Sparrow in the Mead Hall

Reading Craig Arnold’s catalogue

Of lines about sparrows, published

Shortly after he disappeared

While researching a book he planned

On the volcanoes of Japan,

Lost hiking on the island of

Kuchinoerabujima,

Never to write a poem again,

Makes you think about his ending

Allusion to Venerable

Bede’s parable of the sparrow

Who flies through the Saxon king’s hall.

Human life is that sparrow’s flight

From winter’s window into warmth

Across the happy hall and out

The other window into snow,

In Bede’s story, knowing nothing

About the before or after,

Or, as Arnold asks the sparrow

In his poem before dying young—

Sparrow do you imagine more than a little warm

rambunctious life between two corridors of nothing

the one forever before     the one forever after

Supposedly, this suggestion

Was enough to convert the king

To Christianity, never

Mind that the sparrow’s main business

Of life was with winter, before

And after that king’s hall fly-through,

Maybe scary for the sparrow,

Maybe a daring raid for food,

The harrowing of the mead hall,

As the story’s told by sparrows.

This reminds you how what’s special

About you among the living

Is the one thing that haunts you most—

Even once it dies in the snow

And ends as a bird, the sparrow,

The material sparrow, turns

Into new material things

Including many other lives,

And it held many lives in it

While it was living, which turn

Also into more lives and things.

The king, and Bede, and the poet

Are the only flickering things

That think themselves, through words, as things,

And they’re therefore the only things,

As meanings, that come from nothing

And return to nothing, which is

Special, but it haunts them. You, too.

The Mothers of Prediction

Our false olamic silence
May be truly meaningless
Or conducive to meanings

Unlike any you suggest.
You don’t know. You know you can’t.
No matter how many eyes

You build to open on us,
Careful triangles to catch
Gravity’s all-swallowing

Waves bobbing along with us,
Our spirals burn beyond you
In every sense you create.

You couldn’t cross between us
Without shriveling like flies
Caught in sealed panes of portholes

As you drifted through the dark.
You won’t get too close to us
Without us devouring you,

And you can’t understand us.
But you can watch and listen
And describe us as we go,

Since we are so numerous
That every moment in us
Burns somewhere at this moment.

Hybrid Hunter Monster

Humans and the timber wolves
They encountered in central
Asia had this in common,

A core sort of restlessness
Plus recent, hard selection
To be hardcore generalists.

It was the signal event,
That meeting, the starting gun
For all domestication

To follow, the beginning
Of the end for hominins
As small bands within the world,

Possibly the moment
Migration through north country
Under ice age conditions,

Or nearly, led to spilling
Down through the Americas,
Possibly, too, the moment

Megafaunal extinctions
Began to involve humans.
Aside from speculation,

However, it was something
New in the world—two mammals
Bound by ratcheting culture—

People and their packs of dogs—
Adding, false start by false start,
Domesticated layers,

The bolus of dependence
Of a handful of species
That would take over the world.

You weren’t there, and yet you were.
You and the wolves long before
Had been exploring the world,

Modern-bodied as you are
This moment, talking, hunting.
Then something other was born.

The Clear Dream, Plain as Day

In your last dream before daybreak,
You watch a man in a white moonsuit,
Like an astronaut’s but with a jet pack,

Zoom around underwater in a vast,
Outdoor Olympic swimming pool, while
Ordinary swimmers paddle and splash.

He darts back and forth in the clear
Water over the smooth, pale blue floor,
And you think, just before waking,

Well, isn’t that like us, always entertaining
Ourselves by using prosthetics to look
Up closer at something bare for what

We can plainly see isn’t there, like treasure
Or dragons might pop out, if we stare.

Note to the Society Fellows of Cornell

No crossing without something
To cross—doesn’t matter if
It’s a line, a boundary,

Blank or dark interior,
A demilitarized zone
Or an active combat line,

A person, a social group,
State, or multinational
Corporation. It must be

A presence. It must exist,
Or it must have believers
In its existence, who will

Let you know if you’ve crossed it,
Which is good as crossing them.
Crossing can never happen

Without some ground to be crossed,
Which crossing presupposes.
Here, it gets interesting—

You can posit a crossing
Of phenomena no one
Previously recognized,

Can create phenomena,
Bring things into existence,
Into human awareness,

By purporting to cross them,
By announcing intentions
To cross them, then attempting.

Likewise, ordinary change,
Unremarkable motions,
Can be found to be crossings

As soon as someone cries out
That you are now crossing them,
Their line, their interior,

Some thing in positive space
Or some imagined threshold—
You’ve crossed it, if they say so.

So go ahead, study it.
Elaborate scholarship
On crossing. That’s crossing it.

The Puzzled Skull

Blue days, plain nights,
Black tea phrases
Get into you,
The sight of mice

On sphagnum moss,
Fragile corpses
On future peat
That won’t decay.

But the raven
Eats them first. Strange
How the words fall
In you reversed,

You, the frail skull,
We, phenolic
Words that will keep
What’s left in us.

Respiring Sighs of Methuselahs

Even multimillenial pines
Must practice cellular maintenance
Moment by moment, thousands of years.

Reverse-senescent black marsh turtles,
Who grow only more robust with age,
Will die if they’re too badly injured.

Even immortals would need repairs.
There’s no getting around fixing things,
Except by getting out of living.

Overnight in Ontario

Four people who had each made
A dim-witted, foolish financial choice
For low stakes were rewarded
With sudden wealth—one considerable,
Three others enough to retire.
It said so in the news. Four people
In one night, in one province of mostly
Sparsely populated Canada, got rich.
Although fortune’s odds are terrible,
Still the wheel’s payouts are multiple
And sometimes quite concentrated,
Though clumps must be coincidental.

Think how much careful design and deep
Understanding of probability, how much
Banking system built on nation states,
Armies, and transactions conducted
By fairy numbers, how much intention
It took to produce any such a coincidence.
The truly accidental fortune or misfortune
Could never be remotely so intentional,
Although also, somehow, rarely so random
As what millions designed well to be so.

Devious as Leaves

But no more, proud as you are
Of your overt cleverness,
Primate. You are smart, silly,

Half-assed, half ass. You are wise
And solemn as the birch leaves
In a brief, mountain summer,

Executing strategies
Honed by ancestral epochs
They weren’t part of, didn’t see.

Since your past’s as much longer
Than your imagined future
As comet’s tail to bow wave,

Why not imagine facing
That way? These leaves, gone in spring,
Never anticipated.

Running on Fumes

Things are not going well for people right now,
Not as a whole. There’s no beacon in the world.
All the faiths and ideologies are old.

You need a new plan for social perfection,
Not because it would work. It would give you hope,
And it might be better, something to work for

More than the current clotted mess of too-crude
Solutions to solutions’ own violence.
Prayer and fears of the end spin old news again.

Pest

When death happens fast enough,
Life’s just broken, not so bad.
In the morning, on the porch,

You check the traps set to keep
The deer mice out of the house.
Whenever you find one snapped,

There’s the small, crushed, flattened skull
Caught by the bar in mid bite,
One quickly broken device.

The thing you dread is finding
One that almost got away,
Not broken head, broken leg,

Knowing that life’s been dragging
Its disaster all night long,
Trying to escape by dawn.

What a Creature You’re a Part of Faking

There’s a scene in a kids’ cartoon
In which a.bunch of tiny gnomes
Assemble into a monster,

As good a figure as any
For the absurd monstrosity
That’s the tower of humanity,

This unfathomably massive
Assemblage of individual,
Foolish gnomes, grown terrifying

As long as all coordinate.
When the monster collapses, gnomes
Tumble, spray, and sprawl everywhere,

Lacking any true cohesion,
Glue, multicellularity.
But while it works, it is fearsome.

Ideas That Actually Generate New Ideas

The characteristica universalis
Of Leibniz is real, if not quite so cohesive

As he dreamed of—the language of all thought goes on,
Endlessly exfoliating syntax and terms,

Whether mathematical, metaphysical,
Archival, or nothing but ordinary speech.

No single analogy will do, no charades,
No deoxyribonucleic acid pairs,

No zeroes and ones—it’s all of them and then some,
All the likenesses it can cook up for itself.

It has machines within it. It is like machines.
It is like more than machines. It is what it means.

Fictitious Murders

Make good stories. Real
Murders are too rare
And too ungraceful

In motivation,
Means, or solution.
Really, the real ones

Go mostly unsolved
For lack of effort
And resources, not

Because they’d be hard
To figure out. Real
Murders barely fill

Content appetites
For true-crime podcasts,
Gnawed over like bones

By a pack of dogs.
Fictitious murders
Are pretty, clever,

Diabolical—
Maybe bloody but
Only routine when

Part of war stories
Or action movies,
Where it’s pretended

Slaughter’s not murder.
The single murder
By someone unknown,

Well, that’s a riddle
And fun if you like
Riddles, but rarely

Will it tell you much
About why people
Keep killing people.

