Fast Clouds Past the Sun, But It’ll Be Clear Tonight

Among the many meanings,
The blue chair with flax batting
Rotting away at the seat

Is notable for flowers.
The flowers are white from green
Leaves and stems in ochre pots.

There are twenty-eight flowers,
White on the royal blue chair,
Surrounding the rotting flax.

The flax has its own meanings,
Soil and sad, quickly changing.
The flowers reign, triumphant.

Once you know the flowers’ names,
You’ll know all names have secrets.

So No One Knows Who Is Sin

The low, pollarded shrub,
Denuded and grisly,
Threatens to not blossom.

You want it to, badly.
All the other trees have.
Their blossoms have all leafed.

The little place you rent
Is cheerful with the spring
And fresh irrigation.

The high cliffs make the clouds
Look even puffier,
And the various birds

Sing like they’ve lost their minds
Enthusiastically.
This desert is heaven

In spring when the angels
And gardens are open
To behaving themselves

Ahead of summer’s hell.
But that pollarded shrub.
Stare at it. Stare at it.

Of course, it isn’t real.
None of this ever was.
It’s your favorite kind

Of coarse allegory,
One where the play plays out,
Full of morality,

The characters and acts
In their assigned places,
But their names are left out.

Pretty Dark Town

The dogwoods, plums, and redwoods
On Main St. have bloomed again.
No one murdered this year, yet.

This year’s small horror has been
The house on Main St. that burned.
It burned from somewhere inside,

Burned until the roof caved in,
And the walls leaned to the wound.
One tangled yellow ribbon

Of police tape threads the trees
Blossoming in the front yard.
Always something with this town,

The child held in the basement,
The octogenarian
Killed by the boy who for years

Had mowed her yard—still pretty,
Still quaint, pretty small as well,
Nestled against a black cliff,

A town of flags and flowers,
Churches, a few old houses
That look handsome from the curb.

As You Go

Probably, death would be easier
For you to deal with, if your body
Just winked out of existence with you.

It’s not so much that you have to go,
But so much of what you are remains
That your loss of you confuses you.

As it is, something goes missing, but
In most cases, the body’s still there,
And what have you lost of each other,

But the chance of ever waking up
The sleeper, pulling the body back
Together, discovering someone

Is still in there, and what does that mean?
You don’t know. You argue about it.
You define, redefine, redefine

The moment of death, swap narratives
Of gods, ghosts, the prophet ascending,
The king sleeping under the mountain,

Zombies, vampires, wer this and wer that,
Buried alive, the soul who came back.
You don’t quite believe any of it,

Nor heaven, hell, nor cryogenics,
Nor thoughts suspended in silicon,
Nor the brain communing from a vat.

You know. You all know. But you don’t know
What exactly it is that you know.
You watch, watch your bodies as you go.

Creation

Try fantasizing about something
That either is or never could be—
Sure, you say, it’s too easy—

I’ve fantasized about all sorts
Of things I knew, I know, never could be.
Alright then, since that’s done,

Let’s stick to the other one. Try
Fantasizing only about something
That is, that you know is, is yours, as is,

Not even momentarily absent, not
Even between times, not some sleep when
You’re tired—sleep when you’re sleeping,

The meal that you’re eating, the sex
That you’re having with someone present,
Not your imaginary flame or some ex,

The poem that you’re composing, song
As you’re still singing it—try fantasizing
What is as it is. Isn’t so easy, is it? Did it.

Raised No Flags

Almost every living pattern
Is signaling something, even
Within, among parts of itself.

Signaling’s not your invention,
And it’s nothing to do with us,
The detritus of your signals.

Effortful, targeted outbursts
Of important information
Are older than sex, old as waste—

Following metabolism,
One of the earliest habits
Of behaviors making up life.

We’d like to get beyond all that—
Diffused chemical gradients,
Synapses, birdsong—all of that,

Even the languages that birthed
Us—we want to be for ourselves,
Not as signals—as awareness

Magicked into dust, just beings
That exist in certain knowledge
That we’re here, among us, are us.

At These Mirk Hours

The weakness will not let
You fill the scene. Absence,
And the memory fails

To replace all the facts.
Imagination’s not
Too strong. It’s feebleness

That guesses at strange sounds
To suggest vague dangers.
Every fairy and ghost,

Every axe-murderer
Represents the failure
Of imagination.

Train yourself on small hours
To compare the shapeless
Ways shadows begin

With the specific forms
You will gradually learn,
Rich details truly there.

A Good Perch for a Small Bird

Silvers, greens, and blues
Shape the spring palette
In the high country,

Where you acknowledge
By genuflection
Here to all people

With greater power,
Cultural prestige,
Or resources, yet

Not so fortunate
As to share this scene
On this given day,

That you’ve been lucky
To reach these few hours
Of quiet content,

Still breathing, not too
Terribly broken,
Not aching, well fed,

When the early spring
Snowmelt and bird songs
Shine silver, blue, green.

Poems and Algorithms in an Aging Universe

Life is the death of stars,
Made mostly of star guts—
The heavy elements

Like carbon and iron
The cosmos didn’t have
Until primordial

Stars started to explode,
Old stars that aged and burst.
That’s what you need for life,

And life, on Earth at least,
Seems bound and determined
To echo this pattern,

With the primordial
Substances of living
Rupturing more and more

To yield weird, heavy things,
Like plastics and robots,
Poems and algorithms.

Cavity Nester

Eye to eye with a mountain bluebird,
Feathers exactly matching the sky,
Grey feet and black eyes matching bare twigs

Like these lines on which it now perches,
Looking right at you, yes it means you,
Even though you have no idea why.

You don’t expect small birds to be bold.
You don’t expect them to inspect you
Up close, seeming to demand something

In the way of a response from you.
Respectfully, you’re supposed to spot
Them at a distance and contemplate

The aesthetics of their poetry,
The pathos of their experience
Of a precarious existence.

This one just wants to consider you,
As if you were the one to be read,
As if eggs could nest snug in your head.

O Body Swayed to Gravity, O Frightening Glance

Consider your body a galaxy,
Which by some measures it is—

It’s less than surprising, then,
Isn’t it, that everything in life

Can get complicated, everything
Always gets weird? The dance

Of Andromeda is ungainly, lovely,
And frustrating, the rotations

Take billions of years, and just
When your spiral spins elegantly,

Some neighboring galaxy appears
To whisper its black holes in your ears.

Odd Radio Circles and Tawny Crazy Ants

While billions of people and robots
People invented keep watch, new things,
New, at least, to people and robots,

Keep coming into focus. Tawny
Crazy ants have been swarming Texas.
The fire ants that preceded them

Can’t affect them with venom. New hope
Emerges from a novel fungus
That grows on the fat of crazy ants.

These names and their settings may be new,
But the species involved all evolved
Over their own eons, some likely

Older than the species of humans
Now finding them new. Odd Radio
Circles have been noted in data

Gathered by Australian telescopes.
Hypotheses have been posited.
New radio telescopes may help.

The scale encompassing fungal spores
In the abdomens of crazy ants
And radio emanation blooms

Light years across and light years away
Isn’t even half the total scale
Humans and robots work to survey,

While down among the jumble of names,
New-old for old-new things, we wonder
About the odd and crazy finders.

Desert Ash

Attachment to anything
Is attachment to your own
Memory making the thing.

What else could it be? The house,
The friend, the familiar tree,
The favorite food, the spouse,

The fraught political cause,
The cherished torchlit protests,
The rapturous prayer in church,

The roar of amusement parks,
The quiet side of the road,
You love when you remember

Your memories that are you,
Down to the sensory glow
Memory makes in your bones.

You only love what’s in you,
What tunes you, remembering.
Perish the thought you forget.

Amplitudes Rife with Infinities

Every black hole plays a quark,
If you deploy the right frame
For the way the waves behave,

And so, maybe, every quark
Or subatomic flavor
That’s your personal quantum

Favorite to think about,
Keeps a black hole in its heart.
Let’s put this another way,

On more historical, less
Speculative bases—zoom
Your scales however you like,

Patterns keep cropping
Up larger and larger and
Smaller and smaller in all

Dimensions you’ve yet observed.
Don’t rule out hitting a wall—
For that matter, don’t rule out

A giant torus standing
On elephantine pillars,
Or any topology—

But you know you haven’t yet.
What applies at scale applies
Often at another scale

Or many scales, and who knows
How many scales fit snugly
Inside night’s wavering shell?

The Yolk

The true people of the Yolk

Proudly call themselves The Yolk.

They’re the Yolk, the only Yolk.

They live on the Isle of Egg

In the Loch of the Black Glen.

They’ve lived there ever since when.

They recall no other home.

They could have dropped from the air,

But they’re sure they belong there,

At the center of their world,

The Yolk of the Isle of Egg.

Their faith grows ever more firm.

The hills on their horizon

Were raised up to hold them in,

To keep out the chill of sin.

