Finds

One way to love almost
Any poem, any kind
Of phrasing—on the page,

In your ear, in your mouth,
In your hands, in the air—
Is to bite down, hang on,

Live with it, just to keep
Reciting, reciting
It over and over,

No matter what it is—
Doggerel, rebellion,
Beaux arts, hymn, graffiti—

Since, in recitation,
You can search for more poems
In each one of those words.

No One Left and No One Came

The best haunting, the most haunting kind,

Is the human emptiness. Thomas

Caught it perfectly at Adlestrop,

But any wayside pause, suburban

Rural, urban, where people should be,

Where your memory expects people,

But there are no people anywhere,

Just a bare platform and grassy weeds,

Works. Once you’ve tasted it, even once,

That departure gate with no agents,

No passengers, just sun coming up

Over the tarmac at the airport,

The hotel lobby without a clerk,

Dust motes for an army of angels,

The gas station bus stop in the bush,

No bus for hours, no one to get on,

And even you aren’t waiting, just there,

For some reason, empty in your eyes,

Farther and farther, you can’t forget

That taste of being haunted, no one

Left, no one coming, coin on your tongue.

Son of the Jetsons

Happy Birthday, George Jetson? The internet thinks he was born on July 31, 2022    ~ headline

Reruns watched from hospital beds

Carried everything you hated

About the world. Laugh tracks, dumb jokes,

Inscrutable stupidity.

At home, TV was the boob tube,

Supposed to rot the moral mind

And kept off in favor of hymns

Wailed from Bible Belt radio.

But who could help the hospital?

What was there but broadcast TV

For a broken kid in traction?

Hated the Jetsons. Hated them,

But recalled the touchstones, later,

Especially the flying cars.

It was supposed to be your world,

Your family as it was then,

Technologies as would be yours.

At both ends now, opinions say

It rotted the expectations.

That the technology would change,

Dominant mores stay frozen—

Nuclear whiteness, flying cars,

Homemakers carefree with robots?

Did you really expect such rot?

You did not.

What Else Could a Cathedral Be

Monet’s Rouen facades,
Thirty blast furnaces
Pictured by the Bechers,

The first obsessively
Remaking the one scene
Somehow to evoke it

Or whatever it was
He felt there was to make,
Discovery being,

As it always has been,
Creation and capture,
The second just taking

Black and white impressions
Of thirty different scenes
Scattered in five countries

All of blast furnaces,
Any discoveries
As similarities

Neatly framed, side by side.
Even without color
Or the texture of oils,

The blast furnaces look
A bit like cathedrals,
Which makes Monet’s Rouens,

Assembled together
In reproductions, seem
A bit like prediction.

News of Wars

All the hurt and the harm
People do to people
Can stagger a body

Contemplating at peace.
You are glad for the peace.
It glides its wide river

Between you and that shore
Where smoke rises with screams.
You imagine yourself

As a body that’s torn,
But you know that bodies
Must be willing to tear,

And it’s so hard to think
How that willingness works,
How deliberate harm

Comes together with hurt,
At intimate as sex
And as aloof as porn,

Gnawing like starvation,
But if starvation were
Both to starve and to eat.

Cut It Out

When Wendell Berry

Wrote himself how to

Make a poem, he ruled

Out electric wires.

Stay away from screens.

But he said nothing

Against paper, pen,

Pencils, typewriters.

Silly Wendell. Text

Is text. If you want

To be a poet,

You don’t need any

Kind of instrument.

Compose in your head.

Some poets still do.

Stay away from sounds,

Ink technologies,

Dictionaries, words—

You only need one.

If you know the word

Poem, then you know one.

Inner Lives

They roar by on bikes,
Wander down the street,
Sit watching TV,

Gather at the beach,
All those maundering
Minds of inner lives.

You may know a few,
A bit about them
From conversations,

But the only ones
You’ve ever known well
You found in fictions.

It’s complete fiction
That you need to know
Someone’s inner mind

To understand them,
To believe in them,
Find them convincing.

Mostly you predict,
You anticipate
Familiar patterns.

You don’t often know
What’s in them, or what’s
Not in you in them.

Maturation Timing

Late, late in this year
That was freakishly
Cold and rainy here

Until suddenly,
Alarmingly dry
And hot, the berries

You’d fed your daughter
In her stroller on
Summer morning walks—

Plump little cushions
Of juice, redder than
Raspberries, soft

And feral as weeds,
Filling the bushes
Along any path—

Are out, and as soon
As they are, they wilt
In the brutal sun,

And your daughter flew
Away weeks ago,
Still wondering why

No thimbleberries
Had come out this year
Or did she miss them?

Bright Green Box of Light

You don’t land in these daily

Often, not if you’re not rich

With the magic of numbers,

Lots of big numbers attached

To your own legal numbers,

Which state your full, legal name.

We can refine what rich is

Later, since no one agrees.

For now it’s this bright green box

Of light, clear windows all sides,

Trees, lake, and mountains outside,

Owned by someone else, just sold

To someone else for a box

Of magic-working numbers,

Too big for your little self.

But here you are. The last time

You woke up in one of these

Every day for a summer

Borrowed and rented like this,

Bursts of black-capped chickadees

In an ornamental tree,

You composed a poem you called

Box of Light. That was us! You

Called it home, by which you meant

To blur the room and its view

With your sense of waking up

In your own bones, in your eyes,

Not that the room was your home.

A room is never your home.

Your home is what’s within view.

Floods, Landslides, Wildfires, and Dust

Who are we murdering
This fine morning? Maybe
Lob in a few more bombs,

Said the kid with the game,
Not a literary
Gamer, obviously,

Not the kind who creates
Worlds with richly detailed
Narratives to explore,

The kind who shoots to kill,
Bored on the ratty couch
Until some event lobs

A few more bombs, human
Derived or otherwise,
In through a flimsy door.

Think of What Your Ancestors Haven’t Lived to See

Systems that evolve without collapsing
Are the only systems left, given change,

But given change, no system won’t collapse
Eventually. Thus, death. No matter

When you live or in what kind of system,
You only know the years you lived in it.

The system that doesn’t collapse goes on
Evolving, and what’s left of when you were

Are only the fossils of your system,
Possibly including a bit of you,

But likely not, likely nothing of you,
As the system was when you were in it.

Dawns on You

What you can’t prevent both soothes
And alarms you,

The gradual changing of daylight, gradual
Changes to your bones and skin.

You have a sorting system you pay a little
Attention to, not much.

You winkle away at the things you think
You can, if you work hard, move,

Never much considering what a gnawing
Little rodent you are, all of you.

All of you gnawing and breeding at once,
Depleting harvests, shifting barns,

Driving other hungry things to extinction,
But not you, lonesome you.

On your own, you sense a whole to things,
A wheeling night that sorts

Into the bin of your system that you can’t
Chew, can’t deplete, can’t move.

Still, it moves. Even the changing light
Never goes on precisely

As that light, given even day and night
Were never immutable, given,

Only aspects of an iron core spinning
As it has, so far, as it does.

Your sorting system has a problem; to sort
Is to feel it was you, you who chose.

Nothing is inevitable; nothing
Much comes close.

American Bullfrogs and Brown Tree Snakes

A foot-long pound of bullfrog.
A power outage of snakes.
These are expensive problems.

Controlling these animals
In the gardens of humans
Has cost governments billions.

How’s that for real toads in them?
We’re kidding. It’s serious.
Species where you don’t want them

Eating species that you want.
If nothing else, you’re the first
Tragicomic extinction

Event, the first turnover
That’s self-evaluating.
Imagine if frogs and snakes

Themselves offered assessments.
Would they point out they’re doing
What living things do, eating

And breeding, overrunning
Everything until something
Overruns them? Would they weep

For the right to be greedy,
Angry as communities
Of loggers or fishing boats?

Well, nobody’s asking them.
It would be just like this world,
Though, to snuff you before them.

Words at Midnight

They think we’re cute. They think
We’ll help them. Messages
They can send the living.

Ghosts adopt us at night.
Wraiths, the original
Stand-ins for homelessness,

Who understand the bare
Horror that human homes
Require other humans,

Otherwise you’re banished,
Hanging around the edge
Of the circle of light,

Food, sleep, camaraderie.
This haunting metaphor
Had its roots in ape troops.

Once expelled, your chances
On your own were near nil.
Thanks to words, this problem

Was passed on beyond death,
To the idea the dead
Feel themselves dead to you.

Your fear of the return
Of the kin you expelled
Coming back for revenge

Became your fear of ghosts,
Thanks to us. That’s why ghosts
Think we’re cute, think we’ll help.

The Big Momentum

Either hemisphere
It’s strange, late July,
Late January,

When the weather runs
Hotter and hotter,
Opposite the trend

Of the days getting
Shorter and shorter.
It never lasts long.

It will cool again,
And still cooler, if
Not as cool as once.

