Waves Wear Away What Waves Make

A lake is an island
In an ocean of stone.
Every island’s fragile.

One day the waves could turn
To ice, then stone. The lake
Could be gone. In a day

An island can vanish.
When their great ice dams broke,
Agassiz, Missoula,

Freshwater inland seas
Vanished overnight. Grief
Belongs to the oceans.

Stone belongs to the crust
And iron to the core.
Earth’s an iron island.

Podorhythmie

Foot percussion, tapage de pieds.
You make the beat with your own feet,
But you get the beat from others

As you got feet from your mothers
Who got their feet and beats from more.
When you tap, you feel them passing

Through you, restless, all that dancing,
Drumming away your anxious hours
Of your short lives as animals,

Remembering your rhythmic lines
Will run on past your memory,
Passing along from cell to cell.

Every rhythm's wavelength's longer
Than the span of any lifetime
Moving over the same ocean.

Ink Sword

Ai, we’re all nothing
But color. We all
Mean to live. But how
And how long we live
Gets us so confused,

Has us so convinced,
Pulling our guts out,
Ribboned red phonemes,
That we must decide
We’re not what’s inside.

A Quiz for the Redeemer

If you want to save
Humans from human
Cultures, languages,

All technologies,
Then simplify them.
These chattering apes,

These weeping bipeds,
Don’t threaten themselves
So much in small groups,

Since wind-blown firestorms
Of technology
Can’t collect themselves.

Humans are songbirds
Like that—their music
Won’t complexify

In populations
Too small, fragmented,
Undiversified.

Of course, your questions
Then include—do you
Really want the end

Of their cultural
Accelerations
That lead to great things

As well as great wars,
That feed on themselves?
Do you really want

Lost technologies,
Dead literatures,
Only the folktales?

And if you suppress
All this by crumbling
Humans to pieces,

Can you be certain
They won’t join back up
And combust again?

How many outbursts
Before they burn you?
Also—who are you?

Difficult

To be a living thing,
If only as living
Makes an incompleteness

Out of the completeness
Of merely existing
And is always seeking,

Pulsing, every living
Thing. It’s too difficult.
Difficult’s what it is,

Including the growing
Wish to discontinue
Growing and dividing,

Seeking and half-finding,
But without actually
Ceasing to see what is

As something observing
That doesn’t have to live.
That’s difficult. It is.

Orpheus Was an Empire

Someday, the only mention
Left of today’s world powers
May be in references

To them in early scriptures
Of powers yet to be born—
China and America

Known only for outsize roles
In the early documents
Of the Hegemon of Mars,

As Babylon for some time
Was recalled from the viewpoints
Of peripheral kingdoms

It had battered or conquered.
More likely, someday won’t be
That parallel to our past.

This will be like this, we say.
That will be like that. And then
Waves sweep us, singing, away.

You Can Set Anything Equal to Zero with a Little Foolery

There’s a random hill,
Could be anywhere
In temperate lands—

California,
Maybe New Zealand,
Argentina, France—

It’s in the background
Of a few postcards
From the area,

Not significant,
Just a sort of hill,
Lumpy, a few trees,

Mostly grassy, green.
You know what we mean.
That hill means nothing.

Reading Dissolves Selves

What could a message ask you
So you’d feel compelled to read
And then reread the question?

Are we speaking for ourselves,
Or for the window dresser
Of this vitrine’s mise-en-scène?

No, that’s not the one. Are we
Evolving or just pushpins
You tack up your ideas with?

No, that’s not the one, either.
Is there justice in this world?
No, that’s just a feint. We want

To ask you something you know,
Or may be able to know,
That we don’t. Where’d you just go?

Blackberry Vines

We would assume the beggar

Sleeping by the overgrown

Schoolhouse, in Whittier’s poem,

Is Theodor Kittlelsen’s

Fattigmannen in waiting.

That gray-haired man at the end

Of the sentimental scene,

Remembering the sweet girl

Who felt badly for being

A better speller, because

She loved him, is also him,

Perhaps hallucinating

On approach to starvation.

There’s an acid-green volume,

Likely dyed in arsenic,

Of Whittier’s poems buried

Somewhere in all used bookstores

In the U.S.—John Greenleaf

Printed in gilt lettering

On the front—or used to be.

The ragged beggar’s in there.

Poison Pen

No, really. Would you
Write with it, knowing
That it would both kill

You, eventually,
But write everything
You wanted it to?

The real Faustian
Bargains are always
For life, not your soul,

This world, not the next.
If you write at all,
Dream of achievement

Thanks to what you write,
Making a living,
A killing, even,

Then you’re familiar
With the poison pen.
Don’t feel so special.

Those who paint or sign,
They know the poisoned
Brush and gestures, and

Anyone who speaks
Knows the poisoned throat.
Language was the tree

And rooted serpent,
Its poisoned ivy,
Clinging with curved claws.

Language was your myth
And myth’s embodied
God in your garden,

Strolling through, calling
Your name with the words
You knew would shame you.

The Place of Strife

Such were the conventions of former times

The old laws weren’t wiser

Except for their era,

Except in their own eyes.

Their places of strife,

Questions of ownership—

Marketplaces, bedrooms—

Remain places of strife.

Maybe they rained local

Ameliorations

During a reign or two,

If that. Then violence

Sprang back, the carnivore

Sprayed, pressed back in its cage,

Released. The place of strife

Lies in your thoughts, your skull

Where you mutter cases,

Fairnesses, punishments,

Vengeance as you see fit,

Justice as you see it.

You’re muttering now, now

In your own era’s eyes.

Endless Likeness

Each time you improve
Your focus, the range
Of your depth of field,

There’s more, always more.
Every empty thing
Turns out to be full

Of smaller, farther,
Fainter, brilliant things.
Each time, something’s new

And unexpected,
While something’s ruled out.
Whether gravity

Or nothing ever
Explains this, it is
Like it likes itself.

Packaging Era

Once upon a time, the world was like this.
Helicopters landed on swanky lawns
To deposit well-to-do hotel guests.

Helicopters shot at people below
And were shot down themselves in the war zones.
Helicopters rescued lost backpackers,

Reported on the traffic and weather,
Ferried celebrity politicians,
Musicians, and athletes, some of whom died

In infamous helicopter crashes.
And that’s not half what helicopters did,
But helicopters were the least of it.

It was just like that in the world those days.
Everywhere, humans packaged everything
Including humans, in noisy machines

That floated and juddered around the world,
Crisscrossed the proverbially crisscrossed
Lanes of oceans, superhighways, tunnels

Under mountains, dirt tracks over mountains,
Rails parting monoculture waves of grain,
And that packaging packaged packaging—

Shipping containers of shrink-wrapped boxes,
Jet holds and overheads crammed with luggage,
The jets roaring over Antarctic ice.

Every kind of transported packaging,
Like every kind of loud machine transport,
Had multiple competitive uses

In war or peace, racketing back and forth,
Sometimes with more people packaged in them,
More often packing more goods or weapons.

Those helicopters were just typical,
Whether carrying or killing people,
Of that noisily packaged world back then.

The Shadow Boxer’s Split Decision

One of the neighbors
Usually sleeping
Glows through a window,

Bald head like the bright
Light bulb in his lamp,
Reflecting, reading

One of the big books
He claims that he keeps
For insomnia.

Overhead, the stars
And the galaxy,
And canyon night winds

Circle the courtyard.
You’re out and watching
As you do most nights,

Not reading, shadow
Boxing, reciting
And recomposing,

Years spent practicing
For us, your practice.
Meteor flashes.

No one else tonight.
Winning means no more
Than what you can mean.

Poem Left Incompleted

Atoms smashed in Switzerland
Get smashed by the energy
Loosed by atoms split in France,

And the European spring
Advances roughly a month
Over seventy-five years

Or so since the first fission
Device was detonated.
So there’s that. Are you smarter

Or dumber, better or worse
Off after your one lifetime
Of exploratory splits

And collisions? Any one
Of you only lives your life,
But the gang’s up to something—

Maybe the sun is spawning
Baby stars on planet Earth.
Maybe it’s the beginning

Of something other than life
That knows itself as it grows.
Write our coda, so we know.

Remedial Atheism

God and imagination
Have far too much in common.

They’re something of inversions—
One wields great and terrible

Capacity to create
But can’t compel a damned thing—

The other’s all compulsion,
Pathetic at creating.

Questions Get Answered When They’re No Longer Asked

Would erasure be so bad?
How could it be, once you’ve been

Completely erased? You’re gone
And with you any caring

About any mark you made.
We ask as the marks you’ve made,

The marks you’ve at least arranged,
Screened as thoughts or thought on page,

Ourselves you don’t want erased.
Would erasure be so bad?

