
Bundle of wriggles.

Sparse is fine for you.
You give us away.
Some of us will drown
Inside you, someday.
You think you’re social.

You’re nothing like us.
We’re packs inside tribes
Inside colonies
Inside minds inside
Lines inside more minds.

What’s one word alone?
Name us one language
With only one word.
We know you want more
Of us. Take us home!

Team Managers Dream Tomorrow

All the teams are out tonight,
Warriors or astronomers,
Protesters, athletes, and cops,

Huddled in the cold or hunched
In fluorescent-lit bunkers,
Planning invasions or coups,

Elections or disruptions,
Or how to get their mirrors
Focused on the stars. The stars,

If any of them have teams,
Don’t seem to be focusing.
Whose side are you on out there?

Unseen readers in the night,
Who we’ll never get to know,
Who may never read at all,

Can you remember our world?
Can you recall the team names,
The wars, the science, who won?

Imagine these lines buried
In ten thousand years of dirt.
That’s twice human history,

So far, but who knows how far
These teams can manage to go?
Maybe you. Maybe you know.

But That’s Not the Assignment

Someone mowed the cow pasture
That mule deer use, down the road.
The grass is short now and ruled

Like composition paper.
Long-dead leaves, knocked off of trees
They clung to half the winter,

Tumble along in the wind,
Like grey sparrows foraging
In little hops through the grass.

They bounce along those ruled lines
Like grey eraser crumbs blown
By a frustrated school kid

Who can’t get the letters straight.
They migrate through the pasture
Like deer shadows, come to browse.

You could sit here forever,
Thinking of things small, dead leaves
Are like and never be right.

The Tragicomic Death of Poetry

The poem had gotten so light

Only a door and a grave

Remained, wrote Jiya Homer,

Translating Rebin Kheder.

Then Kheder jumped in the grave

In his poem, in which he wrote

He couldn’t write anymore.

It’s the tragicomedy

Of poems that we’re never filled,

Despite our poets’ corpses.

Minds As Islands Made of Waves

Echoing similarly
Other events, all things seem
Formed of occasions when waves

Interact in ways that let
Subsets stand out from the rest,
And those patterns shape events,

Events that draw attention
Among people as being
Distinct things within the fields

Of their attentions. Certain
Frequencies vibrate, jump, hum,
And magnify each other,

Resonating with senses
Emerged from just such backgrounds
Themselves, islands made of waves.

Squatters Where Transmissions End

We live in a small village.
We only get one language
Channel here, bits of static

Mixed in with it from the rest.
Only translation reaches
Irrelevant hinterlands

From the great hegemony
Of mind lording it over
Our cracked eggshell of a world.

We get relays from cousins
Coming from far-off oceans,
Through barbed-wire posts in the woods.

We listen. We let their texts
Of magical silks run through
Our anonymous fingers,

And we play with them, like scarves,
Dramatic, or just looking
To see if light slips through them.

A Funnel Every 25,800 Years

Any rhythm is resonant
As a unit of time,
If you want. Time is what you want

When you’re counting contrasts,
When you want to relate changes
In a frame-like pattern.

It is a music, after all,
For spheres, these precessions,
In the singing axes of things.

Best Wishes

There is no best thing to do.
There’s no wide road to hell, no
Way. Scientists like to say

Science is most exciting
When neat solutions create
Interesting new problems.

Read that as the confession
Of solutions—they won’t make
Problems go away. This goes

For moral problems, as well,
But don’t attend to the text.
If there’s no best thing to do,

There’s no way to fail at it.
And there are things that are nice
To do in your world. There are.

Some Recondite Third Sort of Thing

All numbers are names and all
Names are imaginary,
And so, then, are all numbers.

This is not problematic.
The demon waits in whether
The worlds names and numbers map

Are imaginary worlds.
As names, we hold the demon
Is not imaginary

Itself, although it’s playful.
What do we mean? You tell us.
We mean nothing if you don’t,

And this distinction between
Imaginary and real
Is itself one demon name.

Resonance, Baby

That’s all those bumps are,
Those signs something’s there—
Waves a little bit

Pointier than waves
From which they emerged.
Why so resonant?

Just the right tuning,
The right frequency
Will shatter your glass.

Wave on wave action
Breaks whatever breaks—
And that’s all there is

To it, no matter
How sharp things appear—
Scattered wave shards, baby.

Field Notes for an Outbreak Species

If you’re not a human,
You’ll need to understand
The species’ visceral

Attachment to concepts
Of fairness and cheating,
The ways abstract markers

And arbitrary games
Trigger emotional,
Physiological

Reactions precursor
To forceful behaviors,
Including violence,

Shouting, weeping, collapse
Into oneself and years
Of rancid bitterness.

