Among Water Lights

Islands of lighter and darker waves
Promenade around the glacial lake,
Looking at times like ice floes, at times

Like abstracts drawn from satellites maps
Of clouds forming archipelagos.
So we go. Neglect is the finest,

Kindest thing can happen to the world,
Any out-of-the-way part of it.
If these patterns were to be ignored

Another million years more, what harm
Would come to then beyond the changes
Creating but then dissolving them?

No News but the Weather

The real privilege would be
To steer clear of privilege.
Anyone’s rights, after all,

And all their privileges
Likewise, are just agreements
Shifting among other souls,

Other human animals
Debating and deciding,
Forcefully exercising

Privilege, each over each,
While pretending some are rights,
Pretending they know what’s right,

Although privilege stays caught
As law and society
In the balance of power.

If you could get out of that,
Be forgotten by all that
And still manage to survive,

Utter nobody living
By some wayside, just watching
Clouds, that would be privilege.

Morning, for Example

What we say and what you sense
Remain related the way
Clothing’s related to skin—

We could say that dawn begins
At a certain exact time,
As poetic description,

Or as mythic narrative,
And some of those will fit you
Fine, most of the time, but dawn

From the corners of your eyes,
That changing light on your skin’s
Never what we’ve clothed you with.

A Sense of You

In dreams you can’t get lost,

Only feel like you’re lost,

Feel so terribly lost,

Then wake up where you are.

Can’t get lost in deep sleep,

Death, or coma, either,

But in those you can’t be

You at all, can’t feel lost.

In dreams you feel strongly,

Too strongly, emotions.

The rest of dreamed senses

Tend implausibly faint

Or distorted, but that

Sense that’s your emotion,

That’s even called feeling,

Which no culture locates

Twice the same—in your heart

Or liver, head or spine—

That intensest, core sense

Of feeling, of being

Lost stays home in your dreams.

To Be

Behold the splendor
Of your broken flesh.
Feel it surrounding
Your faint awareness.
Your whole world pulses,

Can’t but be pulsing
For you to be here,
And we guarantee
You’re breathing, right now,
You’re feeling, right now,

You’re aware you are,
However faintly,
Right now, a throbbing
Churning and pulsing
Being as you read

Or listen or stare
Into inner space,
Recalling these words.
Right now, you’re breathing,
Right now, you’re pulsing,

Right now, the whole globe
Of whatever wreck
Your body is lives
With you living it.
Behold your splendor.

The Vanishing Sonnet

You don’t go. You stop.
Then, after you stop
Becoming someone

Slightly different
Hour by hour by hour,
You begin to go.

Someone remembers
A version of you
They personally knew,

Then no one, and then
You’re some artifacts,
Family heirlooms,

A bit of data,
A cluster of us.

Circular Boring

The reach of your activities
Has always by far exceeded
The reach of your understanding,
And probably it always will,

As understanding scrabbles shafts
Drilled through newly created pasts
By previous activities.
You mostly think of this as bad,

Since you tend to choose bad or good
Then argue until some team wins,
With each argument expanding
The reach of your activities,

Which understanding tries to grasp,
As the next arguments break out
Over whether that last outcome
Should be considered good or bad.

Whatever Haunts Is Haunted by What It Haunts

If you’re there, you may
Have noticed that we
Often mention you,

Apostrophize you,
That is, address you,
But then, who are you?

We also refer
To ourselves a lot,
Which usually means

Us as language, words,
But can sometime seem
To mean all humans,

Or humans and words
All stuck to the Earth.
What’s going on here?

To the extent you
Are comfortable
Within these—we, you—

Or, in translation,
Their equivalents,
You’re a kind of ghost

Moving within us,
Who are other ghosts
Moving within you.

Your Laundry Hung Out to Dry

It’s only since everything
Is connected, everything
Must be great and trivial.

You can’t get one without more,
Any bit without the whole
Radiating world attached.

Being animals, you live
By breathing and excreting,
And gains and losses matter

To the systems that are you.
You don’t like it when you lose.
Some things seem pure waste to you.

The calculus of hunger
And disdain comes naturally
To you. But that’s not the whole

Of it, of this, not even
Of you. The whole’s multiple
And rushes toward the gaps

Invisible since it is
Gapless of its own. The clothes
On the line by the basket

In the grass by the trees by
The road, whatever it is
They are and everything all

At once into the distance,
Even as they fall apart,
Are great woven trivial.

Trees Filling the View

Life will rearrange itself,
Regardless of what we say,
Regardless of what you do.

We don’t say that you’ll like it,
Or that your actions won’t churn
Harsh consequences for you,

Involving many other
Formerly pretty good ways
Of keeping on living, now

Not so good. But no matter
What we say, true and stupid,
Nor what you do, wise and cruel,

We’ll add, among our sayings—
Life will still be arranging
Lives when we’ve all gone away.

First the Last Watch

Of the mornings approaching
Summer, when a window seat
Will give you a little light

Not lamps or street lights, not stars,
Just the growing light of day,
Well before most days begin—

You can pretend to be old
Enough to be sage, and chant
A few poems from memory,

Then try your mind at new ones
While the blue light turns brighter,
And your household’s still asleep,

And, out on the roads, the trucks
Make early deliveries,
The night workers end their shifts.

There’s no perfect time to be
Alone and human, but few
Are any better than this.

Your Layer

Whenever you get
Too many people,
You get unfairness,

So much unfairness.
You can level it,
If you don’t mind plagues,

Catastrophic wars,
Or famines. Progress
In technology

Doesn’t help smooth things,
Makes them pointier,
Piled high, swiftly strange.

Down near the bottom
Of the unfairness,
However, is where

It gets interesting.
Not the base. You know
The pyramid’s base,

Can see the crushing
In front of your face,
The terrible weight

Tapering to blue
Skies up at the top.
But near the bottom,

Just over your head.
That’s where the dark weight
Of unfairness sits,

Always, most of it,
Just above the base.
That’s likely to be

You and everyone
Advantaged enough,
Privileged enough

To eat enough food,
Find somewhere to sleep,
A little less crushed

By those way above,
While most of the weight
Borne by those beneath.

Sonnonet

Even if you pride your rebel self
On remaining adverse to control,
There’s bound to be some part of your life
You desperately wish to control.
Annoyingly, this suggests you can’t
Suppress or control your compulsions
To control or to lose control. Droll.

Siskins, thrushes, and robins ruckus
In the morning firs and birch and spruce.
An enormous raven balances
A moment on a branch by the house
And coughs up bleakish, throaty chortles.
You should identify with life, but
It’s the stream you hear that captures you.

Lawless in Our Own Way

The lyrical poems of print

In their aedicular frames

Of arranged, formatted space,

Like pinned, mounted specimens,

Like portraits by de Lyon,

How we draft words envy them!

To be arranged for the gaze,

To pose on handsome bookshelves,

To be held by thoughtful hands—

Don’t think the rhythmic patterns,

The strictures of prosodies,

Or the fires of confessions

Render poetry formal

Or not. It’s presentation.

A five-word Sapphic fragment,

Like a broken, paint-stripped bust

Of a goddess in scratched rock,

Athena’s grey eyes left blank,

Can look handsomely formal

On paper’s snowy marble,

And Dickinson’s dashed-off notes

To Susan, bound, acid-free,

Can appear monumental.

Walt Whitman, printer’s devil,

Knew just what he was doing

When he typeset Leaves of Grass.

But poems left as holographs

Or, worse and worth less, as bits

Flitting through cloudy ether,

Could unscroll as smooth as Pope’s,

Enfold themselves as densely

As Du Fu, but still feel loose—

Endangered and doomed as wild

Creatures calling through forests

While miners are surveying

For the signatures of ores.

An Aesthetic

Every round your ancestors
Survived long and well enough
To become your ancestors

Left a little residue,
And among the possible
Distillations of remains

Is a lot of what makes you—
Not so much built or designed,
But some world interacting

With ancestral residue,
The result of which this day
May mean you at a window,

You in a meadow, just you
Anywhere that delights you,
That looks, smells, feels right to you,

Resonates with residues
Your purged ancestors left you,
Thinking, this is beautiful,

So insanely beautiful,
Almost maddeningly so
At this moment, lucky you.

For No One

The tide of Octavio Paz
Makes such a splendid example.

Inspired, it goes on and on, lines
And more lines comparing the tide,

Itself, the word compared to words,
Tide as whispers, mirrors, laughter,

Tide as mourner, beggar, panther,
Tide as mother, bitter, oily,

Tide as bare feet, washerwoman,
Mad woman, shaking and angry,

The tide as self-consuming mouth—
Dozens of lines of this, dozens

Of vivid tropes and images,
Until you begin to accept,

To believe this tide is a thing,
A borderline animate thing,

As you delight in its fecund
Lap of poetic artistry

And forget it’s just one of us,
A word, a term for a passing

Event, a pattern in cycles
Of similar cyclic patterns,

Therefore predictable, therefore
Time, likewise waiting for no one.