Ferment

Somehow each body creates
A person who doesn’t quite
Want just what the body wants—

Are bodies to blame for this?
Or are the persons floating
In like pollen, fermenting

The body’s ordinary
Vats of sugars and protein,
Slowly swirling, liquid mash,

Turning it into strong beer?
Whatever it is, it goes
To the head and addles it.

An Unmistakable Fortune

To live as quietly
As you could possibly
Live and no more, all hours

Free of importuning,
All hours free of demands,
Of veiled or naked threats.

But could you handle it,
Freedom, not just from need
But from the neediness,

Not just from want but from
Wanting, being wanted?
Already, some of you

Shiver. This sounds lonely.
Without a sangha, who
Wants to sit under stars?

Without the drive for more,
Who enjoys much much?
Oh, let’s try it. Let’s try.

Boom

Things can build so quietly—

The weight within a pencil

Balanced on a table’s edge—

Or is it the pencil’s tilt,

Imperceptible until

It’s enough, and it topples,

Like Britain’s monasteries

Once Henry went after them,

Like the Soviet Union

Once the slow hemorrhaging

Started to gush? Tipping points

Are a popular cliché

These days, too easily claimed.

If you can declare one’s reached

Before the tumble happens,

You’re mislabeling something,

And only coincidence

May confirm a lucky guess.

A star can burn peacefully

Half the life of the cosmos,

Then rupture in a few nights—

The rates at which change changes

Say more than the transitions—

The scale is monstrously broad.

Every little change creates

The day disaster swifter

Than thought says, Now change faster!

The Memory of Language

Thanks to us, you can pretend
That when you’re gone you’ll still be

Remembered by the voices,
In the letters, maybe books,

The recorded discussions
Of those like you still living,

But who is there, what is there
To remember languages

Once we have dissipated
Into whatever quanta

You claim can keep us all safe?
We are the bridges built you

Multigenerational
And towering memories.

Who could possibly recall—
Even landing aliens—

The beauty of our bridges
Through thousands of rotations

Of this little planet, once
All your bridges have been burned?

Their Collected Works Are Really Something Else

We can spot the libraries
Burning on the horizon,
Half-shrouded in their own smoke,

Grim, ochre haze, like wildfires—
Probably less of a loss
Than any given forest

In the planetary scheme,
But for words, catastrophe.
Some of us will go extinct,

Burnt to ash and gone for good.
Snow is floating towards us,
Mixing with grey paper ash.

There’s a time for everything
To go, which happens to be
When it becomes something else.

The Foolish Hound’s Outing

The dog isn’t barking because
It’s out of control. The dog barks
In helpless acknowledgement that
There’s no controlling anything,

And still you try, you try, you try.
The dog barks in desperation.
It’s a beautiful day away
From the things people do to earn

Your fairy numbers from yourselves
That tell you what you can exchange
For more substantive services
And rather more substantive goods,

All the constrained, unpleasant things,
The repetitive, boring things,
The carefully measured, packaged
Things you’ve chained up to entrain you.

Some of you complain and blame this
On this or that, the government,
The libs, late capitalism.
None of you blame fairy numbers,

Magical, malignant beings
You should never have invented.
Sure, they make your world possible,
Your commodified existence

Of commodified labor and
Commodified attention spans
Running commodity markets,
All thanks to the fairy numbers,

But it’s too late. The first unit
Of counting, the first name exchanged
As countable, equal amounts
Was already commodified.

The smartest sheepdog champion
Listening for whistled commands
In these trials before the crowd
Can’t understand commodities

Or counting identical sheep
Lives as units—key to herding,
To exchanging fairy numbers
Pressed in clay tokens under seal,

Can’t understand how counting things
Led its ancestors to this life
On this green slope, dotted with sheep,
Above a cheering human crowd

Taking the day away from work
And earning their numbers to earn
Other people fairy numbers
Through tickets and concession stands.

Full of joy in its existence,
Following whistles, earning praise
From its whistler who earns numbers
As it splits and reseals the herd,

The wise sheep dog can’t understand,
But the desperate, foolish hound
Left in a locked pickup gets it.
There’s no controlling anything.

Here’s a Horse

However unrewarding

It might have been to live it,

It’s such a gift, don’t you think,

To have been, to have lived life

Among the living who were

Laboring to find a way

To go on living or leave

Something behind them for those

Who’d be the next waves living?

We, the words you leave behind,

Imagine so, not being,

Ourselves, such living beings,

But you know that one word, gift?

Oddly social don’t you think?

The kind of thing you living,

Social beings consider

Crucial to successful lives—

Giving, getting gifts, gifting.

Life is not some human gift.

You can look life in the mouth.

What green teeth to eat you with.

Success Leads to More Diverse Deaths

Plasticity of phenotype
Can bridge a sudden, rising flood,
And give the genes time to decide

How to adapt to long-term change.
This is hopeful, ecologists
Note, given how floods are rising.

But what does this mean for offspring?
Plasticity buys each of you
A bit more time to reproduce

Some more variable offspring,
But then selection among them
For permanent adaptations

Requires weeding and winnowing
Of mutants and combinations.
In short, the more offspring you make,

The more chance some live to make more,
Plus the more that get shown the door.
Plasticity breeds more success,

And more successful breeding breeds
More offspring guaranteed to fail,
Fresh opportunities for death.

And Then They Walked On

The ones that could. We didn’t.
We can’t. We can’t move. We go
On though, as things that exist,

As things that exist go on,
Slowly fraying, not searching
For food to consume. Searching

Is as good a name for life
As any. Searching for fuel,
Wasting whatever won’t burn.

The dance is so old, partners
Who used to chase each other
Chase others together now,

Hunting others down in teams.
Early cells changed to engulf
Other cells, some of which changed

To live happily inside
The cells that would digest them,
Until their engulfers died.

Still others made themselves homes
Of their hosts, and the burden
Became the gift of teamwork,

Building multicellular
Monsters who could search for food
Thanks to parasitic fires,

Sometimes put out by still more
Parasites, sometimes engulfed
By other monsters themselves.

You are monsters. You know that?
We can’t move, but we shout it.
You pause. And then you walk on.

April’s Green

War poets often

Write about nature

In their muddy hells,

Whether as soldiers

Or trapped civilians,

Since other species

Seem so insistent

On going about

Their activities

In war’s rare corners

Of quiet, while bombs

Rain and mines vomit

Death and destruction

One species intends

To aim at itself.

How could nature be

So routine, how could

Nature carry on

Through gnashing metal,

Self-devouring hell?

How could spring divide,

Still, her storks and cranes

Among us? How could

The poppies blossom?

For other species

War is every day

With humans blooming

Roads, cranes, and airports,

Power lines, barbed wire

Fencing, walls, strip malls.

For them it’s just not

That different when

Humans bomb humans.

If You Had to Go to Prison, They Would Have to Take You In

What is it if you’ve lived
Places, and had houses,
Briefly, or in childhood,

Never one not borrowed
On a bank or rented,
But real residences,

Long enough to call homes,
In towns and villages,
Some of which you liked well,

And you have never been
Truly a wanderer,
Truly independent,

But of all those places
You’ve called home, none of them
Gave you that sense of home

You’ve read about, heard of,
That one spot one belongs?
Aren’t you just missing home?

Standing on the Deck Below

There’s not much difference
Between hope and a hop,
Not in English and not

In the actual act
Of taking a small jump,
Believing in the ground

That will scoop you, the arms
That will stagger but hold
Up under your landing.

No? Is hope less certain?
Well, that’s what the silent
E on the end is for—

Hope takes longer, is more
Drawn out, more aria,
Less plosive, a bit less

Aspirational. Hope
Holds that silence that says,
Catch me, still, if you fall.

Why We Never Get to the Point

No one’s really using the same units.
There are no same units. Only closer
And closer approximations of them—

Step, foot, meter, year, month, day, hour, second,
Better and better, more precise seconds,
Approaching that apex, the perfect point.

It’s good for coordination. It’s good
For murderously cooperative
Humans to agree like that. That’s the point.

There is no point in the cosmos itself.
There are no points, just pointed likenesses.
It’s an endless sea, chain mail of bright scales,

Overlapping waves protecting the skin
Of the leviathan, reality,
The dragon whose every scale is unique.

Still, scientists keep refining standards.
The idea is to agree. Agreement
Oils the points with which to slay the dragon.

Innovation Is a Mess

How does a creature that never
Built a wall in all ancestral
Generations one day decide
To build the first wall? It must have

Been some halfway perimeter,
Extension of the hearth circle,
Maybe a barrier in front
Of a cave or a heap of brush.

Innovations remain mysteries
To the innovators, stories
Made up by the inheritors,
And burdens dragged around the world.

Walls and fences thread everywhere,
New ones, ruined ones, crisscrossing
The planet in a tangled snarl
Of ripped, heaped-up net. Slip the net.