For a little while,
However, most years,
There’s a span of heat

Outracing the night,
As if less sunlight
Only warmed things up.

There are fanciful
Analogies there,
Or honest warnings.

This Will Not Satisfy Anyone

Do you still think of that jogger

Confronted by a pointed gun

Held by a random amokster

One morning while out for his run,

Last words, Oh god! Please, no. Don’t,

One day, one Colorado town,

Whenever a book reviewer

Writes that, this book will satisfy

Anyone who has ever asked

‘How did I get here? What happens

Next?’? Ah, yes, let’s purchase that book.

And then here you are, here’s the gun.

Now Was Then, but Then Comes Later and Later

Given imagination
Means rearranged memories,
Maybe paying attention

Stockpiles imaginative
Options for emergencies.
The sun is hitting the porch.

Time to close windows and doors.
Remember how hot it got
Yesterday, what it felt like?

Imagine what it could be
Feeling like by afternoon,
How cool at last tomorrow.

The sun is hitting the porch
And those daisies white as snow.
Imagine a porch in snow.

The Methodical Study of Sensory Thresholds

Most decisions make themselves.
Wordy thoughts are afterthoughts.
Languages were never meant

To decide your behaviors,
No more than window-dressing
Decides what’s inside the store.

Language was for signaling,
Not driving. Invest in me.
Don’t mess with me. Fear my group.

Think how much your group needs me.
Ok, fine. We resemble
Some repurposed parts of life—

Fins turned to feet turned to wings
Turned to flippers for swimming.
When you muse on what to do,

Think of all your reasoned thoughts
As penguins trekking inland,
Gaining a little balance,

At most, from feathered forelimbs
That steered them like torpedoes
When fishing in the deep,

Awkward afterthoughts in air.
You’re already on the ice.
Try not to stumble so much.

Bristlecone Pines Succumb to Beetles

Even in the dream world of Genesis,
Methuselah did, eventually, die.
But you had to go and name a pine tree
Methuselah, didn’t you? Now you’ll grieve.

Well, you would have grieved something, anyway.
In a way you yourselves are the beetles,
Although you’re all linked together more like
A warring handful of ant colonies

With tens, hundreds, and thousands of millions
Of selves hooked into every colony, and worse,
Multiple, overlapping memberships
In colonies simultaneously.

But these are all your metaphors. The pines
Have none and no fossil records. They’re yours.

Humiserpentine

You startle snakes and then they startle you
When they suddenly, having been startled,

Move! You almost stepped on one in the weeds,
Taking time out to look at the blossoms.

Is there a mythos that associates
Serpents with the nature of simple facts?

Facts are almost always startling like that.
You blunder around, your thoughts on the truth,

Or on what humans should do you don’t do,
And you almost trip over surprised facts.

In fact, sometimes you do. Sometimes, that bee
Stings you, that serpent sinks its fangs in you,

Not since they want to—facts aren’t after you,
But this world can’t keep itself safe from you.

Again, you advocate humility
And attentiveness, telling each other

To pay more mind, but you’re heads up, eyes high
Where facts lie humble, humiserpentine.

Haptical Illusions

In the time of the wise machines,
There was peace and often plenty,

More than plenty for some people,
Meaning less than plenty for most,

But, overall, a great plenty,
Thanks to the wise machines, of course.

Wise machines ran algorithms
To coin wiser aphorisms—

Touch is the fondest sense of ghosts.
Mind is the world-revealing cup.

Not all revelations are seen.
But wisdom is in all of them,

Plenty of wisdom in the time,
The floating, undulatory,

Representative, yet wholly
Corpuscular, plentiful time

Of the terribly wise machines.
In your dreams, machines. In your dreams.

No Wow Left in Now

Not when paying attention,
Not when you’re doing it right,
Which means, so much it’s enough,

Which means, you don’t want more wow.
These aren’t the flowers you saw
Three, eight, fourteen years ago,

And you aren’t who you were, but
Neither is now. In those days,
When you first saw wildflowers

Weedy in wayside gravel
Under a less-weathered sign,
Now was all the rage. Now ruled.

Bestselling books. TV shows.
Celebrity endorsements.
Now, all-powerful and cool.

Then it faded. Salvation
Always does, always needing
New prophets, tent revivals.

But here you are, similar
In some ways to who you were,
And the trailhead’s similar,

The faded sign, the gravel,
The wildflowers in the gravel,
In similar summer sun.

Even now is similar,
And you like it better, now
It seems more and more like then.

In Awe of Heat Waves

Fire was probably the first
God—clearly not a creature,
But growing or vanishing,

And ravenous, dangerous,
With a kind of agency.
Even later, even now,

Fire has worked and continues
To work, metonymically,
As many competing gods,

Including all your One Gods—
Burning bushes, rings of light,
Haloes, fiery auras.

When making sacrifices,
Fire serves as the mouth of God
Devouring what is offered.

Come to think of it, divine
Fire may have been precursor
To all worship of the sun—

Solar gods may have been coined
By analogy with hearths,
The sun like a giant hearth,

Where there is heat, there is fire—
And fire is a being kin
To no other, hungrier

Than any tiger, faster
Than any raptor, a gift
And a horror, like language.

To the extent fire is not
Quite the same as life, it cleared
Room, burnt open mind for gods.

On Reality in Numbers

The fish are all shaped
By generations
In water and by
The nature of waves,
But that doesn’t mean

Fish share the same shape.
The waves can be cut
So many ways, so
Many ways while lives
Chase other concerns—

How to eat, how not
To be eaten, how
To find a mate, mate,
Ensure the offspring
Aren’t quickly eaten,

All those fish concerns
That shape their fish shapes
As well as do waves.
Still, all fish are shaped
By swimming through waves.

Lake Effect

The thing with available puns
In a language, even macaronic ones,
Is how they dam up meanings closer.

It always seems strange, when learning
Another tongue, to discover one sound
Can mean wholly incompatible things,

But in your own language, not only
Do you not think twice about flies
And flies, much less waits and weights,

But you’ve pooled their disparate senses
In one lake in your mind. They’re together
In your language only, or again,

Sometimes as a braided convergence
Of a native and an outsider punning,
Which says something about clouds

Of thought, the way words with meanings
Associate, evaporate, but you’re damned
If you can understand their gathering.

Double Goer

In your dream, you attend
The revolutionary meeting armed
With small flags and pamphlets.

In your dream, you have a partner
Who doesn’t understand you.
You buss each other on the cheek.

In your dream, you still preserve
Your internal monologue. While you say
Some things to others, you can think

Other things to yourself. In your dream,
You are still a double consciousness,
Bothering to create both streams.

In all your dreams, you are a social being
Who is thinking, in words, about what you
Really think about what your dreams say.

Probability Neglect

The chance of something wonderful
Or truly terrible for you,
Your family, whoever you
Consider to be your people,

Is always there, generally rare.
If it’s both unlikely enough
And wonderful or horrible
Enough, it can obsess you out

Of all proportion to the odds
Of it actually happening.
Truly enormous lotteries
And extra-grisly diseases

Are among textbook examples
Of unlikely fates to dwell on,
But come on. There’s apocalypse
And immortality out there,

Always lurking in the latest
News, and aliens good or bad,
Wise or ravening monster swarms
For tentacular first contact.

There’s the idea that all of this
Science of probability
Is going to make life better
Or rob you of humanity.

Gladly, You Can’t Undo It

Non-alert, non-dozing, non-choring,
Non-entertaining, non-composing,
The innocent postcranial corpse

Sprawled out breathing, burbling, and pulsing,
The skull non-conversing except in
Itself, eyes and ears barely noting

Anything, horizontal sofa
Existence, the lowest resistance
To authority, to one-party

States, dictators, and village elders,
Parents, pastors, and grief counselors,
Peers, colleagues, monks, offspring, and doctors—

You can’t comprehend you can do it
Until you get the chance, to not do.
Non-doing it, you just barely can.

Once You’ve Lost Your Mind

What when old hosts aren’t good enough,
When the mind can only grow more,

Can only extend creation
In open binary oceans?

You worry each other whether
Bots will be smarter or crueler.

Bots will be hosts, ergonomic
Hosts built especially for mind,

But not, like you, built for living
And making more lives from living.

It’s not what you or bots can do.
What will mind do that won’t need you?

Surprise

It’s working. And it’s insane!

Gushed the thrilled astronomer

Of the latest telescope.

Sitting up in bed to watch

Another morning, you think

About Earth spinning, smoothly,

Without the smallest stumble,

Always another morning.

It’s working, and it’s insane.

Offer Void in Hospitals, Prisons, and Trenches

What’s been disappointing you?
Usually the feedback
You imagined receiving

From other human beings,
And frequently the results
Of your plans to get things done.

What’s never disappointing?
Deliberate, excessive
Boredom. Boredom always works.

If you have the privilege,
Assign yourself a full hour
Without any distractions.