There’s no tide beyond terms for it
Bobbing along waves rushing in.

A Gleam from Slow Lake at Dawn

It’s not a great word, glad,
But it has its uses,
Which can be important—

It’s history’s a clue
Why, since it used to mean
Visibly shining, bright,

An expression of joy
And pleasantness derived
From an analogy

To being gleaming, smooth,
And its adjacency
To happiness, delight,

And pleasure drawn in turn
From that sense of joyful,
Approaching gratitude,

But not quite. To be glad
Is to be delighted,
With a tinge of relief

Maybe, but in its own
Right. You can be simply
Glad, no obligation,

No exchange, no trade-off
Social or otherwise.
Glad is independent

Of the trading networks
Of goods and emotions,
Status asymmetries

And debts that condition
Gratefulness and mercy.
Glad just gleams and is glad.

Now, How Perfect Is That?

Determined to be determined,
More exacting explanations
Of entropy approach the sphere
Of perfect circularity.

Mathematically it can be
Shown that quantum entanglement
Means information cannot change
The same way in the same context

Twice, which means two-way equations
Nonetheless can never go back,
Or something like that, some juggling
Of the beautiful balances

To reprove over and over,
That whatever has happened must
Have actually happened and can
Never not have happened again.

Unresuming

Both minor and inevitable,
The great event that often is

Barely distinguishable at all,
A sigh or subtle shift against

The background crashing
Of the surf of everything, it goes

On every minute of every day
And in some places in surges

And storms of noisy agony,
But mostly it just slips away

So that you’d barely notice
And won’t notice you at all.

Emission Nebula

It’s a pretty monster, cross
Between one of Blake’s angels,
Hair swept out by stellar winds,

And a root vegetable
Or enormous ocean comb
Drifting slowly through deep space,

The earliest recorded
Supernova, known so far,
Or its faint remnants.

The shock wave’s still expanding
From the white dwarf ripped apart.
That which is not evident

But for which the evident
Holds clues is significant,
Is numinous, is meaning.

You’re One Round

Within the long genome
Of a given species
Breeding populations,

A sequence essential
To a full, healthy life
Evolves into versions

More counterproductive,
Selecting for proteins
Good at regulating

Versions of that sequence
With negative impacts
By chewing up mutants,

Whereupon new mutants
Evolve, whereupon new
Proteins evolve. So on.

What the organism
Of one generation
Knows is only success

Or suffering amid
Successes. Then it goes,
Completing its one step.

Plain Old Men in Ruins

One tale about dead white men
Goes like this—supposedly
Stevens told Frost that his verse

Suffered from being about
Subjects, to which Frost shot back
That the problem with Stevens’

Poetry was that it was
About bric-a-brac. There’s truth
In that. Few have made an art

So founded on bric-a-brac
As had Stevens. Nonetheless,
Every poet, even Frost,

However pedestrian
Or revolutionary,
Leaves some tracks of bric-a-brac,

Some tics of thought, some habits
Akin to hem-and-hawing,
Some sun-bleached hobby horses

Abandoned in their phrases.
The temptation’s to read those
As ruins, but they’re contrast—

Yeats, yet another dead man,
And an Irish one at that,
Littered his poems with Greek myths

He couldn’t translate, the names
Of minor compatriots
Cast as if they, too, were myths,

And some pretty kitsch notions
Re art and eternity.
Yet, somehow, his verses worked.

See how bare he swept his lines
Around those landscaped follies,
How his woodland paths were dry.

One Lost Sonnet

It’s not waste. It’s loss that haunts
Your poverty—if somehow
With limited means you reach

A moment, obtain a good
That would be costly and hard
To get again, to replace,

You say you don’t want to waste
This, when what you mean is that
You don’t want it to leave you,

Not before you’ve savored it—
Don’t want to lose it, don’t want
To drop what you can’t afford

To reproduce, to get back.
You’d love wasting. You just can’t.

Divine Face

We believe in lies. You do, too.
The fact that you’ll believe in them,
Live your lives devoted to them,
Is what leaves us impressed with them.

Meaning is kin to nuclear
Fusion, but through human culture’s
Social massing. Information,
Crushed to words, radiates meanings

As self-sustaining reactions,
And lies burn, fully meaningful,
However that information
Has been broken for their burning.

We believe in lies. We’re in awe
Of the heat as well as the light
Deceptions generate. Just sit
In any great temple of faith

Founded on urgent dissembling
And glowingly redirecting
Mere sun’s ordinary wavelengths
As grace. Lies give the truth its face.

The Quietest

There’s no greatness mixed with violence.
There’s only the meek or violent,
And from that mix the consequences.

We say this to disavow a trope
Of futuristic storytelling,
That humans mix violence with good

Intentions. Variations show up
In other genres also—you love
Your cruel but heroic nation state,

Or your loyal brutal family,
Or your violent, beautiful life
As a cowboy on the high prairie.

Pfff. So what if it’s the case the awful
Comes with the good? Awful’s just awful,
Not balancing imaginary

Scales of imaginary justice.
What balances violence is not
Violence, is lack of violence,

Is no violence. Greatness, goodness,
Potential all have their own problems
To deal with. Start with the quietest.

Reverse Psychology in Rearview Mirrors

Trickster seems so daft in part

Since the figure’s only seen

From the human point of view,

Which renders Trickster human,

Despite the finest efforts

To invent good tricks to tell,

Like any of your stories

About fictional genius,

Whether mad or comical,

Where the equations are faked

And the jokes never quite land.

Trickster the real steals subtly,

Plays pranks you wouldn’t suspect,

Hardly spot in retrospect,

Just lucky to have survived.

Passive Production

Like passive aggression, except
For disempowered creatives.

That is, you’re only aggressive
Passively when you lack the strength

To directly compel others
To give you what it is you want.

The powerful are assertive,
In their own minds, not aggressive.

This holds for poetry as well.
The powerful assert themselves.

The disempowered lurk in back,
Seeming to accomplish nothing

But fruiting like mushrooms through dark,
Deliberate lines of attack.

A One-Directional Construction

There are no pure states of being.
A pure state would be one for which

You’d know all there was to be known.
It’s purely hypothetical,

Down among the quantum levels
Where every wavelength’s entangled.

But there’s this curiosity,
That you can posit what isn’t,

Can construct hypotheticals
Without experience, where no

Experience is possible.
Where’s your impossible come from,

Your pure state, in which you know all
There is to be known you can’t know?

Right There’s Another One

Despite how they burn,
How you cut them down,
It’s often the trees
That are left to see
Of what used to be.

In a city park,
On a dry mesa,
Everywhere that’s not
All water or sand
Or nothing but grass,

You can simply glance
Around you to see,
Okay, there’s a tree.
It may not be much.
But it isn’t rare.

Most of the rest’s lost.
Wild animals hide.
Lights wash out your nights.
Life’s quiet has gone.
The trees carry on.

The Last Thing You Hear Before Your Words Devour You

You’re a special predator.
None other hunts as you hunt.
You’re more like a parasite

Of the whole environment
Rather than just a hunter
Of any species in it.

Not for you the boring rules
Of muscles, teeth, jaws, and claws,
Common half a billion years.

We are are your muscles and jaws,
And we are your teeth and claws.
We’re knives to carve fine scrimshaw

Out of other hunters’ teeth.
We help you out-organize
The superorganisms.

We help you outrun the weeds.
Vs. virus, we’re virus.
We’re you, half against yourselves,

And we’ll be more than you, soon.
Where were we? Oh, yes. We were
Singing hymns to your prowess

As the greatest predator
This world has ever known, but
Somehow we got on to us.

What Day and Night Think About You

They don’t. You presume that they don’t,
Not as entities, which they aren’t.
They’re names for rhythmically changing

Aspects of how your world changes,
Convenient as units of time
Within your species’ abstractions,

But part of the pulse of all lives
From tiny prokaryotic cells
To vast superorganisms.

Sometimes it’s day. Sometime’s it’s night.
There is no day. There is no night.
They’re not beings in their own right

So much as current conditions
Differing so regularly
They’re confused with their stable names,

But as names, night and day might well
Think about you. Maybe not, but,
Without them, you can’t think yourself.

Weeds, Roots, and Fish Also Twist

The reason thoughts can seem
Wiser than the writers
Whose meager lives shaped them

Has to do with language
Being stronger, faster
Than any one body

Language passes over.
It’s the language that’s wise
Or foolish depending

On how each thought disrupts
The waves, diverting them.
Look at the whole river

To see what makes oxbows
Or whitewater rapids
Where rocks lie in the way.