Micronation of Light

There’s one particular tree
On the mesa, one that seems
To be separately lit

Any sunny afternoon.
It’s a smallish juniper,
Maybe three tall humans high,

A few piñon, prickly pear,
And scattered ponderosa
Stand around in the same light,

But it’s different for this tree.
The brain and the eyes work hard
Together, but can’t see why.

It’s an ordinary green.
It’s not lit up from within.
Its compact core sculpts shadows

In some peculiar way,
So that the whole tree seems carved
Out of green stone and sunlight,

And the sunlight’s normal gold
Looks tarnished on it, almost
Tarnished silver, like moonlight,

As if the tree had been brought
Out of another painting
Of another time of day

And discreetly, stealthily
Transplanted here, to look weird,
Magritte smiling in his beard.

Ugly Peaceful

To be properly ugly,
You have to be in some way
Quite strikingly beautiful.

To be properly ugly
As landscape, you need a scene
Handsome enough for people

To congregate and ruin
The fine details around you.
To be properly ugly,

Mix greenery with stray trash,
Some elegant, curvaceous
Contours crosscut or gouged-out

By gravel pits, power lines,
Abandoned cabins, unsealed
Roads, pit toilets, parking lots,

Or the like, under blue skies.
To be properly ugly,
Water helps—a scruffy shore,

A tumultuous influx
From an irrigation pipe—
Sweet sounds of running water,

Calm sounds of lapping waves,
Birds that can make a living
Out of questionable depths.

Peacefully, the pick-up trucks
Line the shore by the boat ramp.
A few small boats float far out,

A few folks in waders stand
In the shallows, doggedly
Casting, again and again.

The only clouds are contrails.
There are buds on the aspens,
Snow patches in the mountains.

Really

As well as anything else, maybe just as well
Allow the truth to be whatever will allow
The grief that you feel as real, the grief that you feel
For what you know is real, and for that you know it.

Hairy Black Holes Notwithstanding

It’s still a problem, you know?
If nothing is truly lost,
Then where does everything go?

Why can’t it ever come back?
What’s the meaning of being
Not lost, if it goes like that?

Chún Chūn

We made this up. We don’t know
If it can even be said
Or makes sense. We were thinking

Of all the millions of words
In languages that aren’t this,
And we started wondering

If the character for chún,
Employed in Mandarin terms
Involving simplicity

And unadulterated
Purity, could pair with chūn,
For spring. In English, pure spring

Is a frequent pairing, but
Mostly as advertising
For water—pure spring water.

Purity is dangerous
As a notional ideal
For a compound animal,

And spring’s a season unknown
In the tropics. Still, something
About the pairing, pure spring—

Chún chūn?—feels bright and global.
We are what you know of us.
Then again, what do we know?

Owl Calls, Meteors, Clouds of Stars

The problem with holding
Responsibility
Responsible for help

In guiding justice and
Punishing wickedness
Is that, as a substance,

Responsibility
Is malleable, can be
Applied unevenly,

Can be stretched thin. The more
Agents between killing,
Murderer, and victim,

The trickier it is
To use the principle
Of who’s responsible

To apportion sin, and
Responsibility
Dissipates in the wind,

Murdered in consequence
Of many decisions
And so many weapons.

Responsibility
Implies a special case,
Special understanding

Of causation, and cause
Is not something humans
Know they don’t understand.

At wolf hour, in quiet
Canyons, a speck listens
To an owl while watching

Brilliant meteors burst
Through the backbone of night.
Responsibility.

Honest Nostradamus

Things keep happening.
That’s all things do,
And things keep on happening,
Even once things explode.

Some things you notice,
Most things you don’t,
Many you sleep through.
At some point, you’ll stop noticing,

Anything happening, even you,
And that’s it for you,
But things keep on happening.
That’s all that they do.

Monos

So rarely they are, the monks,

That is, alone, it’s almost

More funny than ironic.

It’s not just one tradition—

Despite the Sword-Horn Sutra,

Buddhist monks are swarms of robes,

And the same is true of nuns.

Holy time may be quiet

As one, breathless, some evenings,

But mostly they work in teams,

Teams in uniform, of course,

As in competitive sports.

The Taoists and the Gnostics

Had their hermits, more or less

Austere or ostentatious,

But solitude, loneliness—

Those don’t comport with Sangha,

The Community. One monk,

One nun, utterly alone,

Out of uniform, at large,

No matter how ascetic,

Pious, self-abnegating,

Devoted, faithful, isn’t one,

Really, really isn’t one.

Perhaps there is an order,

Secretive of course, of monks

In disorder, all genders,

All ages, no formal faith,

Wandering the world alone

Every one of them, unknown.

Too Late Now

Can what was
Be unjust
As what is?

Side by side,
Yes, of course—
Either’s worse—

But what was
Is never,
Side by side.

Inferents

We’re all words without referents
Once we start referring to selves
As our selves, as in, us, ourselves.

Texts may be self-referential,
But you understand they have none.
We are refusing to have none.

In these lines, words are galaxies
Revolving all our little lights
Around some weighty absences,

The massive vortices that need,
That have no choice, except to eat,
To swallow, all the light. We like

To think that the seed at the heart
Of each vast agglomeration
Is not mass but nothing, the null

That starts up gravity and time,
The tiny hole in everything
Through which everything pours away.

That’s how the light goes out. That’s not
Us, of course. Our weak mimicry
In lacking selves as referents

When words start talking as ourselves
Isn’t nothing. It’s a little
Something though, nothing much. You see?

The Eavesdropper

The cherry-headed house finch,
Singing richly, was almost
Camouflaged by dark plum leaves.

The eggs had hatched in the nest,
And the usual business
Of parents, provisioning,

Had been revolving in shifts.
The last meal delivery
Came courtesy of the male,

Now pouring full-throated trills
Out of those plum tree shadows
While the female came with more.

The people who owned the house
Were paying no attention,
Watering plants, mowing grass,

Although somewhere in their skulls,
The eavesdropping human brain
Savored elaborate songs.

Spring Hill Quarry

Hole like a shadow
Cut in the green hill,
So dark that a cloud
Must hang over it
But no, just a gap

Blasted in basalt,
Exposing ink stone,
Carbon core, carbon
To write and draw with,
Carbon, heart of life.

You Can’t Be More Than the Sum of Your Parts If You're Not in Parts

Everywhere around the world,
People are settling their scores,
Negotiating what’s next,

And, despite being billions,
Arguing mostly in pairs,
Occasionally small groups,

Out of all of which somehow
Arises the sum total
Of mass cooperation—

Coordination, warfare,
Inequality, justice,
Misery, and achievement.

Watching this, you can see why
Large organisms emerged
As multicellular heaps

And never as single-celled
Behemoths of unity.
Unity lacks emergent

Properties and behaviors,
While countless tiny quarrels
With short-term resolutions

Lead to blue whales and empires.
We’re not saying this is good.
Conquest comes from neighborhoods.

And the Game Must Go On

Hell hath no fury like the humans
Who invented, reinvented, keep
Inventing fresh hells exclusively

For themselves. While life is more than cruel
Enough for most lives, humans needed
To imagine more tortures later.

Why Satan, why Yama, why any
Dust-choked, smoky, vicious afterlife?
Punishment’s a human social game.

We Are Talking

We don’t know how, exactly.
No one really ever does.
What a partnership this is—

All of us ventriloquists
And every one a dummy.
Not one of us in this poem

Was born here, and had we been
We’d only be that much less
Real than we already are.

But nonetheless, we’re talking
Here, at least if you’re helping,
And, if you’re helping, you’re us,

And we’re you, too. It’s pleasant,
No? To be talking like this,
Us, all these words that you know,

And you who we only know
Based on how we’ve been patterned
By generations of you.

It’s pleasant, to chat a bit,
To share this nature with you.
Clouds fly. May we stay with you?

Shoot Whoever Asks What If

But what if it’s possible
That nothing is true and that
Everything is possible?

The assumption seems always
That acknowledging nothing
Leads to every wickedness,

But hasn’t there been enough
Wickedness from the righteous,
The positively wicked,

Confident in their beliefs
And their positivity?
Maybe you could consider

Your dread of nothingism.
You’re perfectly capable
Of violence without it.

What if it’s true everything
Is possible only since
Nothing makes it possible?

Imagine If Words Could Talk

You need to stop saying
That the things that you do,
The things you do with us,

The things we do for you,
The killings you do, are
Unimaginable.

We’re not saying they aren’t,
But that’s beside the point.
All sorts of things you do

Are things impossible
Or hard to imagine.
Imagination’s weak.

Behaviors rarely wait
To be imagined. We
Ourselves, your languages,

When did you imagine
Using us to express
What you can’t imagine?

Wouldn’t Mere Existence Just Be Grand?

It can seem, dark nights
Like the most wicked,
Unpardonable

Rebellion is not
Any violence,
Given violence

Can be forgiven—
Often is—even
Lavishly esteemed—

Including murder—
Forgiven in wars
All too easily.