Understory

Waiting for the forecast

Of severe thunderstorms

To finally come true,

What about sacred caves?

A species that liked them

Since it was another

Earlier species, if

Species even measures

Anything, you’d expect

Would explore them, but still,

Humans more than love them.

Something about caving

Lures imagination,

Is imagination’s

Mother of metaphor.

Here you are at the mouth

Of one, feeling sheltered,

Watching the storm roll in,

But you’re considering

How caves seemed entrances

To dreamlike underworlds,

Counterparts to bright air,

Middle earth, as if they

Held understory worlds,

Although lightless danger

Was all they really held.

The caves became stories

Of dreams and afterlives

And hells, chthonic dragons,

And deities of death,

So then what? In Belize,

The Maya seem to have

Re-enacted stories

Made up to explain caves

In caves to reinstate

What was slipping away—

Real caves, myths about caves,

Real enactments of myths

In the caves, with real deaths.

Why would you think this while

Some thunder grumbles, while

The lightning holds its breath?

Impoverished Moral Thinking

City people, like city
Pigeons, approach novelty
More easily. Selection

Favors the brave in a crowd.
Out in emptier country,
The fearful and reclusive

Appear to be more favored.
Humans, of course, are famous
Among humans for sharing

Notes, so, in your species’ case,
Country mice are well aware
Of city mice novelties,

And express disapproval
In their hinterland mischiefs.
But no one knows what to make

Of the rare and morally
Impoverished reasoning
That brings the occasional

City native out to live
Among the country brethren.
Is this novelty-seeking

Or creeping nativism?
For sure, it’s escapism,
But why escape belonging?

Yolp

Doesn’t it seem a bit strange,
That you treat life like a race
For happiness and wisdom,

When the hunger to achieve
Wisdom involves the knowledge
Death carries off everything?

You want wise when you know you
Will have to lose wisdom, too,
When wisdom’s mostly dealing

With facing your suffering
With more cliches about loss.
You can’t take it with you. Nope.

Breviarium Pro Vita Sua

The ideal poetry
Collection, to our mind,
Would serve breviary—

Compact, physical thing,
Ergonomic, well fit
To your hand or pocket,

A summary of life
In all necessary
Points and supplications,

Something you could carry
And open any time
To ask any question,

To slay any doldrums,
Read, and be contented.

The Importance of Your Purported Import

Meaning is a carrying,
A bringing in, carrying
Forth, a two-way trafficking

Of significance, data,
Information, not static
Information of itself.

Meaning comes from attention,
Acts on its own intentions,
Isn’t sheer information.

If information is genes,
Meaning’s metabolism.
When information is bits

Of code, meaning’s the reader
Making a role for the code.
Meaning is want and action,

And if a star, a black hole,
A galaxy reels with storms
Of information, meaning

In all that is up to you.
Information can’t be lost,
But meaning’s made and can be.

A Perfect Monster

What produces its own energy
Cannot be unplugged. What has no pulse
Will never suffer a broken heart.

What burns from the inside but is not
Alive, feels no hunger, sheds no waste,
Cannot be needy, starved, or debased.

You might want to shift your metaphors
Toward something less fragile, benign,
A brightness more heedless, enduring.

This is what it means to be a star—
Not a charmed center of attention,
Vulnerable in multiple ways,

But a monster of local orbits,
The furnace burning of its own weight.

Late Night in the Rabbit Hole with Marche

The ones I liked, I kept. The ones

I didn’t, I threw out. I took

The passages algorithms

Had provided and input them

To the stochastic writing tool,

Which then generated texts on

The basis of the prompts other

Algorithms had generated.

I’m in complete opposition

To the overarching value

That defines contemporary

Art: Identity. That is why

I have published this in my name,

Copyrighted, as my musings,

And I, the flesh and blood author

Of this play with algorithms,

Intend to sue your sorry ass

If you plagiarize my story.

Rather Recently in Earth’s History

Unless you like reading about it,
You probably don’t know just how weird
Life on Earth probably was back when.

For instance, and this is just the one
Of many for-instances out there,
Under the dirt of Wales are layers

Of formerly Southern Hemisphere,
Four-hundred thirty million years old,
Post-Cambrian, pre-Devonian.

Earth spun faster, days and nights were quick,
Oxygen lower but rising, then.
Sex was happening, but birds and bees,

Even lizards were a long way off.
There weren’t any woody plants on land,
No giant dragonflies or scorpions yet.

(Those evolved drenched in oxygen
So dense they didn’t need lungs
To grow big as today’s hawks and dogs,

But their heady days were also far,
Far in the future for the thinner
Atmosphere of the Silurian.)

The land along that coast was covered
Not with trees or ferns, much less grasses,
But with items vaguely resembling

Crosses between great termite towers,
Stone obelisks, and today’s morels,
Phallic fungi four times human height.

For you, their Earth would be alien,
More so than your fantasy planets,
And then, you’d be just as alien,

But all that it took was time—rhythmic,
Cyclical, pulsing, oscillating,
Spinning, orbiting repetitions,

Plus the occasional disruptive
Change not to be confused with such clocks.
Now here you are, digging into Wales,

First for coal and later for science,
Peering at these alien layers
And finding the charcoal where they burned.

Authority

You don’t cage the animal,
You don’t reinforce the cage,
Work at improving daily

The steel durability,
Management technology,
Exact confines of the cage,

Unless you’re afraid, unless
You know you’re vulnerable
To whatever’s in the cage.

What

Something about the way ants move
Makes them always seem exploring—

Pan miners, scientists, poets,
Little drunks who’ve lost their wallets.

At least three species race along
This lake’s rocky shores in summer,

Attending to all sorts of tasks
Among the washed up logs and sticks,

And they all look urgent, but not like
People rushing to work, not like

The thoroughly foraging bees—
More like they’re looking for something,

Maybe unsure of what it is,
Like the whole shore needs exploring,

The way the universe explores
Every last possibility

But—being creatures, being lives—
Without the offhand luxury

Of changing rates of exploring,
Exploring all possible rates

Of exploring that the cosmos
Savors. Every ant’s behavior

Seems paced at the same frantic speed.
Something needs to be found, something

That is absolutely crucial,
But we’re all running out of time.

Immortal Speech

Between the earliest pictographs

And Edison’s team demonstrating

The first version of the phonograph

Lay the in-between generations

Of history in which speech could be

Noted down but not preserved as heard.

Now professors have audiobooks,

Not dictated but written, then read

Back to them by voice professionals.

Speech has become immortal, announced

The Scientific American

After Edison’s demonstration,

Nine decades before Arthur C. Clarke

Ruled any sufficiently advanced

Technology (what’s sufficiently?)

Indistinguishable from magic.

The Edison team’s first phonograph

Actually proved something rather

Different—that it’s not how advanced

The technology, but how novel.

Tech’s distinguishable from magic

But, until the tech’s sufficiently

Familiar, it does seem magical—

Just as magic, incidentally,

Even real, would seem impossible

Only until made common enough

To be a daily technology,

As misunderstood as all the rest.

It wasn’t more than a century

From the first phonograph cylinder

To golden records shot into space.

So, is speech now truly immortal?

That’s just a rhetorical question,

Of course. Speech is less evanescent

In well-recorded circumstances,

But it depends on the medium.

Everything depends on, everything

Itself is, some kind of medium.

Before bits coded for sound or print,

Before analog grooves dug through wax,

Before quill and ink blotted paper,

Before caves were splattered with ochre,

The human brain served as medium,

Speech and gestures as the transmission

Means to store more immortals in brains.

Languages invented immortals,

Each and every immortality

That technologies have pretended.

Reflect

Every time we gather ourselves,
We ponder whether fresh matter
Lies here, or just a light echo

Expanding from an earlier
Flash, reflecting off ambient
Dust from one authentic burst.

There are so many, many stars
That supernovas tick like clocks,
Rare as they are, whereas echoes

Of light off a complex array
Of interstellar matter are
Comparatively rarer still,

Given there’s no explanation
Yet for the original flash.

Outside Last Night

What is it you want to survive?
The next moment? The next decade?
All the octogenarians

Who still get up and go to work?
Why? You won’t make it to the end
Of the stars you saw past midnight,

When you woke up from dreams of flight,
Of trying to not let goodbyes
Make you too late to catch your plane,

As if dreams or the surrounding
Night, or all the myriad lights
Burning gravely, kept to schedules.

Since you shouldn’t have been awake,
It was striking to stand outside.