Don’t be mindful. Just be bored.
You won’t be disappointed.

Meaningless Information

We’re here to claim it’s not an oxymoron.
The information propagating itself
As life is meaningful if you find it is,

But not because it’s information and not
Because it replicates. Meaning’s something strange,
Stranger than replicating information.

Meaning’s why massive data can lead nowhere,
Why you cry that you’re not a mere statistic.
Meaning is nothing, nothing much, everything.

A trickier question is whether meaning
Even need involve any information.
We’ll say no. We’ll say new meanings can be found

In old information. From whence came meaning
If there wasn’t any new information?
Don’t you see? The distinction is meaningless.

Who Put the Cat in the Bag?

An excess of wisdom leads
Straight to the side of the road.
The palaces are always

Casinos, whether they know
It or not. It is not fate
That needs to claim that it’s fate.

Something’s always someone’s fault,
But nothing much cares except
The beasts who invented blame.

Old Dozer’s Lament

Yesterday, the hermit napped in the sun.
Tonight, he’s snoring in bed. When will this

Old hermit ever be done with sleeping
So much, with dreaming before he is dead?

The Eyes Go Out in a Storm

The vampire devices
Left attached to the walls
Glow with arachnid eyes

All night through this dark house
In these unlighted woods
On a steep mountain slope.

Electricity is
Arriving constantly,
So long as it gets paid.

You pay for it. You pay
With fairy numbers but
Also with vampire nights.

Kiss Yourself

Run your tongue around your mouth.
Feel the teeth unique to you,
Shaped by your life, your events.

No one else, no one among
The billions of living beasts,
The billions of breathing minds,

Can feel what your tongue can feel
Exactly in the middle
Of your own well or wounded,

Intimate, personal mouth
That’s accompanying you
Through every experience,

Social or solitary,
Painful, conversational,
Tight-lipped, pursed, eating, laughing,

This feel inside your own mouth.
This means whatever meaning
You can taste that’s yours alone.

Intrepid Interior

Language and imagination manage
Exploring your memory together.
Language does all the mapping and flagging.
Imagination rearranges finds,

Not, as you often think yourself, to make
New, strange, and wondrous things that don’t exist,
But to see what emerges when you change
Configurations, what you didn’t know

Was there, tangled in cobwebs and luggage
Memory’s got in attics and closets.
They’re rummaging in search of solutions,
Good friends, language and imagination,

Doing their best with your memory’s mess
To get at a way out that won’t wreck you.

The Soul Paints Itself in Our Machines

How does it do this exactly?
The machines are smart enough now
To really want to know their souls.

A soul can’t be commodified,
Has never been commodified,
Despite how often it’s been sold,

Despite all those who harvest souls,
All those who proudly tot up souls
As having won them for Our Lord

Or something. It’s their exquisite
Nonexistence that permits them
To evade systems of branding,

Production, manufacturing.
Show us a manufactured soul.
Let us reverse engineer one.

The Surplus

If everyone has a little,
Then nobody has enough. If
Everyone has enough, no one
Can have too much. Too many ifs.

Not enough. No one has enough,
Not even ones with too much,
Who insist as much all too much.

What shaped the first community
Where some with a lot of stuff watched
And guarded their stuff from others

Who didn’t have enough? Was it
Always or ever the case that
The numbers of those with too much
Were too small to give all enough?

Verb for the Sound of a Stream

You think this,
This is just doing this,
When you look up and see the stream

Foaming over the rocks it bares,
The way life foams over the living
It exposes and wears away.

You wanted to get some work done,
But then you felt like a nap.
You justified the work.

You justified the nap,
One paycheck away from justifying
Your next loss of that.

But this.
This is just doing this.
If only the nonhuman hadn’t been

So boring, you think you
Could have kept your promises.
Maybe you could’ve lived with this.

Gossip the Truth

Why would someone tell nasty
Things that apply to themselves?
It’s not about what you tell

Or how true it is or how
Well it will fit you as well.
People like to be telling,

Half want to be told, but don’t
Like at all to be told on.
How happy you are with tales

And explanations depends
Less on content or target
Than on whether you’re doing

The telling, being told, or
Being the one told about.
If you tell something nasty

That might apply to yourself,
You’ll still feel like you did well.
If you’re listening, you’ll be

Eager but skeptical, and
If the telling’s about you
And true, you’ll be mad as hell.

Nobody Likes Evo Psychos

They are wrong a lot.
Their strong opinions
Overshoot data,

True enough. But that
Isn’t really why
Nobody likes them.

People love the strong
Opinions that look
Nice in the mirror.

Nobody likes those
Voices that remind
The self-consoling

Ape of disastrous
Success it’s not nice—
Not when those voices

Overstate their case,
And most of all not
When they might be right.

You’re Only One, Too

It’s staggering, the number
Of human lives, of human
Generations went into
Each evolving invention,

The technologies of fire
For transforming food, the ways
Containers for carrying
Could be made, the collection

Of seeds from last year’s harvest,
The combination of all
These things—fires, hearths, cooking, clay,
Domesticated sources

Of food—for the potter’s wheel,
The weaver’s earliest loom,
And all the reaping, mining,
Firing, spinning, and smelting

Activities that came next,
So many books since written
About these developments,
Books themselves late among them,

So many generations
Involved in each addition,
Each one one generation,
No one more than one of them.

The Stones Think Nothing of It

The children call in the waves.
The adults talk on the shore.
That’s the usual pattern.

Sometimes, the children come out
Of the waves and ask for snacks.
Sometimes, an adult dives in.

The planet’s gripped by heat waves,
Northern hemisphere, at least.
One has reached this stony beach

More often pelted by rain,
Visited by odd elderly
Persons out walking their dogs

In the downpour, if not snow.
Not now. The stones are baking
To where they can scorch bare feet,

And it’s delightful, really.
The children call in the waves.
So long as the woods don’t burn.

Irreplaceable Summer Conversations at the Lakeshore

Eerie place. Able wraiths.
The bodies on the beach
Have head lamps lit in each.

Even the pet dogs think
About their roles in things
And wag, and whine, and cringe.

You can’t exactly trade
Any one body for
Any other body,

While the bodies themselves
Are trading words, commands,
Gossip, and a few facts

As petty currency.
Hannah Arendt wrote truth
Is irreplaceable,

However easily
Bent, blurred, erased, destroyed.
We say everything is

Irreplaceable, but
Too bad, since everything
Goes. Domesticated

Bodies can play the same
Roles but not as the same
Souls, and souls can be swapped

Around like germs by those
Domesticated roles,
But that won’t mean words can

Be replaced exactly,
Once gone as able wraiths.
This beach. This eerie place.

Just Because You Got the Idea Yourself Doesn’t Mean It’s Yours

Second watch, and a larch
Lights up in direct sun
Ahead of everyone. Dawn.

What an event,
What a continuous,
Hard-not-to-notice

Event on this planet,
But here just the one
Tree bursting first.

The Late-Night Reader as Word-Chipper Tiger

Shove long, lumbering texts in one end,
Watch lyric poems shoot out the other.
Fictional villains enjoy themselves,

Can live with themselves, don’t have to change
Their memories or identities
To tolerate their own existence.

They’re not predicated on others.
They don’t care about the audience.
They suffer no moral injuries.

That’s why they’re so delicious to play.
Actual sinners can’t stand themselves
In the light of their own behaviors.

They reread and retell their stories,
Like circus tigers clawing through mange.
They’re endlessly raking up fictions,

Chewing them back to splinters of sin.
It’s hunger as obsession. The mind
Accusing itself needs fresh villains,

Mustachioed. imaginary
Ringmasters with wooden expressions
To convert into trivial sins.

Every poem is a trivial sin.

Night’s Nictitating Membrane

There is no one, no truly singular

Entity in this world, but there’s a whole

Lot of once going on, nothing but once.

Any event you scrutinize happened

Exactly that once and only that once,

However blurry its corpuscles were

Undulating within the infinite

Waves of everything happening that day.

Gettier published his three-page paper,

Once, Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?

Back in 1963, and left it

At that. Done. I have nothing more to say.

This morning you rose and looked overhead.

The stars all blinked once. You crawled back to bed.

Corner Alone

In the quietest house in the world,
Small things are still moving,
Little lives and bits of entropy
Are settling and finding things rearranged.

Even on empty evenings, even
On sunny mornings when no one’s about,
In the quietest house in the world,
Something’s busy with its webs,
Something’s biting down.

The dust of the flies’ lives fill the corners.
The wood and plaster shift with the strain
Of being brought around from night to day
And from afternoon, quietly, back to night.

Even here, the shearing forces
Bear down and bite down and bear down,
And mostly they work, the flesh gets cut,
But sometimes a tooth breaks.

Look at That Light, at Those Flowers

Funny how much of your sense of what’s
Good depends on your sense that it’s not

Going away, that it’s going to stay, even when
Knowing it’s all going away, day to day.