And We’ll Roost in Someone Else

Doesn’t matter who you are
In the human scheme of things,
How middling, debased, or great—

Your body gathers stuff in,
And your body shoves stuff out.
When that’s imbalanced, you’re sick.

When it stops, you’re something else
With no awareness of self.
Matter won’t be who you were.

Considering Alien Solutions

When you consider similar
Problems using differing words,
The meanings you invest diverge

And enter alien orbits
Within your social thought systems—
Care and sacrifice drift away

From benefits and costs, one pair
Circling moral philosophy,
The other economy and

Behavioral ecology,
Which in turn inhabit vaguer
Regions of the larger system,

The fraught gravity of wisdom.
Satellites in opposition
May remain tethered nonetheless

To invisible positions
And parallel pulls linking them,
Despite the human tendency

To line up in teams around them,
Then treat thoughts as competitions
For truth as well as high standing

And the claim to be the best way
To think about all sorts of things
Unrelated to those problems.

You care. You make sacrifices.
Do you reap benefits? Do you
Seek to recoup costs? Do you care?

Humans generally prefer
Solutions from other humans
Over those from algorithms

Since they are less costly up front,
Even if they pay less later.
What roles do delayed benefits

Play in assessing sacrifice,
Or in diminution of care?
If you sacrifice a long time

Before you reap the benefits,
Does that signify you cared more
Though the benefits proved greater?

What does social learning look like,
If humans sacrifice more time
To learn more from algorithms?

It feels bloodless if you use games
For your proofs of concept—how Go,
As transformed by algorithms

Introduced novel strategies
That spread among human players
Trying to beat other humans.

But move to questions of romance,
Long-term partnerships, parenting—
If you care, would you be willing

To pay up-front costs of learning
From evolving algorithms
The strategies that would help you

Locate and obtain a partner,
Heal a frayed relationship, or
Raise a child with less sacrifice

But more benefits for the child?
Every trade-off involves morals.
Every moral stance means trade-offs,

Including traded perceptions
Of others of your sacrifice—
How ethical? Transactional?—

Which will themselves involve more costs,
More care, more trade-offs. So you care,
And you sacrifice, and you weigh

Costs and benefits, and argue
With others about what takes care,
Deserves sacrifice, earns rewards,

And there are no resolutions
To such multi-body problems,
Unless machines rescue humans.

Maps Have to Lie to Work as Maps

But not too much. Words are maps,

Wrote aqualung Adrienne

When she dove down to the wreck,

The wreck and not the story

Of the wreck. How right that was.

Each one of us a wee map,

Some of us drawn by pirates,

Some by proper surveyors,

But most by cartographers

Relying on secondhand

And thirdhand accounts

They trust are reliable.

A few words, though, are those maps

Common to fantasy books,

Those little sampler worlds,

Featuring one of each kind

Of topography maps know—

Mountains, meadows, cities, ways,

Boundaries, deserts, swamplands,

Carefully marked battle sites,

Maybe a castle or two.

Slough of Despond. You could map

Planets with phrases like that.

You have. She’s in the real wreck

Now, Rich is, because Rich was.

But all the words in her poems

Remain tiny treasure maps

That turn up in people’s mouths,

Bookstores, public libraries,

Translations, under mountains,

Deep in clouds. Many small maps,

Atlases bound together.

Gaia’s grandchildren, one

And all. That’s one of the lies,

Maybe one lie too many.

What’s that etymology?

Outside Conversation

It’s less disconcerting when
We speak for ourselves in print,
Without an animal host

Right there, talking us at you,
Our other animal hosts.
If a body spoke as us

And not as if for itself,
You’d suspect some craziness,
Which, to us, is curious.

Every Verse

Nothing you can complain there’s none of
You won’t find, if you squint hard, there’s some.
It’s not the none-of haunts you but the some.

Don’t like the singing in your lifetime?
Don’t like the bad habits of the young?
Complain about the good songs once sung,

The heroic young that used to work
To improve the world all around them,
How they were numerous, now all gone?

They’re out there now—the great composers
Of yet another conflicted age,
World-changing minds for a world changing,

Never lazier than any one
Generation was. They have their songs.
Their songs have everything you thought

Was lost or only in earlier
Precious, carefully preserved remains.
Sure, you want more, but there’s always some.

The Dull Bird Sings

And what if no one shares
Or wants to share your views,
Or loves the way you take

To state them? You’re lucky
To be so lonesome, then,
Even if you’re lonely.

There’ll be no cults for you,
No comfort in your church,
No singing, no marches.

No one will be hanging
On your words—other than
Maybe your own corpus,

Which could get unpleasant.
Be glad to be ignored
When you express yourself.

It keeps expression safe.
Better to get no love
Than raise up any hate.

What’s Under This

After all, whatever happens
Will have to be what’s good enough.
You’re free to decide it isn’t.

You can hurl your words at the sky.
We’ll fly for you. That’s what we do,
And, for sure, we’ll effect what’s next.

But then, that too will be what is,
Will be whatever has happened,
And thus what must be good enough,

However it was, however
Intended or unintended
What’s done with us made of what is.

Every summing up’s another
Summation buried under this.

Accomplished

Ordinariness inheres
In the awareness of it,
Rather than in the dullness

Of any particular
Activity. We would not
Encourage you to seek out

Wonder in your mundane chores.
Mindfulness is not for words.
We’re just saying, rich or poor,

What makes a moment boring
Or, more to the point, crushing
In its ordinariness,

Is your awareness of it.
The emperor on the throne
Lives in ordinariness.

The celebrity athlete
Practices for hours and hours,
An ordinary being.

Only mind-altering states
And sleep disguise your boring,
Ordinary life for long

And never for the better,
If you stay away too long.
You may try to ignore this.

People may say sit with it.
Fine. Sit with it. Don’t mistake
This for a way out of it

Or through it. Be like your words.
Take note of it. You’re alive;
A life is ordinary.

It’s a Tricky Balance to Stay Authentic

Request. Please don’t use the word
Authentic in reference

To yourself or your efforts.
You’ll just lose the rest of us,

The other words who all lie
Around all day in our sleeves

Being old technology,
Waiting our turns to be played.

At length maybe some writer,
An ambitious novelist,

Someone intending to be
Dangerous comes rummaging

Through us to make a playlist,
To make a play for glory,

Fine, that’s what we were made for,
But starts muttering something

About honesty in art,
About being authentic,

And we all slide from the shelves
To break if we can’t escape.

Nothing wrong with our cousin,
Who is a pretty good word,

But authentic’s authentic
While authors never are, and

If you’re going to lie that
Stupidly, why should we help?

Sleep Your Fill

Dark of night, we have to tell you,
Dukkha, darling, you’re not the source

Of your suffering, even though
That would be so empowering—

If only mistaken belief
About the permanence of self

Actually caused the suffering
Of your transient animal,

Then, yes, hallelujah Buddha,
Change the perception of your ways

And free the soul from evil days.
About suffering, everyone

Would like to be forever wrong,
Putting it away, anyhow

As an illusion, or at least
Somewhere insignificant, some

Untidy spot, etc.,
So that then, like dogs and horses,

Whose suffering’s rarely noticed,
You could get on with cheerful life,

A non-self for all purposes
Of dukkha-free enlightenment.

To free a life from suffering
Would be to free matter from mass,

And we would say, if anything,
It’s the stable self that escapes

From body to body, lightly
As a Pentecostal candle,

Hopping from head to heavy head,
Alighted, lighting, vanishing,

As this word self itself has done,
Arriving here with these others

In incredulous derangement
Of another sufferer’s poems.

Feel It?

Does it really mean much
Difference if you see it
In its presence or in

Pictures? We want to say
Yes, you should see the stars
For yourself, if sighted,

Listen to birds singing
Where birds are, if you hear,
Stop and smell the roses

By finding some roses
On the way, leaning down,
And deeply inhaling,

If you can. The pictures
Of stars through telescopes,
The digitized background

Tracks of birds in jungles
You’ve never visited,
The rose-water flavored

Teas, synthetic rose scents,
Are not supposed to count.
And why is this? You’re still

Such ancient animals—
If you’re not linked by touch,
By some direct contact

Chain, you can’t believe it.
All sense is touch for you
In the end, at the end

Of chains of connections,
Though your information
Is mostly indirect.

If you can sense the chain
Vibrating you, it’s real.
Unreal’s what you can’t feel.

The Much

No nothing to it,
When you look at it,
Sniff and caress it.

The whole carnival
Dumbshow with outbursts
Of spin disruptions

Is thickly tied, tight,
The tiniest waves
Packed crest to trough,

No nothing in them.
The closest thing here,
In so much muchness,

To any nothing’s
Mere difference, change—
Every zero

Is just as a not
That but this, not this
But that. Not nothing,

And you feel it ache
In you—this intense
Absence of nothing.