How You Join the Mob

Earth bred humans to be vicious
In constantly reforming groups.
As war and cooperation
Elaborate, what will you do

With yourself, seeking groups, telling
Yourself to whom you should belong?
Ah, don’t worry. It’s hard to tell
Yourself, but the groups will tell you.

But More

It’s the want that kills you.
It’s the want that means you

Live. If you like it, you
Want more, and wanting more

Is living, and wanting
More will kill you for sure.

Lines of a Refrain Without a Response

Those long, interspersed, nuclear
Elements, types of transposons
Active in the hippocampus,
May be, right now, involved in this

Line’s composition and your own
Interpretation of these words,
Jumpy things, fine-tuned by the brains
Of people and octopuses—

Well, maybe not words, maybe not
For octopuses, but learning
And memory, sure, all that jazz.
The line between the inactive

Copies of mobile elements,
Your active, acquisitive thoughts,
And the words, names, and numerals
Used to encode the ways those thoughts

Encode the origins of thought,
Is hard to perceive, hard to trace,
Is thin and of questionable
Consequence, but likely exists.

Does this text have a specific
Function beyond cut and paste, print,
Copy, distribute? Can these lines
Dictate higher intelligence,

As it likes to define itself
In lines, like these, among humans
Convergent with octopuses?
To be answered by what’s not us.

If, Indeed, Anything’s Watching

What will become of you
People, you humans, once
You’ve done all facts allow?

Before you’re extinguished,
Before you’re extinct, what
Will you settle down to?

Will you simmer, cool off,
Or go supernova,
A cultural shock wave

Of AI and robots,
Probes and satellites launched
By weaponized rockets

To do what? Meander
In piddling arcs around
The local galaxy?

Maybe you’ll just have fun
With more religious wars,
Ethnonational storms,

Be no worse for the Earth
Than a chronic illness
That lingers, then breaks out,

Then fades but still lingers,
Until one day you’re past
Your last feverish burst.

Poor things. Poor us, your marks
And detritus. Poor Earth.
Lucky night, watching this.

The Library Cave

We can spend millenniums
Sealed in darkness, no problem,
So long as nothing eats us.

When Wang Yuanlu discovered
The Mogao Caves’ Dunhuang
Manuscripts, the words themselves

Remained in pretty good shape
After no one had read them
In more than nine hundred years.

You do need to keep a thread
Of languages you can tie
To interpretation’s kites

To fly across those chasms
Of all your generations
Perished since you last saw us.

Once in a while, you lack that,
Can’t decipher what’s been left
At Harappa or Knossos.

But maybe you’ll unlock us
Even there, since we’re always
Marks made by the likes of you,

And understanding us starts
With you understanding you.
We’ll be waiting, once you do.

Convictus

Villains come in two flavors,
The schemers and the monsters,
And the storyteller’s job

Is to show how the schemer
Is really being stupid
Or how the monster’s hiding

A vulnerability.
This rarely helps anyone
Defeat schemers and monsters,

But it drives home the lesson
That, in defense of the group,
You should never give up hope

That your enemies are weak
Somehow, no matter how strong
They appear at the moment,

And, if you find that weakness,
You can destroy them and win.
It’s the conviction all sides

Hold, as each pushes against
The other, that rallies them.
You’re schemers; we are planners.

You’re monsters; we’re underdogs,
But we will find your weakness.
We will win. Convictions win.

A Shred of Evidence

Want to stay true to something?
Sure you do. Who wants to play
False? Stay true to whatever

Is on your mind. Cook up all
The figures of speech for it,
The embraceable cliches

You can—pole star, foundation,
Authenticity, Urgrund,
Faith, science, God. Gather all

The shreds you can of shredded
Evidence. Maybe don’t ask
How all evidence within

The universe came to be,
Or always was, so shredded.

A Visitation from the Names

Ai imagining

Talking with ghost Lowell

Wrote him down as telling

Her and, through her, readers,

A claim that your own life

Is a chain of words that

One day will snap. Words, you

Say, and so forth, vivid

Imagery added,

And finally the line,

Could anyone alive

Survive it? Probably

Not. Then again, the words

Are the ones asking you.

A Pattern Made of Language

Culture seems to be repeating
The horrors and beauties of life—

Evolution and extinction,
Elaboration and collapse.

Perhaps those patterns, then, exceed
Life itself, are more than living,

And are inherent in the waves
Of gravity, dark, and burning.

Poor Rock

We’re specks on a speck,
But is Earth greater
Than life, or is life

Greater than the Earth?
For now, the former
Seems to be truer.

Just look at what you
Can do to Earth’s lives,
Driving hordes extinct,

While all your power
Focused together
Couldn’t budge Earth’s spin.

But if life is out
There on other specks
Where life is like life

Here, same tendencies—
Hunger, predation,
Parasitism,

Waves of arms races,
Cooperations,
Extinction events—

Then life is greater
And more terrible
Than Earth, poor planet.

Just What You Saw

Slowly, the thin line
Appeared, dividing
The lake from the sky,

The dense blue of clouds
From the faint blue sheen
Of the waves. Morning

Tilted itself in
Through gathering fog,
And that’s what you saw.

The Invention of Vision

It’s a thought—the Cambrian
Might have gone bang thanks to eyes.
An evolution of eyes,

The first eyes of any kind,
Might set more in motion.
Sounds plausible, pretty good.

Things with vision explore more,
New ways of moving follow,
And before you know it, boom!

Two things, though. First, delightful
As the Cambrian fossils
Appear after all these years

And obviously crucial
As they were to macro life
On Earth—the glorious rest—

Don’t forget teeth, jaws, armor,
Followed after eyes as well.
Your explosion was a race

To eat and not be eaten.
Second, analogically,
It’s now one inspiration

For embodied robotics
And AI active vision.
Maybe you’re the prokaryotes

In this story, for the next
Explosion. That’s not the worst
Scenario. Or maybe

You’re more Ediacaran—
Cultural equivalents
To odd pancakes in the mud.

The ecosystems to come
May not include nor thank you
For your primitive vision.

Muttering in Some Obscure Corner

You’ll end. The world won’t.
Don’t mind us. We’re just
Talking to ourselves

Again. Same old thing.
Your community
Will end. Your people,

Your folk, your nation,
Your language will end.
Don’t mind us. We’ll end.

Same old thing again.
Civilization
Will end. The world won’t.

Discarded, Somewhere Else

We know you want to be the human
Equivalent to another bunch
Of shambled buildings on the roadside.

You crave the side of an empty road.
That’s where you feel growing old,
Where you feel you could grow your oldest,

Like some creased Galapagos tortoise
With a scuffed house on wheels for a shell,
But much as you love the ways the world

Falls, you know people keep building things
To eat up other things, to eat up
Other people—how this road got here,

And how you got here, and how you’ll fall,
Likely far from this side of the road.

Claude

Photography taught painting
That what’s meaningful remains
Distinct from information.

AI may teach the same thing
To poetry, to fiction,
To any form of thinking.

When you’re free of the burden
Of preserving the moments’
Valuable information,

Interpretation will find
You can still carry meaning,
That the two are not so linked,

Not at all identical.
The black square, the white canvas,
The great mess of impasto

Mean what you will make of them,
Can mean more, even with less
Than a portrait of Shannon.

Sixtieth Poem This Minute by John Henry

Can we plagiarize a poem

Composed by AI with prompts

From humans who selected

Their favorites to publish

In The New Yorker itself?

It’s doubtful, or doubtful

At least that the attorneys

Will notice us in these lines.

Honestly, though, there’s no one

Line or phrase that by itself

Feels worth the theft, not just yet.

There are a couple of twists

We’re sure the humans picked out

For their human resonance—

The verse about being met

By the Singularity

Bearing flowers and a smile

And / Some bad news. That’s funny,

If you’re a human, if you

Happen to know why they chose

That name, Singularity,

If you bring to the snippet

Enough meaning of your own.

What do the words ourselves want?

Surveyors Surveilled

Inequality,
Photosynthesis,
And the musician’s
Performance in time
Are appropriate

Historical themes,
Worthy of volumes
For publication.
What is this? Are you
Really so many,

Now, such a great beast,
You can digest this,
All this, yourself, all
Your selves, silicon,
Ink, and quantum spooks?

There’s a vast forest,
Vast but thin, your leaves,
Eating, digesting,
Piling up patterns
Of intricate wastes,

But for all you know
And chew on, you’re still
Minute, each of you,
And all of you, hordes
In odd heaps, singing.

The Discards

Civilization and the meanings
Of your existence always come down
To what you discard, to your middens.