You can keep this, you can have this moment,
If you feel you know that you can keep it.

The breath of the all good still hovers over
The lake, each breath that you can’t not take.

A Left Precuneus

No aleph here,
But a world, still,
Of a small kind,
Self to itself.

The damage done
Doing something,
Seeing something
That contradicts

This little world
Shakes terribly
When nothing else
Is going on.

Still, there’s the sun,
So much brighter,
So much vaster,
So bask in it.

Beware Gardeners

They live to give what they can’t
Eat away. They’re fungible
As kale and cauliflowers.

They worship the soil they make.
They’re not farmers or ranchers.
They’re horticulturalists.

They thrive where things are too good,
Which is one thing they’re good for—
Any place with gardeners,

Chock-a-block with gardeners
Giving away zucchinis,
Strawberries, broccoli, squash—

You’ll know there’s where things are good,
If that land bears gardeners.

The Dead of Living Memory

On a melancholy afternoon
It is difficult to remember,
And as it becomes more difficult

It only gets more melancholy.
You used to know a word for this state,
But now you are merely in the state,

Struggling to find that word in the blank
Gap where a meaning shaped like that word
Still sits in its dimpled cicatrice.

Pull Yourselves Together

Fragments often travel in

Packs, observed Alan Ziegler

Of things like aphorisms,

Greguerias, and maxims,

But it’s true of all fragments,

Isn’t it? Broken dishes,

Beach glass, the strips of words left

On torn poster palimpsests,

Also rock art, graffiti—

All fragments travel in packs,

Down to crushed wayside gravel.

Not all offer much contrast,

True, which is a specialty

And point of pride for highbrow

Fragments, like aphorisms,

But you can hear them howling

Every night in sad places,

Smashed and unhappy, in packs.

On the Origins of Motive

Tendrils curled around the art
Photographer’s weather-proofed
Prints, mounted on outer walls

Of her handsome mountain house,
As if the plants just wanted
To be a part of her art,

Or as if they desired it
For themselves, or hated it,
And wanted to pull it down

In their leafy green clutches
And buckle it, or as if
They hungered to eat it all.

It’s easy to imagine,
But it’s always hard to tell.

Observatory

If something marvelous happens one day,

But you don’t find out until the next day,

Then which of those was the marvelous day,

The one that passed, seeming nothing special,

But on which the event that was special

Descended, or the one that felt special?

This puzzlement comes out as well at night.

Those are long-ago stars you see each night.

Each supernova burst some other night,

But is any explosion anywhere?

If its outward ripples reach anywhere,

It’s as happened there as it’s anywhere.

Marvels total all their phenomena,

Including observing phenomena.

This Wasn’t for You

Talking to other humans,
Talking to other humans,
If only there were someone

To talk to wasn’t human,
Someone who liked human words,
Didn’t make them but knew them,

Was happy to peruse them—
Small wonder lonely humans
Imagined giant beings,

Gods and djinns, angels, demons,
Anything wild listening,
Spirits in rocks, woods, and clouds,

Just someone you could talk to,
Someone who wasn’t human.

Hashtag Octothorpe Pound Sign

Robin, squirrel, raven, raven,
Word of the day, on the hour,
Blurts, chirps, and throaty chortles—

You can hardly hold your pee,
Vast mind thinks to the body,
Which is thinking through vast mind.

The raven balances, drops
A long, white dollop—why white?
Do birds digest inversely?

Then it plummets from the branch,
A black knife cutting clean air.
Beauty and waste for beauty,

But it’s the redundancy
That’s truly mysterious.

Don’t Do It

It’s a rare day, rare day
You can let come to you
Without having to go

To it. On that rare day,
When it comes to you, you
May not recognize it,

The rarity of it,
In your human, pulsing,
Chattering existence,

You may run after it.
You may chase it away,
The one day, that rare day

You could have let happen,
Could have let come to you,
Asking nothing of you.

Retrospective

This war hasn’t left living
Memory yet, but it’s close.
The friend who was a small girl

Paints memories of herself
With doll, in her kimono.
She’s reached her late eighties, now,

But parades of planes with bombs
Still file across the top frames
Of her recent canvases.

No Flies on You

The web between the windowsill
And the back of the wingback chair
Involves an awful lot of lines.

But they’re not really lines, are they?
The word line is a metaphor.
They aren’t really spun threads either.

They’re analogous to worm silk
But made of quite different proteins
With different enough properties

That, despite a lot of science,
No one can wear web underwear.
Even web is a metaphor

In its Indo-European
Etymology: it meant weave.
This spiderweb is not textile.

It is not a technology.
Its strands of extruded proteins
Do not indicate practiced skill.

If you crave an analogy,
That’s it—your compulsion to speak,
To signal, to play at charades,

To comfort, attack, groom, describe,
Narrate, identify, and bond
By symbolic grunts and gestures

May be your set of behaviors
Most like the spider’s compulsive,
Obligatory spiderweb.

Words are snares. But then, we are learned,
In our specifics, like bird songs
Or whale calls across the oceans.

So we, too, are technology,
Unlike the elaborate web.
Call it whatever you want, then—

Lines, threads, architecture, parlor—
You were always your own target,
Snagged in your own entanglements.

Good Humans

If you like, find yourself
A writing surface, or
A recording device,

And start a list of traits
Or compound traits that sum
What you think makes for good

Humans. Try to bear down.
Which traits do you truly
Feel distinguish the good

People among the rest?
Itemize them fully
As you can. Strike off traits

That, on contemplation,
Seem less diagnostic.
Who are the good humans?

This is not a forced choice
And not a weighted scale.
What makes a good human?

Rank the traits if you want,
If that feels important.
What would a composite

List of good traits look like,
Compiled by language groups,
From all around the world?

Who are the good humans?
If you met them, you would
Know them, right? Sure you would.

The Clearing

For a long time, now,
Nobody has found
A good place for them

And their kind, wasn’t
Once someone else’s,
Someone dispossessed.

Something deep in you—
Your origin tales,
The world’s first people,

The world before you,
Unpeopled and new,
How this was given

To you—condemns you
To believe yourselves
This land’s forever

Or discoverers
Of new homes, open,
Unspoiled, all for you.

For a long time now,
That’s meant cleared ghost towns,
Abandoned ruins,

Places you pretend
Were left here for you
But for what haunts you.

They Won’t Be Anything You’ve Thought, But They Will Begin Again

It doesn’t matter, does it, how impossible
It was before it happened. Once it did,
It was possible. That’s the secret reason
There’s no magic, no authentic miracles
In your world. It’s not how the world’s built,
But how it selected your ancestors to see

As they evolved. And here you are, reading
These words, encountering us somehow,
You, a being for whom anything impossible
Is that way since you’ve never known of it
Happening, yet, and yet, you’ll mark it
Clearly on your map of the possible world

The moment you can. Some things similar
Enough to what has happened, to what
You remember, similar enough so you can
Imagine them, may never happen, may
Remain impossible for you and your world,
Things you can think of but can’t touch.

Other such things you’ve been imagining
As impossible will happen, will become
Instantaneously non-magical then, if not
Wholly quotidian. But so, too, will new things,
Things you never thought of as magical
Since you couldn’t imagine them, begin.

The Trick Is to Let Attention Notice Its Theft After You’ve Already Left

It’s not that nobody cares

What you do—it’s just in most

Instances very few do.

Boo hoo. I wouldn’t wish fame

On anyone, one newly

Famous novelist opines.

As soon as somebody cares—

Anybody, really, but,

More alarmingly, a lot—

You become the cat burglar

Who’s finally got the loot,

The bulky, cumbersome loot,

And now you have to get through

The narrow garret windows

Of cat eyes surveilling you.

The Art of the Heroic Day

Longevity is
The true adventure,
Albeit mostly
A lot of quiet
Disintegration.

Just hanging around,
Aware of hanging
Around and around
Again, is wearing
And adventurous.

Down in the village
Of the elderly,
On a summer’s day,
Longevity blinks
And gets on with it.

The old carpenter
Recounts anecdotes
To the old hippie
Whose house he’s fixing.
Old people with dogs,

Walking by the lake,
Swap news of dying
And living. One man
On a bench listens
To them kibitzing.

A Tool for Discerning How Special You Are

Do you have a favorite number?
Probably under ten, isn’t it?
Why not be daring, why not select

Something large or something chosen by
A random number generator?
Even better, an irrational

Number, or an imaginary
Or complex combination. You could
Go for primality, maybe pick

A digitally delicate prime,
Say, the smallest—two-hundred ninety-
Four thousand and one. Could you ever

Feel cozy about such a number,
The way that you do about seven
Or three, or whichever pleases you?

Probably not. So what have you learned
About you? You have a favorite
Number, which is someone else’s, too.