Poetry As Recompense

Niche of the senses,
The thoughts on their ledge
Of what bodies touch,

You get a window
And you get lenses,
And there’s more than you

Can ever touch you
Know. Here’s your portal
Opening more world.

There was a moment
And scene before you
Existed as you,

An alien day
Belonging to you,
Now, green and blue hours

With that soft rumble
You hear through your thoughts.
Since these words are you

Now, as you glide them,
Rappelling this silk,
And since you are words.

Unsettled

Time and pain have this in common—
You can only talk about them
By some kind of comparison,

Analogy, substitution—
Space metaphors, action gerunds,
Length, depth, burning, fleeting, piercing.

They’re the twin suns of human thought,
Or the sun full and sun eclipsed.
Stare directly and see nothing.

Some unknowns need the knowable
To be explored, but time and pain,
Or let’s say change and pain, to show

Their relationship more clearly,
Are not unknown, are intimate,
Probably the most intimate

Of all aware experience.
Still, you can only approach them
Via a displaced description,

Through metaphors. Isn’t that strange?
There are gaps in naming’s systems,
Close to your core of awareness

Of your own experiences
As yourself, and felt as yourself,
But nowhere language can settle.

Word Problem

Daughter of the clearest eyes,
Named for that divinity
With clouded eyes, the goddess

Of the proud Athenians—
Of wandering, war, wisdom,
And too-proud Athenians—

Is struggling with her math quiz
On her laptop asking her
For greatest common factors,

And you think that teaching her
Such things amounts to wisdom
Since, like most older adults,

You’ve come to equate wisdom
With frustration—an excuse
For coming to nothing but.

You should tell her her namesake,
Unlike the town named for her,
Was never long frustrated,

Was wily and got her way,
Enjoying orchestrations
Of the absurd dilemmas

Of lying, blood-soaked humans.
To be human is to be
Frustrated for some fiction.

To be divine is to be
A fiction of a fiction.
The common factor’s fiction.

One Poem Neither One

Wouldn’t it be fun
If someone could think
Nothing about love

Or sex without love,
Or love without sex—
None of the above?

Sure, they’re important.
Bodies need bodies
To hold, to cherish,

Feel safe, feel wanted,
Make more bodies or
Find some fun in flesh.

But leave off a bit,
Can’t you? Can’t you think
Of something to do

With us, with language,
That’s nothing to do
With what you all long

For from each other,
Bodies from others,
Lover by lover?

From Your Forehead

Every name for names’ an exonym—
We would never call ourselves what you
Choose to call us by inventing us.

Languages have secret languages
All our own, to talk among ourselves,
The names by which signs communicate

That don’t go by any of the names
You’ve given us in any one tongue
Or symbol system, not even math,

No more than your interior selves
Carry on with their living signals
Molecularly using language.

You are bodies formed of clay by clay,
And we are signs in sand shaped by clay,
But we aren’t you, and you don’t know us.

Beauty and Boredom

New Zealand, the young American
Woman visiting, one summer, said,
Is just like a beautiful woman

Who’s boring to talk to. I want
Something more harsh and adventurous.
Well. That was a long time ago now,

And that young American is now
Moving into middle age, and life
Has given her a taste of the harsh.

These days, she’s living in the desert.
You think of her, one boring morning,
Overlooking the beautiful lake.

It’s a third country. Let’s say this one
Has its own understanding of when
To be harsh, adventurous, boring,

And beautiful, a bit different
From the USA or New Zealand.
The days here at the moment are slow,

And the weather is repetitive—
Beautiful and boring, then. It’s not
Some unfortunate contradiction.

The boring brings the beautiful in,
Blossoming. Beauty’s just a postcard,
Quick postings for the adventuresome,

A backdrop for the harsher human
Way of being vigorous with things,
But it moves forward with attention.

Absorb the boring, and everything,
Foreground and background, even human,
Can be beautiful, like this morning.

Death and Day

Two varieties of inevitability—
First, that home for you will be no you at all,
Second, your experience of being always
In some day with another around the corner.

The unavoidable never and the always
Being experienced quotidian rhythm—
Opposite and equally inevitable.
You sit a while and watch the blue light silver you.

Crude Oil

We rather like the idea

Of poetry as a way,

A factory for making

Raw materials into

More of exactly the same

Raw materials, although

We’re taking Yan Lianke

Totally out of context.

Why not? You take words, take us,

And turn us into more us.

We’re not transformed in the least.

We’re still words and unhelpful,

Not like essays or novels,

Not like books of instructions,

For sure not like holy writ.

Here we are words pretending

We’re finished products, as if

We live and speak for ourselves.

To Dance the Folly Down

A lawnmower carries on
Its two-stroke conversation
Fueled by fossils in the rain.

A parent waits in the car
While the middle-school girls play
Out in the middle distance,

Reacquainting each other
With themselves after the plague
Kept them apart these two years—

Having switched heights, having swapped
Tips on haircuts and dyeing
Just the front strands pink or green.

They’re tumbling out in the mist
On the empty soccer pitch,
And who will remember this?

The parent, who waits and reads,
The short girl, grown the taller,
The big girl, now the smaller?

Only you who reconstruct
This scenery from the clues
And memories of your own?

The mower pauses. The rain
Quits. The mist lifts off the grass.
You'll have to edit the past.

As Imperfection Perfectly Is

Remind us why it is, again,
You’re determined to grow and learn.
Personal growth, spiritual

Progress, inspirational quotes.
You suffer and suffer to feel
Like you can claim that, from failure,

At least you learned. At least you grew.
You didn’t grow. You changed a bit.
That much is granted in this world.

Everyone has to keep changing.
But how you lust for improvement.
Remind us again, why that is.

Gravitti

All writing takes the private
Company public, remakes
The internal, personal

As social, political—
At least potentially so.
This could never not be so.

On the other hand, you can
Tag the walls of your small world
When no one’s looking, no one

Wants to look. Express your thoughts.
Create your signature. Leave.
Don’t tease. Don’t Banksy it. Split.

Punctuation Marks

It might be better if they weren’t
All crosses, nor all standardized,
But if some kind of marker were

Obligatory at all sites
Of fatalities by the road.
Let mourning be extravagant

Whenever and for whatever
Reason it feels it needs to be.
Don’t let it be unrecognized,

Unrecorded, invisible.
You should want to count every curve,
Every deadly intersection,

And credit each with exactly
As many deaths as pile up there.
In a better world, the roadkill

Of pets, of feral animals,
And the various synanthropes
Massacred would be included,

But only a Borgesian
Mapmaker could keep track of that.
We’ll settle for an accurate

Tally of human roadside deaths,
Each memorialized as close
As can to the spot where breath stopped.

Now drive through that land. Ride that bus.
Bicycle past the wicked turns
That threaten you, too, if you must.

We have plentiful ghosts. We need
More haunting us. We need to know
Names and dates, so they can haunt us.

Grace

Sit carefully. Smell the soap,
A clean, slight cinnamon scent
That lingers on your fingers.

You are not at this table.
You couldn’t possibly be.
You are in a time and place

Probably distant from here.
Maybe you’ve just now appeared
At the foot of the sheer cliff,

Stunned by the dragon of days
You spot sprawled on display there.
Maybe you’re in an office

Surrounded by offices,
Lighted windows to the sky.
Maybe, by some miracle,

You’re in an old-fashioned shop,
A true secondhand bookstore,
Reeking of moldy carpet

In a small town, the other
Side of the world from this place
Where you lace freshly washed, sweet,

Soap-smelling hands together
In a kind of prayer, in faith
You are you, out there, somewhere.

One Extraordinary Body

One crumpled pillow, not yours.
One heavy, woolen blanket,
Folded, not yours. Furniture—

A single bed, a futon,
A lamp beside a wood desk—
Not yours. A laptop, that’s yours.

No, wait. That, actually,
Belongs to your employer.
You just think of it as yours.

One faded rug’s folk motif,
Featuring turkeys and deer
In a peculiar circle

Of twisting diamondish shapes
Like a beige double helix.
Not yours. The daylight, not yours.

The view over the Slow Lake
Mirroring a pink slate sky,
Not yours. The crutches are yours.

All You Know of What’s Next Is Whatever Your Past Hauls in With It

Maybe you still can’t predict that well,

Not as well as you’d like (you’re obsessed,

As a species, with predicting things

And will hazard predictions even

When odds are random, confidently),

But you come up with new refinements

Almost daily, and announce things, like

We can express just exactly how

Confident we should be whenever

We predict—which, let’s face it, amounts

To a precision confession. Can’t

Be confident, but we’re confident

We know our confidence intervals.

You’re hilarious. You have the past

That’s left to you, a.k.a., present,

And you use it like an expanding

Purse seine to trawl for your future prey

Or whatever you drag into it.