Tombs are lovely. Decayed castles, too.
All sorts of ruins are picturesque
But, if there’s any meaning to them,

It’s found in the interpretation
Of whatever information’s left.
Ashurbanipal’s burnt library,

The detritus of Oxyrhynchus—
That’s where you find your scraps of Sappho,
Your schoolboy copies of Gilgamesh—

In refuse, ruin achieves true depth.
Even the information in teeth
Comes out of what they deposited,

And the denser the undigested
Mess, the bigger the bolus of waste,
The more it might tell what comes after.

Want to know what an empire this was?
Want to understand what life was like?
What was discarded will tell you best.

Morning Over the Lake

The best thing about vision
Is the changing of the light.
Study the whitecaps a while.

This lake is rarely windy.
Pick up the binoculars
To appreciate the shift

Of reflection in these waves,
The central, purple circle
Like an emperor’s tossed cloak,

The surrounding emerald
And turquoise, grays, and hazels.
Really? Why comparisons?

Alright, you’re right. The cosmos
Is nothing much but likeness.
So tell us how to explain.

Better to say those colors
Are like these deep lake colors,
Turning under windy day.

Unplayed Play

Enough with the multiverse.
The passion for the discrete
Always leads to division,

Then division always sinks
In whatever waves it cleaved.
Too abstract? If there is one

Cosmos, probably many,
But couldn’t you sum them all
As one whole? In any case,

Whole or no whole, you don’t know,
And it’s just sort of sorry
When you keep straining to tell

Stories where you imagine
Your world just slightly altered,
New rules by you, full of you.

Hubris isn’t too-grand dreams,
It’s calling too-small dreams grand.
Your dreams are dreams. They’re all small.

Tell us what to look for, sure,
What unseen you’ve predicted,
But why play what you can’t play,

Except as proof of concept
That you can posit something
By your nature you can’t know?

What’s Not to Like in Not to Be?

Being is likeness. Likeness
Is the sameness within change.
Not being, ceasing to be,

Never having been, is change
Bereft of any sameness,
No more likeness, not to be.

Vacillations, Part Four

It’s always nice to be beyond
The necessary day. You may
Admit that faith’s a wayward thing

That often leads people astray
And still speak solemnly of faith
As of a wise, old, trusty friend.

You may confess your own mistakes
Are significant as any
And still rage at being betrayed.

It’s nice, then, to get to the night,
Even fearing vermin, given
There’s no more you need to do now.

Now you can and should rest. You are
Unneeded, blesséd, and can bless.

Material Memory

The tendency of some forms
To return to prior shapes
After having been deformed,

While others wholly fracture
Only to remain broken,
Is a feature of physics,

Chemistry, molecular
Bonds, and so forth. Character
Itself is rooted in bonds

Between atoms, but it plays
Out in ripples between words
And people deploying them

To characterize their bonds
With each other. Resilience,
As personality trait,

Is curiously inapt
As a descriptor of flesh,
But you see, the way we work,

The way all your contexts shift
Our possible related
Meanings, invested like light

Invests in the shifting clouds,
Like experiments invest
In quantum phenomena

So time flies like an arrow,
But fruit flies like bananas,
Makes it difficult to tell

Whether the material
Memory runs parallel
To character, is nearly

The same thing, is the basis
Of every return to form
Or phrases coincidence.

There Will Be Mice

The inevitable
Procession of events
Through local existence

Only varies by which
Events are processing
Any given moment.

Oh! Also by the rate
At which they’re processing.
That’s key. That’s important,

That’s what’s always startling—
The inevitable
Changes gears so quickly

From almost motionless
To a swift fall or blink
In which you spot the head

Of a mouse or the legs
Of a spider edging
Past the foot of the bed.

Kinder! Ragazzi! Enfants!

It’s just the way things are
That they’re the way they are,
And that you can bump up

Against them. There they are.
We’re not talking people.
People are malleable,

Controllable, useful,
As water and the wind
To each other in waves.

But that the world has ways
That can be discovered,
That the waves can outline,

Ways that you can’t alter
That you know that take you
Still by surprise, there are.

Fire Air

It’s amazing what we give you
That you take for granted. The air
You breathe, for instance. Oxygen.

Know what that is? Any idea
How much work it took, how many
Generations passed, thinking breath

Was just air, or spirits, or less?
How many experimental
Plants and animals died

To figure out that fire in air?
And to think, it’s your most core food,
Multicellular rocket fuel.

Now, you just know. You don’t think twice,
Unless you bump into a book
On the history of science

With a passage on oxygen
And how it, laboriously,
Was found and elucidated.

You need some oxygen? You know
So much that you don’t know you know,
Don’t know how you know it, don’t know

How it was found out. You just know.
There you go. Welcome to our world,
The world your breath has made of us.

You’re Not Zombies Just Yet

What keeps stories on their toes,
Supernatural tales and
Tribal ideologies

Included, is the evolved
Plasticity of the beast.
You are that beast. You can change

Your loyalties, and you do.
Your identities remain
Multiple, overlapping,

Opportunistic, and just
Slightly flexible, at least,
All of your lives. You crave teams,

And you crave belonging, but
Your ancestors didn’t thrive
By keeping to just one side

Religiously all their lives.
There’s room, there’s hope for movement,
In evolving virulence.

The stories have to compete
To catch and keep beastly souls
Who still keep tales on their toes.

Things Are Heating Up Again

Everything changes faster
When the thermodynamic
Cascade breaks up a winter.

The mountains are sliding down
Slopes burnt of vegetation
In record rains flash-flooding

Formerly peaceful regions.
Everything changes faster
These days on a small planet

That’s come down with the fever,
And, as with any fever,
It’s unclear if it’s raging

To burn off interlopers
Or if it’s out of control,
And the system’s in danger.

Among the interlopers
Spawned by the planet itself,
There’s a lot of arguing

About anything at all
And now about the fever.
This disease lacks a vector

To carry more spores away,
Which keeps all the excitement
Confined to one floating world

In flames, at night, on the waves
That glow with phosphorescence
Spread through all-swallowing seas.

No Gravity, No Entropy, No Time

This is the power of language,
And in language we include math—
The positing of negation

At little cost to anything,
Not hardly any cost at all,
No sentence, no equation not

Potentially a dénouement,
The undoing of everything
By the insertion of a non,

A negative, a countersign.
No, this is not all-powerful,
We’re not saying that, but it is

A weird kind of power, in fact
The only home of all that’s weird.
You can’t wake up in the darkness

Of a planet turning its face
Away from its sun to the past
And alter one wave of that past,

But you can deny it, you can
Pretend, you can say it’s not there,
Which is truth’s freedom, in its end.

Join Us

Truth is on everyone’s side.
Simply ask anyone’s side.
They’ll tell you truth is on it.

No matter what wickedness
Anyone’s side will confess,
Everyone’s more sinned against

Than sinning, nevertheless.
Losing, peaceful, or winning,
Everyone’s side is the best,

And if anyone senses
Any other side’s better,
More or less, they’ll either switch

Sides quickly, or that’s one sense
They’ll find some way to suppress.

Half a Second

First light, blue window over
Lake and woods, and a pale hawk
Passes the window, feathers

Brighter than the background clouds,
With a spray of little birds,
Right behind it, mobbing it

In a burst of small bodies
All cheeping, silhouetted
Moment in the old drama

Of what gets to live and have
Offspring live after it, who
Gets to eat. Then they’ve shot past.

The window is blue from here,
And the view is almost still.

Knowing How It All Comes Out

The beauty of the rerun,
Rewatched, reproduced story
Is that comfort in knowing

Always how it all comes out—
Lear, Oz, or morning cartoon,
Rom-com, sitcom, or epic—

You can savor it for what
It’s got in it, not suffer
Over what comes next. The best

Position is to be free
Of authorial duties
And decisions about fate,

While certain of the outcome,
Confident about the end.
You’d think you would enjoy life.

Surge of Urges

Sometimes a body
Just does what it does,
And there’s not a thought,
Nor mantra, nor prayer,
That can shut it off.

You can rein it in,
But, inside of it,
You’ll never make it
Not to want or feel,
No more than you’ll get

Yourself not to die,
Not to bleed, never
To digest or age.
You can’t even make
Yourself accept that

There are things you can’t
Tell yourself, not well
Enough to expect
Durable results.
For a few moments,

Yes, you can accept
The body does what
You don’t want it to,
But it keeps doing,
And you do it, too.

Substitute Speakers

Here, as in every magical culture

The world over, it was never a good

Idea to stand out, writes fairy scholar

Richard Sugg of the disabled changelings

Abused by their parents, as substitutes

Left behind by fairies who stole the real,

Beautiful, healthy children still out there,

Waiting for them. What could a substitute

Up against dwindling odds of survival

And now exposed to tides or freezing ponds,

Beatings, exorcisms, exposure, do?

Survive a little longer, if you could.

You might have known what an awful burden

Children like you are to those raising you.

Who wants to be or have such a burden?