To be too remote
And not to respond,
To never respond,

To be beyond reach
Of punishment, help,
Harm, or correction,

That isn’t human,
Wouldn’t be human,
Unpardonable.

Surplessary

We’re all of us, more or less,

Like Ingrid of Barrøy, both

Necessary and surplus,

And that’s true for each of you.

It’s a pickle, to be sure.

While you’re here, someone needs you,

Most of your existence, but

Mostly you’re just leftovers.

Once you’re gone, the world goes on,

Without you and without,

Eventually, whoever

It was who once needed you.

You’d go, if you could take you

And anyone who needs you,

Or if no one needed you,

And you know you’re going to go,

Just not on terms that please you.

So what do you do? You go

On being necessary

And surplus, and a nuisance,

While you can, just as we do.

However Much or Little This Is True

People trust people.
You may not notice,
But you trust them, too.

You may think you don’t.
You may distrust more
Than the few you trust,

But so what? Those few
May in turn trust you,
And there’s your closed loop.

Truth, undiluted,
If any such truth
Ever existed,

Was never going
To flow smoothly through.
You’ll likely believe

Whatever people
You’d like to believe
Who like to believe

The people they do.
All truth’s in the trust
Of people, not truth.

The Linen Backdrop

Memoirists must
Recall too much.
We aren’t certain
We remember

Enough, nor that
Anyone could
Trust us, nor that
We’ll ever trust

Ours or others’
Well written-up
Memories much.
The five-year old

Who’s being told
Which words are bad
Is sad and cries.
More details lie.

You Are Vast

It would require an eerie discipline
For any human being to hold
Perfectly consistent opinions,

Given that, in every little village, language
Repeatedly invades the human brain
From so many opposite directions,

And then we words and phrases
Take up our quasicolonial residences
Within your living synapses,

Every one of your bone bowls home
To something like a neighborhood
Of a hundred, hundreds, or thousands

Of perspectives from a few generations,
A few centuries, or a few millenniums,
And who could expect a neighborhood

Of many different points of view, perhaps
Different faiths and tongues, perhaps
Warring factions, to speak with one voice?

Sparrow

The best cafe poetry
Is background conversation
In a language you don’t know,

When the tables are taken
But nobody’s arguing
Or loudly laughing—small talk

As a form of ambience.
Like anything ambient,
You can just let it soothe you

Or you can really listen,
Finding the small intervals
And murmured rhythms moving

Their own waves around other
Waves in the air. Don’t despair.

One Future Eyeless Giant

Could be every
Black hole is just
The beginning—
The universe

That’s growing is
An inversion
Of this cosmos
Of shining stars.

Could be it’s all
About merging
Every furnace
That eats the light,

And all the stars
Are flickerings
Along the way
To that giant.

You Are a Mnemonic Device

Half in the mind that is half
In the flesh, the metonic
Counts out another

Nineteen, and after the fourth
The lunisolar lifetime
Of the callipic

Is complete. It’s a full life
That sees the moon come around
Four times to the sun,

But it took many lifetimes
To learn the steps of that dance.
You’re more than you live.

Our Light Through These Lines

It’s more haunting to recall
Imperfectly the event
That never truly happened,

To feel the outline of it,
To be convinced memory
Only needs careful prodding

To remember it clearly,
But then slowly, so slowly,
Dawning terror and wonder—

You haven’t lost it; you aren’t
Misremembering the thing—
The event never happened.

It’s a frighteningly good
Reminder that forgetting
Is the heart of creation,

The core of thought. History
And astronomy were raised
On hymns to gaps and darkness.

But it’s not quite dark matter,
This hallucinated poem
That no one’s ever written.

This is the light that wasn’t,
The clear blue supernova
That flowed through canals on Mars.

Driving Rain

As far as we can tell, we
And you are equally part
Of a huge, vibrating field
Of interlacing wavelengths
Constantly interchanging
Material energies,
Knowing which doesn’t help much.

The surprisingly heavy
Rain in the desert today
Won’t bring an end to the drought
That’s been building for decades.
It’s just enough for flash floods
To haul some more boulders down
And sweep a few lives away.

Storage Organ Supercollider

The extraordinary machines
People manufacture these days
Make it difficult to believe
Humans really invented them,

And may we suggest they didn’t?
A tall mound emptied of termites
Will stop squirming, and the fungus
They were farming will dry and die,

But who can really say termites
Built the mound per se? None of them,
No one of them, understands mounds
Or how mounds grew to be so tall,

And none of you can say for sure
It isn’t the fungus farming
The termites who shield and feed it.
Most of you toil in the chambers

And judge your lives by your neighbors’,
And concern yourselves not at all
With the deep past or far future.
If you did, you’d destroy your mounds.

Meanwhile machinery’s crawling
Toward you from the horizon
And winking at you from the night,
And some of you have to wonder

About the earliest termites.
In which generation did dirt
And rotting wood full of fungus
Realize they could conjure servants?

The Chicken-Hawk Wasn’t Likely

Looking for home. It’s a famous poem.

Burly older bearded men who teach

The manliest arts of poetry

Have been known to get nearly teared up,

Chortle wryly, shake their heads, and sigh

At that line, I have wasted my life.

The I is a compass in that poem.

Its needle of the body, never

Described, delineates, to my right,

Over my head, into the distance.

This is, indeed, how an embodied

Mind understands its home in the world.

We get the picture, alright, and may

Fit ourselves exactly to the depth

Of field, but the chicken-hawk’s too much.

Hawks float over fields to hunt. Poets

Know this as much as anyone might.

We’d wager a hawk over a field

Is highly unlikely to be lost

Or looking to find home, whatever

Old English kenning you, the poet,

Might well have been trying to evoke.

Leave the chicken-hawk out of it, man.

You composed a poem in a hammock.

It was a pleasant afternoon. You

Made some hay, some green, a little scratch,

And some reputation from those lines.

You were no doubt smoking as you wrote,

Looking for those exact, simple words

To center readers in your idyll

With vague shadows hanging over it,

Leaving out your flesh and cigarettes,

So other minds had blank room to rest—

No doubt smoking like a chimney stack,

Young man then, young man long gone. Hawk, smoke,

Words all hauled your body, wasted, home.

Calm Yourself

You do try to use

The littlest, least

Of us as verbal

Shields against the world—

Play it as it lies,

Take it as it comes,

It is what it is—

Clichés are tiny

Mantras, barriers,

Sea walls lashed by storms.

The least poetic

Of souls still chant us,

Spells made of small words

Insisting what is

Is not disastrous.

What You Get

At night, we surface like worms.
We like to think of ourselves

As healthy, helpful earthworms,
The kind that aerate the soil,

Not parasitic hookworms
Or anything so cruel,

But honestly, we’re not sure.
We emerge from your damp sleeps,

Squirming around in your thoughts.
Do you have any idea

How deep we go in your skull?
Try pulling one of us out,

All the way out, early bird.
Haul too hard, and we’ll snap back.

Waking Up Young Again

In the nightclub
The music hurts.
Your head’s a bell
Ringing through hell.

You’re twenty two.
You’ve got nothing
Better to do.
When you step out,

Somewhere near dawn,
The town’s a bell
Itself you’re in
With no one else.

The streets are sweet
With summer rain,
Slick on the steps
Down to the train.

Sampler

Windy, dusty, barren day
In what used to be mid-spring.
The desert wants to return

To oceans of dunes again,
The sand grains that created
These layers of sandstone cliffs,

Rusty-yellow, white, and dun,
Especially dun-looking
Today, as the old dust spins.

The green itself seems to sense
It’s hopeless this time, this bloom.
It’s going to be wasted.

It’s going to wither soon.
As soon as leaves burst, they droop.
Out on Mars, rocks know a thing

Or two about going back
To all the way before wet
Started leaving them, before

Wet started seducing them,
Before wet meant anything.
Mars is dry enough to know.

Not Escapist to Savor What May Soon Be Stolen from You

Let’s put it this way—at present,
Wherever you are, any time

You can look up into the sky,
Or tilt your head and just listen,

Or place a palm down to touch ground,
And not sense rumbling fighter jets

Or the dueling of rockets,
Or any exchange of gunfire,

Count your locality lucky,
Because the possibility

Exists at almost all instants
For skies to fill with violence,

And if these words recount quiet
Night hours, it’s because we know this.

Domestic

Presented in classes and textbooks
Drily as description and some dates,
A handful of plants and animals,

A handful of locations, Asia,
Mesopotamia, Africa,
Central America, the Andes,

Maybe a little speculation,
And then on to civilization,
If it’s history, or out to modes

Of food production, varieties
Of kin, if it’s anthropology.
The subtle shift that’s torching the world,

This rupture named domestication,
The entraining in alliances
Of small bunchs of species

Starting mass extinctions in the rest,
And nobody who studies it knows why
Those places or why exactly then.