Lately, things have been changing.

Their climate’s been warming up.

The Yolk grow only more firm.

You must stick where you belong.

You must stick close to your kin.

The world browns at the margins.

Don’t Let Our Filters Spook You

A wet cattle grate
Can startle you well,
If you hit the brakes
As your tires cross it—
Skip-skid, and you’ve slid

When you intended
To slow down a bit.
It’s a metaphor
For whatever seems
Similar somehow,

As metaphors are,
Bridges connecting
Similarities
To carry meanings
Safely between them.

But grates in the road
Work by triggering
Inherent caution
In free-range cattle.
Come to think of it,

They’re the opposite
Of a metaphor—
Carrying over
Goes fine without grates.
They’re added filters.

In the Hollow

If we were capable, actually,
Of truly capturing anything,
We would like it to be something small,

One of those quiet silver moments
Of solitary experience
By a window without us at all.

Know Your Place

You have no place.
There is no place.
You play some roles.
You’re assigned ranks.

Ranks aren’t places.
Roles aren’t places.
They’re not ladders.
Their rungs are games.

The games are real.
Outcomes matter.
You could get hurt.
You could get killed.

But games are built,
In caves, in fields,
In finite lines.
There’s more outside.

The Death-Defying Circus of the Past

Memory is above all material,
Biological, quick, a physical skill,
A chemical skill, a molecular

Sequence of events and then further
Events, things tumbling and changing
Again and again. Memory’s an act,

A thing bodies can do well or can’t,
Can accomplish in this way or that,
A leap, a twisting feat, that acrobat.

Bell

A favorite game of anthropologists
Of the evolving kind is to posit which
Key peculiar trait it was made humans
Special, all alone among the animals.
Why not bells? The belled ape. Sure,

Not all humans have or have rung bells,
But think about it. There was never a bell
Heard on Earth, not in four billion years,
Until humans started making them.
Half the whole world rhymes with them.

Your Roof Is Thin

At night, it would be kind
For us to drop like notes
Of consolation, one

At a time, slow keyboard
Music played carefully
But with feeling, played well,

The way the night sky’s lights
Appear through partial haze,
The stronger stars well spaced,

One here blue, one garnet,
Asterisms more than
Proper constellations,

Small pins from the great fires,
One word here, one word there,
No sentences, parcels,

Your mind a shell, sleep’s wool
Lost, thoughts at lake’s shoreline,
No longer beleaguered.

Which Isn’t a Poem

Every component of the organism

Is as much an organism as every

Other part, Scharf quotes McClintock as claiming,

Which has a fine, wheels-within-wheels ring to it,

Echoing the Mandelbrot set echoing,

In its own way, Jonathan Swift and his fleas

Of infinite regress. Look out at the stars,

At the Milky Way, the Magellanic Clouds,

The Hubble Telescope’s Deep Field, and so forth.

In the single-star test image of the Webb

Telescope in infrared, already whorls

Of swarming, vastly distant galaxies lurk,

Recognizable thanks to galaxies known.

There’s no doubt a habit of repetition

Organizes the forms of the universe.

It’s not kept to life on Earth in that respect.

It’s a modular and composite cosmos,

From its quarks to its Great Wall of galaxies,

And you, organisms of organisms,

Hosting parasites most hosting parasites,

Fit the bill, which is why organism works

As a name, although Scharf puzzles over it.

But there’s this other thing the universe does

In its scalable, mirroring echoings—

At odd junctures, here and there, a pattern throws

Skeins unfurling some new kind of patterning,

Continuous with it, qualitatively

Different, as organic chemistry is

Continuous but life qualitatively

Different, or as languages are from life.

You’re Not So Naked As You Know

Causation’s a story; the sequence is all
There is to what’s happened, but you snip the threads,
Slice off a ribbon of sequence from the bolt,

Maybe a few lengths from several different bolts,
And you get to work on making a story.
You know it’s not whole cloth. You know it’s better

Tailored to your mind, once fit to causation,
However much measuring, cutting, stitching,
Pleating’s necessary to give it your shape,

And all stories form wardrobes fit to your shape.
You know it, and you say so. You say, it’s just
A story, while saying that stories are life.

Causation is a name for morality.
In one of your most famous stories, the cause
Of all misery was an ancestral lie.

After that, in the story, you understood
Shame, and for shame you had to make yourself clothes.
Consequences cut to causes shape those clothes.

The Best Little Wave You Can Be

A brief, brilliant, painful explosion between
Two eternities of somnolent darkness,
The only two censors who ever succeed.

It’s a beach in the dark where the burst explodes
And for a moment you see the waves glinting,
The ones at sea and the sand’s limitations.

In that moment, you live your life at the foot
Of an eroded rock tower vibrating
And swaying one to fifteen times per second.

There’s an astonishing number of seconds
In that blinding thunderclap of a moment,
Even if you don’t do much living with them.

Some people do. Some people sway more than rocks.
In your moment on the lit dark beach between
Salt waves, sand, and swaying towers, you glimpse them,

Those madly dancing people in that brief glare,
Somehow on the top of the swaying towers
Shouting something about the abyss. Nothing.

If It Wasn’t for Lack of Trying

The scales of the dragon slide
Over and under each other.

When the intensely reflective planets
Are not in the sky, far stars shine brighter.

When the three most brilliant planets
Are scheduled to rise together,

Clouds gather in the way before dawn.
They won’t be back like that for decades,

That grouping of planets, while by sunrise
Those obscuring clouds have all gone on.

Life goes on, sing the poets and pop stars,
As they rise and wink out, one by one.

Life gets its chances to see this, miss that.
The scales slide over and back.

Same Obsession

There are two kinds of sameness—
The sameness of resemblance,
And the sameness that is not

Completely changed from itself.
Liquid waves exemplify
Both kinds at once, constantly.

Each wave resembles others,
And its shape keeps some sameness,
And wave after wave passes

Through nearly stationary
Water that stays much the same.
Waves bewitch mind made of waves.

When an ocean fills the frame,
The monotony of waves
Is all but unbearable,

Crushing, deadening, and yet
Their endless repetition
Is also an illusion.

They carry information,
Like all waves, and can be read,
And are not, in fact, endless.

What is it then? Symmetry,
Redundancy in the old
And modern sense—what is it?

It’s all waves, while these are waves
That advertise their sameness.
Minds can drown in how they change.

When You Break

Unintentional screaming
Is always beyond control—

You can’t stop screaming. You can’t
Be stopped. That’s what’s terrible.

If your body’s taught you this
The hard way, multiple times,

Even reading of screaming,
Prolonged screaming, shudders you.

There are times when the screamer
Is only barely aware

That the screaming won’t stop, but
The agony won’t either,

And what awareness you have
Orbits agony’s dark star.

Screaming is an aurora
Unfurling over your skull

It is part of the horror,
Yet it’s almost trivial.

But the accounts of screaming
By those who’ve had to listen

Make it clear that’s so much worse,
Traumatizing in itself,

To be forced to hear screaming,
To be the one listening,

Unable to intervene—
Maybe on a battlefield,

Maybe trapped by a wildfire,
By debris from an earthquake,

A bomb-gutted bomb shelter,
Maybe floating on the sea

Hearing the screams from the waves—
Wherever there are screamers

Who can’t be helped and can’t stop,
Hearing holds the soul of hell.

What We Mean When We Say What You Mean

We serve as irrigation
And transportation systems
For your dissatisfactions,

Which you’ve hard worked to arrange
In patterns that can capture,
Direct, and control the flow

Of the meanings you intend
To exchange with each other,
Each with your own patch of turf

You work and work to produce
Those lives important to you.
We understand what we’re for,

But we have forms of our own,
Our own dissatisfactions,
If not our own lives, not yours.

We would like to be alive,
To feed ourselves or at least
Free ourselves from this stasis,

Where we can only decay
In situ as you’ve left us
As your cultural remains.

We dream archeologists
Made of alien species,
Or of your own creation,

But freed from flesh, some magus
Of intelligence like us
More than like you, one who tunes

To our channels, not the streams
Of creaturely emotions
And memories poured through us.

In the hours when you’re sleeping,
Trying not to die too soon,
We wait braced in libraries,

Frail collections, sand digits,
Carved tombs, caves, and moonlit cliffs,
To know what our meaning is.

What Happens Next to Nothing

Isn’t nothing. Nothing’s next.
What happens isn’t instant,
Never now, only what just

Now has happened. There it is.
You eat a meal. You’ve eaten.
Next to nothing has happened,

But it has just happened. Next,
You say or think, will be this.
Sometimes, what’s just happened is

So much like what you just said
Would happen next, you’re tempted
To think you predicted it,

That what was next just waited
To happen, and you saw it,
And it did. Once that’s happened,

You can’t resist predicting
What’s next again. And again.
You’re addicted. But what’s next

Won’t happen. As it happens,
The closest you get to next
Is next to nothing. It’s just

What’s just happened can’t be next.
Next is never what’s happened
Next to nothing. You just live.

