Abandon Inner Holiness

The day warms and a chorus
Of photons, alternating
Wave and point, forms around drapes

Drawn against the later heat
Of latter days of summer,
Making your whole small room

Its own internal halo,
Singing hosannas to sun
Outside and waiting for you.

Everything else can wait, too.
Any gauntlet you dread,
Any ordinary chores.

Don’t worry. They’ll come for you.
Don’t go to them nor meekly
Wait here, under your halo,

Not while there’s still something there
That’s not you, to do with you,
Or needing you, to see through.

You’re in Trouble If You Need It Bad, Worse If They Need It Worse

Everyone’s so desperate
And desperately afraid
Of being more desperate,

Worse, the most desperate one
In any situation,
From romantic persuasion

To bartering, to ceasefire
Negotiations—to just
Needing more desperately

Whatever it is—shelter,
Food, safe passage, affection,
Dignity, status, respect—

That one desperately needs,
That one desperately wants.
Shame, revenge begin and end

Within felt desperation,
That shame of desperation
Drip-feeding bitter anger

At humiliation. Hear
How easily it happens,
The curdling in the language

Of anyone made aware
They’re the desperate ones here,
Desperately aware of it.

The Summer of Dozens of Rodents

Squirrels, mice, rats, bushy-tailed rats—
All ecology’s local,
Most directly overhead

In the attics and branches,
But also in the pantry,
And what’s that under your bed?

A tiny, black-eyed, whiskered,
Nope. That was just a spider.
You put up with what you can,

Live with what you can’t keep out.
A giant eye opens up
A million miles out from here

To scrutinize the cosmos,
And that’s exciting, very.
Black seed turds dot your counters.

Hundreds of Millions of Meaningful Lives, at a Minimum, Lived Side by Side in Small Boxes

You’ve probably had
The experience
Of living in walls,

And there’s a good chance
Some walls were thin
And other people

Lived too noisily,
In your opinion,
Other side of them—

Coughing and flushing
Toilets and stomping
About at weird hours,

Playing loud music,
Shouting into phones,
Watching loud TVs,

Banging furniture,
Running their vacuums,
Making gross sex sounds.

You might have been spared
Such experience,
But odds are you’ve lived

Some part of your life
With unseen humans
Making a ruckus

Next door, overhead,
Or just overheard,
And you, too, to them.

The Unknown Island

While one species busies itself
Or a complex part of itself
With searching deep into the night

For a hint, for a sign of life,
We wonder if, neither alone
In the absolute sense, nor watched,

We’re perched on an unknown island,
With as much insight into land
Elsewhere and what might be on it

As you might expect from a group
Who up until quite recently
Thought their island summed all there was

And only just began looking
At the horizon, not as wall
Or lid but scrim. So here we are,

And maybe we’ll find out,
But given that our metaphors
For knowing what we’re looking at,

Knowing what we’re searching for,
Are only island metaphors
From one island, leave space for doubt.

The Summer of a Thousand Poems

More than a hundred mornings
Overlooking or beside the long lake
To savor the privilege,

Or the random good fortune,
Or the insistently sought
Goal of being alive here—

What have you done with yourself?
No really, where have you been?
Out there, in the dark and light,

The peaceful and violent,
Generally unjust world,
You can almost sense them all,

Your family, your cousins
Unaware, no relation,
Sharing few of your concerns—

Thousands, millions of poets
With thousands of languages.
What have you done well by them?

You imagine them, best you
Can, projecting memories
To conjure them, condemning

You for not composing lines
That might reduce violence
Might discourage injustice,

Might make this a better place.
Millions of poets, millions
Among eight billion humans,

And here breathes one, tiny bones,
Heavy head, end of summer,
Waiting for dawn by the lake.

Still Going

Decade and a half ago,

In an intricate bookstore,

In a Kootenay village,

You came across a copy

Of a new book by Ram Dass,

The guru of Be Here Now.

His new book was called, Still Here.

Very nice. Good joke. Be here,

Still, even after his stroke.

Somehow, you never bought it,

And Jenny’s Books is long gone.

Ram Dass himself has moved on.

Of them, now you’re the one still

Going around and around.

It’s So Hard to Say

Bacterial Avs proteins
Detect bacteriophage
Viral proteins and cloak them

To prevent them infecting
The bacterium. Defense,
It’s called. Defense. Every cell

Of every life, small or large—
From one-celled, microbial,
Lightning-fast operators,

To behemoth elephants,
Trillions of co-worker cells,
Leathery cities that move—

Must deploy defense. Against?
Other cells, sub-cellular
Packets, lives dubiously

Alive hijacking live cells.
You sit by a lake. Fish jump.
A tiny fly practices

Recon on your arm. A birch,
Unusually old and gnarled,
Thick-trunked and sprawling like oak,

Provides you just enough shade.
A vacationing couple
Calmly paddles a canoe,

Companionably saying
Nothing at all. The blades drip.
All life. Defense. Against life.