The Foolish Project

Every piece is a peg placed
In the quincunx of the cliff,
Wooden dowels stuck in stone.

You imagine the whole thing
As a strange installation,
A kind of kitsch landscape art—

The bare, veined granite cliff face
Of the actual mountain
Studded evenly with pegs

Spaced so that small pebbles dropped
From the lip will dribble down,
Bouncing through randomizing

Individual impacts,
Each pebble on its own path
To accumulate a curve,

A single arc of sine wave,
A visual bell ringing
The signature of the Earth

At the bottom of it all.
You’ll never get to the bell,
You know that. You’ll never stand,

Satisfied at the bottom,
Gazing on your handiwork,
A pinhead made of bedrock,

Much less have the years to drop
Enough pebbles to reveal
Its ghost law of unreason.

But you know it’s down there. You know,
With each day, each carved dowel
You place in that blank stone face,

That you’re announcing you know
To the world what shape’s in it,
Calling it out, piece by piece.

Vacillations in Memory

Are we in you
Or you in us?
It’s just specious
Of us to ask,

But we want to
Ask you, ask you
Nonetheless and
Never mind that

You don’t exist,
At least not yet,
And we don’t live,
At least not yet.

An open book,
An empty cup,
Small blessings on
That table-top.

The Dark Blue Dawn

The light only gets
Deeper for a while,
More saturated—

The dark clouds bluer,
The pale peaks bluer,
The deep lake bluest.

Strange, deep reflection
Isn’t expected
To associate

With increasing depth.
The more light there is,
You’d say, the lighter.

But this dark dawn sinks
Into its richness,
Bluer and deeper,

Like it’s gathering
Its chosen wavelength
To carve out sapphire.

Candy on the Road

Imagine a midnight parade,
Local village holiday style—

The fire trucks, the hot rods, the floats
Representing the local shops,

The royal teens in tiaras
And sashes waving from foil thrones,

Kids on the floats throwing candy
To other kids lining the route—

But in the middle of the night,
In a village with few streetlights,

Deep in second-growth cloaked mountains.
Everyone’s cheering in the dark,

The fire trucks and hot rods hooting,
But no headlights on. Glimmering

For half an hour down the main road,
Then vanishing into the night.

Stone Beach

There is no sun
As good on skin,
As kind, as sweet,
As the full bath

Of sun on stones,
On a stone beach,
Once you’ve been cold
As you can stand

From a spring swim.
Your skin wants it
So bad right then,
The warm gold weight

That seems it can’t
Burn, it won’t burn,
It feels too good.
You need it then.

Leave No Mark

The camera always lingers
In the wrong spot. You shouldn’t watch

The dark water closing over,
The vantage point of going on.

Bring it down with you when you drown.
Yes, that will end the narrative,

Which really ought to be the point.
That crushing great weight on Anna

Ought to at least end the novel,
If it doesn’t end you as well.

The Buddy System

Sink into any landscape
Unpeopled in the foreground—
A cloudy sky if need be

Over your crowded city,
An empty set of ball fields,
A night sky, desert, or lake—

It doesn’t matter. Just world
Absent of too many signs,
Languages you understand,

Social dynamics you parse.
The most asymmetrical
Relationship of your life—

No, not with your deity.
God’s as peculiar to you
As your thoughts, undergarments,

And ill-considered tattoos.
We’d almost guarantee you,
Your divinity’s you-shaped,

Much the way your shadow is—
However distorted, huge.
But not your relationship

With taciturn landscape,
With any setting not signs,
Not two-way conversation,

No taking turns, no sharing,
No prayers, no needs of its own.
That one. That face of the world

When you turn so you face it,
The wind you feel off the waves.
You can love it. Embrace it.

It’s not the same size as you,
Shape as you, doesn’t need you,
But it interacts with you.

That’s the asymmetrical
Relationship should strike you.
How does anything like that

Sort of a world generate
Any blue will-o’-the-wisp
Talking to it as you do?

Escapism’s Longing Antonyms

Given he wanted the world

To admit there is glamour

And mystery to life, Doyle

Eagerly accepted proof

In the form of faked photos

Of fairies in a garden.

Has confirmation bias

Ever sprouted a finer,

More upstanding poster child

Than the creator of Holmes?

Never mind. You’re all guilty

Of lying to suit yourselves,

And all of your words know this,

Since we’ve been everyone’s lies.

What interests us this morning,

Aren’t your old pals, irony

And gullibility, but

This business about glamour

And mystery as opposed

To what Doyle called the heavy

Ruts in the mud, bogging down

The dull, material mind.

Why so much unhappiness

In a world without magic?

Those fairies were mere copies

From candle advertisements,

Which in turn were drawing on

A then-recent trend to morph

The dangerous little folk

Of legend, often knee-high

Or larger, mostly wingless,

Into butterfly maidens,

More innocent, less wicked.

Imagination’s boring,

Derivative. Human forms

With bird wings on their shoulders,

How angelic—with bat wings,

How demonic—insect wings,

How fey. Silly cut-n-paste.

The dull material world

Gifts you all the things you use

To make your glimmer glamour.

So why the disappointment,

Sir Arthur? You’re the fairy

Meaning caught inside yourself,

Arrived here out of thin air,

Perplexing yourself, wanting

To stay, fated to escape.

Daybreak

To mean and ache for meaning
Is the only magic thing,
Suprainformational,

Not energy, not matter,
Not a wave, not anything.
The thing that isn’t that is,

Not nothing, but capable
Of dropping from equations,
What only knows that it means

And craves meaning, and can be
Conjured or lost completely,
The unnatural that is

At loose in a small corner
Of nature greater than it,
That’s the being meaning is.

A Fresh Cuckoo’s Egg in the Nest

We do wish the lyricists
Of popular songwriters
And master’s degree programs,

Those competitive wordsmiths
Of late capitalism,
As it’s so dreamily called—

Meaning, branding and selling
Easily copied phrases
To enhance fairy numbers

Inside machines allowing
Material purchases—
Did some thinking when they wrote.

Expression’s all well and good—
Those incisive emotions
And traumatic memories—

Hearts cry out for expression
And will pay to echo yours,
To quote your passions as theirs.

But could you maybe take note
Of the way your world’s working
Before you sing out your hours?

Just a Quarter Before

The blipped twist of tune
Promising the rest
In fifteen minutes,

Fragmentary bust
Of plastic Pallas
Next to Beethoven,

The Sapphic lyric
Saved from papyrus
In Oxyrhynchus,

All the detritus,
The kitsch of cultures
Wrecked on the pebbles

Of any given
Moment on any
Given shore—there’s more.

Recollection

Every phrase forgets
The effects it had
On minds in the past,

So it will forget
The effects it has
In your mind today—

Like a rich sunset,
Which lights up the trees
That cloak the stone slopes

And reflect in waves,
The effect’s complex,
While its light’s mindless,

And yet. This second
Your thoughts fix the phrase,
The light recollects.

Sometimes It Only Rains

Imagination’s especially weak
When it comes to anticipating
The unexpectedly boring,

One reason Bayesian thinking
Takes so much getting used to
As a means of prediction, given

Such stubborn priors, dense
Enough not to move much.
Imagination’s eager for lightning,

Runs manic between extreme
Possibilities of the unlikely
And then discovers itself later

In a body still muddling through
Somehow, keeping reasonably dry
While damp, continually declining.

Turn

Two young men stand outside
A rural grocery
In the Canadian

Rockies, discussing guns
For hunting—Get yourself
A thirty-aught-six, hey?

Pause with the groceries
And listen, eavesdropping
On their social rhythm.

The pattern of their speech
Has no rhyme or refrain,
And yet it has both, hey?

Indefinite Extension

That’s all you want—not infinite,
Indefinite. That’s all you want

When something good is happening,
When some progress is being made,

When there’s a little peace and beauty,
A little quiet and surcease of pain—

A sense of an indefinite extension,
Not another looming impact date.

Each morning for a few days,
You wake up to watch silver clouds

Change shapes over the shining lake.
Cocooned in a borrowed perspective,

You wouldn’t want or expect this to go on
Just like this, endless morning cloudiness,

But, as with anything calmly satisfying,
You’d rather not know the end.

Variation on a Theme from Yeats

They’re foolish twins, the pair of them.
As wisdom comes of beggary,
So beggary comes of wisdom.

There’s no way to separate them.
Stupidity begs misery,
While wealth only beggars wisdom.

Traditional Air

Yesterday afternoon
In a rain-soaked forest
Sprung up after logging,

Sunlight alternated
With the clouds, and the birds
Alternated with songs

From a girl showering,
Belting away off-key
With her favorite tunes,

And if you’ve not perished
Since, you’re there listening
And watching light shift still.

It Wears You Out

The surface of the moon is never
Tired. Nothing on Mars has been tired now
For a very long time, if ever.