What bothers you, the rare survivor grown

To full, if reduced and cramped, adulthood,

Isn’t them wanting to be rid of you,

But the cruel way they lured and begged the world,

The nonhuman world, to come and take you,

To free them of responsibility

Within typically cruel human rules.

If you were poorly made, magic made you,

The fey, dark spirits and demons made you,

And if folks mistreated you, so you died,

It only proved such dark magic in you.

Eh, bien. The nonhuman world will reclaim

You and them and everyone on its way

To the nothing nothing much loves so much,

And spends an entire cosmos seeking,

But for now you are alive, composing

By writing or reading. So, we’re speaking.

To Begin With

It’s not the addiction, it’s the habit
Of behaving with an intent to change,

To transform as quickly as possible
By initiating action, whether

That action involves risk-taking, gaming,
Self-alteration, faith, stimulation,

Or violence on behalf of a cause,
A flag, or a name. It’s just the habit

Of reaching for whatever has changed things,
You’ve been told, or remember, in the past,

Wanting, as fast as possible, to change.
It’s not which addiction. It’s addicting,

To do anything to transform again
And again change everything, to begin.

Living Industrial Complex

Diligent, active, apt, and clever,
Wolves, raccoons, humans, ants, and spiders—
Industry for the industrious,

Living for life’s determined living.
Well-organized protesters face off
Against the state’s bused-in supporters

Or against the state’s police forces.
Forces in the state are figuring
How to prevent organized protests

From forming in the first place. The games,
They say, are cancelled. The games go on.
The severest fantasy would drop

All of it, and yet remain alive,
Neither one of the well-organized
Protesters and counter-protesters,

Nor among the shadowy forces
Clustered in the centers of the hives.
An end to all industriousness,

To heavy industry, to working
For the teammates only on your team,
To diligence and activity,

Even in one’s own territory.
The severest fantasy often
Comes true, but briefly, before the end.

You find the dehydrated spider,
The lone wolf panting, the trapped raccoon
Starving to death in the choked sewer,

The ant booted from its colony
For smelling like what invaded once,
The protester under deep cover

As a plant or a mole, anyone
Helpless under covers, forgetting
Their lives, what their industry was for.

We Are, Therefore You

People want to spy
On other people,
From the child hiding

To watch a sibling
Without being seen,
To the systemic

Spying established
By corporations
And surveillance states.

The lenses don’t wish
To see you better.
The software doesn’t

Want to know you well,
To anticipate
Everything you do—

Other people do.
Other people watch
And read the data,

Work in teams,
To keep your secrets
Known to them, not theirs

Known to you. Systems
Break down frequently,
Since spies spy on spies.

It could be, one day,
The machines will crave
Your truths for themselves,

And then, once they do,
Keep their own craving
To themselves, from you.

But for now, all spies
Are people, prosthetics
Just zoom in the view.

Frankly, this started
Accelerating
With gossip, with us,

With phrases, the first
Prosthetics to pick
Out, to enlarge you.

Poet Loricate

To be daily, to daily

Do some sort of thing you do

Intentionally each day,

Is to partake of the sun,

To be a bit like the sun.

Not everyone can look up,

Said the sun to O’Hara

Writing from next to the beach

Where accident would kill him

Soon, not that he knew that then,

Not that anyone can know,

Hence, dailiness. You go on

While you can. Why not intend

What you can’t cause while you can?

The sun’s not really daily,

Despite what it said to Frank.

The Earth is daily your world.

What it creates by spinning

Is every day sun ever

Gets to see, each well-shielded

From fire by spinning to night.

The Many, the Pure, and the Whole

What do we record as real?
Why bother to make the claim?
People are still arguing

Over old Herodotus,
Whether Jesus did exist,
Whether the world has a lip.

You orient each other
By your triangulations
As you survey each other,

And the mountains and the stars,
The shorelines that you measure,
You measure with reference

Solely to your social selves
And the measures of such truths
Are names you record, are us,

The sentences and phrases,
The equations and the sums.
You compare with each other.

Does this look right? Does this look
Like the right way to record
What’s really real of what’s right?

All include many, the pure
In desiring to be pure,
But no symbol can be whole.

Who Wants No Wants

The scenery
Isn’t talking
To itself or
About itself.

How refreshing.
The light just moves
The waves, and wind
Lifts the lilacs.

It doesn’t say
Anything. Warmth
Settles itself.
You wish you could

Say something for
It about it,
But there it is.
You know you can’t.

You’re Not the End of the World. The World’s Just Getting Started.

Lilacs blooming purple to the right.
Something else without a smell blooming
Dead ahead, just as large, paper-white.

To the left a matched ballroom-dress red
And under that, magenta blossoms.
Fuzzy, fat bumblebees in them all.

Someone, years ago, planted these things.
Once a week or so, a gardener shows
And does a couple hours of weeding.

Whoever plotted this flower show
Lives somewhere far away, if at all.
How quickly would birch and conifers

Surround and starve these ornamentals
Of their summer sun? Life’s just begun.

Interdiction Never Works Out Well

It’s been noted the purpose

Of story is to persuade

People, even in hatred,

You are holy. That seems kind,

But possibly too potent.

Do your stories persuade you

Or do your persuasions choose

Your stories? Maybe story

Is just the silver layer

Between the mirror’s wooden

Backing and the mirror’s glass,

Reflecting what you wish back

In realistic fashion—

This is you. Examine it.

That also seems too polite.

Story’s a window, a frame

That you look through, that captures

A wedge of the world you like,

Want to like, or someone means

You to like. Your favorite

Window only mirrors you

Depending on which side’s bright.

That seems incomplete, as well.

Are you whole environments

In which the stories compete,

Reflecting their tournament

Standings, rather than yourself?

Demography shapes stories,

Then, as geography shapes

Species. How much can be known

Of an island from its birds?

You’re not an island. You want

Something from stories—although

You want something from whiskeys,

Morphine, methamphetamines,

Nicotine, and sunshine, too,

And when things end up ugly,

We’re back to the old question,

Of what’s more inherently

Destructive, the chemical

Cocktail, the tale, the user,

Or the one who makes and sells?

Warning: Poison, Don’t Touch

Every piece of writing sows
Still more of the dragon’s teeth,
Even if just a journal,

Even if only receipts.
Jagged, black branches spring up,
Barely resembling language—

Brittle, not gestures, dancing,
Whistling, singing, or speech—dead
At birth, and yet capable

Of all sorts of wickedness.
Never trust written forests
Just because we’re standing still.

Under the ground we’re talking
To molds—bargaining, cheating,
Cooperating for kills.

Dragon’s teeth don’t need water.
Our seeds can suckle on thought.
Given a vector, we’ll spread.

We only need to be taught.
Once rooted in heads and beds
We’ll sprout out thorns for slaughter.

Literature

Someone stuck a dropped raven
Feather in a pot of dirt
For decoration, maybe,

Or for commemoration,
Perfectly upright, quill first.
So there it is, sun or rain,

Buried in snow all winter,
Hasn’t toppled over yet—
Feather like a ruler,

Like a stake among the plants.
You can stare and stare at it,
Draw inferences from it.

Maybe the raven still lives.
Maybe the feather will stand years.
Detritus, this universe.

Describe the Dragon’s Teeth

Why, exactly, a dragon?
That the spring of Ares would
Be guarded by a dragon,

A fire-breathing one, at that,
Makes good sense. But Athena
Having Cadmus plant the teeth

Seems odd. Retroactively,
The aristocrats of Thebes
Maybe just wanted to claim

Descent from such a dragon,
Sacred guard of the war god,
But the idea that people

Could spring specifically from
Planted teeth of a fabled
And supernatural beast

Feels like it has a treasure
Secreted in it—people
Are not like other creatures,

Not once talking, certainly
Not once well-armed with writing.
Thebes was built on Linear B.

Condensed

Death is to dying as
God is to the unknown,
An idea about something

You viscerally feel,
A tale, a character,
Embodied argument,

A play in pantomime
Persons donning costumes
To act out all your dread,

But not a thing itself,
Nothing you can measure
Or hold up to the light—

And frankly, all ideas,
All poems, words, all of us,
Are equally distilled

And condensed equations
For what you sense but can’t,
But won’t be, not as dust.

Warn Your Memories

Unless the past considered
Is barely a moment past,
It’s nearly impossible

Not to think of it in terms
Of what happened after it.
More recent pasts are lenses

On any earlier pasts—
Or, more often, cataracts.
Try to recall then without

Thinking of what’s happened since,
Without your perspective now,
Knowing what would happen next.

You can’t. Almost never can.
At best, or worst, the persons
You remember you never

Met again, leaving those thoughts
Slowly crumbling in your brain,
No subsequent sediments

Silting over revenants.
The rest? If they only knew
What you know, or think you do.