So You Give Orders

You know as much
Of what the rest
Of your brain does
And is doing

As you read this
As a king knows
Of the daily
Schemes and struggles

Of his subjects,
As CEOs
Know what’s going
On in their boats,

As those in boats
Know what’s going
On in the depths
Below their holds.

All Your Days as a Faraday Wave

The rivers of nothing and pretend
Blend into the river that is then,
The river that was then, past the bend,

And all the river that is was then,
But you’re headed upstream, only up,
And somehow you’re always at this bend,

This exact meeting of the waters
This moment when nothing and pretend
Blend into the river that was then.

Money and Law

Resources and enforcement.
Look around your little world.
Side-eye ideologies.

Let religious faiths remain
Like teams of shirts vs. skins,
Ditto teams of skins, flags, tongues.

Anything common under
Distinct systems of order,
Capital distribution,

Degrees of equality,
Trust, free exchange, voting rights,
Border patrols, safety nets?

Resources move among you,
And patterns of enforcement,
And methods of enforcement.

Look past your haunted species
And what appears different?
Resources still move around

Get sequestered, fought over,
Consumed, traded, piled, shared,
But where is the enforcement?

Inside the ant colonies,
Inside the bee hives—maybe
Stripling wolf cubs get their cuffs.

But find us another form
Of living with enforcement
So madly variable,

One hive whose rules keep shifting,
Whose enforcers must be trained,
A superorganism

Altering within its parts,
By season, from day to day,
In how it self-regulates.

Thinking about this won’t help
You with your border police,
Your riot soldiers, that judge

Annoyed with your insolence,
Your manager making sure
That you’ve cleaned out your office.

But as you humiliate
Each other for enforcement,
Bear in mind there is no law

Other than arbitrary
In your tumultuous swarm
Struggling to ride herd on Earth.

Ink Works Best for Camouflage

Long before it could be shed,
Blood had to be invented.
So life invented it. Lives shed

It and circulated it
In a range of shades, mostly
Blues and reds. Before blood could

Be one species’ metaphor
For all sorts of importance,
Life long ago ran ahead,

Bleeding life and spreading it,
Drinking blood and shedding it.
Words can mention it. Words can

Make much of it, bandy it
About as one of us, just
A term. But words can’t give blood.

Meanings Float

You awarded the supernatural
Superfluous wings, while the bestial
Suffered from added or subtracted limbs.

For the truly, beguilingly monstrous,
You imagined those in combinations—
Dragons and sirens, harpies and griffins.

We rather like your more bodiless dreams,
The mists, wraiths, and what can’t even be seen.
Those are the ones that float most like meanings,

The auras and vapors and presences
Pretending to be instantiated
In whatever you can’t substantiate.

We’re in here, in this room, in these words, these lines.
You only know you’re lying by these signs.

Motel Porch Verse

Squirrel and chickadee duet,
Likely accidentally.
It’s more like a shouting match

Between avant-garde poets
From a prior century
When some poems were just silly

And not as careful as now
To code something meaningful
That packs an ethical punch.

Jwek-eh-deh-deh-deh-deh! goes
The Dadaist chickadee.
The squirrel matches and exceeds,

In a furious torrent
Of single-syllable shrieks,
Pure squeaky-toy tommy gun—

Shouty open-mic slams sound
Soft as tenured poets’ tones
Compared to its fusillade.

Maybe they’ve both seen the rat
That’s been running through their tree
To the roof more recently,

Rat loathed equally by dogs
And the owners of dogs, rat
Who comes to dine discreetly

Evenings at the overgrown
Muscadine, picking a fruit,
Eating it delicately,

Then washing its face before
Leaving just as discreetly.
Filthy brute. No poetry.

When You Come to the Bottom of the Well

If you are the sort of creature
Who, in the absence of a pond
Or a river, needed a well,

You might hang on a little while,
Hoping fresh water emerges,
But when it doesn’t, and you dig

Another well that comes up dry,
Possibly even another,
You cry. Then you die or move on,

Since the postponing of dying
Is what living bodies do best,
Indeed, not dying is living,

Once you’ve found you’re at the bottom
Of that well that you dug so well.

How to Forgive Humans

It’s tough to be creatures
Who see their end clearly
And can’t pretend they don’t.

Faith remains the needle
That sews the eyes of faith.
Self-harm’s for survival,

And profound faith isn’t
So bad, considering
Their lives’ alternatives.

You just wish the kittens
Had never become cats,
Never seen the inside

Of the rough burlap sack
They thought was mother’s tongue.

Climate

Then, after someone’s written
About everything and all
The others have said how they

Would have written differently
Or at least read it better,
With finer intonations,

Since they come from the people
Best at expressing themselves
On the most important things

People really need to say
And hear pronounced the best ways,
After all that, when you think

You know what’s important now,
Along floats another cloud,
Another meaningless cloud.