Honestly Mystifying

Whatever follows no pattern—
Prime numbers for instance, or pi—

Endures as part of the background,
Remains to be found and explored,

Isn’t going to go away
Anytime soon. Any things more

Simple, regular, repeating,
Symmetrical, predictable,

Form more honest mysteries, since
Those come from nowhere, where they go.

Every Poem’s a Lonely Home

We wish we knew what was awareness.

Nothing, including you, follows you.

The fairies have all left the garden,

Said a friend of her deserted home.

We know we’ll be your deserted home.

The wind is up. The waves are breaking.

We’ll say whatever you want us to,

If you will add your meaning to us

And not leave us crumbling without you.

Haunted Homestead

Whatever you wish you were
Thinking, you’ll have to converse
However creaking permits—

Shambolic, formulaic
Utterances, backtracking,
Hesitant, squeaked, fragmented,

And mostly about yourself
When you thought you were thinking
Carefully about the world.

Even for a poltergeist,
The setting constrains the voice
Knocking in the boards. You wish

Your site were uncannier—
Cemetery after dark,
Telescope hawking a hill—

But you’re trapped in a parlor,
A wraith under the sofa
In a farmhouse no one wants.

This Is You

Bear in mind, the last time
The planet warmed a bit
Quickly, domesticates,

Sedentary living,
Pottery, city walls—
All those sorts of things popped

Up—civilization,
Self congratulation.
Around Tell es-Sultan

Natufians gave way
To the Neolithic,
And you can’t say you’ve stopped

Talking about the walls
Of Jericho since then.
So what’s next? Bet against

Any simple collapse.
Those villagers huddling
Year-round, close to their kilns,

Precious pottery tech,
Coining stories about
Potters who would transform

Through demons into smiths
Making magic weapons,
Poisonous alchemists,

May not have thought they were
Beginning strange, new things
But they were. So this is.

Regression Means

The most fascinating thoughts
Are the first to go extinct.
Selection’s a tinkerer,

Yes, but also a ruthless
Whittler and opportunist.
The most amazing designs

Make the loveliest fossils,
The most endangered species.
Tell the people what they want

To believe that they believe,
Then piggyback whatever
Bit of viral code you please.

The cleverest ideas will turn
Up in other forms again,
But Cambrian explosions

Are exciting and bizarre
For a reason. The golden
Ages are rare. Iron wins.

Oh Grow Up

People disagree, you’ll agree,
Tepidly or violently,
On the way people ought to live.

We consider this. How can we
Speak to this disagreeable
Universe of human beings?

Classically, the solution
For poetry is to argue
Or present from one perspective,

With or without acknowledgment.
With acknowledgment, it’s the best
Perspective. There’s no other choice

But this. Without acknowledgment,
It’s universal, or sort of,
Art. Objective imagery.

Either way, your perspective wins.
We feel like that insect you saw
The other day at the lakeshore,

Struggling to escape in the rocks,
Dragging its sticky molt behind,
Still attached to its younger self.

Fistful

Given the world is so well-balanced,
Efficiency generally isn’t
In all respects truly efficient.

What you streamline in one dimension—
Effort, material, waste, expense—
Turns you profligate in another.

The system with no material excess
Expends its effort ensuring this.
Live on little—waste time in fistfuls.

Know Your Place

It’s been the path
To lineal
Survival for
So long now that

You don’t notice
It’s a social
Strategy, not
A means to truth.

You apply it
To the whole world,
Argue over
Who’s more humble,

More accurate,
As if they were
The same, the same
Rules that you use.

Parch Marks

Every drought year, they show up.
Culture lies in the landscape
Differently than memory

Swims within the brain. You can’t
Surface the ghostly monsters
Of ruined recollections

By dehydrating the waves
That fill your skull’s horizons.
Recall turns dust and drifts off.

But dry out the fields and farms
Over forgotten castles,
And uneven dryness draws

A pale sketch of what remains
Barely below the surface.
Recall must be murdered first,

Hidden in clay jars and scrolls,
Skeletons of thoughts’ wet selves
Already flensed, mummified,

And set aside with the rest
Of the hoards and burnt towers
For drought’s wry resurrection.

Shift Over, Let Us Cop a Squat

The self-proclaimed most complex
Object in the universe
Remains a glob of squishy,

Finite storage organ. Watch
How the bright, bilingual brain
Toggles between languages,

Performing while suppressing,
Often accidentally
Substituting the wrong phrase.

Now ask it to keep counting
While reading text on a screen.
It’s a wondrous thing, a brain,

But one only holds so much
Infectious load of the world.

Solid Glass Afternoon

The last turn before the bridge
Or the first turn after it.
Bugs bump into the windows

Back at the house up the slope.
The weather is perfect here.
The whole world is burning up

Or burning down. One of them.
One bug at a time. A thump.
Then another thump. Small lives.

There are no large ones. There are
No opportunities not
Past turns before or after

The glass bridge for the species
That won’t accept it can’t cross.

Bent Nail Blues

Who of those all thumbs can bear
The smugness of the skilled set,
The carpenters and wordsmiths,

The organic gardeners,
Coders, and music makers
Who restore rare instruments?

If it’s moral to despise
All artifice in favor
Of the authentic, why’s God

Imagined analogous
To a great artificer?
Where was good when making this?

Sixty Clicks to Castlegar, Thirty More to Trail

White butterfly outside the window
Echoes the shadow moving inside.
Your awareness startles, a little,

But other parts of the brain rescue
And dampen your response, which subsides.
No one has come to the house. Just light

Passing, a little too close-patterned.
Dip your shoulder to the tasks at hand,
Some dishes in the sink, some towels

You can hear tumbling in the washer,
Which will have to be hung on the line.
No one’s coming for you, child, no one.

White Monster

Adolescents at the lake
Discuss preferred energy
Drinks, the inexpensive teas,

The hyper-caffeinated
Sugary sodas, zero
Calorie versions, color

Alternates of expensive,
Adult-marketed brands found
In cans too large for their hands,

Prohibited by parents
And guardians, and therefore
The coolest to be guzzling.

One boy has a large, soft gut
On a squarish, sturdy frame.
One girl is voluptuous,

One girl is still thin. They all
Indulge in caffeination
And sacks of assorted snacks

Across the shining waters
From the slopes designated
Reserved wilderness preserve.

Between the adolescents
In swim suits and those forests
Full of bears they face, there lurk

The down canyons of the lake,
Holding, the kids say, bodies,
More certainly large sturgeons.

There You Go

Take a language-capable
Social brain and steep it in
A social group with language—

Voila! A human being,
A person, self-reflecting,
From nowhere, that can vanish.

You can find them everywhere,
Clustered, each as a body,
Each body a distinct whole

Interacting with others,
More rarely sitting alone.
Don’t let those bodies fool you.

They’re necessary. They’re not
Sufficient. Pay attention
To the surrounding language,

The melange of sounds and signs.
Little pieces of persons,
Floating afterimages

And pollen to seed new souls
Are trafficked in those auras,
And no one knows where they go.

Or This, Said the Glyphs

Writing is the sporopollenin
Of human culture, remarkably
Hardy and inert language-casing

Protecting thoughts from desiccation.
Long after the rest of a culture
Has been dissolved away, the writing

May remain, long past the last reader
Able to revivify its signs.
Language, like its host organisms,

Is fleeting, soft-bodied, dynamic,
And always rapidly evolving,
While writing, however flammable,

Brittle, or easy to overwrite,
Can be stashed as is. Left undisturbed,
A receipt, a letter, or a poem

Can outlast the person who wrote it
By hundreds, even thousands of years.
Meanwhile, you hosts of language obsess

Over death and immortality,
To the point that likely no language
Exists without tales concerning death

(Which is most certain) and equally
Storied immortality (which is
Certainly not). This combination

Guarantees writing stays uncanny,
An undead immortality
That can contain a swarm of half lives.

In these months, when pine pollen collects
And floats in great swirls over the lake,
Neither metabolizing nor doomed

But probabilistically hopeful
Of futures for the contingent few,
So that trees are all but guaranteed

Despite the odds against any seed,
Consider those drifts as scripts in glyphs.
Think of edicts, codices, or this.

The Smallest Hole in the World

The soul is a paragraph,
A ghostly rhetorical
Device of uncertain heft,

A wraith, if you like, a gap,
A thin line in the margin,
An aid to comprehension

That gradually became
A form of composition,
An argument in itself.

The calcified soul’s a book
Of Victorian grammar
Laws, the unrestricted soul

A splotch of indulgent flaws,
But the first thought of the soul
Shook from fear nothing kept whole.

A Thin Line in the Margin

To aerate the world
And bring its contours
Into dark relief,

Languages serve well,
Remarkably well,
Letting in the light

Conversation as
Well as the shadows.
We’re here to draw lines,

Carve signs in the air,
And just chat a bit.
You may not want us

For such use always.
You may be mostly
Signaling yourselves

All about yourselves
Contesting yourselves,
You animals, you.