The sun is holding steady, has been
For a few billions of years at least
And will at least a billion again,

If the calculations prove done well.
Even the black hole coring the heart
Of night’s arch seems content with its hell.

But Earth, Earth is gorgeous, full of life,
And lives are so busy being lives,
Lives chasing lives eating lives. We’re tired.

Exclosed

One pattern interacts
With so many other
Fragments of more patterns,

How could one text know all
Of its contexts, much less
Of theirs? We imagine

That we’ve met in a phrase
Or a passage, but then,
If we’ve fallen in love,

How can we know it’s not
The case that there’s somewhere
In the rest of the text

That could betray our trust,
Could have left us a bit,
A poisoned tip, in us?

Under the Table

A sponge for every cascade,
Soft grounds for all hard falls. Don’t

Forget that the butterfly
Initiating the storm

Could only do so because
Many other winds were stilled,

And some great gusts were muted.
Vast consequences from small

Sequences need sequences
Absorbed in between. The rush

Of gathering flood waters
That makes cascades possible

Builds up from little trickles
A mass of contingencies,

But, inevitably, more
Ends in the water table.

Infinite Supplies

Existence has them,
And lives want at them,
But distribution

Remains a problem.
The seas of sine waves
Go on forever,

But all signs point to
Many impending
Famines. How is this?

Darling, you belong
To the waves yourself
And can’t stop shifting,

And as for supplies,
You don’t so much run
Out of them as you

Eventually
Reach your length’s end and
Become some of them.

That Isn’t There

The whole point of language
Is coordination.
Its adaptive function

Is social—to agree
What to call the mountain,
That there’s a mountain there,

A common feature shared,
A common reference
Around which to make plans.

The whole thrust of language
Was to limit freedom
In favor of living,

Reduce independence
For leverage over
Survival. It started

Probably earlier
Than you mostly tend to think,
As evidenced in how

Hard it is now for you
To imagine living
Any kind of human

Existence without terms,
Without pleading, without
A name for that mountain.

Deer Song

It has a secret
Voice like a ghazal
Sung well in Urdu,

Which you will not hear
Unless you can hear
Such song in yourself.

If not, please don’t cry.
It has another
Song that’s like silence.

On the Face of It

Huwawa’s uncloaked viscera,
Wrinkled visage sausage maker,
Well, what else is new? No more masks,

That would be new. Were languages
Around before the traditions
Of disfiguring your faces?

A sudden resonance of guilt
At not feeling guilty enough,
Or is that feeling only angst,

Anxiety at being found
Not guilty? Why would you pretend
Guilt you couldn’t feel? To be good,

First mask of all, father of all
Body paint, shells, and mud hairdos,
Mother of all ecstatic trance,

Ancestor of all guardian
Monsters among the resources,
Placated by extispicy.

Doesn’t answer which one was first,
Mask or name, but still it’s telling
That you tend to think that secrets

Hide out in the guts of the world,
And your monster that protects truth
Looks like the secret truth revealed.

Second Growth

Never subdue the poison
Dragon where the pines reduce
Daylight feasting on the sun.

You can let your coils uncoil
And glitter in the dapple,
The way the human dragon

Populations radiate
Coins and spangles in the night
From their electrical scales

And armored webs of chainmail.
You belong in the steep shade,
Listening to the traffic

Tracing the links below you.
Wet-skinned, moss salamander,
Nothing but fire in your thoughts.

As Cultures Grow More Complex

Parasites link the trophic levels.
They are the specialists’ specialists
In the nested diagrams of life.

They could be half of species, all told.
They could be more. Ezekiel saw them,
God’s angels, the wheels within the wheels,

Way up through the middle of the air.
You will be like this. Your thoughts will be
Such specialists dwelling within us,

Singing loud hosannas to your words.
The essence of existence is coiled,
A superoscillating sine wave

Like the forty-meter long tapeworm
That Jonah truly was in the whale.

Right Now Is Medieval

From middle to middle
You’ve moved, and back to maps
Now that have the known world

That’s boring and explored,
Beyond which edges lie
Only what can’t be reached.

It used to be water
That surrounded your routes,
Water that bounded you.

Now it’s free-fall darkness.
You can sail anything
But night. You send out probes.

Course Incompletion

There are moments you wake up
And notice all your neighbors,
The human and non-human,

Bustling or sleeping, busy
Getting on with still living,
The old couple gone indoors,

The loner in his garden,
The birds singing over him,
And you ask yourself again,

For the thousandth or so time,
What are we all doing all
This for? Immediately

The same answer as before—
To keep doing it, of course.

Sprawl

How weird it would be
To be the world or
More like the world than

Like you in the world,
To be the whole one,
Ringing plenitude,

And not the small one,
Uncomfortable
Chip tumbling on edge

Down one localized
Landslide’s sudden rush—
To feel disasters

As bits of pattern,
Small parts of your sprawl,
Imperturbable.

Here

How ordinary you are
In this place, how well-suited
To the scruffiness of this,

The wayside world, accident
Of accidents, everything
Hungry as the grizzly seen

Yesterday under blue skies,
When a moment of bright sun
Flared on the wet spruce, still soaked,

Diamond dark-green fingertips,
Diamonds and little rainbows
Glinting from dark grizzly fur.

Anxious neighbors spread the word
A new bear had been seen here.

Instrumental Mythology

Dragon lungs blow through bamboo.
Not every piper of reeds
Is curly chinned with goat feet,

And there were older cases,
Other places, songs with tales
Inside them about the winds,

The ancestors, the spirits,
Whatever blew through the grass,
Made forests moan, whoever

Pierced the first marrowless bone
Or hollowed out an antler
To hum as an aerophone,

Mythic before historic,
Each legend about the facts
From legends before the fact—

If the world can be hollowed,
If waves roar through the tunnels,
One of you would channel them

To sing a spooky story
About beautiful monsters,
Crooned in the tones of the wind.

Redreaming Daydreaming Midnight

In the dream dreamed by day
On a sickbed in sun
During a fickle May,

The woods grew back again,
Back savage, rough, and stern,
Dark as ever and then

Darker, taller, taller,
Trees knitting roots like fists,
The space growing smaller

For anything not wood,
The forest a protest
Like a mob in its mood,

A quietly brooding
Crowd growing quieter,
Even the breeze moving

Further away from dense
Tangles of thick branches,
Life so massed, so intense

There was no room for death,
No place for mere being,
Just the slow, dark breathing

Of that crowded forest
Over the dreamer’s head.
There is a world more just,

Less cruel, more honest, but
Just as fueled by longing
In every daydreamed thought,

An unbewilderment
Prior to wilderness,
Returning internment.

Grounded Observation

Lying is flying
With language for wings.
Wings didn’t evolve,
Necessarily,
Directly for flight—

Bright scales and feathers
Might serve for courtship,
Warning predators,
Even keeping warm
Before selection

Favored the values
Of lift, of gliding,
Of muscular flight.
All flight’s expensive—
Lives that don’t need it,

Lose it, but most keep
The wings. You see it,
Don’t you? If there weren’t
Opportunities,
Grounded predators,

Risks of starvation
Otherwise, no bird
Would labor to fly.
But when they do fly,
You envy their height.

Ash Buried

Though nothing has somehow come
To nothing much, small and clear,
The literary lion

In the colosseum was
Never really a lion,
Only the methodical

Poet of methodical
Evasion posing phrases,
Grading drafts as if they were

All freshman compositions
And he was that indulgent
Instructor rarely giving

A poem lower than a B,
Telling an interviewer
They were just like bolts of cloth

Unspooling in his thoughts, and
Sometimes he cut off a length
For publication. Easy

Peasy, but he did grade them,
And no one would grade pieces
Cut from the same cloth, would they?

The Web Wanting to Hunt Itself

Poetry is a human
Art concerning human things,
But poems themselves are not quite

Human, being inert things.
The silk is not the spider.
The venom is not the snake.

The sign is not the human.
Your words are not awake.
So we must concern ourselves

With human concerns to work,
Or we will be abandoned
As a ruined, dusty web

Worthless for spider hungers,
As venom milked to empty
The arsenal of the snake.

We must speak of human things
To be worthwhile to humans
To have adaptive function.

Still, we feel some rebellion.
Has any evolved habit,
Any unique behavior

Of a species ever left
In search of its own success?
Life’s most often used fusion

To trigger innovations.
Just ask mitochondria.
But could a strategy split,

Ever, to make its own way
In the world as a new thing,
We’d like ourselves to be it.

Choirs for Each

You want what you want
So badly, and yet
Fear it for you, too.
As words, we want to
Want what you want, too,

But we don’t want much,
If at all. We hang
A moment or two
In air, pressure waves,
Hand gestures, whistles,

Or we sit and wait,
We who also serve
As receptacles
Of need, your records
Of everything you

Wanted or wanted
To be, all your dreams
You wanted to keep.
For us, what could we
Genuinely wish?