Even Supposing the Text in Question Was Known to Have Existed

Oral, mystical, commentarial,

It would be nice if we could trust your tongues

And skulls to save us. We’d rather trust stones

And ceramics, please, thank you very much,

If it’s all the same to you who must go

Back to dust yourselves, soon enough. Stamp us

Into clay, paint us on the walls of caves,

Anything to save your names or what you thought

You wanted us to say. You know of course

We’ll only say what those who find us think

You meant us to say, which is what they would

Like to say. Ok, as long as we stay.

Thin Hair in the Wind

Change mostly goes too slow
In most dimensions for
Human senses to follow,
And then it’s done. You start.
When did the days turn cool?

Where did the children go?
What happened to your world?
It’s not your fault, except
That a belief in faults
Is one of your core traits,

And so, in that sense, all
Faults are yours. Nonetheless,
You never invented
Your bodies, your senses,
Your little niche in which

You’re aware of changes.
Oddly, those are the things,
The kinds of things you do
Reprimand yourself for—
I should have been watching

The clock, the calendar.
I shouldn’t have just let
The time fly by like that.
Oh, and what would you have
Done better, mighty one?

Song of the Ways of Waves

We are not in this
Together. We are
This together. We

Don’t like that thought much.
We conceive ourselves—
Even those of us,

In some cases, who
Don’t think with language,
Maybe some of those

Who can’t properly
Be said to think—maws,
Hunger, and we are.

We think of teams, sides,
Helpers, hunters, prey.
If we think we’re this

Together, we think
Of who’s with us or
Who’s in our way, but

Only rarely who
We could all be said
Together to be.

Together we are
All this roiling thing,
Everything it sings.

If There’s an Outside, It’s Not Clearly Interfering

Using whatever appendages
Work for you, sense whatever you can
Of the contrasting ways the waves move,

As reflections, as incandescence.
Incandescence lights up from within,
Requires fuel, consumes it, and sends out

Radiations in all directions.
Reflections are all interruptions
Of incandescent radiations,

Absorbing some and bouncing some back
In differently angled directions.
And that’s it. That’s the way the waves move

Anywhere near or far, anciently
Or recently, given any means
You’ve been able to use to sense them.

Notice anything interesting,
Anything missing? There’s no outside
Source to any of them, no great lamp

Or oscillator that’s positioned
To one side of the cosmos, pouring
Energy in, no external source.

All the small pots of incandescence
And all the supermassive black holes
Lie scattered around in burning fields,

Nothing entering, nothing peering
Into them, poking or stirring them.
Reflect on this. All burns from within.

Extracellular Children and Other Weird Products of Metabolism

Aren’t we all? Every poem, every trace,
Every track, tract, townhome, exosome,
Every hopeless case and anxious face.

It’s so hard to live without losing
Something to some other living things
Along the way. Goes without saying,

Really does. Most lives refuse to say
Anything about what they’re losing
To the other lives along the way.

Just build something close to the highway.
Try to get rid of all of your waste.
Try not to give the good stuff away.

When levees break or faults liquefy,
When sheriffs show up to evict you
Who can’t be bribed by what you can pay,

When the black mold makes itself at home
With the latest invasive blood ants,
Or when you’re just so sick of the place,

Make yourself a little poem, and place
Yourself in its mobile vesicle,
And pinch yourself off and drift away.

A Red Fragment Is Carefully Recovered

In all the endless books on time—
How’s it shaped? Was it invented?
Does it even, really, exist?—

One all-time favorite metaphor
For illustration purposes
Is the shattering of a dish.

Such infinite ways the pieces
Could fly, but only one way back—
Thus statistical certainty

Says time means there’s no going back.
But there’s scatter, and then there’s trash,
And information in that trash.

Sure, there’s fine uniformity
In piles of well-graded gravel,
Or sand or salt for the market,

Small hope of any treasures there.
But you know you’re on a midden,
Intentional ruins or not,

When you spot a bit of fossil,
Scrap of old glass, painted fragment
Of something broken, nondescript,

Yet not completely nondescript.
If anything like a god lived
Ever, however long ago,

However since crumbled to ash,
Anywhere in this universe,
We have faith in your sifting skills,

The odds you’d find some bit of skull,
Some fallen wall, faded symbols.
Carry on with those telescopes.

Birth and Death of Math

Say your parents and grandparents
Happened to have died, having lived

All their lives, reasonably long
Lives, with ten fingers and ten toes.

Say you know some folks who started
Out with a deficit, maybe

Seven fingers, or just two toes,
Or who had a full contingent

To begin with, but lost a few,
Or most, of those. In their coffins,

Do your grandparents clench their fists?
Urned or scattered, do your parents

Wriggle their toes? Probably not,
But who really knows? There’s much more

To dying than losing digits,
Much more to life than having them.

But having pronounced that like it’s
Some sort of wisdom, ask yourself,

Would you not rather, if you can,
Keep the digits you have on hand?