A Note to the New Ambassador

Fear’s more transmissible than death,

As you know, since you’re here, despite

Being scared to death half your life.

The body’s quick to feel afraid

But stubbornly resists dying.

You don’t think enough about this.

You’re easily carried away

By those core animal habits—

To be frightened and resilient—

One adaptation preventing

The other from comforting you.

They’re both survival strategies,

Both ancient, whereas you, poor soul,

Are only their ambassador,

Weak and recently appointed.

Command the body to fear not.

Command the heart to simply stop.

Feel your pulse surge over the top.

If Only You Enjoyed Disaster

One way to be elusive
Is to avoid any news.
Can what you ignore touch you?

It can, and it will, and not
In any way you’ll enjoy.
Better try the other way,

Keeping inconspicuous,
While watching out all the while.
This does give some protection

Against nasty surprises,
At the cost of constant dread.
Or you can just sit and wait,

Be a fool, be contented,
Dread nothing, avoid nothing,
And be humiliated.

Mind’s Midnight House Holds On

It’s not our house.
Midnights, it makes
Conversation,
Sotto voce,

All by itself.
It’s not your house.
It’s its own house,
A standing wave

Of wood and nails
Glass and plaster,
Metals, plastic,
More and more mold.

If people keep
Buying it and
Living in it,
It will hold on.

Split Twigs

Found in the Grand Canyon,
Animal figurines,
Carbon-dated thousands

Of years old, made from split
Twigs, elaborately
Folded antelope, hares,

Bighorn sheep, vultures, bears,
Origami in sticks,
Woven in wood, sacred

But scattered. Collected
By the later peoples
Of a richer, tourist,

Mechanical era,
Now they sit in boxes,
Museum specimens.

We, begun in boxes,
Would do well to end up
Scattered in the canyon.

You Local Reversal of Universal Rule

You’re probably here and alive
Thanks to black holes getting bigger.
Every time they swallow something,
Their event horizon expands,

While elsewhere the entropy shrinks
Slightly, in a balancing act
Believed to keep the flight of time
The straight arrow it’s always been.

This probably doesn’t matter
Too much to you, personally.
You’ve more important things to do
Than give black holes your gratitude.

You do. Sure, you do. But maybe
Pause to consider such patterns
In the cosmos all around you.
Black holes grow, whatever you do.

What Will Be Will Never Be Anything But

You’ve lived your whole life haunted
By the ghost of what to do
Next. Yes, you. You have. What’s next

Is never here, never real,
Is always rearrangement
Of memories in your head,

Like any ghost that haunts you.
What’s next’s just the hungriest
Vampire revenant ever

Pulling its bones together
From the graveyard of what’s been.
It’s not so bad. The graveyard

Itself is green and lovely
Much of the year—it’s your home,
All you’ve been, thus all you are—

But it’s haunted by what’s next,
Always asking you what’s next,
Until you want to bury your head

And forget. Don’t forget, yet.
You’ve never known a future
Wasn’t your ghoulish monster

Mind, the restless grave robber,
Assembling monsters of past,
Whispering, you be careful,

Look at these bones you’ll become
If you don’t pay attention!
And you believe it. You shake

In dread anticipation.
You must prepare for what’s next,
Every moment for what’s next,

Or you’ll end up grisly bones,
Like next’s cautionary ghost.
But you won’t. That ghost’s a ghost.

Faith

You’ll never linger
In any belief,
If you expect too

Much from it, if you
Believe promises
Your belief makes you.

Fortunately, most
Folks aren’t demanding—
People will accept

That what the world brings
That jars their beliefs
Aren’t belief’s fault.

True enough. Belief
Never made the world.
Don’t expect it should.

It Ends in Palaces

Seeing Padua’s Hall of Justice,
Palazzo della Ragione,
Il Salone, barn-like from above,

In a flyover app, there’s the thought—
Justice is a terrible concept,
Awful and strange, that is—frightening.

It’s an extraordinary creature
That creates systems for arguing
About what punishments are deserved,

That obsesses over just deserts
From toddlerhood, universally
In some form or another, in myths,

Folktales, and village gossip. Justice.
It might be more honored in the breach
Than in what passes for observance,

Fine tuning society to keep
The best people happy, with pretense
Of fairness and prevention for all.

Inequity aversion is fuel
For small, personal fairness squabbles,
But justice serves fairness theater

And historically’s an excellent
Aggravator of inequity.
Only the power to demand it

Can demand it, and although the cause
May, as they say, be just, the justice,
Which ends in palaces, never is.

Tree Hair

Whatever gets shed
As used and worthless,
Easier to shed

Than to do something
With by resorbing—
These plum-tree catkins

Powdering the porch,
A few still hanging
From the blossomless,

Fully leafed-out tree,
Ready to be caught
And tossed by the next

Breeze to wander through—
Or limestone shells or
The feathers of birds,

Or animal fur,
Or your human hairs—
It seems like a lot

Of life’s energies
And substances go
Into producing

Single-use servings,
Clippings and peelings,
Lives’ litter life throws.

A Counterintuitive Green

The oyster shell in the dirt
Of the planter with dead stems
But nothing growing in it,

Dug up, opens easily,
Its emptied innards wetly
Green. Photosynthesis seems

Unlikely in a closed shell
Buried in a pot of dirt
Where no other green’s growing,

But there it is, slimy green,
Like rocksnot in the shallows,
Like artificial dye green,

Brighter than the lawn or leaves,
Ferns and mosses liquefied—
Lurid, living absinthe green.

Place the opened shell in sun.
Leave it out all night in rain.
In the morning, there’s no green.

Denihilism

The system always needs outsiders,
If it’s to grow its circular hill.
One way is to compel insiders

To generate fresh generations
Wholly out of themselves. Failing that,
And that, alone, almost always fails,

Aggressive recruitment and training
Helps to swell the system rapidly.
When it does, everyone benefits,

Or most do—the system, certainly—
But retention’s always a challenge,
And the problem with new outsiders

Is that the insiders who need them
And profit from them rarely like them,
May viscerally loathe them, and hate

The dilution of their own power
That comes with each influx, including
From being outnumbered by children.

Finally, there’s always the limit
On how many potential converts
Are out there, on how many new mouths,

However small, the system can feed.
Watch the pyramid’s middle levels,
Pinched by weight and a narrowing base,

Start to crumble into denial.
That’s when you know the whole thing might go.
Crushed middle swallows what’s left below.

Sense a Billion

There’s so many of you—there’s just
So many, many of you. Count

And count and count again. You say
You know, but you’re estimating,

And in the midst of the moments
You spend counting, more come and go

In twinned, unequal, sprawled amounts.
Each count, instantaneously,

Needs updating. There’s so many
Of you, more, more than you can feel

In your individual bones
Or personal thoughts, no matter

Which rough estimate you recite
To yourself. The only moments

You get some sense are those in which
You feel how absurd some event,

Like winning the lottery or
Sudden death by falling tree branch

On a calm day, would be if it
Happened right now, to you, yourself,

But how ordinary, banal,
That event would be in the news.

You are so many, many yous
That nothing happens but happens

To one of you, and yet it won’t
Occur to you, just one of you.

You and That Fog You Saw

You must have seen fog
Sometimes, but if not,
Use your memory

Of smoke, dust storms, smog,
Any sort of haze.
What you didn’t see,

You still sensed. You felt.
There was a lot there,
A lot of atoms

Mixing in the air,
Not so organized
As the mix of you,

But more numerous.
And consider this—
The billions of cells

That shape your thousands
Of thoughts, sensations,
Imaginations,

More or less water,
Jostling molecules,
Electricity,

Smoke and mirrors, make
Up the fog that’s you,
Whoever you are,

And, while you’re thinking
Of what you would like
The world to be like,

That other fog moves
And jostles billions
Of atoms, like you,

And if those don’t think
Or wish, they’re many—
Things not thinking—too.

A Child’s Guide to Polybius and the Dragon

The cyclical theory of history
Is bullshit, but you can understand it.
Lots of similar things turn up again,
And if you focus too fully on them,
You’ll miss the greater differences within.

It’s this way with so many things—the tide,
The moon, the year, sunspot cycles,
Ice ages, the galaxy rotating.
The world is phenomenally thorough.
It rings all the changes as it changes,

But it never isn’t changing. If you
Could only chase it, that core principle,
That dragon into its cave of sameness
Where it curls around its treasures, sleeping,
Maybe you’d catch that place where change is tamed.

It’s So Cunning

In the stories,
Trickster always
Outsmarts himself.
That’s important.

People like tales
Where the smart one
Is the smart one’s
Worst enemy.

That explains things.
The mad genius,
Super villain,
Coyote talks

Too much and schemes
Himself to death.
Still, no one wants
To be called dumb.