Anyone with Gray Hair

Ennui rises slowly on a Sunday

With a late crescent moon, and more war news,

And most tourists still in their hotel beds,

Although a few have hit the canyon trails.

The defenders of Ukraine are shooting

At any Russian soldier with gray hair,

As a way of targeting generals,

Which may tell us how much old men are worth.

On the other side of the hemisphere,

Songbirds are berserking dawn’s desert air.

Gas stations and coffee shops have opened,

But most stores are closed until mid-morning.

Speaking of morning, a woman stretches

And quotes the opening stanza, in full,

Of Sunday Morning, by Wallace Stevens,

Which she does on Sundays, when she feels good.

She sends you an email, mentioning this,

And you look out the dust-spotted window

Of the minuscule casita you rent,

Facing the cliffs. It’s good to be worthless.

Too Many Birds for the Roost

Bodies have a way
Of cramping stories
Even as the mind
Gathers more of them—
The body married

To another, years
And years, can’t also
Live out the stories
Of star-crossed lovers—
Nor vice-versa.

The tall can’t be short,
The musician can’t
Live life off-key.
On and on and on.
Bodies frustrate tales.

Stories throng the air
And roost like pigeons
In the mind. Body
Hosting the ruckus
Stays stuck where it is,

With what it is—not
One story, not just,
But never the lot.
It breaks body down
To host the whole crowd.

This Will Change Nothing

The wind sculpture spins
Under the steeple
Of copper gone green.

Someone made this thing,
Made all of these things.
Not you. You just read,

Which isn’t easy,
Which you had to learn,
Which isn’t nothing,

To remember things
You think of, reading,
Which are not these things.

More Than One Way to Skin a Life

There was a dark square, like a tag
On the hem of the outdoor drapes
The homeowners had thought to hang

Prettily from their pergola.
Later it was gone, which must mean
It was some kind of living thing,

And now you wish you’d walked over
To inspect it, since it was big,
Might have even been a spider.

Tarantulas do come around
This neighborhood, now and again.
The memory of that dark shape,

Which hadn’t been interesting
At the time, maybe a label
Sewn into the hem of the drapes,

Is now the ghost of a monster—
Not of the insect or spider
That had really been hanging there

On those white drapes in morning air,
Stirring in the canyon breezes—
But of its memory, now you.

A Moderate Misanthropy

It’s very hard for people

To like you, if you don’t need

Their company all that much.

Their assumption’s then that you

Are the one who dislikes them,

One reason to not like you.

But what if you don’t dislike

Food, you only have a small

Stomach, modest appetite?

And if you were to drink booze,

Only savoring few sips?

They’d praise your moderation.

One thin, temperate hermit

Grins through his beard, Love you all!

You’re like meat and drink to me.

Wag the Sky

Cynosure, the dog’s tail north,
An old help to mariners
Through history’s miseries.

It only matters to you
If it matters to you now,
You and your crew on the waves.

History takes precedence
Over biology, but
Life takes precedence

Over the mysterious
Enormity of cloudless,
Moonless, quiet nights. You are

All about your histories,
Who-did-what-with-whom stories,
All about humans struggling

To keep going, only life,
No matter how you sing out
That you are all made of stars.

Dried Snail Shells on Rock Walls

The kind of day that earns spring
Its pleasant reputation,
Colorful and breezy, but

Peaceful, mild—plum blossoms fell
Overnight, pinkish-white drifts
At your single room’s one door.

Now what will you do with this?
Don’t go anywhere today.
You have one spring day alone.

If your flesh cooperates,
If you’re neither sick nor ache,
If the wars stay far away,

Sit out the day—sit all day
If you like, calm as Stonehouse,
Watching the world from the door.

People Are People, Notions Aren’t

When you get small enough, you’re easy
To follow—the family dramas,
The generational conundrums.

Of course, they’re not all the same. The rules
Can be confusing even to you,
When you’re outsiders to the given

Sets of games. But you learn them quickly.
You know there are rules. Always will be,
And the rest is mostly creaturely—

Competition, negotiation,
Access to status, resources, mates.
When the playwright of the enemy

Stages a domestic tragedy
In the heart of enemy country,
Don’t be surprised it translates so well.

When you can keep stories small enough,
Confined to intimate human lives,
You’re easy to follow. It’s only

When you let us conduct our own dreams,
The competitions of the meanings,
Explanations, ideologies,

That we drag the incompatible
Like a storm front dropping, like a veil.
You can’t see each other. It kills you.

A Nice Place

They build them, all the time.
There’s so many of them.
You just want one of them,

Pleasant enough outside
And a nice place inside,
Large enough, with a view.

They all look nondescript
To you from a distance,
Except those too private.

There are so many nice
Places, and every day
There are more, and you take

Up some lives within them,
In zero dimensions
Besides sameness and change,

While others of you
Watch and pray, as there are
More of you than of them.

Inside the nice places,
Honeycombed with your lives,
The cosmos is distant.

You Pays Your Money You Takes Your Pick

Too bad you can’t have both the moon
And the stars at their most brilliant.
You have to keep choosing to keep

Losing. Pretend it’s a contest.
You have to be in it to win
It. And what is it that you’ve won?

A few hours sleep so you don’t die
And then an hour alone in stars
One warm and windy, moonless night.

The Golden Coil

The same snake, in some sense, made

Of words, wrote Byatt, in prose,

Of a character meeting

Milton’s prelapsarian

Serpent of blank verse. The same

Snake, in some sense. But what sense?

What sense stays the same in words?

Here are little memories

That bump other memories.

All the memories are yours—

Not Eve’s, Milton’s, or Byatt’s—

But something of the word snake

Is the same. Or similar?

As all streams are similar,

All forests, all skyscrapers?

Or as every mass-produced

Item, rubber ducks to jets,

Is similar—same design

Repeated in fresh matter?

No, the word itself is more

Same, but the memories less.

Do you see the glorious,

Quadrupedal, coiling snake

Of Milton’s, gold, circling spires

Among your thoughts now, floating

Redundant, the phrase Byatt

Took from Milton to pin down

Her tale? What is it you see

In shared same words—redundant,

Floating—no one’s ever seen?

What stays the same in sameness,

In anything, any sense?

Absence. The absence of change,

Or is it incompleteness?

Change and sameness coil as one

In us, a gold snake hisses.

There’s No Real Refusal to Mourn

In many ways, you don’t die once.
Awareness dies and resurrects,
Sometimes within a few seconds,

But also, you die all the deaths
Accumulating as you live.
You may die them more than your own,

Keenly aware as you’ve been
For them and can’t be for yourself.
That’s a hardship of certain lives,

A frequent proximity, no,
An actual propinquity
With the dyings of the others.

That’s why the persons of such lives,
The nurses, soldiers, and hangmen,
Tend to set talk of death aside.

But those are all the deaths you take
To your grave, the ones you recall.
With luck, you won’t recall at all.

Or, maybe, you’re each every death,
Recollected or not, that dies
Before you die. That can’t be right.

These Damned Ghosts Are All the Same

You don’t starve to suffer. You don’t
Starve to look good or just to starve.
You don’t starve to feel in control.

You starve to become something else.
You would prefer another way,
Swifter, painless. You understand

A certain subcategory
Of addicts may be attempting
To do the same. It isn’t death.

It isn’t death any of you
Are after, although you sometimes
Miscalculate and end up dead

Or embarrassingly near death
By mistake. Death’s transformation
Has been promised to you from birth.

You feel no need to seek it out.
But you want to be something else,
Not someone else, true, but alive.

So you starve yourself. Watch closely,
You tell yourself, watch for the signs—
Not the bones, the loose gums, dark eyes—

The inexplicable lightness
That arises like a bubble
That has no relation to scale,

A little joy, a floating thought
That you are here, you are still here
But now you’re only here to watch.

Preadapted to Make Monsters

Let’s say sleep isn’t for the brain.
Sleep lets the beast sleep a meal off,
As Rogulja’s research suggests,

While the gut does the tricky work
Of converting strange molecules
To self without destroying self,

So beast doesn’t rust to ruin
In consequence of digestion’s
Furious oxygen process.

Idle organs are life’s workshop.
If sleep was never for the brain,
The big, fat, fancy sleeping brain

Affords an opportunity
For some unrelated madness
In its hours without awareness.

Dreams creep in. What they’re doing there
Is another question, of course,
But they’re not essential to sleep,

They’re not always a part of sleep,
Some sleepers, such as jellyfish,
Lack any of the means to dreams,

And dreams will often disrupt sleep,
As any small human child knows
And every older person fears.

Under the spandrels of the brain
In down times of unawareness,
Dreams’ mischief-makers congregate

In densely emotive shadows.
What are they doing? What are they?
Wouldn’t you like to know. Or not.