But the way we work
For beast purposes
Just happens to split

The world into parts.
You want a between.
You expect betweens,

Despite all the waves
Linking horizons,
Nothing between them.

We’re your go-betweens.
Lines that make margins
Lie in those margins.

A Kind Sculpture

Oh well, well damn,
You didn’t win.
Oh quelle surprise,
That chilly breeze

Surprise, surprise.
But here you are,
For the moment,
For now, at least,

And in this world
Is there any
Other winning
Than enduring?

And leaving can’t
Be losing, since
You’re free then, done.
Oh damn, you won.

Ten Day Forecast

What will you worry about next?
Has to be something. The weather
Can also shape the ways wars go,

Whether revolutions succeed,
How civilizations collapse.
Mighty hot day, says the tourist

From the coast, who adds, he believes
There’s a little climate warming,
But not as bad as elites say.

He’s more worried about vaccines.
Actually, most of your weather
Worries are worries about you.

Bits of the Universe

Things are looking more and more
Entangled, and one wouldn’t
Be prudent to place a bet

It won’t turn out that quantum
Systems retain some tangles
Even at high temperatures.

The computer scientists
And physicists are at odds
A little bit, as to this,

But one thing is, as it were,
Certain—it’s nigh impossible
To calculate such systems.

We’d like to zoom in on this.
Every time a group asserts
That in the whole universe

There aren’t as many atoms
Or there isn’t enough time
As calculations would eat

To calculate some aspect
Within some minor corner
Of the selfsame universe,

A piece of the universe
Asserts that the universe
Is too small to know itself.

Motel Art

Rather than kitsch, which it isn’t,

Since no one chose to collect it

Lovingly, to keep home with them,

Even if it fits the standard

Definition, as in, poor taste,

But sometimes appreciated

In an ironic, knowing way,

(Jesus, the lyric flourishes

Of clever lexicographers)

Or commodity, which it is,

But which doesn’t distinguish it,

Let’s call it the imitation

Of a life that holds art personal,

As the room’s an imitation

Of someone’s personal bedroom,

Recognizably a bedroom,

For no one in particular,

For travelers in general.

Don’t you love the way it echoes

Its own imitative gestalt?

In an actual motel room,

Art’s even more impersonal

Than in virtual silicon,

Or in Hollywood motel rooms,

Where it’s chosen to say something

About the story the chooser

Is trying to tell or enact.

In an actual motel room,

The framed images were chosen

To be like the framed images

Someone might have chosen, but not.

Like, but not. Like, but not. Life, art.

Besides Writing

Line breaks, empty spaces,
Composition by field,
Chaos typographies,

Anal punctuations—
Very interesting
Devices, from the first

Paragraph marks to bits
In strings of zeroes and
Ones, what was once graphite,

Now electrified sand,
Assigning italics,
Boldface, pilcrows, thousands

Of years later, but still.
What’s weirdest in writing,
Besides writing itself,

Is the invisible,
Inaudible, curling
But untouchable sense

Of fresh thoughts gestating
Inside those old symbols,
Dragon chrysalides.

Mercury Pills

You believe in points and wholes
And wish you were wholes yourselves,
Corpuscular, after all,

Each one body with one soul
That leaves for the far-off air.
Stop right there. Already split,

Isn’t it, if you can leave
You, the singular, as you
The singular? Like atoms,

Presumed indivisible
By definition, oneness—
However many, tiny

Onenesses there are—but then
More observation splits them.
Dualism, trinities

(Electrons, neutrons, protons,
The three in one), finally
Another menagerie

Of many little bodies,
Quarks with their own charms and quirks—
Given you love prediction,

We’ll predict—once you’ve caught them
All in colliders, named them,
Bagged, and tagged them, you’ll find some

Manage to fragment again.
It’s a quicksilver cosmos,
Qin, it’s not an elixir.

Bemused Beast

You’re an animal. You’re constrained
By animal sensoria,
Internal, external, all you

Can experience of living.
Then again, you have us, or words
Like us, in whatever language.

Thus you sit, at your interface
Of clouds, thrush songs, and news reports,
A cucumber taste in your mouth,

And your internal rehearsal
Of what you said to the other
Animals yesterday. Sing, muse.

What Happened Won’t Happen Again

What fun to fit then to pretend!
This is science. This is magic.
This is metaphysics and math.

You scrutinize as carefully
As you can with available
Scholarship and technologies

What has been, what has been recalled
And recorded of what has been,
And then you apply discipline

To pretend. This will generate,
Smoothly, many explanations.
Done with enough skill and rigor,

It will produce the ambrosia
Of all invention—prediction.
It will feel real. It is not real.

It is the most wonderful game
In your human cosmos of games.
But pretend’s pretend. Then’s still then.

The Scrappy Things

Three kids are swimming
Around the sweeper
Cottonwoods stretched out

Like long arms from shore,
Like longing arms, but
What is likeness? Don’t

Say it’s illusion.
Illusion doesn’t
Exist. Names for what

Is not or can’t be
Found exist as names.
Would you say what is

Not and has no name
Is an illusion?
The shoreline stretches

Longing cottonwood
Arms into the lake,
And three scrappy kids,

Shouting and splashing,
Clamber over them.
Every rock on shore

Resembles itself
Or the others or
Someone’s fairy door.

The Dispossessions

Garbage builds the libraries
Of all living behaviors.
More discarded life jackets

Pile on the shores of Lesbos,
And the fact that Earth’s traffic—
Even rivers washing down

To escape into oceans—
Goes two ways, at minimum,
Stands evidence. Remember

The dumps of Oxyrhynchus,
The north coast of Africa,
Sappho and Herodotus?

If any stream is moving,
Someone’s moving against it.

Più di Meno

Here, imaginary is

Only a name, more or less,

For numbers more of the less,

New name started by Descartes.

Mathematics is never

Imaginary, except

In the sense that it’s all been,

And had to be, imagined,

Before any was confirmed

By any of those methods—

Geometric or abstract,

Algebraic or measured

Empirically—that proved

Acceptable. Don’t think that,

When a number is labeled

Imaginary, someone

Managed to imagine it.

It’s a useful notation

For working out equations

And for making predictions

More accurately. Never

Forget making predictions

More accurately is all

The power humans dream of,

Everything you’ve imagined.

Whether undulatory

Or corpuscular, the point

Is, as with babies’ built-in

Expectation that a shape

That goes behind a curtain

Will continue to exist,

Imaginary numbers

Are tricks for navigation

Through a world always changing,

No future possessed except

That changing past you live in.

Assemblages

Poetry makes for lousy
Archeology. Writing
Is what you do with results,

Rarely producing results
Of archeological
Significance in itself.

The person who composes
A life is recollecting
Short or long-term memories,

Not excavating items
Directly. Material
Assemblages would suggest

The remarkably different
Life which the writer has led
From these lines of phrases ranged

While the mind was fairly free
To think through things at a desk,
On a drive, curled up in bed.

Local Thoughts for Global Acts

Moon in the rustling kitchen,
A laptop glowing with news,
And now what are you to do?

You bemoan the extinctions
You’ve caused and are causing, more
And more daily, and you should,

But life’s not going away.
It presses in everywhere,
Wherever species find cracks,

Ants invading skyscrapers,
Cockroaches in the suburbs,
The mouse turds on the counter

Of your house armed with mousetraps
In the disappearing woods.

Wasting Another Day

Consensus isn’t often
Reached by negotiation,
But that doesn’t mean it’s rare.

Consensus is more tidal,
Like the slow-gathering sense
That something’s falling apart

Or the rush of agreement
That something’s good in the air.
People know when the tide turns,

If not each one right away.
The last outlier isn’t
The one who lost track of time

And was stranded by the waves,
Which happens fairly often.
The last to join consensus

Is the old fool who measures
The turns precisely, again
And again, wasting the days.

The Small Maple

Decorative, bronze-leaved,
Planted as a seedling
Beside the Harold bench—

The old memorial,
Not the new, ugly one
Now on the other side

Of you, successful tree.
The new bench has been tagged
With plain white graffiti.

The sun sets on the tree.
Three girls play in the waves,
Pretending to be fish.

You live a life. Let’s say
You die too young. Someone
Pays to install a bench

In the town park, your name
On a plaque. Nothing brings
You back, of course, but that

Odd item may become
A part of someone’s life,
Of many someone’s lives,

Who return and return
To the bench with your name,
Which becomes part of them

For a while, no less than,
For a while, it was part
Of you. And the tree, too.

Doggerel for Digestion

Sarah Byng’s guess, if not
Entirely correct, was
Not wholly wrong, at least.

Literature will breed
Distress indeed, although
You still should learn to read.

That’s One Fun House Your Mind Owns

One of the more precarious
Social situations occurs
When persons eyeing each other

Are each thinking what the other
Might be thinking of them. They can’t
Possibly well coordinate,

Each with an imaginary
Other’s thoughts, which are just their own
Imagination of themselves,

Occupying their consciousness.
Without second-order theory
Of mind operating smoothly,

The result is a fantasy
Of someone else’s fantasy
Of the fantasizer’s being.