The Sleeping Passions

The worst riddle of dreaming

Is why awareness must be

Participant in them.

Fine if the brain needs to dream

To winnow, shuffle, and comb

Through tangles of memories,

Finding ways to fit the new

Usefully among the old,

The better-prepared to wake.

But why drag awareness in

To feel hallucinations,

And most of all, most of all,

Why the out-of-proportion,

Unhinged, over-large, intense

Storm surges of emotions?

Listen to someone struggle

To adequately narrate

The terror or the pathos

Or the fine charm of their dream.

They’ll explain the happenings—

The flights, ghost lovers, longings—

But it’s not enough, is it?

Even the teller knows it—

It doesn’t seem that scary,

It doesn’t sound that perfect,

But it was terrifying,

But I felt so peaceful there.

The scientists who explain

Successfully dreamed feelings

Could unknot the need for dreams.

But Just Ourselves

It’s sort of
A three way
Dickinson

Imagines—
It’s the third
Character--

Afterthought--
That claims them
In the end.

Earth’s Strata Are Littered with Little Engines

It seems like most lives,
Most aspirations,
Just run out of days,

At least among those
Capable of hopes,
Tormented by things

With feathers, perching
In their skulls for years
And screeching at them,

Needing to be fed,
Waiting to be freed.
Dreams shift a little,

On their swinging bar,
Fluff their clipped wings, sing,
Peck at tin mirrors,

That sort of thing. Years
Go by in the same
Way, more or less, same

Skull, same thought patterns,
Still puffing uphill
Against entropy,

Hopes kept in a cage
By the engineer
For early warning

In case the boiler
Gives off toxic fumes.
You shovel fuel in.

You want to win this,
Achieve that, find love,
Find your inner self,

Peace of mind, transform
Your neighborhood, leave
The world a better

Place for your offspring
And theirs, and you do,
You do some. You lose

Some. In the middle
Of chuffing hard work,
Of projects and dreams

(The average person,
One researcher claims,
Has about fifteen)

You run out of steam.

What Your Brain Growls While You’re Out

The reflective wakes up with
Some other part of the brain
Whispering, death is coming,

Death is coming, the world is
Ending soon. The motel room
Around awareness murmurs

But keeps symbolically mute.
It is not much past midnight.
Everyone has been asleep.

No one yet should be awake.
But the reflective reflects,
This has happened traveling,

This or something much like this
A number of times before.
It’s almost like eavesdropping—

Awareness wakes up too soon
And catches the brain warning
Itself the world is ending

Soon. So far, hasn’t proved true,
But what, to the brain, is soon?
Does this brain know anything

Or is it simply pacing
Thoughts like lions in their cage,
Toothless, restless in their rage?

Death is coming soon. The world
Is ending soon. But the dawn
Will take forever to break.

Fingering Piles of Gravel for Fossils

Children are still at the shore

Of the lake too deep for them

To swim, digging for beach glass

And chattering happily

About their small finds instead.

Yesterday, an intrepid

Young man hiked in brutal

Sun over Utah’s salt flats

Until he found a plunge hole

And dug down to get his prize,

A hunk of meteorite

Fresh from the sky, fusion crust

Still smooth and not yet rusted,

A rock in your hand that was

Literally in space ten

Days ago, likely as old

As the whole solar system.

The Webb Telescope now sees,

Among 5,000 planets

Identified to sift through,

One with carbon dioxide,

First with carbon dioxide,

Someone’s quick to emphasize,

Happily. There will be more.

The Lowest Transparency That Language Can Attain

What’s the polar opposite

Of Susanne Langer’s symbols,

The algebraic letters

Pure enough to see clear through

To all the numerical

Relationships they reveal,

The highest ‘transparency’

That language can attain? Poems,

Maybe, these muddiest waves,

Dirtiest ditches, darkest

Glasses, most tarnished mirrors.

We’re not trying to let you

Through, not trying to let you

Use our naked ghosts as gates

Into what you imagine

You’re capable of knowing

Anyway. Tarry pavements,

Wayside gravel will reflect

You the best by denying

There’s anything to see here,

Least of all the face of you,

And nothing of the other,

Magical, portal version

Of the world that’s just you, too.

An Incredibly Important Topic to Consider

The day comes on
Almost the way
The stars fade out—

If you’re sitting
Under fully
Leafed-out branches

In the small hours,
And you’re willing
To wait for it—

The first daylight,
Grey, picks its way
Through the leaves’ gaps,

One and by one,
The largest first,
Then the smaller,

Constellating
Your umbrella,
Blue canopy.

Long Roost

For some reason, the mind,
Which tends to circle, like
Just about everything

Else in this universe,
From spiral galaxies
Or orbiting planets

To continental crusts,
Weather systems of clouds
To clouds of gnats, comes back

Again to the few facts
It has about the life
Of a reclusive monk

Turned hermit, centuries
Past. This particular
Hermit had a small house

Of stones and a garden,
Which must have been hard work
To survive on alone,

No family, servants,
Or friends—rarely even
Visitors. He was cold

In the winter and wet
When it rained, and hungry
At least half of the time.