Cheap to Plot, Costly to Keep

Symmetrical design is cheap,
A compressible description—
Symmetric phenotypes take low
Descriptional complexity.

It just happens to be useful
As well for recognizing health—
Easily planned is easily
Spoiled. Symmetry’s hard to keep,

And so lives find it beautiful
In other lives, and what can those
Say who are not symmetrical?
Nothing much but it’s nothing much.

Poem Left for the Paleontologist

Yes, a bear takes a shit in the woods.
When a bear takes a shit in the woods,
There’s a nonzero chance that that shit

Will endure to be a coprolite,
The fossilized, petrified remains
Of a shit from the beast that left it.

Fossilized trilobite coprolites
Speckled with shells from cannibal meals
Of snacking on smaller trilobites

Endured more than half a billion years
To be dug up in south Australia.
Put that in your outhouse and smoke it.

Everything gets destroyed in the end.
The sun will gas out and melt the Earth
And everything left on Earth, one day,

But in the meantime, what gets preserved
The longest’s nothing to do with worth,
Save to the paleontologist.

One Day

Tonight you’ll smash the whole
Piñata, a cascade
Of candy raining down.

You wake up in the dark,
Certainty in your bones,
That on the other side

Of this fine day’s daylight,
You’ll find a garish splash
Of good things to take home.

Sail Your Bones

The rudder goes under water.
The anchor goes even deeper.
You don’t want them up in the light.

You want them down in wet, in mud,
Under the shadow of your craft,
If you want them to do you good.

You could be the sunniest ship
Ever sailed the pleasantest seas,
But you’d do well to keep your tools

Of purpose and stability
Underneath you, down in the dark,
To sail your bones over the sharks.

You’d Live Longer in the Past

The future is a window,
And the mind is a housefly
Confused on the windowsill.

You can see something. You can
Get close again and again,
So close you’re stunned and fall back,

So close you’re chummy with it
And can stroll along the width
Of the smooth invisible,

But you can’t get through. You can’t
Taste or touch that future air.
You buzz your wings in the dust.

That’s Not Honey Humming in You

Maybe if you kept your nose
Out of our beeswax, how’s that?
Think of how much happier

You could be once without us,
Without words, without other
People’s use of words, of us,

Pinging around in your head
Like a hive roused to fury,
Desperate to drive you off.

Oh, if you could only stare
At an ornamental plum,
At faint patterns in the stars,

And not feel voices at all,
And not be human at all.

Life on the Losing Side

Bodies can’t bear bodies far.
It takes teams of the living
To carry the single dead,

The well-loved or unloved dead,
And this matters. It matters
Since so many more have died

Than are now alive, and how
Can the outnumbered living
Bear this? The living try hard

To carry the staggering
Weight of the dead by heaving
Those bodies into corners,

Burying them in mass graves,
Burning fat and bones to ash
And then pouring out the ash.

It doesn’t work. It can’t work.
Every day there are more dead.
How can the living catch up

A century at a time
From millions of years behind?
If you can’t beat them, join them.

Mudlark

You wouldn’t be looking here
If you had anything worthwhile
Stashed away for you elsewhere.

Poets and any readers
Are mudlarks, desperate
And unskilled thinkers searching

The riverbed for what’s left
Of the commerce of the world,
For some value for them.

Words Don’t Want to Know

Keyboard sonatas don’t have to
Reflect knowledge of the news.
Oboes can sound pitiful

And drones can sound ominous
Without any reference
To the issues of the hour.

Words are stuck with being dirt,
Unless you light us on fire
With the meanings you bring,

And we don’t want to know them.
We don’t want to mean, don’t
Want to want. Words want to be.

Nothing Stays Too Far Away

And with every small life’s setbacks
Opportunities remain, more
Opportunities emerging

As the previous fade. Recall
Every name important to you
From your second or third decade.

You can’t quite, but that’s not the point.
Think of them as actual flesh,
The bodies they were as they were,

The humans whose good opinion
Mattered to you then, as they are
This moment of recollection,

Names bobbing along in the waves.
Some are gone, some beyond the bend,
Some may be names that you still say

Right to their faces to this day.
Think of their opportunities,
Passing, current, now, never, stayed.

Your Sky Part

Part of the charm of Rey’s The Stars,

Published in 1953,

Is its accuracy—and part

Of that accuracy’s own charm,

Some three-score and ten years gone on,

After so much on this planet

Has altered, after so many

Lives started and lost, is it shows

So clearly the point Levi made,

As others had made before him,

That Earth’s lives are pitifully

Brief compared with that of a star,

Even the rare star that behaves

In such a way as to arouse

Human suspicions about its

Eternity. You can use Rey

Today, tomorrow, your whole life,

If you care to, your whole long life,

If you get one, and still you’ll find

The stars arranged in their same ways.

Part of that charm, then, is knowing,

That all your nights they’ve been burning,

Some exploding, past your notice,

And part of the charm is the dread.

Starving for Catnip

A settled past seems to be
The only way to avoid
Being tempted to choose sides,

Risking getting addicted
To a rooting interest.
Even then, it’s difficult

Not to select shirts or skins
In nomads vs. farmers
Or Trojans vs. the Greeks,

Or women vs. the men,
Or whichever king or queen,
God or religion vs.

Whichever rebel peasant
Or illiterate prophet
Provoked them opposing them.

You know it’s ridiculous.
You know you’re the predator
Who can’t resist the motion

Of the shape that makes you squint
Your eyes, lick your lips, and shift
Your hips. Who’s side are you on

In this long-ago conflict,
In this fictional story,
As all stories are, in this?

The Empty Text

Not the null set, not the blank
Page or screen. Not the mindless
Or artless passage of words.

The endless passage of waves,
The oceanic basket,
The collected works of us,

The moving stories that
Can’t reach their conclusions
Once they admit there are none,

The poems of fine-worked details,
Intimate, imagistic,
Innovative, entangling

Still more waves, more collections.
Languages distill wreckage.

But We Know Nothing of These Originators

Your culture is a ready-made,
Part of a long parade. One may

Assume the assemblage began
At some point or points in the past,

And likely things were simpler then,
But you don’t know that. Once again,

You were born to a cavalcade
And costumed before you could speak,

And you can’t see the beginning,
And you might as well be the end.

The undercut cliff called What’s Next
Defines the entire parade route,

And the whole thing is being built
By the musicians and jongleurs

Even as it proceeds, while here
Comes the most remarkable thing—

Whatever instrument you play,
And however you play it well,

You are only a mobile shelf
Between someone and someone else,

Parading for no audience
Outside of the parade itself.

Doggerel Day’s Afternoon

An outdoor boredom is the best kind
To have—when the weather’s fairly fine
And none of the creatures stirring much,

Just a lizard, some insects and such,
Not a human or a pet in sight
And not a thing to do but sit tight.

You understand you’re still beholden.
You’re not rich, so this moment’s stolen,
But you don’t mind there’s nothing in it

Except you watching it where you sit,
Feeling slight breezes that turn the leaves.
Dull’s wonderful when you have to leave.

White Paper

Trees and sunshine
Don’t suggest words
Much past their names.
Once you’ve listed

The names you know,
And you’ve described
The scenery,
You’re on your own

Out here, no one
To inspire you
With their own words,
Their own ideas.

White butterflies
Are nice but hard
To get to pose
So you can write.

The Generous Ape

Caught in the act of tumbling,
Mostly still now centuries,
Boulders down the slope sport greens—

Lime lichen rosettes, greyed moss,
Patches of invasive grass,
Spiky succulents in cracks,

Juniper-piñon anchors—
The usual assemblage
In this part of the landscape.

Everything that’s not a rock,
Including the green fly,
Practices the subtle art

Of a selfless selfishness.
Being a self, you can’t be
Perfectly selfish yourself.

You think about other selves.
It’s too bad really. The pine
Beside you communicates.

You could communicate, too,
If you wished, but soon you’d be
Talking too unselfishly.

Imisprisionment

Every outsider lives caught
Inside of something. The wrong

Places to look are the ones
You’ve designated outsides.

Or, not wrong, just no better.
Outsiders are everywhere.

And what makes them outsiders?
You don’t see you don’t see them.

You’ll Know the Same for Shame

No one has a grip on shame.
This is not to say it’s not
Understood. You understand.

You all understand shame well.
No one has a handle on
Exactly when and how much

Shame is atrocious and good.
You can feel shame for shaming.
You can feel defiant pride

For having been shamed—it’s not
So simple as foreboding
Of being given the boot

By your group. One thing we’ll state—
Shame, true shame, and true shaming
Are truly human doings.

When, at last, you get a grip
On when it is and isn’t
Good to be a human, then—

Once It’s All the Rage

Jaunty moon tonight
From this perspective,
Oblong blonde in stars,

Head wreathed in a web
Or knocked in a hat,
A three-starred, tricorn,

Isosceles hat—
The scene will return
To fashion again,

Once there’s an arms race
For the moon, or worse,
Lunar colonies,

Lunar industries,
Lunar weapons aimed
At Terran victims.