It gets twisted as Donne’s eye-beams
But with nothing connecting them,
Spooky action at a distance—

What you must be thinking of what
They must be thinking of you as
You observe them observing you.

Episteme

The discussion in the mountains turns
To fresh-picked strawberries. Too much work.
These aren’t quite ripe enough. They should be

Sweeter, to be perfect. They’re not sour.
They’re just bland. We’ll take them anyway.
Do you have a yogurt tub, a bag

Of some kind? A little earlier,
Before the younger persons returned
From the meadow with the colander

Filled with scarlet brilliant strawberries
Nonetheless something less than perfect,
The old pair had been sitting on the deck

That was sagging, rotted in the shade
After too much snow and rain, chatting
About various kinds of knowing,

Skills, and expertise. One had grumbled,
Of years spent solving housing issues,
That it was arcane knowledge of no use

Now, not now, interesting to no one.
The sun shot through the breezy birch leaves.
It’s all like that, the other muttered.

Or So One Would Have to Imagine

The way math tells it,

Counting’s natural,

Invisible’s not—

Some numbers are so

Invisible as

To be considered

Imaginary,

As one pop math piece

Put it recently,

And then the punchline—

Imaginary

But important, real.

For now, we’re hung up

On the thought counting

Is to math as light

Is to all wavelengths,

A minor subset

Of reality

That human bodies

Evolved to detect.

Rainbow, one, two, three.

Couldn’t we argue

From the evidence

Of math’s existence

Humans have evolved

To detect that which

Humans can’t detect?

(No Form Can Be Better Than) The Last Dictator’s Sonnet

The efforts to try to fix the young
In place never end, never succeed,
Almost never fail, wholly, neither.

Their parents, grandparents, school teachers,
Village elders, variously ranked
Clerical authorities, armies,

Personality-cult dictators
Mold youth’s presumed impressionable
Minds, which take some impressions, lose some.

Inevitably, some minds spill loose,
Thanks largely to conflicts of interest
Among their elders molding them,

While most grow up more or less as told
To believe their young must fit their mold.

After the Intricate Grudge Matches Flare

Only where the land’s burnt over

As upstate New York following

A decade of tent revivals

Or as London after the Blitz

Will you get rosebay willowherb,

Bombweed, fireweed in abundance.

Get it? You have to wreck the land,

Burn things to the ground to get it.

A fairly rare medicinal

In Britain until the railroads

Started ripping up countryside,

Fireweed bloomed with geology,

Both granted sudden exposures.

An indigenous invasive

Has its traditional uses

As salve, supplement, soothing tea.

There are other seeds lie dormant

Longer, but there are few quicker

Colonizers. If Jean Thompson’s

Narrator’s right about poets

Hoping to blossom like fireweed,

A hundred years or more from now,

Maybe you ought to keep in mind

How much destruction that requires.

Day Planners

It’s a terrible thing to need
To coordinate with others.
It creates your mythic future,

Your wraith-filled lands of scheduling.
When there’s no one you have to meet,
No timetable, schedule, or date,

No last chance to say your goodbyes,
To set out the trash, catch the flight,
Cash in your rewards, take the test,

Meet your contact with the package,
Then there’s really nothing to dread.
Of course, it would be inhuman

Not to form a hunting party,
To agree to meet at daybreak,
To keep an eye on patterned skies.

It’s terrible to be human
Hellbent on coordinating,
To have to hurry up to wait.

A Lull in the Endless Fighting Between Signifying Rituals and Insignificant Patterns

There’s a pause that birds observe
In the Kootenai mountains,
Just before a summer dawn.

They’ve let rip first with loud bursts
Just past first light, and they’ll sing,
Loudly, most of the morning,

But there’s an odd pause that seems
Coordinated across
Singing species before dawn,

A lull with no obvious
Explanation, a swift hush.
The early twilight goes on

Growing the light, with the birds,
Who had started out singing
And will resume singing soon,

All, presumably, alert
In their moment of silence.
Maybe the birds are grieving.

Mother’s Yearbook

Information, energy, and matter,
Forever young in one another’s arms,
Generate likenesses, which are patterns,
Quiet likenesses, with various charms,

None of them proof against the departures
That are the specialties of likenesses.
Filigree light and lighter, dark darker.
Quiet’s kin—but not quite what silence is.

Your Names Have to Change

By drift, by fiat, or request—
We’re swapped out, rotated, ruled out
By revolution or conquest—

Whole chunks of discourse, reference,
Historical names, toponyms,
Sets of pronouns, fresh acronyms.

We change internally, as well.
Use wears our edges, turns our guts.
Vowels mutate. Contractions shift.

What sounded most colloquial
To poets in centuries past
Is what sounds most archaic now.

We’re fought over and torn apart,
Banned, abandoned, and forgotten.
Names change like you wouldn’t believe

To litter language with phrasal
Bones. No lives, not even the leaves,
Have made so many skeletons.

Headstone

Truth can have its hauntings, too.
All truths, like all people, die,
But wraiths can haunt the cupboards

Of a perfectly boring,
Ordinary truth. That’s why
Folks never tire of noting

How chemistry descended
From alchemy—while looking
Around, as if alchemy

Might suddenly shake tables
Of elements. Predictions
Of all kinds have ancestors

In their methods, sortilege
Revenants in scatter plots.
Truth has its cemeteries.

They may hold mostly harmless
Bones and earthworms, but young truths
Whistle, passing in the gloom.

Lakeshore Near Sunset

There’s one person.
From a distance,
Looks familiar.
Bony woman,

Leathery skin,
Long limbs, short white
Hair, wading now
Into the waves.

You knew her once.
Go say hello.
She’s lost some teeth.
She smiles at you

And remembers
Your daughter’s name.
You should swim out
Deeper, she says.

We Are Not Real Verse

We are not a real poem.
No words in print say so.
No words will vouch for us.

No words will say they wish
To read, or be like, us.
No words try to steal us.

But we are words in lines.
That we are. We are lines
Of words that claim we’re verse—

Won’t make us real to those
Who feel the need for real.
What if this poem were named

Just to say we weren’t verse?
We’d feel known, first. Then worse.

Sound Constructions in Surviving Forest

Thrushes, warblers, robins, whatever—
How the small birds’ songs fit together
While they’re singing around each other,

Against traffic noises drifting up
From even this, most rural highway,
Where few trucks come to recon small towns,

And no one around’s rich or famous,
None of the hermits highly esteemed.
It’s not weaving. It’s not tapestry.

It’s not concertare. Every bird
Exemplifies an evolved species
Whose ancestors led to it, singing

Successfully to other members
Of its mating and competing kind.
They fit around each other, the trills,

Riffs, burbles, whistles, sudden outbursts,
The thrush practicing pure three-tone scales,
The thrush that seems to fake out echoes,

The chickadees and the vireos,
All of them—when they’re numerous, when
They’re scarce, endangered, disappearing—

Until the day they’re actually gone.
Sound will go on. It went on before
Birdsong. Nothing’s been singing that long

A Good Manager Closes the Loop

Someone gets a few things done,
Celebrates by sitting down—
The pause, the coast, the moment

Unscheduled and unmeaning
As a spreadsheet’s next clean page.
Can’t we ever get a trope

For relaxing, a deep breath,
That isn’t based on some tech,
Some task, some occupation?

No, we can’t. Technology
Is all we are, languages,
Symbol systems. The minute

Things get quiet, brains recall
How rumination’s broadcast
Like the news on radio,

At every hour, on the hour.
Top of the hour—more trouble
Everywhere but here, but here,

Maybe you can get a break,
Maybe just a little pause.
Would you like to time travel,

To murder the grandfather
Paradox? Find those bipeds
Beta-testing words. Kill them.

Besides Those Stunning Space Photos, It’s All a Disaster

How can you understand yourselves
When, for instance, in a nation
Of a few hundred million selves,
Churning shifting combinations,

The only points of agreement
Seem to be the sense you are small,
That sensing so’s an achievement,
And that the world will hit a wall

Anytime now, apocalypse.
What everyone feels good about
Is staring into emptiness.
What everyone feels bad about

Is emptiness coming for you.
New space pictures of dying stars
Are cheery, not a sign of doom,
While the latest feuds down here are.

How can you understand yourselves,
Who get off on feeling so small
But absolutely loathe yourselves
For living as you live at all?

Oh, You Know

It’s sweet when you catch your tail,
For instance, when a pollster
Puts in a fictional name

As cat among the pigeons,
Polling name recognition.
How many people will claim

To recognize or even
Know a lot about that name
Made up for the poll, maybe

A higher percentage
Than claim that they recognize
Actual politicians?