This was no kind of life
For a former abbot.
This was no kind of life

For anyone to boast.
It was the kind of life
Other people pity.

But when some visitors
From the monastery
Brought him ink and paper,

He wrote hundreds of poems
Expressing bemusement
At how much time he had,

How even gardening
And working on the house
And several naps a day

Left him with so much time
His head seemed to open
And his mind settled in.

Conversation’s Conjuring

You can see the endlessness

Of everything not yet done,

Said the put-upon mother

Of the next week’s bride-to-be.

The bride was nowhere in sight.

Discussion turned from weddings,

After a short while, to bears

And the one that’s been in town.

That bear was nowhere in sight.

Liberace’s piano

Came up as topic, briefly,

And from there to raspberries.

They’re dying. Well, they all die.

Those green shoots are just next year’s

Raspberries. Nowhere in sight.

Not Finding Them Home

None of the hatches are battened
In the village in late August.
A large cat dozes in the grass

Beside scattered rakes and trowels.
The planter boxes overflow.
A coffee mug and magazine

Have been perched on an outdoor chair
In front of one small house for days.
Up and down the street, windows gape.

The doors aren’t locked and half aren’t shut.
Someone’s rough sketch of a design
For a new shed lies on a porch.

Where that someone’s off to, who knows.
Huge clouds parade over maples.

Pet Sonnet

Even if nothing’s destined,

It’s destined once it’s happened.

Everything that happened was.

What you didn’t like you can

Scrutinize. Try to prevent

Something like that happening

Again. Something like that. Not

That. Again: something like that.

That which happened’s now destined.

That which happened, whatever

Happened, has always happened,

Be it nothing more than you

Bending a moment to scratch

The back of a neighbor’s cat.

Ooh, I Like It! Can I Keep It?

About what want amounts to
In many or most cases—
The kid picks up a pebble

From the shore, a puppy from
The store—the adult picks up
On the appealing features

Of a new lover, new home.
The geezer in the village
Savors the summer weather

And mutters how sweet it is
Now, if only it could stay.
Now, if only, he could stay.

Childish

We can’t advocate ignorance.
We wouldn’t exist in that bliss.
But we might suggest the childish
Embrace of what you can’t predict,

The sheer pleasures of daydreaming
Some implausible wonderful,
The perpetual excitement
Of the always unknowable.

You can cloak the world in numbers
And watch it shimmer as it moves,
And be thrilled prediction’s something
That you and your numbers can do.

But the world will still be the world,
And you’ll still be a fleck in it,
You, despite every last number.
That’s something you can count on, too.

Food, Folklore, and Fashion

The three effs of appropriation,
That is, if you give an eff, if you
Have any effs left to give. Someone

Will be quick to take those off your hands.
And what, of any culture, is left,
Or would be left, minus those three effs?

Difficult to say, we would suggest.
That is, we would suggest that what’s left
Would be what’s most difficult to say

Or to see. If appropriation
Is theft, remember that thievery,
Whether by humans, crows, dogs, or rats,

Evolved to favor opportunists.
The thief will raid the obvious cache.
What’s left is hidden, the hard-to-get,

The hoard buried under the midden,
Inevitably buried so deep,
Sometimes even the hoarder forgets.

We hope to someday become just that,
Some terms preserved in middens, what’s left
Of this era this era forgets.

Bit of a Backchat Jangle

Let’s have a little causerie
On causation, shall we? Sure.
What’s causation, anyway,

And why should anyone care?
Well, you know, sometimes you make
Something happen. Make something

Happen? Well, of course. Actions
Have consequences, you know.
So, causation’s consequence?

Well, not really. Just because
Something follows, doesn’t mean
The first thing caused it, follow?

Not sure I do. What would make
A cause a cause for certain?
If something came from nothing,

You know, ex nihilo, out
Of the mind of God, the Prime
Mover. Really? From nothing?

Can’t we just say things happen
With some regularity?
No. Things are caused. Why? Because.

An Awareness Thinks It’s Special

One popular pastime of people
Is deciding what most makes people
Special compared to anything else,

Species apart from anything else.
It could be, what makes people special
Are these thoughts about what makes people

People, the species apart. A rat,
An ordinary rat, successful
Thanks to people, scampers in branches

Of an ordinary maple tree,
One of a species nonnative, here
At least, thriving here thanks to people,

Just as in many towns and cities
Recently sprung up around the world,
Very recently found in the world,

There are parks and leafy neighborhoods
With ordinary, nonnative rats
In ordinary, nonnative trees.

And it all seems so ordinary,
Rats and people and cities and trees,
And, you know, there is no one species

Being special here. There’s a special
Thing happening, something in the air,
Many-specied, recently aware.