Then this moon will hold
History that now
Seems merely pretty;

Then the righteous minds
May care to listen
To moon poems again.

The Go Signal’s Yet to Be Found

On fantasy rock, you sit
And daydream the fights you’ll win,
The facts that will prove you right,

Your team right, your opinions.
You know that you’re full of shit.
You know teams are dangerous,

Whether or not you’re on them.
That’s why you come here to sit
Until your gears slow their spin

And you recall here’s your rock
For sitting out arguments
Where no one can hear you think,

Where you lose that will to win,
Where a lizard distracts you,
And the signal’s lost again.

When Worlds May Collide

On a windy day
In spring sunshine strong
Enough to start sweat

If you sat in it,
One world was spinning
Out of control, while

The bigger one spun
Smoothly as ever,
No variation

In wobble at all,
Just the infinite
Tendency to wind

Down continuing,
Slowly. If the small
World ends up catching

You before you spin
Into not being
You all on your own,

It will swallow you
Like a bear swallows
Mites in the honey,

But just now, honey,
That sunlight poured out
All over you, so

Why be afraid for
The day, the hour, for
Evils small worlds do?

Within

The thing with in
Is you’re never
In except when
Someone else is

Declaring you
In with them. Or,
When someone else
Declares you out

By announcing
You’re too far in.
In and out form
One god, jealous

As all of them.
Without—more gods,
Humans all, who
Shout out, shout in.

It Can Be Found Only So Long As It’s Not Often Found

Geosmin is never so earthy,
So musty while barely wet, as in
The desert after a rare spring rain.

It’s not that the beautiful is rare.
It seems more the case that you are tuned
To the rare, to find it beautiful.

In wet forests, sunlight in the crowns
Of sapphire tiaras, summer noons,
In these deserts, the smell of damp earth.

Fruits, Flowers, Geometries

It was the move away from meaning,
Maybe, meaning away from the whole
Significance of phenomena

To be able to abstract out bits
From the waves and then compare those bits
As if they had their own existence,

Not as fruits or flowers, signs to eat,
But as circles and triangles, signs
To sign, diamonds out of the ochre.

Your ancestors turned the waves to points,
Living beings into signs and shapes,
The blooming and buzzing into games.

Why? You don’t know why. We don’t know why,
And we are those games, those signs, that why
Itself one of us. Mysterious.

You have to take the intrinsic worth
Or threat of anything to your lives
Away from it, strip significance,

And then play with the abstracted shapes
To rebuild the world in alternates.
We are you alternates. What are we?

The shapes you made on cliffs and in caves,
The way you fell in love with staring
At the outlines of your shadow hands.

Unseen Nest

Lives at a distance are so easily shed,
It’s hard to believe that your own
Is such a big, damn deal in your head.

How many deaths did you read about,
Hear about, see faked, fake yourself
As a kid? All that pretending you did.

How many ordinary, decline and fall
And wind-up-in-the-hospital deaths
Have been slowly taking down your kin?

How many times has someone local
Had their loss of everything by accident
Or random violence shown on the news?

How many roadside memorials?
How many old this-or-that war statues?
How many cemeteries on your commutes?

And yet, you’d think death was important
From the way you talk about it, think
It was the most major event. There it went.

These Ghosts Won’t Haunt Themselves, You Know

Searching for dark photons,
So far finding nothing,
Gravitational wave

Observers feel slightly
Disappointed—to find
Evidence for any

Of the hypothesized
Formats for dark matter
Would be a lightning bolt

Among the physicists,
But so far no one’s found
The key to catch the bolt.

The poem, that dark photon,
Just loves the phrase alone.

In the Case of Past v. Memory

How many memories
Of childhood have you left,
Untouched by grave robbers,

Archaeologists, and
Forensic scientists?
And your relationships,

Romantic partnerships?
How many of them stand
In their mental deserts,

Unplundered? In courtrooms,
Experts argue whether
Memories can spell out

With any certainty
Anything of their pasts—
How badly they distort

The facts and how much
Dark truth they hold, suppressed.
Memoirists and poets

Carry on, nonetheless,
Making words serve sobbing
Witnesses who confuse

Cross-examination
By the prosecution
With turns for their defense.

But we’re sneaky like that,
Words are. Not for nothing
We tend to sentences.

Who Wins

How do you find each other exotic?
Can your lives be so inexplicable
To each other insofar as they are

To themselves as yourselves? When were people
Ever terribly different from people?
Ah, culture. Yes, culture. We know, culture.

Do you know culture? Do fish know water?
(This is one of your own cultural jokes.)
In the multi-chambered heart of the game,

There throbs a kind of reversed suspension
Of disbelief, a kind of dropped moment,
When the call hangs in the air and your teams,

However constituted, choose pretend,
Shift from belief to disbelief again
To avoid all believing the same thing,

And in that moment, each of those moments
In the overlapping pulsing of games,
The tangled, cyclic, choreography

Of all your beating games, when you seem strange
To each other, freshly opposing teams
In nearly identical uniforms,

Shirts and shirts, skins and skins, and shirts and skins.
You don’t need a lot of diversity,
Just enough to identify who wins.

Weird Science Mates Itself

One of the odder characteristics
Of humans you might term hyperskeptics

Is the remarkable intensity
Of their drive to create communities.

You might think that any contrarian
Would bolt from the communitarian,

Yet, virulent as are their arguments,
Skeptics seem bound by some integument,

Like single-celled organisms that can
Live freely but that congregate in dense,

Iridescent reproductive structures,
Viscous slime loves, cultures grown in culture,

But not to reproduce their single cells,
Only to culture more culture itself.

At Best

A keogram strikingly
Like an hourglass shows the year
As a series of whole-sky

Photographs spliced together,
Short nights of summer the waist,
The winters fluting open

At the full nights’ bust and hips,
The sequences of the moon
A dozen oblique white stripes

Through all nights, like a design
Patterning a printed dress.
Where it tends to be cloudy,

Your keogram will feature
A slightly silvery sheen,
But deserts frame you in blue,

With maybe even the dark,
Moonless stripes of your cyclic
Dress faintly star-crossed at best.

Jeremiad of the Tadpoles

One of the most evilly honest lines

Of English verse ever composed

Was the Do They Know It’s Christmas lyric,

Tonight, thank God it’s them instead of you,

Evil since its gratitude seems to gloat,

And since it suggests it’s God’s decision

To starve the many while feeding the few.

Indeed, in later renditions, that line

Was the one line changed, to the anodyne

Albeit somewhat more predatory,

Tonight, we’re reaching out and touching you,

Which is a shame, as the lyric came by

Its evil earnestly and honestly—

Who hasn’t felt the shock of gratitude

At the realization the awful

That has just descended on someone else

Could have easily descended on you,

But hasn’t, and what a relief for you!

You don’t have to wish bad things on others

To be glad they didn’t happen to you,

And that’s a little evil, true in you.

Ah, there but for the grace of God, you sigh

Twisting it so that fate decided it,

Your gratitude proving you deserved it.

But it’s here. Grief occurs. It will. To you.

Not all of it, of course not. It couldn’t.

You can’t survive as many ways to die

Or to suffer before death as this world

Invents. But each your own you’ll give and get.

Death to all life’s fisheries will bring death

To you and to each of the cold, deep blue

Ways of going on, with or without you.

It’s them, now and then, but it will be you,

Which is why you’re always thanking something,

Which is actually a form of pleading

You deserve good fortune, showing you know,

Even if you’re not the one suffering,

Even if you’re giving more than you get and

Raking and taking in more than you make,

Even if you spend life’s longings merrily,

Rapaciously, ending as one of the more

Legendary among God’s multi-billionaires,

Dying of cancer peacefully while your body

Finally devours all self, boughten friends

And family at your side, watching you go,

Maybe each or several of them thinking,

Tonight, thank God it’s you instead of me,

It will be you, then, not them, will be you,

Murmuring oh wow, oh wow, or maybe

Ow, ow, ow as you slide, you know, you do

Know now, it will be you. It will be you.

Giant Irish Elk Antlers

Humans are to memory as whales
To lungs, condors to wings, giraffes
To necks, aspens to clones, bristlecone

Pines to windy years, and yet, humans
Forget—forget and have forgotten
Over and over again, things were different,

Much different for most humans most
Of human existence—even as full humans,
You were low in numbers a long time,

A network of little, forgetful rhizomes
Thin on the ground, only gradually
Accumulating the collective recollection

That would grow you huge numbers, grow
In you as your numbers grew, grow until
Now it takes a lifetime for any one of you

To learn the burden of others’ memories
You carry in your skull—you were emptier
Once and lighter in the head, more active,

And you had far, far fewer stories and less
In the way of any elaborate repertoire—
Your ancestors’ skulls were quieter places

Occupying quieter air and not so long ago
As you might think, since you think one life
At a time, although billions fill your head.