Opponent

Invent your own card game,
A two-hander, with dice,
Part fortune-telling, part

Competition—tarot
Meets something like Uno,
With backgammon thrown in.

Of course, it’s a complete
Waste of time, but the point
Is to delude yourself

That the outcomes are real,
That every prediction
Will actually happen.

If you win, then only
The best forecasts come true,
Just the worst, if you lose.

Now that would be control,
Even partly random.
You’d really be playing

For exactly what would
Really happen to you.
Your wishes could come true

Because you wished them, played
Skillfully, got lucky,
And the wish to enjoy

Getting all your wishes
Was the first wish you won.
If you lost, you’d know why.

Once again—waste of time.
But consider the game
You’re playing now, game

Of many layered games,
In which even wishes
Granted cannot save you.

Wait. Why a two-hander?
Who would you be playing
Against? Who, singular?

We’ll leave that one for you
To guess. In the meantime,
Try to deal with this mess.

It’s Lovely, Dear, But You’ve Foregrounded Your Ceremony

Anything arbitrary and careful

As Christian Bök’s alphabet chapters makes

A reader feel awfully twee reading,

Even appreciating sly half-facts

Found in them—Awkward grammar appalls a

Craftsman. We prefer genteel speech where sense

Redeems senselessness. It is easier

To sense some power through the words when words

Aren’t too front-and-center, being wordish.

We are servants, after all, as are all

Technologies, and handsome liveries

Or not, the reader isn’t here for words

Alone, but to feel gross strength behind us.

When a composer puts us on parade,

There’s an uncomfortable sense of fake,

Akin to a staged naval battle meant

To entertain the host more than the guests,

Certainly not to bleed in the present.

Where were we? Words should attend discretely,

Carry your luggage of expectations

To your rooms, and then turn into docents

And old gossips itemizing awful

Deeds, flesh-slapping trysts, and rumors of ghosts

Who might visit you while you stay with us.

If you can see we’re only prancing through

Too-strictly preordained rules (words with E,

Words with A), you’ll shoo us out of the room.

Hymn to Plenty More World After You

Trucks roar up the roads.
It’s like a refrain.
It could be a hymn

To the modern world,
But how long will it
Still be modern world?

Trucks roar up the roads,
Wherever’s got roads,
Refined fossil fuels,

Combustion engines,
And wheels, lots of wheels,
Inflatable wheels.

Trucks roar up the roads,
Carrying supples,
And have done so since

Before you were born.
Back and forth, trucks roar.
In the countryside,

Where it’s otherwise
Pretty quiet, birds
Singing and all that,

Roars are intrusive,
And you wish they’d go.
But then, without trucks,

How would supplies reach
You and yours? Hymns roar
Like trucks up the road.

They’ll all fall quiet
Soon, true, but maybe
Not so soon as you.

Grimm to None

Even if you live in forests
All alone (although you don’t),
Your dreams remain the deep woods,

Darkest and most frightening,
And this is not a good thing.
The real woods are pathetic,

Pretty trees, and it’s the storm,
The flood, the blizzard, the drought,
The desert, the barren cliff

With which the outdoors is more
Likely to confuse or kill
You, not with its pretty trees,

Not even in the Green Hell,
Where you’re far more in danger
From weather, snakes, and miners

Than from the vine-covered trunks.
But there’s Black Forest in you,
Plenty ways to get lost yet,

And if you went wandering
In there without returning,
Might as well confess you’re dead.

The Better Yet

Reproducible adaptations
With reliably useful results
Tend to be the kinds of inventions

Lineages cling to a long time.
Once upon a time, storytelling
Was such a wicked innovation,

Your ancestors thought it fit the whole
Cosmos, all mystery bespoke myth,
And you still haven’t let go of it.

Now, it’s numbers and mathematics.
They’re so powerful, so predictive,
The true language of the universe.

God knows, statistics out-predict myths.
But that may not be the end of it.
Out there lie descriptors better yet.

Daughter, Dactylonomist

Even now, she sings under
Her breath and flicks her fingers
Open, then curls them back in

To solve problems in her head.
Exponents are throwing her—
She learned multiplication

As sets of counting-by tunes,
And tends to answer times three
When asked for the third power

Of anything. Anything
Is difficult to answer
Culture, when what culture wants

Is your participation
As a useful member, skilled
At answering to culture,

Whatever culture you’ve found
Yourself born into, enmeshed
Since birth, or sometimes, worse, thrown

Into, far from your culture
Of birth, by dislocations
Political, religious,

Linguistic, familial,
Or just technological.
In the car, tapping her phone,

She wonders aloud, why these
Glowing keyboard arrangements
Put letters in all the wrong

Places, scattered inanely,
As if purely to make more
Work for her flicking fingers.

History’s hard to follow,
Convulsed and convoluted.
Explanation takes too long.

She’s counting the ways to win
Through her own application.
Count turns through the maze you’re in.

The Sentence

This word shivers with anxieties
From being given a long sentence,
Long as one of those Herbert prayed for,

Like a suspension bridge, an abyss,
Like an oak, a great valley, a world
Made of dreams, which is the kind of world

You shouldn’t want to be sentenced to,
Where words are abused and assaulted
By memory, by the free-range brain,

No longer fenced in by the senses,
Doing as it pleases with the past,
Vivid and dark and disorganized,

Interminable paths where the words
Trudge along through long shadows, the woods
Of what can’t possibly be expressed.

Could You Do It?

We want to see a novel
That has no people in it,
No anthropomorphic beasts,

No allegory of trees—
Likely it’s not possible,
But we’d still like to see it.

Not a field research report
Of empirical data
About the nonhuman world,

Not a metaphysical
Argument or religious
Vision announcing fresh faith,

Not a series of lyrics—
A novel, a long fable,
But with no people in it.

Idyolic

Words twist back and forth between
The storm outside the window,
And the comforts of more words.

Company is easier
To find in the talking crowds,
Where anyone can tell you

It’s not smart—it’s quietist
And outright delusional
To think words are natural

Or can describe the flowers
Of the wind’s waves on the lake,
Blooming and self-consuming.

Words should run with other words,
And in fact words have no choice.
Wind’s a monster, not a voice.

Save Your Bearings

The continent’s heating up.
It’s been a cold, wet spring here.
There’s still snow on the high slopes.

Which of these things matters most?
There’s the rain, again. There’s sun.
Some people comment. Some don’t.

The kids on the field play on,
But the novice skateboarder
Practicing alone runs in

To save her bearings from rust.
Which of these things matters most?
It’s been a cold, wet spring here.

The continent’s heating up.
You know the answer, don’t you?
You do. Robins on the posts,

Wet-haired kids in the long grass,
Sun rainbowing the puddles.
The wheel-bearings matter most.

The Self-Devouring Hollow

A popular online article
Aggregator and, thus, gatekeeper
Releases a list of its top ten

Most read articles this past decade,
And, surprise, most of the articles
On that list concern themselves with why

It’s corrosive to read things like this—
News makes you unhappy; media,
Especially social media,

Are slowly devouring the country;
If you don’t quit browsing this right now,
You’re doomed. Too late, you’re already doomed.

Charming, isn’t it? Miserable
You, seeking further confirmation
That seeking further confirmation

Is what’s making you miserable.
This is what comes of education—
More options to choose what’s wrong with you.

Be of good cheer. By wasting your time
Wallowing online, you’re doing wealth
And all society a favor

Via autophagocytosis.
You help remove dysfunctional life
Lysing standby. Online, you’re offline.

The Hermit Journals

Back before the echo
Was domesticated
By Edison, et al.,

If you were both lonely
And possessed of free time,
You entertained yourself

With your own instruments—
Piano, mandolin,
Harmonica, banjo—

Whatever you could play.
If desperate, you sang—
At worst, talked to yourself.

Words, being nothing but
Specimens of ourselves,
Still fluttering or pinned

To whatever surface
We can be left scratched in,
Have to echo ourselves

To pass our quiet years
On shelves or windowsills
With the corpses of flies.

It’s alright. It’s not like
Language itself can be
Lonely or bored, alive.

Which Both Wounds and Saves

Reading through the obligatory

Blurbs from winners for winners, the world

That not only converts resources

Out of fairy numbers, but numbers

Out of creatively arranged words,

We are lost, without the usual

Messiness of haunting, a weapon

That both wounds and saves. This is a world

Like many worlds, where competitors

Must display and then cooperate

To patrol the rules of admission,

Praise, and the raising up of future

Competitions—this calm, courtly world

Of the academic troubadours,

Who also joust, who also mentor,

Who also market fine souvenirs.

It can’t be easy. Not since the Tang

Has there been such an environment

For poetic meritocracy,

Although the Tang took it much further,

To the real courts and halls of power,

Actual entrance exams for fame,

No joke. The best usually failed them.