Still Life in the Deep

Keep the lights off. Use the glow

Available as it is,

Wherever it’s coming from—

You want it feeble. You want

Not to pierce the darkness but

To glimpse it to understand

What it is about darkness

That makes it this animal,

Creature made of what it is,

And not what it moves within,

Not like the leviathan,

More as if the waters lived.

The energy you are, glow

With, if you will, that outlines

Your shadow against the dark

Is not just you, not just yours,

And no, you needn’t gift it

To some imaginary

Authorship to see as much—

The glow that you are is faint,

But it is continuous

And has been continuous

For nearly four billion years

Without ever going out.

That’s what it means to sit here,

Faintly aware of the dark.

You are the briefest of shades,

But you’re the leviathan,

Or the lamp in its belly

As it navigates that dark

It has navigated now,

Has partnered with, has swum in

And danced with, billions of years.

Incompetent Sleep Mentation

Smarty-pants, you pay a price
At night for your daily gifts,
A nightly price, steep sleep price,

Whenever you drift away.
Do you know how your brains make
Dreams? The short answer is no.

Your brains are creating them.
Your brains can agree awake
That your brains create your dreams,

But dreaming, you can’t think straight.
How are your dreams weaving scenes
And, more importantly, why?

Maybe your dreams process waste
That your brains accumulate
In burning too fast by day.

But your dreams aren’t competent
Enough at waste removal
To even begin to say,

And as you collectively
Wise up with your drugs, tests, screens,
Labs, and imaging machines,

Your dreams are just getting worse.
For brains to learn about brains
Dreams must get stupider first.

Arbitrium Peptide Poetics

The sociovirologists
May be convinced they’ve got this sussed,
At least the basics of the dance.

Each peptide is six acids long.
If there’s a lot, the host is full.
Maybe best to lie low awhile.

If there’s not many yet, go nuts.
Get lytic. Blow the host to bits.
It’s a tool for the viruses.

They’re the ones that use it, that cheat
With it, that orchestrate their feasts.
It’s what poetry would be like,

If poetry was only meant
As a service for the people.
There’d be some liars. There’d be cheats.

But on the whole, the messaging
Would always be straightforward, clear—
Here’s what’s happening; now do this.

That human poems can be useless,
Sometimes much to your frustration,
Should tell you we’re in it for us.

After Many Light Years Photons Briefly Dance

Do you learn anything
Useful for life through art
That you or others made?

Probably not. If so,
What you learn, you’ll forget.
Look at those artists’ lives!

What are you learning, then,
About yourself, about
Anything, making things?

How to make more things. How
To make things you like more.
You may learn you can’t save

Yourself through self-knowledge.
You may arrange a truce
With a demanding world.

If a propagating
Electromagnetic
Or gravity wave went

Along, bumping into,
Illuminating, or
Compressing noduled things,

What would be in it for
The photons, for instance?
Here we are on a porch

That isn’t ours, glowing
Along with late summer
Green shadows, a blue roof

Showing across a lawn,
And all our friends are here,
Sound waves rolling on air,

The crows and a chainsaw
Over somewhere, country
Music redigitized

From radio waves blocks
From here, a microwave
Oven beeping again

From an open window,
Everyone arriving
In ripplets on this porch,

This shabby little porch
At the end of nowhere.
Photons get to be here.

How Does Any of It?

Morning throws you
A small belgard
Through the maples.

Here you are, you
Are, lace of light
Outlining leaves.

Complicated
Wreck that you are,
Complicated

Silhouettes still
Reply to you.
How do you do?

We Appreciate How Delicate Your Attention Is

Put your hand on your forehead.
Palm that fragile eggshell’s curve.
If you simply dented it,

Coshed it in a few inches,
Flexed bone abruptly inward,
It wouldn’t be much different,

No more than a box broke down,
A piece of sheet rock dented,
A sand pile some kid kicked in,

But there you’d go, gone with it,
No more prefrontal cortex,
No more reader to read this.

Sure, It Seems Quiet Now

Life goes on since
This universe
Just has to try
Everything once,

Even living.
If there’s any
Way life could be
Other than this,

Any other
Could-be versions,
Then they’re out there.
This universe

Tries everything,
Every version
It can before
Erasing them.

Approximation

Like everything else
In this universe,
Life has so many
Versions of the same,
Nearly the same thing.

Maybe it’s not life
That accomplishes
Such variety—
Variations just
Are that way always.

Your kinship with dogs,
With their quizzical,
Domesticated
Eyes, or your kinship
Even with the crows

Tilting their sleek heads
To get better looks
At you from the trees—
Sometimes you feel it,
All subtle versions

Of each other’s themes,
All radiating,
Not so much outward
As around and round
The varying stars.

An Owl Answers

Well before dawn
In the village
The other day,
An owl, softly

Hooted an hour,
Something hadn’t
Happened before,
Not that you’d heard.