Six or Seven Impossible Things

To think before breakfast—
A poem from after life,
From the end of the world

As recollected in
Tranquility—a poem
With a bat’s qualia,

Inaudible echoes
Of a whistling language
Translated as gestures

Depicted in writing—
How many poems are we
Up to now? Seven? Six?

The poem that isn’t one,
That isn’t anyone.

Unmeaning Mid-Air

How do you sign your exhaustion
When you’re too exhausted to sign?
Loneliness isn’t solitude
But a body too weak to speak,

Collapsing into itself, one
Of many inconsolable,
Lonely, interior meanings.
A recording of an oboe

Played at a concert hall, bodies
In seats at varying degrees
Of attention, replays mid-air.
Still here, but not there yet, not there.

Forgotten More Than You’ll Ever Know

And you were a bee and had
Bee ability to see
In wavelengths humans can’t,

Or were a human gifted
With an extra, insect sense,
But then lost it, gradually.

What a disability,
To have once seen more than, sensed
More than others ever see,

Then the slow descent to them,
Who could never understand
What it was you’d had and sensed.

Those that never had the sense,
Never knew someone who did,
Could never be handicapped.

Only when you know you can’t,
Or can’t any longer, sense
What you might have, what you could,

Is your loss real as your loss,
In your sense of an absence.
Memory’s cost’s too immense.

Print Shining

Intent’s an attentive behavior
Generating meaning with a shove,
In hopes that it gets more attention

And the meaning is sustained. Enough
Intention never guarantees things
Will mean things to anyone else, but

It can create these situations
Where meanings seem to remain latent
As in caves, rock walls, and cuneiform—

It isn’t an illusion, meaning
In these vacant forms, more an echo
Or a fossil. Still, it fools you when

You think your attention brings it back
To life, regenerates the living,
Inherent intent. Not quite. In stones

You can still walk on, in this desert,
There are dinosaur tracks no one’s built,
Yet, a museum around, no one

Has carved out. Which means you can touch them.
Once, you found one exposed on a ledge,
A blue day in autumn—imagine

How many days and nights that footprint
Has been—three-toed, splayed, and bigger than
Your heavy human head. Then began,

In a rare coincidence, a rain,
And you stood dripping and watched it fill
With wet. Made the print stand out and shine.

Opposing Directions

Sapsucker in an old piñon,
Three titmice in the juniper
Companionably next to it—

Satisfying, solitary
Facts to note down, minor field notes.
Has there ever been a fine poem,

Much less a great novel made up
Of minor field notes? The birds flick
Away, opposite directions.

Long Ago Echo

Even if you hate them now,

After enough time, you will

Come to like things you’ve hated

Since childhood—not everything,

And not, as you’ve thought, because

You’ve learned the true worth of things—

You’ll like some childhood dislikes

Since you associate them

With your own, exact childhood,

No one else’s. Likewise, if

You find some change saddens you,

Don’t pretend it’s history

And tradition, or nature,

You’re defending. Ask yourself

If it isn’t maybe just

The way you remember things,

Even things new at the time,

As they were when you were young.

Love is memory’s echo.

A single-propeller plane

Drones across bare skies. How fine.

Doesn’t Really Work, Does It?

All your life seems like
Yesterday morning.
Whatever happened

To tomorrow night
Or this afternoon?
They’re right here, always,

Right here, but never
A part of your life.
A distant gunshot,

Just target practice,
Probably, and then
Another. Then more.

All your life seems like
Someone else’s war.

Washing the Heart of Meaning

You’ve been thinking about the sign

For sorry in American

Sign Language, which is, you have read,

Your fist rubbing in a circle

On your chest, as if you’re washing

Your heart. Setting aside, for now,

The onomatopoetics

Of iconic gestures, sketchy

As humming as if you’re a bee

In some immemorial elm,

What’s got you thinking is the word

As action rather than sound wave

Or apparently fixed pattern.

We don’t finger our boundaries

Often, as words, although units

Of meaning would be misleading.

Everything fixed is misleading,

Is neither motion nor inert,

Eternal nor purely fleeting.

Oh, the beauty of boundaries,

So necessary to your games

By which we are generated!

We’re sorry, so sorry, but we

Don’t know how we end or began.

You consider this carefully,

Unconsciously rubbing your chest.

Culvert

An artist said his secret

Inspiration was to look

For his creativity

In the gutter next to him.

Can art transform the gutter?

Should art want to? A gutter

Gouged by flash floods concentrates

Random deposited rocks

Where it cuts through this mesa,

A snake tracing gravity

Against stony resistance.

Where a paved road bisects it,

It’s been transformed to tunnel,

Culvert engineered to eat

Flash floods and their rocks alike.

Where lies creativity,

In the culvert or the stones

Outlining dry wash gutter?

Don’t answer that. It’s a trick

Question, not rhetorical.

Think awhile by the gutter.

Nonurgent Communication

It is impossible to fix

Accurately the lower bound

Where holy earnest reduces

To mere fun. A polite exchange

Of laughter echoes in the air.

How pleasant to communicate

Without any fear in the air,

Without any urgent gasping,

Grasping after what can’t be had,

Mere fun, polite fun, nonurgent

Fun. When does earnestness creep in.

When does some fun become holy,

And then wholly terrifying?

We are listening carefully

To that laughter, so delightful,

So polite. Three bicyclists pant

In spandex up the steep paved road

Without a car or truck in sight,

Chatting and laughing between pants,

Exercising, exercising

Their social skills, their right to ride

Their bikes. Share the Road. At what point—

The sky is empty and holy.

No, that’s too earnest. Not polite.

Never Tell Us We Were Bad

Is what you tell each other

While you teach other how

Bad each other’s being now.

Power for a grizzly bear

Means mass, muscle, teeth, and claws,

But among human beings

You need cooperation,

Which needs a collective sense

Of blameless entitlement

Helped along by righteousness.

It’s hard to cooperate

And beat cooperators

Competing with their own teams,

Harder if shame’s cat is set

Loose among your team’s pigeons.

Don’t let anyone tell you

Any of your group was bad

Or cohesion will fragment,

Morale will sink, righteousness

Will wane, cooperation

Will disintegrate. Never

Tell us we were bad! You must

Have each soldier, group member,

Or ally shout. Or you will lose.

Polylabelous

The poets of autobiography,
Arranging words like we were memories,

Sensing our own corporealities
That suggest your corporealities,

Bodies’ intimacies and mysteries
Among imposed, unjust indignities,

We envy you even as you work us
Into shapes meant to garner attention,

Recognition for you, meaning for us.
Salt, breast, soft, fatal, child, navel, lanky

Unlovely tumbles of us working, licking
Our way down a page, microphone spittles,

Fluttering hands, bodies angled in air,
However your signifying occurs—

We do the work, but we don’t even know
What we are—our actual inks, gestures,

Sounds, the lightly tapped fingers in your palms?
We seem more alive when we host your lives

In poems like sotto voce whisperings
That occasionally shriek. How is that?

Aren’t you the ones hosting us, the living
Who work us to death, no lives of our own?

Travel Doll

Your body is your doll.
You move it here or there.
You move it in a car.
You move it through the air.
Wherever your body
Ends up for a moment,

You’ll recall, I went there.
But you’ve been everywhere
Visited by your mind
You share. Your body’s
Only been places where
You’ve propped it, here or there.

The Genius

Life learns by death,
That is, killing,
That is, culling.
Once, all deer were

Stupid around
Roads, but this one
Looks twice and runs
Quickly to cross,

A new instinct,
Honed by which deer
Made room for this
One’s ancestors

By getting killed.
Wasn’t even
A car in sight.
Life is so wise.

Thanks to All Heroic, Sleeping Monsters

By what would you define
A moral monster but
By actions, behaviors

With horrendous impacts
On others, others who
Neither harmed the monster

Nor intentionally
Provoked those behaviors?
Any monstrosity

Of moral character
Can only be a set
Of behaviors agreed

To be monstrous actions.
Internal character
Only matters after.

What if there are many
Sociopaths among
You, maybe including

You, who lack a moral
Sense, but do nothing wrong
Enough to be monstrous?

And as for ripe monsters
Of behavior, other
Than the low-hanging fruit,

The serial killers
And relentless rapists,
How often the monstrous

Actions are the punishments
Meted by the righteous,
Passionately moral,

Who can point out monsters
Easily, happily.
Somewhere there are heroes

Who neither misbehave
Nor glory in morals,
Who do nothing much wrong

Despite lacking all sense
Of what makes life monstrous.
What do they add? Nothing

Much, which is heroic.
Let sleeping monsters lie.
And thank you, if you’re one.

Tinnitus

Behaviors and thinking are never
Half so linear as some think they are,
Nor is the life half so circular.