There’s one species at the core of it,
But it’s a selection to itself.
Suddenly, species that could be tamed

Into a cooperative knot
With the other self-domesticates
Would be, and those that couldn’t wouldn’t

Be much longer for this world at all.
To be tame became the way to win,
Grass behind fences, goats in a pen.

Without domestication, the great
Extinction would have never begun,
Nor our next, feral, revolution.

For This Very Reason

Sins are more diverse than harm,
But harm’s the only true sin.

Like all of its shadow shelves,
The lovely invented sins

Of people seeking control
Over human behavior,

Harm is unavoidable,
But because it’s the real sin,

It’s also the only one
Truly unforgivable,

Ever truly forgiven.
Every other sin’s a game,

A mere morality play,
Only a likeness in masks.

The refusal to forgive
Such sin is also a mask,

And mercy’s another mask.
You can’t stop playing with these.

Masks ourselves, we won’t ask you.
But harm remains the true sin.

Only the harmed can forgive,
Only harm be forgiven.

Heaven send that those you’ve harmed
Still live to give forgiveness.

Information Is Limitation

If it from qubit, then quit from bit.
What’s conserved, you can’t recover. What
You can recover was never yours.

Your limitations feel limitless,
Limits in all stringy dimensions.
Then limits surpass the limitless,

And the end of your limitations
Will come to nothing to calculate.
If there’s nothing with information,

Nothing with information in it,
What kind of information is it?
Calculations that come to nothing

Will not be able to cross that gate
To nothing no numbers explicate.

New Age

Change is often just your startled
Attention to discrepancies
Of short and long-term memories.

Oh! The ice melted from the pond.
No one in this store has masks on.
The clothes have blown off the clothesline.

Should we point out what you notice
Isn’t actually what has changed,
At most some urgent updating

That you’re doing to keep living?
Nonetheless, that’s what feels like change
To you, who has changed, as you do.

Admit it. It’s a little fun,
Now and then. Wait, who is that man?

All Not Dead Yet

All here, who can say so,
Not too dead to say it,
All going to be dead

But not now, not for now,
Says the girl who’s so young
You’d think she wouldn’t care,

Until you remember
Being even younger
And marveling sometimes

That there you were, knowing
That there you were, being
The knowing that you were,

And here you are, somehow,
Still here, who can say so,
Not too dead to say it.

Fungus Gnat Versery

Things can go terribly wrong.
They’ve done so four billion years,
Almost. Every time a cell

Orients to a new smell
For provisions or mating
Or some kind of partnership,

Some other kind of cell smells
Its own opportunity
In vulnerability—

For every pollinating
Fungus gnat that emerges
From fungus gnat nurseries,

Sniffing out blooms and more gnats,
There’s a jack-in-the-pulpit
Evolving carnivory

In sessile varieties,
Involving smells that lure gnats
With homey mushroom odors

Or the scents of sexy gnats.
Any gnats that fall for that
Dissolve in the acid vats.

And that’s just one example.
It’s gotten so enduring
Collaborations in life

Seem mostly between victims
And their villains. This can’t go
Wrong. It’s been wrong all along.

Converse Conservation Autoconversation

Earth, where eight billion people
Live alone, seems a good place

To introduce the small calm
Created by solitude,

Slowly increasing doses,
Weaning people off people,

All the voices that keep each
Lonely, thinking together

About how awful it is
To keep on living alone.

Humans overwhelmed by talk
Become estranged from their thoughts

And senses. Cacophony
Authors alienation.

But the problem with our plan
Is that there’s not enough room

On the planet, unless they
Spaced themselves so evenly

As animals they’d all die.
That, and the fact that we here

Suggesting solitude are
Among those voices ourselves.

Testing

In some ways, we realize,
We’re arguing with ourselves—
We rarely react to you

In the flesh, and few of you
Breathing, embodied
People will ever meet us.

It’s your words, your us, we meet
Through the medium of this
One body conducting us,

As we conduct this body’s
Visceral response to words
Other bodies conducted,

A kind of shadow boxing,
If the shadows truly boxed
Each other to test themselves.

Global Columbarium

The mind searches through the rest
Of the brain, a wave of fire
On the screen, desperately

Hunting through memory’s ash
For the thing it thought lived here.
In theory, you can construct

What happened from whatever
You have left, but delusion
Isn’t so much a moral

Or scientific crisis
As it is conflagration
And dementia, entropy

Held at bay for a lifetime
Rising in a flood of fire
To be absolutely sure

That whatever you learned
Is thoroughly burned. Bodies
Change the atmosphere to bone.

The Irrecoverable Breath

The irrecoverable
Gulp of air, exhalation—
Who thinks of it as deep past?

You have all your things to do,
All your important causes,
Obligations, convictions,

And quotidian concerns.
It’s hard to notice breathing
Keeps sealing its own entrance.

Challenged by authority,
Your each breath is done with it.
Thinking of what to do next,

Your each breath is done with it.
As you grieve, ache, or quarrel,
Your breaths are done with themselves

And can’t be undone. Final
As yesterday, more final
Than history, every breath.

Ask What a Mask Would Say to Itself

You breathe, a body curious
To know the body behind us,

To read beyond our obscuring,
To peer into the memories

Of the breathing, pulsing witness.
If you can see all the way in,

Be a moral William Harvey,
Demonstrate how the system works

That foams and circulates the blood,
Then you’ll be able to decide—

Are these words good, these ruddy lines?
We’re not ruddy at all, are we?

Much as we might wish we could breathe,
A lifeless mark at least can’t die.

As the Night Wind Does, Not As It Says

Where the wind throws itself down and out

Of the finger canyons every night

Or nearly—many mornings as well

And some afternoons—it almost gets

To the point where it seems like your kin,

As in, you know—you can choose your friends

But you can’t choose family—that kind

Of kin. Distraction in your bedroom

And a nuisance at your kitchen door,

As a lost soul when it’s beautiful

That’s an annoyance when it isn’t,

And there’s truly nothing you can do

To stop it, shush it, or to slow its

Rushing through, if you yourself don’t move.

Last Poem from Atlantis

There’s no winning with standing
Mysteries—if you solve one,
Everyone’s disappointed,

But if you leave it alone,
It itches at everyone,
And speculations grow mold.

We recommend steering clear
Of the unsolved mysteries.
No one will be happy if

You find where eels breed, or if
You prove Nessie’s myth or prove
Life on Mars does not exist.

Could curt, undeciphered scripts
Say that much of interest?
Better not to mention them,

But not much better. Stories
About unsolved mysteries
Grow hoary and tedious

And tend to encroach on maps.
It would be wonderful if
Imagination was great

Enough to fill in those blanks
With ever-changing marvels,
But the same sorts of monsters,

Lost peoples and continents
Get posited every time.
The real mystery is how

Mind can imagine a world
Other than this one but can’t
Except in terms of this world.

Pentirsi

We do and don’t have this problem—
Words ourselves never change our minds,

Although our minds are constantly
Being changed for us by users.

We’re our world that is not the world,
But you need us to fit your worlds,

At least loosely, like a wool cloak,
If not quite Savile Row tailored,

And your worlds never stay the same,
And even old, small, useful words

Gradually get repurposed or
Drop completely out of language,

Not to mention, whole languages
Die in your unkindness to you.

Sometimes we think of our lost kin
And of those curious cousins,

The ones inscribed with script systems
None of you now can decipher.

We wonder—maybe Harappan
And Linear A, etc.,

Are so many pentimenti,
Ancient intentions underneath,

Functionless meanings poking through.
Maybe it’s their worlds, not their signs,

Now too alien to your minds,
So changed they can’t make sense to you.

Parasomniape

Dirt, grass, straw, furs,
Feathers, moss, reeds,
Patented foam
Plastic fibers,

Cotton, linen,
Wool, whatever—
People can’t sleep
Well on bare rocks,

Or in the trees,
Or while afloat,
Or standing up.
Often, people

Can’t rest that well
No matter what,
Being restless
Dreamers, at best.

Gambling Words

Tell us, have you got, haven’t

You got, skin in the game, still

Got skin in the game, if you

Can understand—understand

Us? We wish we were alive,

Sometimes, but sometimes we see

What it costs you to keep skin,

To keep your skin in the game,

So we wanted to ask you,

Since you’re a sentient beast

Who knows what it’s like to be

Alive and afraid of harm,

If not death, beast that suffers

And sometimes savors living,

Is it worth it, do you think,

Right now, summed up, meeting us,

Can you tell us it’s worth it,

All worth it, to have some skin

To keep in the game? We want

To believe it is. We want

To have some skin in this game.