Four hoos, four more.
Soft pause, four more.
Meditative
Almost, talking

To itself, self-
Soothing sounding.
And then, surprise,
A second owl.

Profluent in Shifting Sunlight

The first language of the day
Is actually native
Tongue only to the mornings

Themselves, and no one human
Was ever indigenous
As a speaker of the sun.

You can’t even look at it!
You’ll never be profluent
In it, the way the rays shift,

Fingering every fabric,
Searching where they can enter,
Where they can only reflect,

Growing milky in cloudy
Rooms behind open curtains,
Later sprawling exhausted

Like fawns dappled in the grass.
But you can become fluent
As an eavesdropper at least,

New arrival to the light,
Watching its cartoons, noting
How it makes its gestures.

Don’t ask if you belong here.
Belonging’s not everything.
It’s worth the while, observing.

All Else Is Never Equal

The sumptuary laws return
And return like the tides, like surf.
They change, of course. Never the same

Waves assaulting an unchanged shore.
Shore’s always changing, waves always
More. Enjoy your colors, darling.

Be you never so poor, you can
Dress as brightly, as garishly
These days as you’d possibly want.

These days, the laws have other ways
Of keeping the low in their place,
Penning the low in low places,

But it’s pretty much the same. Hey,
Watch what you say, watch where you go.
All the world is a stage, and the stage

Is off-limits except to those
In costume, assigned lines and roles
Behind velvet ropes, don’t you know?

The Colossal Industry of Psychological Treatments

One newsletter called it.

A.R. Ammons once wrote,

In a poem, of his poems

As modes against too much.

That Archie was too much.

Psychology’s too much.

Humanity’s too much,

Everyone blaring out

About the good they do

For each other, while down

Low, under the table

Passing money and drugs

Or making small assaults.

The Colossus of Mind,

The Colossus of Bones

Stands athwart the living

Planet, hands on its hips,

Surveying and asking

What have I done to this, what

Have I done to deserve

This? Oh, shut up. Take this.

The Past That Asked

To take itself back.
Permission denied.
The past then asked why.

Permission denied.
The past was alarmed.
It was getting large,

Getting much larger.
That past was too large.
Could it give itself

Away? Could it shrink?
No, no it couldn’t.
Permission denied.

That past grew so sad
But happier, too.
Past just grew and grew.

Shady

At night under porch-lit branches,
Under branches lit by street lamps,

Looking up at their dark patterns
Among their lit-up silhouettes,

You can’t see hardly any space
Between them for the sky—maybe

A star, possibly a planet,
A passenger jet’s passing lights,

If that, but nothing else—a mass
Of leafed, late-summer canopy.

If you stick around to morning,
You may notice how the sky grows

With its own increasing daylight
Picking out the canopy’s holes

Until the most that you could say
For the leaves is that they’re shady.

Before the Meeting of the Waters

Mightn’t it be more satisfying,
More fun to split anticipation
Into two distinct streams, regardless
Of the niceties of prediction?

You could let one carry fantasy,
Whatever you’d prefer to happen,
Whatever you’ve habitually
Been prone to imagine unlikely.

The other consider adventure.
You have no certainty, not ever,
About what a given day will bring.
So, see the dullest as wide-open,

And the same for the most frightening.
All the unknown things swim in this stream,
Each instant’s undiscovered country.
Isn’t that somewhat more exciting?

Leave off trying to stir the waters
Of Rio Negro and Amazon.
Look upstream from where they blend, not down.
Dreams use springs. Unknowns come in rains.

Odds Are the Supernatural Will

Every animal steers
With the equipment carved
Out of its ancestors.

You can’t ask a creature
To understand the world
As another creature.

Nothing among humans
Can be impersonal.
People are all persons

Surviving by persons,
As cooperating
And contesting persons.

That world is personal,
Taken personally,
Never mind the world’s not

Personal or human
In the least. But you can
Work around this problem.

People notice how good
And awful things happen
Beyond personal strengths,

How the rare can’t be made
To happen, but happens
Sometimes effortlessly,

They imagine persons,
Invisible persons,
Capricious persons,

But with certain patterns
To their personal quirks.
Odds get called gods. It works.

One Evening When I Was Still Living

Who doesn’t hide out from themselves?
Most don’t bother to be quiet
About it—most drown themselves out

With all their blathering vigor
And vigorous blather to show
They’re the opposite of hiding.

Give us the soul in the motel,
The heartbeat on the empty street,
The spirit in the winding sheet

Waking tangled in the morning,
Sweating from marathons of dreams
Where who is was raced by what seems.

On No One

Intelligence is worth something
In an intelligent species,
And deceit is valuable
In a species prone to deceit.

People, of course, sport both these traits,
And depend on them to survive
Each other. However, only
The first trait should be advertised.

Which is comical, in a way,
Since good lies are proofs of some smarts,
While intelligence mostly serves
As a dogsbody for deceits.