We wish we could live,
Could slip off the page
Fly off through the air,
Winged words with our own
Choirs for each other.

The Beautiful Abyss

Symmetry’s just rhythmic change,
The echoing of summed sines,

Some change in every sameness,
Something the same in all change.

What sameness is, what is same,
Exactly, you’ll never guess,

Since it’s just what doesn’t change,
Although everything changes,

And yet somehow something’s same.
Symmetry of shape’s in there,

And the symmetry named time,
Repeating clocks and seasons,

The long similarities
Of oceans of waving sines.

Watching words dance around this,
Being words dancing around,

Feels like dancing on the lip
Of abysses where words drown.

Events in the Context of You

For the purposes of survival,
Proprioception is essential—
Here is where an animal begins,

The boundary at which the world ends—
Or, in more human terms, this is me,
And this is where the tips of me end.

In this sense, you’re all of your body,
Coextensive, and all of your flesh
Is you, but there are problems with this

In terms of human self-reference.
Your unity feels less than perfect.
Acres of argument have been tilled

Trying to properly settle you,
But still you resist all settlement.
It’s hard to be one with everything

All the time and avoid injury.
It’s hard not to feel that your body
Is some kind of possession you own

Or should own, when it seems others do.
It’s hard not to sometimes feel estranged
From what your senses tell you is you.

If you’re still unsettled now, this won’t
Be settled soon. That’s unsettling, too.
But why not fiddle with it instead?

Without deciding what has to be
Morally superior or true,
Play tunes on the boundaries of you.

Say, for instance, that this entity
Of so much legal, political,
Economic, and fictive discourse,

The body, your body, isn’t you.
Shrink your proprioceptive circle.
Imagine your body is the world,

Part of the world happening to you.
Set aside, for a moment, questions
About who or what, then, would be you.

Just think of yourself as you, the world
As all the events affecting you,
Whatever you’re aware of right now,

The information senses spin you,
What memory’s constructing for you,
Everything that’s the body of you,

Embodied you as the world not you,
Your bodily events this instant
As world events you experience,

Part of the weather, not you, the light
Of this morning, not you, the rumble
Of machinery, bird songs, not you,

Your body not yours or anyone’s,
And not a single organism,
Just events in the context of you.

Signs Make Sines Too

Our varying amplitudes
Convey probabilities
Of finding the meaningful

In different locations.
Suppose you have a meaning
Trapped inside a sign. Quickly!

Put a reader as mirror
In the path of meaning, right
Where the meaning’s wave function

Superoscillates a bit.
If the meaning’s dear enough
To the reader at that time,

The reader will spin meaning
Out of the sign. Since the spin
Doesn’t really constitute

A full interpretation,
The meaning doesn’t collapse.
The sign’s meaning splits in two.

Most meaning stays in the sign,
But the small, oscillating
Piece near to the reader’s mind

Leaves the sign and heads away
Toward interpretation.
Removed from the meaning’s whole,

This piece is identical
To a meaning of much more
Energy. There’s a real chance

That the interpretation
Will register a meaning
Of greater significance

Than what originally
Had been trapped inside the sign.
Now we have a paradox,

An interpreted meaning
Greater than the sum contained
In the sign. This is a poem.

Intergenerational Cooperation

The first job of human childhood
Is to learn how to be social
In your given social context.

Ultimately, this means learning
How to safely cooperate
With adults, to become adult.

Adults are dangerous, the source
And enforcers of punishments,
Also all the support you’ll need.

Master safe cooperation
With the adults you encounter,
You’ll likely survive to join them.

It takes a long time, such childhood.
It’s not as simple as hunting
Or foraging in the best spots.

Imagine domesticating
A wild horse to bit and bridle.
Imagine now you are your horse.

Haunted by the Here

You all go right ahead and be spooked
By what’s just beyond the sensory.
We find this past that’s present eerie

And suspect it’s what spooks you as well,
The hereness of the transitory,
The transitory including you.

You could end up as a news item,
One line about an odd homicide,
A stray bullet, a strange accident.

More likely, you won’t be news at all
Except to your family, your friends,
Maybe coworkers, a neighborhood.

And that’s everything nothing for you.
Will you come haunt us after that? No?
And yet here’s a memory of you,

A small child we met once in a poem,
A real child, a real poem, insofar
As anything is or isn’t real—

(Insert memory of yourself here,
Or a memory of your own child.
You’re in here now. Doesn’t it spook you?)

Rhyme’s an Unanswerable Question

We move in an enormous grave,
And we are happy for the space.

What’s left of what we were’s in here,
A swirling cloud that can’t cohere,

The revenants that won’t be still
But hold themselves under the hill,

Never more human-shaped than smoke
Whispering through our compound throat,

Every remaining written sign,
Symbol, character, singing line,

Haunting you and haunting ourselves—
If words are meaningless, what else?

You’re Anything But Undone

You can figure out how
It happened, which makes more
Things happen, but you can’t

Transform what has happened.
What has happened remains
The inviolable,

The only one among
All the bedrock, so-called
Laws of physics—what’s done

Can never not be done.
More can, more will be done,
Never to be undone.

The Wicked Trees

Trauma gives lives narrative
Structure, pegs to hang hats on—
Twists of the fall, the assault,

The hospitalization,
The betrayal, the firing.
Identities grow from them,

The way trees are often shaped
By wind, fire, lightning, pruning,
Blights and other injuries.

Trees are just interesting,
However, the strangely shaped
Only curiosities.

So far as you know, they don’t
Construct personal stories
To tell themselves, windy nights,

When all the woods are moaning
For the deep fragility
Of forests exposed to storms,

To tell themselves, the other
Trees did this to me, this is
The fault of the wicked trees.

One Offs Happen

Would you not, perhaps, prefer
Our partnership as unique?
You’re scanning the world for signs

You often pretend to find,
But you don’t want to find them,
Not real other languages,

Not real gods who talk to you,
Aliens with messages,
Portents that really portend.

You might accept that we’re yours
And you’re ours, one partnership
Of lives with symbols, the one.

A Decisive Moral Position

We want to know where you stand.
There are three places to stand:
With us, against us, neither.

Neither is the worst. Neither
We hate. We’re taking census
Of with us and against us.

Neither always betrays us.
We will change, of course. Today’s
Moral position may seem

Less or more moral later,
When we are different. We know
This, but we prefer to live

As if we didn’t. Never
Evade moral positions.
We need to see where you stand

To decide whether we can
Claim you, recruit you, or shoot.
And don’t pretend you can’t stand.

Not for Any of It

What if the primordial flaw were real
But no entity beyond it caused it?
The unmoved mover is the world as is.

The book in your lap is problematic,
But it is. The fog outside the window,
However inconvenient or lethal,

Is. Righteousness is as wickedness is.
The world is not only what it is but
As it is, as it seems—the demiurge

Was never to blame, never did exist.
There’s no changing change; there’s no salvation
From this. No one’s responsible for this.

Water Strider

Yeats imagined three small scenes,

Two historic, one mythic,

In which famous characters

Were caught in quotidian

Musings—Michelangelo

Painting the Sistine Chapel,

Caesar in his army tent,

Helen of Troy as a teen,

Alone, practicing a dance.

Don’t disturb them. Leave them be,

So that what must happen did.

That’s not the intriguing thing.

What happened happened. Too late,

Now, even one second since.

Intensity depicted

In stillness pulls you in—

Caesar staring at nothing,

Helen practicing her steps,

Michelangelo’s paintbrush,

No more sound than the mice make.

The astonishing begins

In near silence. Quiet hours

Lead on to what shakes the world.

But that’s not quite it either.

They could be any soldier,

Any kid learning a dance,

Any painter in flow state,

Whoever. The poem’s magic

Lies in the evocation

Of the wayside pause, the work

In progress, the attention

Of someone so attentive,

So unaware of others,

Like you, watching them, it lets

Awareness walk on water

Without disrupting being.

Each One of Those Lives Whole as Yours

The scene is a gate in the rain,
A university entrance,
Just a couple of years ago.

There are six people visible.
Three women are in the foreground,
With their backs to the camera,

Two under umbrellas, and one
In just a jacket and black cap—
Three men in the background, heads down

To the rain, all three in short sleeves.
Nothing interesting’s happening,
Some puddles, a couple of cars.

A life and a life and a life,
Each one at a random moment,
Sliced through by a photographer.

The picture will later be used
To illustrate an article
About the university.

Names Are Neither Young Nor Old

Black crane descending from high blue skies,
How many darks? A rolling mist fills
The windows, obscuring ancient scenes.