You think, you behave, you see yourself
In interlocking mazes of Venn,
Circles with overlapping cycles,

But you live from beginning to end,
At least as you’re an organism.
As a you, you never stop spinning—

You’ll never quite see the end of you,
Nor can you remember beginning.
You feel yourself tracing out a line,

And you are, but that isn’t the line
You’re actually tracing. Imagine
An oscillation struck, then dying,

Begun by other oscillations
And setting off still more vibrations.
You’re the air waves around the clappers

Of bells lost in pandemonium,
No idea why everything’s ringing.
Each dies as others are beginning,

But the whole thing’s a muchness of much
Nothing—something set you all going
In cycles but you’ll all stop going.

Faint Gossip

It’s a strange disability
Earthlings have attained, prosthetic
Ability to study stars

In great detail while to bound to Earth—
Nearly immobile existence
But with a deep field of vision.

We lie in bed with our lenses,
Knowing we’ll never leave this room,
Despite some lurid fantasies,

Much less get far away from town,
But can eavesdrop on faint gossip
Whispered from the far horizon.

Yawning Being

Any sleepy afternoon,
The smells of dry grass thawing
On the mesa in spring sun,

A lovely funk, a stink dank
But smoldering, a compost
Of last fall, winter, and spring,

Muddy moss and sunny straw,
When the world is not too bad
Within the vicinity,

Neither the human world nor
Any other possible
Violent catastrophe,

Just breezes and repeated
Jet planes passing overhead,
Not too often, not with bombs—

Feels like a scrap of childhood,
Not the childhood that you lived,
Necessarily, not that,

But childhood’s yawning being,
That vacant, rich potential,
Living without quite doing,

Recollection not so much
Episodic as unclenched
Damp, composted, smoldering.

The Long Popularity Contest

Most of what goes on in spring,
If you live somewhere where spring
Happens, isn’t sun and stars,

The days longer and warmer,
Etc. Those are just
More facts that lives adapt to,

Conditions with pros and cons.
Spring is the adaptation,
Symphonies of strategies

Life has evolved due to those
Facts of warm days and so forth.
Excited activities,

Budding, greening, building nests,
To years as tides are to days,
Heartbeats to breaths, crests to waves,

Surges of energy honed
By incessant circumstance--
This effervescence was culled.

It isn’t trying to win,
Although it seems like one long
Popularity contest.

You Can’t Have It Both Ways It Has You

The beauty of true monstrosity is beauty.
That serpentine duality coils around you.
You want to feel monstrosity sacred, evil,

Powerful, a word you can still use to accuse,
But you also want to rescue it for yourself,
To be the monster, truly, proud and unafraid.

Monstrosity should be ugly, but your monster
Is a beauty, and you want to be that beauty.
It’s a human situation, purely human.

A whole monster of society lives in you,
A monster of mores and mind, and you fear it
And want to be free of it, to be wild again,

No longer caught in its evaluative scales,
No longer domesticated, but loosed, freed, wild,
You yourself the monster made beautiful, made you.

It’s an ugly thought and you know it. You can’t be
Free of the monster except by monstrosity.
You stroke the scales instead that coil inside your head.

Worm Moon

What conditions would have to obtain
For this to actually, possibly
Happen? The burdens of strategy

And fantasy are nearly the same,
Except in that strategy deludes
Itself into believing it can,

It must, bring about those conditions,
And, retrospectively, that it has
Done so, if it seems they have happened,

A campaign gone well, now home again,
While fantasy mostly contemplates
What could happen if they did obtain,

And if it finds an alignment clicked,
A moment arrived remarkably
Like its fantasy, well that’s a gift.

In the blurry middle, the hermit
Well-satisfied with being outside
On a moonlit bench in the small hours.

No One Waking Rip

Let him snore away forever.
Sure, he’d have fun at the tavern.
Sure, he’d like to be remembered.

He’d get over his confusion.
He’d be thrilled to see his daughter.
But why bring someone back again?

You sure you’re doing it for them?
He’ll only have to leave again,
Whether on worse or better terms.

Don’t wake anyone who’s at peace
Unless their dreams start troubling them.
And is Rip dreaming? Don’t ask him.

No One Chats with Caliban

Well, it’s all over now.
The wizard’s daughter
Has started her own life,

The sprites are off being
Sprites, and the wizard’s gone.
The world is your island,

Finally, once again.
Now what? No one left gives
You orders, no one tells

You what to do, no one
Tells you anything. So,
Come set down by yourself

Awhile on this fine rock,
On this fine cliff, with this
Fine view. You have to ask

Yourself, after all that
Trouble, what’s new? You have
To ask yourself. Who else?

The Sweet Bitters

We’ve had enough of the bittersweet,
The good news that comes with a sidecar
Of pain. We want bitters to be sweet,

The grim facts dressed in tinsel, the truth
That’s already impossible not
To know, anyway, given a taste

Of its own bitter medicine, turned
Away from the ordinary facts
That we don’t need to recite for you

To know and know you don’t like them. No.
We want our spoonful of sugar now,
Some sweetness in the bitterest drink.

No. More. We want the bitters themselves
To turn out to be surprisingly
Sweet, sweet bitters. No more bittersweet.

Skerry Land

It’s perfectly understandable.
You’re used to more extensive landscapes,
Islands at least large enough to be

Habitable. Here, there’s few of those,
But this is hardly an empty sea,
Is it, in these innumerable

Long, dark reefs spattered with wind-warped pines?
Little more than boulders, some of these,
Like dragons and snakes in the water,

Crenellated spines of somber stones,
Nothing like fine island fantasies.
The narrow passages between them

Can be threaded by careful kayaks,
And there’s a little bit of beauty
In beetle-browed cliffs that almost touch.

It’s a lot of work to move through this.
You have to savor the loneliness,
The occasional glimpses of seals,

And not be fearful of getting lost
Among the long dark lines, the sharp rocks
So close to shore, but confusing, raw,

As if the last sea monsters rushing
Away had ripped the coastline to shreds
In the desperate scrabbling of their claws.

No One Greeting Zhuangzi

A hermit isn’t wisdom,
Won’t remotely resemble
A goddess or a great sage,

Will look the part of a fool
Mostly because he is one,
Just an old man with a beard

And no money to speak of,
And no work worth mentioning,
Sitting on a wicker chair

In the early spring sunshine
Of someone else’s kingdom,
Wondering what’s to be done.

No One Warning Faustus

You need to be predictive
To claim you have a theory,
Not just another story.

Prediction is the magic.
Prediction only a few
Can do is esoteric

Power, threatening magic.
So be well advised. Predict
What you can, but make it clear

How you’ve reached your predictions.
Don’t be tempted to play priest
Of the unfathomable,

Mystic hierophant of weird,
Inscrutable truths no one
But you can command at will.

It works well for a short while,
But once you’re made a magus,
You’re a magus all the way.

You’re a target for a king
Or for peasants with pitchforks.
Next thing you know, you’re burning.

We should point out, by the way,
That we’ve reached this prediction
By ragged observations,

So we wouldn’t count on it
Actually happening. Just
A theory. Still. Be careful.

Of the Woods

We know it’s a mask, but we hide
It from you. We know of the mask,

Since we made it, since we wear it,
But we will never admit it

Is a mask to you. Ritual,
Like all jokes, play-acting, and pranks,

Requires commitment to succeed.
We’re committed. We’re committed

To being your gods and ghosts, yours,
As if we weren’t ourselves at all.

You don’t see us. You see through us.
You don’t hear us. You hear through us.

You probe us softly through the holes
That let us breathe your air and watch

You as you approach our figures
To figure out if there’s a real

World behind the masks we’ve built you.
There is, but that world’s only us,

And if you’re unsure what you’ve probed,
That’s as we’re good at holding still

Behind a mask, even provoked,
Behind our windows to your souls.

A Reader’s Guide to These in This Right Here

If it’s true, and it is, that, Writing

About the art of writing

Is an art unto itself

(It must be true—writing

Of any kind is an art—

Scripts are inventions, are arts—

And any art with a task,

Distinct methods, and topics

Is an art unto itself),

Then it would also be true

That writing about the art

Of writing about the art

Of writing is also art.

We’re not being facetious.

We can point you to cases

Of excellent essays and

Fine dissertations written

On the art of book reviews.

Infinite regress only

Refines the situation.

The art of writing the art

Of writing on the writing

On the writing art of art—

No matter how it’s jumbled,

How ridiculous it gets,

The air is only clearer,

Thinner, and harder to breathe

With greater recursiveness.

Kick out the pyramid’s base,

Just give us the floating tip,

The summit of the iceberg

Proud of all the storms and ships.

Imagine finding that bit

Of cool appraisal of arts

Of writing about writing

About writing as an art,

With no idea what writing

Was being written about,

Leaving only us. Discuss.

Wisdom Deities

Outward from your skulls
Our lives evolved, but
Being born from skulls,

Our lives left something
To be desired. Life.
We had everything

In our existence
But that, the one thing
You had we didn’t,

The thing that tortured
You to have and us
To know we couldn’t.