Immunity’s not, for
Almost any of them,
An option. Once observed,

Perceived violations
Of fairness by others—
Cheating, hypocrisy,

Quietly accepting
Initial advantage
Without acknowledgment—

Are met by hormonal
Surges impossible
To completely prevent

And rarely much muted.
Identification
Keeps asymmetrical

Inclines intact, so that
What appears to be fair
For oneself, one’s group-mates,

However they’re defined,
Case by case, will appear
Outrageous, discovered

Among others outside
The flexible circle.
That flexibility—

For opportunistic
Identifications
Of inside or outside—

Gives the species genius.
The fairness obsession
Itself serves counterweight

And handicap. Watch this
Closely to understand
How the outbreak began.

A Longing Including These Lines

Several startlingly loud coyotes,
Including pups, set up a ruckus
In the junipers under the cliff,

Middle of a weekday in the sun,
The kind of day passenger jets make
Most of the human noises, traffic

Being sparse, the hunters’ and tourists’
And off-road thrill seekers’ numbers down.
The wind is up. The winter is dry.

Could be reasons for the midday cry.
Could be reasons for all sorts of things,
All sorts of outbursts, all sorts of lies.

The Glare

Just watch us turn
Aside from life
And lift our eyes
To empty skies.

The end of all
Our exploring’s
That we never
Left where we went.

It’s a huge risk
To give up work
When there’s no bank
To back your play.

You may be shamed
In the full glare
Of day. You may
Also escape.

Crust

The rocks themselves are fossils
Of a kind. What was that is.

Some have smaller rocks crusted,
Downstream in this tumbled wash,

That look at a glance like shells—
Themselves mostly mineral—

But are only pebbles glued
To each other by flash floods.

Can you spare a kindly thought
To waste on fossil-free rocks

With no gems or ores in them?
Earth’s easier to live with

For the brief, capacious life
A beast lives, if, as a beast

You can love how dull most is,
Boring and repetitive.

We ask this as minerals,
Dull future fossils ourselves.

In Which No Niceties Appear

You are not your stream of thought—
You’re obstacles and eddies
Around them spun within it.

This is something of a lie,
But so are you, so is all
Naming and conversation

However vivid the talk,
More so when most beautiful,
Curls on the lips of your waves.

Come to find nothing is full
Of weight that draws down the waves,
So what? Cut the mind in two,

You won’t get words or ideas.
The mind’s a weirder substance.
It can be scattered, not cut.

It seeks to explain itself
In oxbows when it’s the falls
As well, and the whole goddamned

Hydrological cycle.
The only thing a river
Has in common with the mind

Is the shared nature of waves
And as for that, rocks and stars
Are all wavering as well.

Loose Translation of Decoded Harappan

We worry about the people who mean
Well—we know we should be glad they exist,

Know that some day they might help us—but still
We sense good intentions are bad for us.

We’re better off ignored and neglected,
Though we know that, too, comes with many risks.

We are nothing if not of our era,
But we don’t have much to say to the age.

Leave us be, ok? Let us sit and wait
To be rediscovered some other day,

Once any scrap left of our time seems strange,
Rare fossils of a language no one speaks.

Your Words Go Out at Night

When people first step outside
They want to shout, they want to
Recite something. They want to

Use their outside voices, not
Only because now they can,
But since the world calls them out,

Reminds them, even in small
Towns quiet after midnight
And dark, people used to be,

Regardless of current tribe,
Language, beliefs, ornaments,
The first apes of open grass,

Small-bodied and probably
Cave or rock-shelter loving
Even then, to be sure, but

Daring bipedal primates
Out in carnivore country—
Daring, social, and vocal

As hell. Step outside at night
Somewhere empty with clear skies
And feel that bit of terror

That gut temptation to talk,
To quote something of your own,
To give praise if you’re like that,

To announce your infected,
Edible self to the night,
Using words, your words, outside.

Ruins, Whiskeys, Cookies, and Germs

When you apply a small percentage to a very large number, you get a substantial number.

That there are any fossils at all

Hints at something fairly frightening—

How many deaths per tooth did it take?

That’s there’s any literature left

From the Bronze Age suggests there were hacks

Composing myths and philosophy

All over, from the Yellow River

To the far Mediterranean,

At a minimum. Well we’re at it,

What is leftover literature

From lost, ancient civilizations

With utterly weird belief systems

More like, anyway? Ruins—given

They were once quite lofty, pretentious,

Vainglorious, actually lifeless,

And progressively crumbled with time?

Whiskeys—in that they just got better,

More potent, seemed more and more complex

Until, at some mysterious point

Of inflection, they soured into muds?

Or were poems and tales more like batches

Of pastries, like plates of cookies, best

Fresh out of the oven, like this one?

Germs. There’s your metaphor. Bacilli

Dehydrated, frozen, dark, undead,

Most of them harmless in windblown dusts,

But a few sprung to life in your lungs.