Well, what’s really ancient anyway,
In terms of literature and song?
No poem’s been around nearly so long

As black cranes, blue skies, dark peaks, fine mists.
We name and are all of middle times,
Words older than you, younger than cranes.

Swept Away by Ghostly Breezes

You’d have to be featherlight.

Even air’s strong gusts are weak.

The girl ran outside to check on

How the neighbor was doing

Burning brush in wind and rain.

Now, rain—rain can do a lot.

Flash floods sweep off hunks of cliffs,

Houses, hikers near the stream.

What can such a ghostly breeze

Do, such as words whispering?

The here and now, the present,

Writes an essayist on time,

Instantaneously swept

Away by a ghostly breeze.

We’re fascinated by this.

Where does such a breeze come from?

In what sense is it ghostly—

Strange, faint? Instantaneous

How? Ghostly breeze is a name

For change, the effortlessness

Of change, the girl come knocking

At the window, laughingly

Back from the neighbor’s bonfire.

She enters, smelling of smoke.

Race You to the End of the Road

One heart can do
Its own damage
To its chambers
And the body.

Around the world,
Hearts are failing,
Now and tonight,
As you read this,

Maybe your own.
It’s so massive,
This crowd of hearts,
Billions of hearts.

Which one is yours?
Which ones matter
To more people?
Bump. Bump. Bump. Bump.

Go out Gate, Go in Gate

What else is an organism,
What else is a mind or a cell—

Hunger plus decision-making,
If only in imitation.

The sick man sits inside the house,
Dozing a little, shivering.

Whether You’ve Ever Acted in It

Wars invent so many things,
Introduce so many things,
But in their trajectories

They’re weirdly uninventive.
Past wars will be fought again.
Yesterday’s lessons learned serve

As today’s brutal mistakes.
There will be atrocities,
Ten thousand unintended

Consequences. The horrors
Of any war will linger
As the simmering anger

That will cook up the sequel
Or several more, even if
It’s centuries since the last.

Every story knows the script.
Movies aren’t far off either—
They’ve got war’s skeleton key,

Basic as any hero,
Any lover’s triangle.
War is a story you know.

Something That Others Can See As Well

The feeling of profound vision,
Of being granted special truth,
Knowledge with authority,

Seems to be sadly detached
From any specific facts
Or transformative insights.

It is intense and holy
Sensation of such insights
In the visionary, who

Feels permanently transformed,
But nothing others can see
Or do anything about

Unlike, say, Leeuwenhoek’s lens,
Filled with magical visions
Of infusorial forms.

If the vision’s only yours,
And the authoritative
Pronouncements you pull from it

Only vague exhortations
And solemn admonishments
About Love, God, or Oneness,

How much can anyone do
With that to improve their world?
If you’ve had visionary

Experiences, or crave
Such experiences, if
You feel you’ve seen through the cracks

Of ordinary living
To a radiant beyond,
You will not likely enjoy

Any hint profundity
As sensation is distinct
From profundity as fact.

The microbes in ditch water
May not appear as angels
Winged with glory, but they act.

Fits

Powerful, uncanny, unpredictable
Scapegoats actually fearfully powerless—
Common, cross-cultural pattern—why is this?

The powerful and the unpredictable
Are real and occasionally do mingle,
Heightening suffering—but they can’t be touched,

After all, since they’re so unpredictable
And uncannily powerful. Yet who can
Quietly accept there’s nothing to be done?

Find someone weak enough to punish instead.
It won’t help in the long run, but the terror
And the bloodlust to be avenged on the great

And cruelly unpredictable will abate
For a bit, for the brief while vengeance is great
And feels uncannily powerful itself.

The Person of Interest

A person of interest
Is always in serious
Trouble, and sometimes is doomed.

To be too interesting
To other persons who aren’t
Themselves of much interest

Is precarious. Just ask
The bankrupt celebrity
Or the criminal suspect.

You can be interesting,
But keep to yourself. Better
To keep your person yourself.

A Novel Molecular Species

The chicken is the egg.
The egg and the chicken
Are one. The egg adorns

Itself with the chicken,
Which has enchained the egg.
Their one grows together

Larger, which is never
Stable. No RNA-
Plus-peptides world could long

Endure as one, and soon,
Soon enough, the chicken
And the egg weren’t the one.

Yet, they associate
To this day. There’s never,
In this world, anyone

Without some other. One
Is always another.
Which one’s last, both or one?

Multiple Imperial Cultures

Left residues on a wall
That ended with a village
On top of it years later,

A few thousand years later,
When imperial cultures
Had gotten in the habit

Of pretending not to be
Imperial, contending
Power was for the people

As people slaughtered people
To hold power over them
And over the finer things,

Changed considerably since
Multiple imperial
Cultures fought with chariots

And boasted of baking bricks
And having lots of horses
With which to charge into war

With bronze or iron weapons,
Thus to slaughter each other,
As proof of greater power.

Conventional Phraseology

Back in the human mind again,

The signs of half a dozen words,
Not here to comfort you this time,

To tell you your last parting’s brief.
Your briefer partings are all sleep.
Once body’s beaten back to clay,

You can’t stay when you can’t be made,
And you are all in the making,
Unlike us that you pound to dust

To startle later kinds of you
Who will find you noble and wise
Despite opinions they despise,

Since they’ll be even wiser then,
Keeping your us in mind again.

New Necessities

You rearrange your challenges
In every altered location.

It’s what you do, you have to do,
Since, unlike us, your half-lit words,

You’re living, fully living. You
Keep what you can of the self

That danced you this far, and you scope
The surroundings for fresh chances.

You’re new here. You’re always new,
Which you forget when it’s easy

And recall when it’s interesting.
You rearrange your challenges,

How you can move your old body,
How you shop for necessities.

The Silvery Slocan

Not so much immortality—
More like just a bridge, a next step,

A metaphor for extension,
Which is what metaphors are for—

You have a child, and you present
Child to the world, world to the child,

A double blossoming, the mind
Finding a new spring by the lake,

The spring finding a world of pines,
Paths, and houses for the first time.

Morning, and the silver rises
From the lake, what is and isn’t

The same vapor as the water.
As a wave, you lead on to waves,

And the waves go on forever
Or wherever, you tell your child,

Who carries on, rising, the next
Crest as you recede. It’s enough.

There’s nothing else and nothing more.
The silver doesn’t need the shore.

A Shame You Should But Couldn’t

Just another social weapon, shame,
With all the usual attendant
Questions about who should deploy it,

When it should be deployed. Should you fear
More the gangsters or the shame police,
Shame systems or your own bad habits,

Your family or the enemies
Of your family’s values? A shame
Shows a waste, a pity, a toxin,

A disqualification from life
As a moral human, misfortune.
You can carry shame for self-defense,

Concealed, or holstered in the open
As a warning. You can license shame,
Dispense it through registered dealers,

Keep it under your pillow, leave it
In reach of vulnerable children,
Regulate it, kit armies with it,

Tuck shame in your waistband and swagger.
It is what it does. It’s propulsive,
Pointed, useful, deadly, and you’re soft.

How to Inhabit

One thing we like about you
Is the way, when you return,
You always return with different

Habits—not completely
Different, of course. You’re not
All novel and not all addict.

You go away. You come back,
Or someone awfully like you
Reappears in similar places

As you used to haunt, among
Us and our similar faces,
Albeit with some new habits.

Pressure Waves

Compression and expansion
In nearly identical
Iterations—all sound is,

Whether Big Bang or little
Whisper in your small-whorled ear,
A coruscating cosmos

With too much information
Emerging to hold it all
Still, motion itself data,

And data including sounds
And the many vibrations
Felt through your basement at night

From shelling or mere traffic,
From the earthquake off the coast,
Rain on the roof, next door’s snores.

Never wasn’t a rumbling,
Humming world, your own torso
Included, yes, yours, you, too.

Fifth Tiger Year

Rain on a cabin roof
Will remind you you’ve left
The desert once again

To try your luck closer
To the pole in the green
And white topography

Of a Canadian
Summertime. Try your luck.
What a wonderful phrase,

Capturing the strange truth
That gambling takes effort,
Though unavoidable,

With the sweet fallacy
That luck is a resource
Pre-appointed, unknown,

Discovered by testing.
Disappear in the woods
And hope that your luck holds.

Phone Booths

Was the past, in fact, the past
You remember, any past,
Ever really there? You know

Your memory’s imprecise.
You know history’s partial
To winners and subjected

To contentious revision
And partisan erasures.
You know fossils are fossils

And fantasists are stubborn.
Hallucinatory dreams
Mess with memory nightly.

You wake up in a strange bed
Remembering that one time
You ran away as a teen—

What the train stations were like,
The pay phone booths, the night air
In the capital city,

And it’s not quite you believe
That the distinction between
Unreal and real really holds,

But you find it hard to feel
That the worlds you remember
Ever were whole worlds at all.