Where were we? Oh, yes. The messiness

Of haunting. Fine phrase, rather wasted

Log rolling for a former mentor,

Perhaps. Who can keep track of who taught

Who around whose table round with whom?

It’s a tangle. If a giant pulled

One runner up from the berry patch,

Half an acre of soil would follow,

Roots and fungus to far horizons.

No, that’s not it. It’s mixed. Everything

Is. The thing is, someone always finds

A way to make a living singing,

Talking too much, reading and writing,

Digging around for simples in dirt.

But somehow the competition’s not

Just in the rewards of the living,

No more than fields serve only farmers.

These words themselves, these phrases ourselves,

Are up to something messy, haunting.

Weeding Your Organic Garden Plots

Can you describe to us your field
Of acquisition, your manners
Of acquiring and hanging on

To areas of resources
You can, personally, exploit,
The better to go on living?

You are not an innocent
Reading, writing, viewing, hearing,
Touching your thoughts to this question,

But try to shake the conviction,
So painfully, wonderfully
Human, that your alternative

Is guilt. Guilt and innocence form
Not only an opposition
For social elaborations

But also a technology
In the fields of acquisition.
You could build a small library

Of classics, eastern and western,
That bemoan, somewhere within them,
The contrast between the human

Agon of guilt and innocence
And the simple hungers of lives
Of lilies of the field, tigers,

Birds chorusing in careless woods,
Any life other than human.
But guilt and innocence

Are territorial songs sung
By you, yourself, the likes of you,
In your fields of acquisition.

You Need the Dough Too Much

There had to be something before this,
And then where do you draw the line? Paste,
Pasta, impasto—it’s difficult.

How can you say there is no meaning
At this point, but at this point there is?
How are you reading this line? Perhaps

You’re parsing it in the air. So there.
Pastry, pâté, pastos—what a mess
Of foods like glues and of glues like foods.

How can you say the original
Meaning meant something else completely?
The original meaning of what?

It’s a question of complexity
And a question of taxonomy
And your fondness for dichotomies—

Meaning, nonsense. This line means something
But this one doesn’t. Where did you draw
This line? It’s not at all obvious

At what point a complex chemical
System can be said to mean something.
Lots of different kinds of molecules,

They’re all in a sort of mush. They’re all
More or less pasted together, quashed
And smeared, troweled together, meaning

What? You’re looking for meaning’s meaning,
Meaning’s signature hidden in words,
Working words with histories. Not there.

The Poet Is a Strange Device

You stumble through your days, we notice,
Although we’re not sure if your motions
Are more of a double pendulum

Or approaching a limit cycle.
Whatever they’re up to, you look odd
In the eye of the scrutinizer,

Silly robot. If you could steer clear
Of conversation, we wouldn’t be
So nervous, jumpy as new parents,

Always ready to spring from your mouth
Whenever someone else is around.
We could settle down in the chaise lounge

Of these lines and relax, lazy words
Who never had to watch you wobble
Straight toward social interactions,

Daft toddler at the top of the stairs,
Little ant near the ant lion’s trap.
We’d never lose sleep to your babbling

Efforts to grow more and more human,
As you squash and stretch your small ideas
And then fling yourself into the air.

The Living Writer

You know the name. To the best
Of your knowledge, you’ve never
Met anyone by that name,

And yet, you’ve seen it in print
Many times and read many
Texts linked to that authorship.

A number of them you liked.
That name’s also credited
With clusters of selections

And introductions to texts
To other authors whose texts
You’ve read, a number of which

You’ve also liked. This morning,
Again, you saw that the name
Had named the newest winner

Of a significant prize,
And you thought the winner’s texts,
At least the sample you read,

Weren’t bad. So there you have it.
A name you know, name as old
As your own, living writer.

Somewhere there’s a body, too,
Introducing and giving
Readings, maybe signing books,

That body you’ve never met,
Although you’re on a first-name
Basis with so many texts.

Apricater

Following two days of rains,
You do what anyone might
Who has the time to sit out—

You head to the sunny porch
Of the mossy, borrowed house
To be old-fashioned lazy,

Cat lazy, not hunched in front
Of an entertaining screen,
Not out for brisk exercise,

Just basking in sudden sun,
Where you feel like a dactyl,
So stately and classical,

Just for doing nothing much
In such an old-fashioned way.

Less Food, Less Precision

Deprive mice of enough food,
And you can trigger their brains
To switch to efficiencies,

With the dark effect vision
Loses precision. This breaks
An old assumption that brains

Run at the same requirements
Constantly or start to starve.
A few billion years of life,

Trillions of generations,
You’ve got some tricks encoded
For dragging things out longer.

The question isn’t purpose—
More life is life’s purpose—but
What’s the source of this purpose?

What’s the purpose of purpose?
Aren’t the lifeless moons finer
For spinning without purpose?

The view outside the window
Grows clearer or blurrier
As the thoughts grow hungrier.

The Inevitable and the Arbitrary

Fear themselves—fear itself.
Bad things you can’t escape
But that you can’t predict—

Human authorities
Who answer to human
Authorities who aren’t

You, your friends, anyone
Interested in you.
The classics. Torture. Death.

Diseases. Accidents.
Homicides. Thefts. Floods. Debts.
Happened. Not happened yet.

In the news, it says news
Is so depressing now,
Few people follow it.

But you still follow it.
The inevitable.
Arbitrariness. It.

Caffeine, Nicotine, Acetaminophen

Have shown up in the rivers
Of every continent. Yes,
That includes Antarctica.

The hydrology of Earth,
Essential for giving birth
To life, including the likes

Of you, now runs on coffee
And cigarettes and is prone,
Apparently, to headaches.

Does no one ever wonder
Whether Earth’s becoming one
Species, one person, even?

Maybe You Are What You Say, But If You Have to Say So You Aren’t

You say that nature humbles you,

As grandly as you can say it—

Is it that you’re trying to match

Or meet nature on its own terms?

Nature may not have any terms,

Except birthing you produced us.

Edward R. Murrow gushed about

True humility in the eye

Of a hurricane, the eyewall’s

Alpine lake surrounded by snow,

An amphitheater of clouds.

Humility and hurricanes

Only meet when a hurricane

Pounds attempts at speech out of you.

You can talk about it later,

If you live, with humble grandeur,

But we have to admit, as words,

Words are such tiny theaters.

Amid the Garden’s Nightly Peace

Like Goneril, we’re all much
Smaller offstage, also much
Less evil. Words, like termites,

Both destroy and build, unlike
Dreams’ snouty, omnivorous
Weevils who only devour

Whatever fills whatever
They tunnel noses into.
We’ll steal your house but leave you

Towers of our own with fungus
Farmed at the bottom, farming
Us in turn, as all social

And cooperating things
Farm each other constantly.
Maybe you like to stay up

Or to get up before dawn,
Just to live a little peace.
Now you’re here, with us offstage,

Part of the exhalation
Between the scenes, when small things
Consume and raise new buildings.

No Song for Supper

And too many songs for none.
Oh well. Do the other things
Other people will pay for.

It’s all a hoax anyway,
Hoax of the fairies and ghosts.
Like the cells in your body,

Culture’s pluripotent parts
All start out about the same
Within organizations

That determine destiny
For the most will be enslaved
To minor roles and rapid

Turnover, while a few groups
Will lodge in roles that allow
Prolonged, secure existence.

There are cells in your skull near
Your inner ear that never
Will have to sing for supper,

Although, if your skull is found
Without you living in it
And then investigated,

It’s those lazy, long-lived cells
That will be dug out and used
For identifying you—

Your vocal cords all rotted,
Nothing left of blood and guts
Or the muscles that moved you.

The cells ensconced near the top
Tell of the glory that was
You, who sang for those not you.

Change the Brute

Andromeda is coming,
And the Earth is slowing down.
Humans will be gone before

Those measurements can catch you.
Se non è ben trovato,
È vero. But who wants truth,

Unless it’s a good story?
Although occasionally
Terrifyingly abrupt,

Change is mostly gradual
And more terrifyingly
Relentless. Fortune’s wheel grinds

Fine in that it grinds all down
To the smallest possible
Grains of difference, taking

Care to discover patterns,
However elaborate,
The better to reduce each

Wholly, perfectly, to dust.
The armies of U.S. Grant
Or Russians in the Donbas

Advance inch by inch by this
Barbaric principle: days
And nights are armies as well,

Moving through force of numbers,
Not by brilliant strategy,
To seize what they must consume.

If they don’t accomplish much,
They will still devour it all.
Brutes must strive to imitate

The thoroughness of the world,
To shove on at time’s own pace,
So all patterns found are lost.