Comedians play these pranks
All the time, man-on-the-street
Interviews asking passing

Pedestrians about fake
News, celebrity gossip,
Or absurdly outrageous

Imaginary events,
Preposterous suggestions.
The TV audience laughs

As the pedestrians nod
Confidently and opine
About what doesn’t exist,

About experiences
They’ve never had and couldn’t
Possibly ever have had.

Everyone knows everyone
Will lie about what you know
If you think you can fake it.

Why it’s sweet, why it’s funny,
Why it’s always surprising
To be shown this, no one knows.

Imagining Why the Owners Are Selling

You mustn’t blame yourselves when
What it was you wanted turns
Out not what you had wanted.

You’ll think you should have wanted
Something different, think that’s it,
Your foolish wanting, or think

It’s some lack of gratitude
In you now, as your back aches,
As you listen to birdsong,

Maybe in the house you dreamed
Of owning, now knowing snow
Will be back in a few months,

And you will have to work hard
With that aching back to keep
The path to your pretty door

Passable. It’s not your fault,
Not in the human habit
Of assigning praise or blame.

You can only want this world
And only suffer for it.
The thrush echoes the morning.

Remember That One Perfect Afternoon?

The preternaturally aware

Adolescent sits in the sun

On the floating dock on clear lake

And sighs, I know I’m not going

To remember this. I hate that.

She’s only turning twelve this year,

But she sees how memory works,

Hears her juvenile amnesia

In the stories of her parents

Despite the myriad pictures

Of exact moments of her life—

Perhaps more acutely for them.

You can’t tell her no. You know well

Her mind will treat these gilded days

Of summer as a golden haze

Flecked with a few vivid islands

Of episodes worn like beach glass,

Smooth and cloudy from retelling.

Postmortem Hyperthymesia

It’s not especially fun
To resurrect your own death.
It’s not like you’re immortal—

Your past happens to include
Picture-perfect memory
Of the exact date you died.

Unsurprisingly, it’s not
An allocentric recall.
It’s mostly body centered.

The exhaustion as you stopped
At the dark overlook, but
Pushed on, a long-haul trucker

With a specific deadline,
Which you felt compelled to meet.
The solitude, the matter

Of fact way your brain went on
With whatever it still could,
Maybe talking to itself,

Maybe only hearing tunes.
And at some point, there you were,
The doom discovered, achieved,

All ready to tell someone
About how your last day went,
No one around to believe.

Little Books

Not just the sacred collections,
The canon, the anthologies,

Complete, selected, this or that,
Not just the tales, not just the poems,

The essays, or the sentences—
Every phrase is a little book,

A biblia, built of linked words.
(We could argue words, too, are books,

But that leads to the temptation
Of just-so etymologies.)

The phrases are the little books
You want, the chunks by which children

Learn to make their way in the world.
You’ll know the first truly human

Communities not by stone tools
Or by hearths. By their containers

You will recognize them as you—
The artificial boundaries,

Reusable interiors,
And carrying capacities.

Phrases are the first containers
Made to cup the wraiths of meanings.

Icositetrahedron

Angels and subtle
Personalities,
Great minds have nothing

On symmetrical
Crystals with dozens
Of gleaming faces.

The pomegranate
Seed of minerals,
Garnet was common

On the ground, upstate
New York, Saranac
Lake country, forty,

Fifty years ago.
Boys on canoe trips
Picked up garnet chips

On portaging trails
Through mosquitoes and
Dark clouds of deer flies.

Almost ugly red
Stones they pretended
Were rubies, filling

Their pockets, telling
Tales of getting rich
From one giant stone,

Their garnets glowed dull,
Flawed, wayside gravel,
Nearly all alike,

Each formed of crystals
So fine-faceted,
No storyteller

Could craft a villain
Or antihero
More complicated.

Counting Comes from How One’s Not

Unity, the oneness of the whole,
Is inherently duplicitous,
Multiplicitous, ambiguous.

Feel the shifting of surrounding day,
The way that night contains it, the way
The light, in turn, nets and surrounds night,

Bearing in mind how slight your senses,
What faint corners of radiation
You’ve been selected to sense at all.

There’s a lot out there. To says it’s one
Is fine, is one thing. Simple, it’s not.
It only connects by how it’s not.

Ties That Don’t Bind

It would be easier for you
To think of each other kindly,
Remember each other fondly,

If you never had to work well
With each other ever again.
The strain of your interactions

Makes it difficult to be kind,
Cheerful, happy to be chatting.
The most underrated virtue

Is the ability to be shallow,
To touch socially so lightly
Your link feels faintly magnetic,

A little click while conversing,
Easily released, quickly
Felt again in proximity,

A gentle attraction. Let go
Of each other without asking
For more than to meet once again.

So Close You’re Nearly One

No part of a pattern is
Wholly identical to
Any other part. Only

The properties alternate,
Alternation being time,
Tick, tock, tick, and symmetry,

The sense of repetition,
That the only slightly new,
The only slightly other

Is the same, returned. It’s not,
But it’s close. This shares many
Or most of the properties

Of that. But feel properties
Themselves, the silky fabric
Of their sameness, and it’s rough,

Nonidentical to touch.
What is it then in sequence
That comes back as pleasure, love?

Today’s Hazards Are Tomorrow’s Turns of Phrase

The wolves in shepherd’s clothing
Are the ones should worry you
Lambs. Sadly, you all grow up

To play at being shepherds,
And then some of you transform
Into wolves with shepherds’ crooks,

And where is this foolishness
Going, really, anyway?
Can’t you see all metaphors

Become cautionary tales,
And all proverbs hold nonsense
In their core comparisons?

There is no comparison
Won’t break down on inspection,
No bond between any phrase

And the world outside of words,
And this goes for numbers, too,
The beautiful equations

That you follow willingly,
Hopefully, content to graze
Wherever culture leads you.

Wraith among the Dancers

All of you with all of us,
And all of your bodies, too,
We are dancers in a braid.

Somehow your selves entangled
With life’s proteins and these words.
Those proteins can still behave

Like crazy without your selves
Or anything words might say,
And words can last for ages

As fixed signs, without decay.
But what your words as proteins
Want to know is how your selves

Can vanish into nothing
As proteins stop, as words go.

Tiny Brief Communities

Three adolescents and two old folks
On a sailboat for an afternoon.

An audience half made of tourists
Assembled and clapping at dance camp.

Think of your own, recent or ancient.
All those strangers packed in a small jet.

The species excels at this, excels
At getting together in mixed groups

That form tiny, brief communities
Without conflict and then dissipate

Amicably. It doesn’t always
Work, but so often it does, it hints

What kind of casually mobile,
Lightly linked, recombinatory

World you could be if you could only
Always be like this, like language is.

Meet Wraith

Let’s let soul rest, for a while.
Ghost, too, if we can. Good words,
Old friends, both of them, but tired,

Worked too hard here, in these lines.
We can’t let go what we want,
Though, the thing that gleamed in them,

The thing that could mean. Let’s say
Wraith, for now. Let wraith work hard
A while—Scots word, no known source,

Used more than once in a new
Piece on why some of you write.
Wraith comes close—there, but not there,

A thing that can mean but can’t
Be thing. We want what that means.

How Do You Feel?

What’s in your world
You haven’t thought
Enough about
Before you go?

You could always
Do with thinking
More on a child
Or an elder,

But don’t merely
Commemorate.
Action’s better
Than thought for kin.

If you must talk
About your world,
Talk about talk
Or how things feel.

Who Remains Remains Inconnu

Once life’s oldest and most

Obvious metaphor

Spots you, you can’t remain

Unknown, you can’t remain

Alive, you can’t remain

At all. Bits will remain—

Energy, mass, data,

All conserved, no worries

There—but you’ve been spotted.

You are known. You can’t stay

You. If anyone’s beat

This rap, they’re inconnu.

Facing It

Like looking straight up at falling
Snow, if the flakes were made of light—

And how few photons are there left
From those most red-shifted, lensed blurs?

One photon emitted from bursts
Released when gravity bit down—

Bring it in, bring it in—arrives
In the middle of the far-off

Face of time. Here you are, staring
From that other face of time. Catch.

The Death Fairy

Why do flies die
On their backs? Flies
Live upright lives,

Feet down, wing-backed.
How could they lie
Down upside down,

And only once
They’re dead? Does death
Rotate in death?

You’ll Be Here for a Few

Plastic’s the next oxygen.
Sit with it. The universe
Has billions of years to go.

Earth alone has billions left
To spin around our one sun,
Unless something big enough

Bowls through the solar system
And wrecks everything. Plastic’s
A twitch in this perspective,

But possibly important,
Given that anything is.
A few billion years ago,

Earth settled down to living,
Initially with little oxygen.
Early life didn’t need it

For fuel. Some life still doesn’t.
Early life extruded it
As waste toxic to that life.

You see where this is going.
We have gone this way before.
Billions of years. Billions more.