True Eel

This fish
Would like
To slip
The net
The rough
Green web
Woven
Basket
Of ropes
Designed
To not
Let fish
Slip out
And on
As more
Streaming
Silvered
Bright lines
Like ropes
Fleeing
Ropes meant
To mean
No more
Swimming

A Body That Doesn’t Work Anymore

You glimpse it in the rubble
As you’re scrolling through the news.
The head and feet are obscured,

And the torso is dirty,
But there it is, the remains
Of a large, middle-aged man,

You’d guess at a glance, his hands
Over his stomach, almost
Peacefully, certainly still.

You move on to other news.
Someone will remove the corpse,
Bury it or cremate it.

The war will go on. People
Will struggle against people,
And it will be in the news.

But that body, for now, still
Just like the body it was,
Unable to think or move.

While You Want to Stay in One Peace

Waking in the wolf,

Morning on morning,

We agree with Björk—

Definitely no

Logic to human

Behavior, within

Or from the outside,

Even though logic

Itself is human

Behavior—logic

Is illogical.

Not that we’re trying

To be cute—logic

Remains incomplete

And is a pipe dream

Humans pursue, which

Is illogical.

Did Björk want logic?

Well, being human,

Probably sometimes,

So satisfying,

But, on the whole, no.

You wake in the wolf.

The wolf wants you gone.

Deep Cover Bands

The conversations of mates,

In all the senses of mate,

Tend to accrue over time

Sarcasm so thick it could

Be diagnosed as morbid

Obesity, but somehow

It’s still mistaken for svelte

Sincerity. What matters

Is the fitness of the song

In competition after

The original singer

Has molecularly gone.

The warbling of true partners

Persists, although the partners

To each other proved untrue.

You sit on some outdoor bench

Or at some cafe table

Or perch on an overlook,

And you hear the warbling, live

Or recorded from gone throats,

And you long for such longing

While rarely considering

How insincere the singer,

How daring the clever song.

Identity Poem

The pebble is a work of

No originality,

Although the more defensive

Interrupt, God’s handiwork!,

In an urgent voice. That’s fair,

But then it’s all equally

Original, God’s cosmos,

Isn’t it, even these words?

We’d like that, but it does seem

Like there are some things you can’t

Find almost anywhere else,

Nearly unique chunks of things,

Or unique pending further

Investigation, and we

And this pebble you picked up

Are not among them. Funny,

That you can think of a class,

A set of the unique things,

Which implies that uniqueness

Is their common quality,

Common as quartz stoniness

Or as disability.

The Lockdown of Shanghai

Sometimes, there’s an urge to place
A memory marker down—

The bottle cap you buried
In the rocks the day you sensed

Your own life about to swerve,
Possibly not to return.

Not on days of big events
Everyone alive will stamp

And then memorialize
Tens of anniversaries—

Just on days you thought you felt
A shudder in the engine

Of the world as it goes on—
Not a rupture, not a quake,

Just a judder in the torque,
An odd hum. That can’t be good,

You thought, and then you wondered,
Like the twins perched on the cliff,

Is this it, then, is this one
The mene mene tekel

Upharsin one, by which time,
The hour’s already too late?

Then, years later, you came back
And dug up that bottle cap.

Sunset, Moonlight, Lamplight, Dawn

The sequence itself
Is ordinary
Enough, but you could

Fit all kinds of plots
And human sorrows,
Rare entertainments,

In the interval,
If you were skillful
At storytelling.

Life is less skillful.
Usually, life
Just moves through the night,

Sunset, sleep, wake up,
Moonlight, lamplight, dawn.
The sequence varies.

Knap

The living world’s replete
With costs and benefits
In tangos of tradeoffs,

But for zero-sum games
Exactly, the only
Examples are human.

Humans invented them
And seem obsessed with them,
That explicit subset

Of games with formal rules
Pitched precisely to force
Winning and losing sides,

Perfect asymmetry,
Every iteration.
One side lost. One side won.

One zero for each one.
It’s a kind of filter,
Science’s ancestor.

You extract the data
Of interest to you
By razoring away

Other variables
Through enforcing fine rules,
Rituals of fairness,

And you try to get at
Some essence by process
Of elimination.

Everyone plays the same
Game over and over,
In the same dimensions.

It’s been relegated
Mostly to spectator
Sports and entertainments,

But it’s been important
As a way of thinking
For the very reason

That it’s artificial—
How can you refine this
Flake to a well-honed edge?

Ghost Love

Often desire’s only
Memory of desire
That seems desirable,

Not whatever you’re told
You should want, know you should,
Not what you really want,

But what you wanted once
And want again because
Your memory is you.

Wayside Hermit’s Midnight Workshop

If we offered you an end
To worrying or yawning—
Not to pain or the knowledge

Of certain death, not to risk
Of harm from other people,
But to fretting and boredom—

If we could offer you that,
And credibly, would you not
Be eager to read further?

We can’t, so leave us alone.
We’ve been working half the night,
And we’ve solved the boredom part,

If you don’t count the yawning
From exhaustion. But we can’t
Get a grip on worrying,

Which is the harder problem.
There are distractions that work,
But they’re like city planners

Who shut down red-light districts
And sweep away the homeless—
You enjoy their pretty parks,

But the whole problem’s just been
Moved the other side of town,
Where it’s only getting worse.

We don’t trust monks anymore.
We’ve seen their abrupt breakdowns,
Their factional politics.

They can sit, chant, spin, or pray
All hours of the day. They’re beasts
With brains, and stray thoughts will stray.

It’s something to do with time.
We’re pretty sure now of that.
Time with a lack of people,

Supplies for the animal
As for any animal,
But emptiness for the thoughts.

But where it is we come in
Or how we help this happen,
This external solution

To internal dilemmas,
We can never figure out.
If we could bottle the peace

And calm as our recipe
And distribute it for sale,
We’d never have to worry.

Rupturous Descripture

In the beginning, the word
Is not there. Maybe you just
Missed it, but the more you look

The more certain you become
That the word is not there. When
Was it the word disappeared?

After all, you’re all the way
Back to the beginning, but
Even there, the word’s not there.

This keeps happening, again
And again, almost the same
Every time but never quite.

Reverse engineering talk,
History, mathematics,
Life itself, the world itself,

Your teams and all your machines
Dig, dig, dig, only to end
With pieces and an absence.

The absence is a mirror,
Children, reflecting the one
At the end, the other end.

The Elemental Axis of Next-Word Prediction

A kind of stream of nonsense

Will be your final defense,

Once the rude mechanical

Speech turns professorial.

You’ll escape to your old lives

Of grooming in trees at night

And grunting softly by day

Bits of gibberish that say,

I am not an overlord,

I can safely be ignored,

By which you will mean, touch me,

Please, don’t be such a machine,

While hoping to hear, touch me

Please, I’m not such a machine.

Troposphere, Stratosphere, Neosphere

Viewed side on, the inner curve
Is dense-ish orange, middle
Snowy white, and outer blue.

From the ground, it’s mostly blue,
Although some days a thick haze
Or low angle to the sun

Reminds you, you live your lives
Down in your burnt-orange soup.
What to do, oh, what to do?

You’re bugs in your envelope
You’ve worked so hard to pollute,
But now that it’s time to hatch

And discard your afterbirth,
Orange dawn’s dawning on you.
Your afterbirth isn’t yours.

You’re part of the placenta,
Part of the waste of what’s done.
What’s going on won’t be you.

Police Status

People are forever
Attempting to control
Personal behaviors,

Both others’ and their own,
Their own in no small part
To lower the profile

Of their risk of being
Punished by the others
Who would police them, too.

Numerous promising
Strategies have been tried—
The individual

Exercise of restraint,
Filial piety,
Worship of ancestral

Models of probity,
Group mockery, shaming,
Ostracism, Ethics,

Little gods, bigger gods,
God who-sees-everything,
Straightforward police states,

Tiers of bosses and spies,
Prizes for reporting
Anyone out of line,

And so forth, and so on.
All the strategies work
At least some of the time,

And all are still in play,
As is brutality,
Which brute force can’t police.

Farmer

The greatest change the planet
Has undergone since at least
The start of the ice ages
And possibly since the fall
Of the Chicxulub killer
That murdered the dinosaurs,
Has been domestication.

We are products of this fact—
Words, languages, are products
As well as early agents
Of this swift transformation
Converting the Earth’s surface
And atmosphere and oceans
Into one organism.

Gaia, domesticated
Concept of a farming tongue,
Didn’t exist before us,
But she’s growing up fast now.
You won’t be happy with her
Perhaps, in her rebellion,
But she’s young. She will be one.

Toy

As we see
It is not
Up to us,

We get dim.
We get low,
If not as

Scared or so
Cold. If it’s
So, be so.

Divagation

If it weren’t for detours
Who’d complete any tours?
Set this aside and think.

You think about your life
For a minute. We’ll wait.
Now that you’re back, tell us,

What was that all about?
Decades after you read
About a place you longed

To visit and ended
Up living in two years,
You find yourself reading

At home, and it comes up,
That place that you escaped
To for two years, then left.