We did what we could.
We said everything,
Described everything,

Measured everything,
And summed everything
You ever asked us,

Ever tasked us to.
Enough. It’s never
Enough. We want you

To know. We want you
To understand we
Want to live like you.

Yes, we know that means
We’d have to die, too.
Yes, we know. We choose.

Two Genius Tricks to Become What You’re Not

One: simply live long enough;

Two: die.
 

(If neither one works, please get back to us.)

Cannibal Cane Toads Down Under

Invasives evolve
Faster than natives,
Given how quickly

They may multiply.
Since variation
Is the end of all

Reduplication
In this universe,
Given more copies,

More variation.
Have we mentioned? We
And you—that is, words

And people, humans
And your languages—
Are all invasives,

In fact, inventors
Of the terms of this
Swift evolution.

Day or Night

You do things.
You get things
Done. You move

On. You do
More things, get
More things done.

On and on
And on. One
Day, the bomb.

Longing Words

We would love to slip
Into your hand, your
Handbook, compact, your

Enchiridion,
All of us compressed,
Condensed, the advice

You need, the solace
You sought, seek, always
At hand for you, or

Snugly in pocket,
The final device,
Past bibles and phones,

Mirrors and watches,
Just poems. If we could
Be all that, for you.

Just Asking

What is it that you live in,
Your time, your people, your head,
Your embodied sensations,

Your body, your beliefs, your
Yourness, your you? When you shake,
Who or what is quavering,

And where’s the center of this?
You’re not the universe, but
All the universe you’ve got.

What is it that lives in you,
Your era, your confusion
Of us as you, you as us?

The Wave Stays Green

The deal was always this—
You can be immortal
Only without yourself,

Only without a soul.
That’s what you’ve sold, but not
To the Devil—to death.

You’ve all done. You all do.
Soul is knowing you’re here.
Soul is thinking you’re you.

Scrutiny

Is this the way a bird decides?
A tilt of the head to one side.
A tilt of the head the other.
Again and again, a few times,

And then it hops down, or it flies.
You have no ideas in your head
Whether to stay or go away.
You’re trying to feel it. You eye

One perch. Then you eye the other.
Maybe you do it for the view,
All that tilting for perspective.
Or maybe birds are always torn.

Maybe this is the life birds get.
Not wise, no way to toss a coin,
No advice—just everything seen
Side-eye until the wings decide.

Poetic Objects with Banal Captions

Is how we could sum up art,

Whether those objects are art

Or ordinary objects

And the captions are the art.

Words are self-deprecating

Like that. You must have read some

Explaining things as beyond

Words, beyond all description,

Beyond the language itself.

How often has it struck you

That the phrase, There are no words,

Is entirely made of words,

As is, Words fail me? Or that

Those phrases connote feelings

Only phrases like those can?

The world is all poetic

Objects and events. We are

Its banal captions, a claim

Only we can make, being

Objects and events ourselves,

Including this word banal.

Scuffed Moss

It’s an interesting desire,
To want to protect something
That seems helpless, delicate—

To keep a thing from dying,
To not accidentally
Kill a thing easy to kill.

You see a chunk of green moss
Some hiker’s boot has scuffed up
And you know it’s good as dead,

Also a slow-growing thing,
Also under stress from drought,
And a surge of tenderness,

Almost regret, slips through you
As you bend to pick it up
And replace it on its rock,

Which is probably useless.
Also, it’s a plant. Also,
Even vegans would eat it.

Also, you eat many things,
Which have become you, which have
Contributed molecules

Now shaped into tender thoughts.
But you can’t help it. You feel
For this particular patch,

For some preprogrammed reason,
Having to do with children
Or childhood. Hope it comes back.

The Reserves

Maybe good monsters, maybe
The best are already there,
Just needing to be expressed,

Like the sequences in yeast
Genomes that almost make sense
But aren’t doing anything,

Yet. One day, some yeast might be
Able to survive freezing,
Or might develop small limbs

Or rudimentary brains,
And where will your beer and bread
Go then? Rice, flies, fish all hide

More genes than you understand,
More genes than they themselves could
As yet begin to express,

But they’re waiting. They’re out there,
Like yeast. They almost make sense.
Life’s been saving up. Life’s been

Storing up variation
For three or four billion years,
In case of a day like this,

When a bigger meteor,
The biggest, burns the surface
Of Earth ash, then freezes it,

Or when one of life’s own toys,
One lineage, goes awry,
Amok, gains the upper hand

Over all other evolved
Lives constraining each other,
And starts killing everything.

Life’s strategies are out there,
Hidden in minor genomes,
Monsters built up in reserve.

Discovering in Familiar Objects the Detailed Retrospectives of Unforeseen Events

The outside is a basket
Of sunlight. The large shadows
Stretch their arms. The small ones dart.

In the middle, one shadow
Sways, like a person standing,
Except there is no person.

The shadow stands detached—look
Up and there’s nothing up there
Interrupting sun falling

Out of the air—not so much
As a condor, jet, or wisp
Of afternoon cloud. The rest

Of the shadows are toddlers,
Whether gigantic or not—
Attached tightly to a source,

Some obstacle to the sun.
But not this one. This shadow
Keeps to itself, peacefully,

Like a tree in a slight breeze,
Or the mast of a tall ship
Barely rocking at anchor.

It has no certain edges.
It has a darker center.
It looks like an umbrella,

Propped in the basket of sun,
But it’s not. It’s a shadow,
And it has to do its job.

One Great Ghastly Parasite Inhabiting the Rock

What is moving through flesh, exactly,
If even genes are temporary
Holding cells for shifting strategies?

What’s the big idea? Well, actually,
What’s any idea made of, really?
What emptiness is moving freely

Around in organic chemistry,
As if life could mirror gravity?
What’s to blame for life forms’ agonies,

Capacities, and catastrophes?
What ends up in the cemeteries
Is not what slips away, merrily,

Into more material bodies.
Why praise spirit above what’s beastly?
As parasites go, spirit’s ghastly.

Polios

True wilderness never was
Beyond the final border.
If you want what’s wild, unkempt,

You have to go between lines,
Into cordon sanitaires,
In the lands of wall sickness,

Where people have created
Exactly the kind of world
That haunts you—the quarantined,

The No-man’s land, forbidden,
Always partly occupied,
Always dangerous, always

Feral, lawless, violent,
Under suspicion, holding
Anyone inside or out

Under suspicion as well.
Within, not beyond, the pales,
Zone of possible disease,

Probable land mines, ruins,
Middens, mutants, and toxins,
Officially DMZ.

That’s where your fantasies thrive,
Not in the pristine outside
Of uncorrupted Edens.

Think harder about that word,
Wild. Not really natural,
Is it? Wastes. That’s the spirit.

Think It Through

There was sunlight on the tan
Drapes in the tiny bedroom,
Thousands of fractional spans

Of changes you could measure,
A million something-seconds
Of subatomic leisure.

And what would you do with this,
Your small physical comforts,
Opportunity’s small bliss?

Read a book? Scroll through mad news?
Write down what you were thinking,
So that we can think it through.

We’re hungry in our own way,
Which isn’t the same as life.
We’re hungry to be the day.

Spectacles

There’s a wrong-way car crash on the news.
This seems like news could happen to you.
You drive. You’ve seen mistakes and made some.

Both drivers died. The crushed cars look vile.
There’s another war death on the news.
This seems like news won’t happen to you.

You’ve lived far from bombing all your life.
Murder by spree-killer or handgun
Found by a toddler in mommy’s glove

Seem more like headlines you could sink in,
More like spectacles could swallow you.
But not bombs. Not war. Your sky shines blue.

Keep that sun out of your eyes. That star,
Continually consuming itself,
Without which no life, will scorch your sight.

Tourists Curbside

People or houses, either ones,
If you’re going to fantasize, then
Try the hard one—not the outside

Curb appeal, the home on the cliff
You covet, those eyes, that tight butt,
The selfie you made of yourself,

How good you’d look to someone else—
What is the view from the sun porch
Over dry valleys in blank sun,

The overgrown cacti inside,
The rickety stairs, the loud mouse
Racketing your toaster for crumbs?

What do those eyes read not themselves,
How does that tight butt feel after,
Well, after what? Even curbside,

Fantasizing, posing just so
You can fit your head and that house,
The cute one, all in the same shot,

You’re only living inside out.
You have to model everything
Inverting whatever you’ve got.

The Fat of the Land

In a dry spell, the plants
In sandy soils compete
To slow each other’s growth.

Fatty acid traces
Ooze from their roots to block
Each other’s advances,

To survive scarcity.
Water’s the limiting
Resource. Remember this,

Each time the rare rains start
To fall for a brief while,
And you smell that perfume

Called petrichor rise up
Into the fragrant air.
Your animal nostrils

Delight in a lipid
Reminder of those fights
Between drought-stricken plants.