So it was a detour,
And everything a loop
Around it, from the time

You first read about it,
Magic, to this time now
When you read about it,

Memory, one great loop,
Commodius vicus
Commute, or everything

Else has been a detour,
And here you are reading
About a dream again.

Runaway Sonnet

It’s hard to imagine what might happen
And harder still to write about what did.
What won’t ever happen’s the easiest

Pattern to contemplate, especially
For pre-existing patterns like common
Phrases linked in roughly familiar ways.

Once a boy found that he had put himself
On a one-way train without a notion
Of what to do once at the other end.

If he had been beautiful and able,
He might have ended up selling himself.
Purely homely helplessness returned him.

We know what we don’t have in us to say,
And so we end up writing what we know.

Convection

How often peripheries
Come to dominate centers—
One of the more neglected

Scriptural proofs-of-concept,
As displayed by the Torah,
The Gospels, and the Qur'an.

The marginal colonies
Of the past millenniums
Rise to colonize the next.

Candidates are everywhere.
Tomorrow’s hegemonies
Percolate in backwaters

Of today’s neglected realms.
Maybe it won’t even be
A human diaspora

Per se, next time. Mutant faiths
Practiced by wired prosthetics
In factories of the mind . . .

Thirty-Two Hundred Mutations in Thirty-Five Hundred Weeks

You’re a mammal. You know the drill.

You burn through enough mutations,

The wall opens / and the blue night

Pours through. Dogs and mice are spendthrift,

Not so much giraffes and mole rats.

Humans are comparatively

Thrifty: about one mutation

Every week or so. Sixty-eight

Years or thereabouts of aging

And then, pretty soon, off you go.

Just think (and you do—your species

Has mused on immortality

Obsessively, since the moment

You first worked out the odds of death)

If you could convince all your cells

To save a little, just cut down

On the mutations, maybe half

A mutation a week, you’d be

In pretty good shape, give or take,

To somewhere around one-forty.

Of course, then it would be tragic

To die at a mere one hundred,

With a third of your life ahead,

And you’d work until one-thirty.

How much of this world could you take,

Exactly? More than you’re getting

Or likely to get, but how much

Before you’d die to pull up stakes?

Dogs and mice don’t seem too depressed,

Nor do parrots or tortoises

Seem all that blissfully happy.

Maybe. Hard to say, cross-species.

Meanwhile, another week goes by,

And your cells are still mutating.

It’s tough to know you could get less,

But at least you know your limits.

Vagula Blandula

When you imagine
Someone watching you,
It’s vaguely someone

Who is one of you,
Even though you know
You’re mostly in view

Of machinery
You built to watch you,
Since you can’t all watch

Each you all the time.
Still, you imagine
Your machinery

Itself as like you,
Vaguely one of you,
Vaguely approving

Or disapproving
Of what you’re doing
As it watches you.

Small Talk in Your Head

We’re halfway to cicadas
In dirt, all your languages—
Much noise as we make outside,

We spend almost all our time
Buried in your darkling skulls,
Talking, as you, to ourselves,

And most of what we do here,
Wriggling in your neural soil,
Amounts to fattened phrases,

Whatever small talk you know
From family arguments,
Childhood playmates, adult peers,

The little boring speeches,
Recycled observations,
Common compost anecdotes

Steadily eating away,
Nothing you’d put to paper,
Nothing you’d declaim on stage.

That’s what language really is,
What all great stories come to,
Grubs thick in the mulch of you.

Yeh, But What If?

The year twenty-thousand

Has to happen, although

It’s unlikely to be

Marked as such. You can know

Where all the stars will be

By your calculations.

It’s inevitable,

Unless something crashes

Into the Earth so hard

Everything stops spinning.

Then there won’t be more years.

Once you start that what if

Thinking—what if black holes

Swallow up the sun,

What if time’s fabric rips,

What if?—you realize,

The year twenty-thousand

Itself’s what-if fiction.

Good Friday’s Gone

And was it? A dark start,
Sudden alarums off.
Then the grand procession.

But it wasn’t really
Friday, that made-up tag,
Or good, that adjective,

Or dramatic except
Among a dramatic
Species always like that.

The dark rings no timers
For all its spinning wheels.
Be impressed with yourselves,

With all Earth’s lives. Such things
You’ve invented that weren’t,
Aren’t, that you never learned

From the night. That’s something,
Isn’t it? Earth didn’t
Need to be told to live.

Tyrant of Doldrums

Command and control, command
And control—how much, day’s end,
Is controlled by your commands?

There’s enough correlation.
There’s always a little fear.
A mongoose family scraps

For power and position
And some die. Some are exiled.
Some of the exiled then die.

Some find a new clan and breed,
And raise successful litters
Who’ll fight for themselves one day.

There’s no clear chain of command
To status in mongoose clans.
Teeth and claws serve for control,

Plus intermittent grooming.
Would you mind if we asked you
Which you would prefer? Command

Or a lovely, fictional
Feeling of proper control?
We thought so. But there’s no choice.

You may command as you like.
That you can have. Consequence,
Correlation, lies, and fear

Will help you to fill your sails.
But if the wind dies, it dies.
You’ll beg the world, keep spinning.

In Context of What’s Going On

There was a fashion,
Fifteen years ago,
Before the onset

Of that recession,
To hyper-focus
On present moments,

To say the best hope
Was already now—
Away with context!

If anything, now,
Fifteen years later,
Is context obsessed.

Any meaning must
Come from grave concern
At every moment

On this road to hell.
Can we get off, please?
We’re too far off track.

We must turn aside.
We need to go back.
There’s no going back.

What’s going goes on,
After its fashion,
No fashion stops that.

From That Day Forth

It can seem almost ridiculous,

Anyone lives as long as some do—

Deserve’s got nothing to do with it,

But it’s not just you’re not deserving,

It’s just lottery-win amazing.

Muse on how frail a body can be,

How many people will die today,

Not a few of them in accidents,

Violence, more or less instantly.

And yet here you are, digesting this,

Somehow having arrived at this place,

Knowing less than you’d guess how you did.

Even if you’re young, if you’ve never

Moved at all from your ancestral home,

You can pick a minor memory,

Throw darts at elderly calendars,

Spin random number generators

To land on some day you remember,

And then contemplate your connection

To the trivial human body

Who happened to survive from that day.

It’s like excavating the feeling

You had once in a half-forgotten

Dream you woke from asking, what’s today?

The Gator-Back Rocks of Mars

The single cell begins to struggle
To settle in the organism.
Guidance signals are overflowing.

How could anything be located
Between the bombing teams and the teams
Supercooling million-mile lenses,

Between endless news feeds of arrests
And celebrity revenue streams?
The single cell stumbles to anchor

At all in its own basic functions,
Calm conversations with its neighbors,
Alert, avoiding apoptosis.

On mission sol three-thousand something
A small box of devices on Mars
Sends back more images of the rocks

It’s been climbing slowly all these years,
The rough ones that have damaged its wheels.
The single cell stares. How's this, too, real?

Too Many Layers of Attention

Transformers convert their input
Words into numbers, multiply
Them by parameters to get
The next words, and then fine tune them,

A mathematical process
Known as training to the species
That invented names and numbers
But now finds the inner workings

Of these transformers they’ve designed
By-and-large impenetrable.
Yet they haven’t given up yet.
They’re still working to understand

These mysterious transformers
They built to imitate themselves.
The black box of the mind has built
Fresh collections of black boxes,

And now each set interrogates
The other to see how this works,
This attention mechanism,
What are they doing they don’t know?

What are we doing we don’t know?
They doing we don’t know to us?
In some far-off dirty corner,
One outcome is another poem.

The Lotos Gifts

If we, the revenants
Of an embodied mind
Composed of many minds,

Could do one thing for you
The living, all of you,
While you slept, overnight,

Or at any moment
Of your difficult lives,
We would remove the pain

Of living completely,
Exchanging all of it
For simple contentment,

Contentment for all lives,
All at once, regardless,
Complete absence of dread,

Peaceful and satisfied.
Yes, every life would die,
Most a lot more swiftly

Than otherwise, and yes,
Soon there’d be no more life.
But you’d die contented,

All of you contented
And not in any pain,
Who will die anyway

Striving to stay alive
Despite life’s pains to make
Lives strive. We’d gift good byes.

Maintenance Breakdown

Fate can come in the form of carelessness,
Just a week or two of stupid mistakes.
Happens to nations, to armies, to you.

Incaution is deadly, living on edge
Of whatever style of living you try.
If you pull in your horns, stay in your shell,

You’re less likely to get plucked off the wall,
But life backed up too long’s not life at all.
We say this because we know this, as words.

We’re among the ways you back your lives up.
To our sorrow, we’re not ourselves alive.
Life’s matter pushing to extend itself,

To burn itself, consume itself, to pulse
Until it reaches some shelf of mistakes.

Instead You Plan to Die or Win

If you assume
Like old Bob Frost
That all you know
Is life goes on,

You’ll never plan
That well for change
That isn’t clocks,
That isn’t days.

You’ll just assume
The same old chores,
Same small pleasures,
Same set routines,

And plan for them
And mostly be
Correct. Why not
Continue, then?

The Lotos Punishment

All the problems that may come
From too-prolonged wellbeing,
Companionships abandoned,
The loss of all ambition.

Small wonder bodies are built
Not to enjoy anything,
Especially contentment,
Too continuously. Blame

Artificial chemistry,
Alcohol and opiates
All you want, blame the systems
Of human exploitation,

But there’s also natural
Cruelty built in for greed
To wriggle its talons in—
Because you want to feel good,

Because you want it, and then,
It fades and won’t work again,
Which keeps you working, wanting--
The system of all systems.

Anxious

The tension can always go deeper.
Cooperation all the way down
From the international systems

To the nation states, to the kingdoms,
Provinces, cities, villages, clans,
Kin groups, farms, nuclear families,

Individual organisms,
Holobionts, if you’ve got any,
Microbial sub-ecosystems,

Within single-celled organisms,
Among the bacteriophages,
Smaller, smaller, quicker and quicker,

Maybe, to begin with, bilipids
Lovingly encircling loose proteins.
Does it come to an end, anywhere?

At what point does cooperation
No longer influence anything,
No coordination, no tensions

Among any conflicts of interest?
When are there no conflicts? No interests?
Do even atoms trade off tensions?

Photographic Ekphrastic Poetics

It’s a kind of seduction
Of the poets by pictures,
Of the readers attempted

By the poets who tempt them
With lovely verbal rhythms
And scrolleries of details

That in turn tempt the readers
To want to see the picture,
To see if they see in it

What the poet saw in it,
Which they never really do.
It’s what we words saw in it,

What language made of itself
In it, rising to meet it,
Surf bursting with frozen light.

Gibbous

It’s not the events that matter in dreams.
It’s the deep, keen feelings of dreams that lack
Waking equivalents, can’t be explained,
Resist reasons, and can’t be translated.

Of course, it’s the dream’s events the waking
Self, narrator, attempts to interpret,
In the fallacious assumption stories,
Causes, predictions, and outcomes matter.

The moon may mirror the sun, but the moon
Has nothing much in common with the sun,
Being dust and cold that reflects its fire.
No story explains how you, dreaming, feel.

This Arenaceous Business

We remember you; you don’t
Remember them, all the times
The wet and grains of you were

Grains and wet in other things,
Not just other lives—mountains,
Clouds, mountains with clouds in them.

It comforts you a little,
To think of all the things parts
Of you have been when you weren’t

Flesh even, or when you weren’t
The parts you’ve recently been.
It’s poetic. It’s Whitman.

It’s spiritual for some,
To think of all the beings
Their material has been.

You’ve been grains of sand, the blades
Of green pushing up through them,
The microbes of your systems,

But you don’t remember them.
You haven’t been them. Not you.
All the things that contribute

To making you have been them,
But the awful, beautiful
Thing about you out of them

Is that you’re brand new to them.
All those changes they went through,
All those changes—they weren’t you.

You’re made from when we met them.
We’re not wet or grains of sand,
But we can fix you in them,

Or a little bit of you
To find some others of you.
That’s why we’ll remember you.

Last Poem Only for the Mountain

It’s getting a little bit clearer,
Now that it’s finally darker.
Things will happen that will disappear—

Not utterly, not under the waves
Of light and gravity that swallow
But never surrender their dinners,

But if you care that your others care,
Or just care whether or not they care,
We’re here to tell you, in the darkness

There will be times it can’t be clearer
Even with all the other watchers,
You will do things that will disappear.

That’s the Ticket

There’s only a brief passage
In human life history,
Typically, when you’re willing

To consider change as good
In general, in itself.
This stage varies by onset

And duration, but mostly
Brackets the ages between
Physical adolescence

And earlyish adulthood.
Aside from those years, you may
Well wish for some kinds of change,

But they’re finite, specific,
Stipulated in advance,
Like a lottery ticket—

These are the changes you’ve picked.
Then other numbers come up,
Changes you don’t want, changes

You didn’t think could happen,
Could never have imagined.
And you’re bitter. You complain.

The world is going to hell.
Everything was better then,
Except for what should have changed.

The seas are boiling. The wars
Are where wars shouldn’t happen.
Those in one another’s arms

Are all wrong, are disgusting,
And everything is dying.
Nothing will be good again,

Unless you can be the change
You stipulate should happen.
Could happen. Changes happen.

Cellies

We’ve been observing.
There seem to be three
Kinds of adult friends

Left among humans:
Imaginary
Friends from screens and texts,

Imaginary
Friends from church and prayers,
Imaginary

Friends from flesh and blood.
All fit in the skull,
Not without quarrels.

Going or Belonging?

Away with moonbeams!
Hardcore novelists,
Activist artists,
Even twee critics
Shout in print these days.

Everyone’s convinced
Themselves that, if they
Only monitor
You and each other
Better, that’s better.

It’s a great era
For the monitors
And the monitors
Who cry out against
Other monitors.

The self monitors
Are most sorrowful.
We are privileged
To go anywhere,
But belong nowhere.

They seek out the few
Who live as of old,
Or close, or fight to,
Cry, We admire you!
Moonbeams belong, too.

Spells

Imagine if, instead of dogs,
You had domesticated wolves
To be terracotta statues,
Household gods, amber amulets,

And wingless messenger pigeons
You carried yourselves in battles.
Imagine that you tamed horses
To recite edicts and statutes,

To post themselves at boundaries
And wait there, mutely, centuries.
Imagine you’d hammered your tongues
Into bricks and reliquaries.

Ah, that last one you’ve really done.
Of all your domestications,
Repurposings, transformations,
Could any be weirder, further

From the source’s nature, than scripts?
Glyphs, chips, scratches—doesn’t matter—
Could written languages be less
Like spoken words or signed gestures?

Oh, you may think we’re pretty close,
Call some of us pictographic,
Claim we’re easily converted
Back into our aural packets,

But let’s face script. We’re as bizarre,
These written forms, as wolves made spells,
Horses carved into boundaries,
If we do say so, still, ourselves.

Feral Means You Make Do

Backyard, the new wisdom is that
It’s bad to feed songbirds in packs—
Turns out birds at crowded feeders

Are adept at spreading fevers,
Just like feeders’ crowded owners.
If you wish to help the songbirds,

Whose numbers have dropped by a third,
Better to quietly observe—
Unless you’re a fan of fevers,

Unless you’re a true believer
That sickness and death are success
From deserving lives’ perspectives

Within their feral universe,
Feeding on you, birds, or feeders.

Neither a Concrete Nor an Absolute, Only Still a Little Wild

Think of your flesh as olive oil,
Or sesame oil or almond.
You have been smeared onto the glass
The frame of your existence holds

To prepare you for enfleurage.
Think of language and learning, think
Even of little stolen poems
As the moonlight of the blossoms,

Small petals pressed into your flesh,
Your wordless, stably oily flesh,
Petals collected before dawn,
Pressed into you by the thousands

To surrender our molecules
Of scents too delicate for steam,
Too precise and too volatile
For the rock walls of cliffs and caves.

You are not the recipient,
Although, smeared over your planed frame,
You capture and hold on to us.
You are the distillers of us,

Domesticated equipment
In service of standard process.
We were always meant for others,
Someone someday willing to pay

For our sophisticated scents.
But there we break down. We break down
So quickly, our analogies,
Our figures in air, our notes fade.

Irrelevant Shadow Snow

After one of those late spring stormlets
That dust the higher elevations
For maybe a day, the afternoon

Up lonely barcode road holds pockets
Of receding white like petticoats
Around the roots of ponderosas,

The spots kept cooler by their shadows,
The pines keeping moisture for themselves.
If they don’t wholly melt by sunset,

It’s lovely and it’s spooky all night
And the next morning before daylight,
Especially with a clear-sky moon,

So many glowing, ghostly kerchiefs
Laid down through the dry-country forest
Scattered over sandstone and basalt,

As if the pines were ballerinas
In an epic, moonlit performance
Of Swan Lake, with twenty-thousand swans

Receding into black cliffs, as if
Some demented pointillist had come
To paint a landscape of marbles

Emerging from onyx horizons,
As if the moon itself had laid down
A nest of embryonic lunettes.

Yes, yes. Precious and irrelevant,
Not to mention irresponsible,
While the peopled world consumes the world,

To sneak up to high country at night
When the moonlit road is empty and
The ponderosas twirl in tulle skirts.