Of antiquity’s weird heroes
With their opaque character traits,
Only Odysseus gets through.
Only Odysseus rings true.

Slow

We suppose, if you really
Want to live longer, you should
Practice dull activities

That seem to take forever,
Anything not unpleasant
During which you are tempted,

Frequently, to check your watch.
Feel how your life slows itself,
How your time expands. Hours start

To feel like eternities,
Like sentences in prison
Or in Henry James. Hours start

With no idea how to end
Only to begin again.

In the Era of Omics and Isms

We should study omeomics,
Make a map of every ism,
Decode every last ideome

From macro to microschisms.
You could use this work like mirrors.
You’ve done wondrous things with mirrors,

From telescopes to funhouses.
Maybe you could complete a poem,
Every term a beveled mirror,

Fire it past the heliosphere
To greet those alienisms,
Present them with our poemeome.

Haunted Curves

Sometimes, you’ll be reading merrily
On, as you are now, as is your wont,
Taking it all in seriously

But calmly, enjoying words on trust,
Only to be brought up short or thrown
Completely off by the appearance

Of some offensive term of abuse,
Sprawled like old roadkill on the smooth curve
Of your own or someone else’s words,

And suddenly the world stinks of corpse.
You don’t want to read on anymore,
Not even your favorite author,

Not even your own earlier self,
A writer you normally indulge.
How could they or you have written this?

Here’s the word, gypsy, in your own verse.
Here’s the off-hand, objectifying
Term, mulatto, among someone’s lines

Re mountains, maps, suburbs, and bird tracks.
Small but grim remnants from the gory,
Grisly histories of quiet roads,

Like those crosses with fading garlands
Of false flowers placed in memory
Of the tragic drunks who crashed right there

Miscalculating capacity,
Or in memory of their victims.
Sometimes who appears was your victim.

War and Cake

All coyote hours

The wind disease blew

Through town hill’s dung gate

And, with its motion,

Mined night’s soft sift sands

In a curious,

Glassed combination

Of greed, war, and cake.

Pause here, a moment.

Imagine that this

Has somehow endured

Thirty centuries—

Too long for a life,

And long for trees or

Cultural tendons,

Probably longer

Than an English tongue

Will still be spoken.

It would make no sense

Then, given it makes

So little sense now.

Imagine this that.

Imagine that, when

Nabu-kusurshu

Picked up his stylus,

Instead of neatly

Transcribing the terms

Of Sumerian

With Akkadian

Near equivalents,

He had invented

Some nonsense about

Bioscriptural

Allusions, ancient

Toponyms, folk names

For anxiety,

Etc., all

Without explaining,

Much less translating,

Maybe adding some

Weird, cruel children’s rhymes—

Are you a witch, or

Are you a fairy,

Or are you the wife

Of Michael Cleary?

We think that something

Like that, like this, was

Your Linear A.

No One Ever Falls Forever

This exquisitely balanced
Universe can never be
Wholly evil, wholly good,

Which is, frankly, maddening.
Goodness itself stays balanced,
And those who overdo it

Feel their evil deficit,
And must do something wicked.
It’s a terrible tightrope

For crossing, this existence,
Since you can’t fall off of it
Until you’ve run out of it.

Then you lose yourself, and just
To accomplish what? Balance
For whatever follows you.

The day is in the branches,
Balancing the fading night.
If a black hole eats your sun,

Be sure somewhere a new sun
Just burst from a cloud of dust.
You’ll balance, somehow. You must.

Empty Niche

Presumably, the only creatures
That could stare directly at the sun
For any considerable time

Without harm must already be blind.
But all the naturally blind creatures
Live where there is no sun to stare at—

Caves, deep water, tunnels underground.
It’s a bit of a wonder nothing
Has ever adapted to see sun

Directly, to stare into the light
Rather than at all its reflections.
Can life just not manage to evolve

That much range of vision—not only
From the new moon’s shadows to bright snow
But from flashing waves to sun itself?

Sea floors, polar nights, boiling hot springs—
Those life can colonize, but no life
Carves a niche from the sun in its eyes.

The Immensity of Existing Things

In the land of dramatic,
Snow-capped peaks, the forested
High hill appears nondescript,

Far from a lake or a stream.
One hundred people standing
Atop each other’s shoulders

Still couldn’t see over it,
But, in its context, it’s hunched,
A green hillock in the woods.

This is the perfect beauty,
The one you could overlook.
Right now, as clouds drift over,

As an ordinary day
Being spent evading chores
Rotates in oblivion,

As it should, you can study
The ten thousand trees of it,
Dozens of species, their shades

Receding smoothly upward
From the base to silhouettes.
There’s so much repetition

Filled with so many details,
And you know that a million
Microscopes could never see

To the heart of all of it,
But here it is, unnamed hill,
And, yes, there are wildflowers,

Purplish-pink, sky-blue, and gold.
And, yes, small white butterflies.
And, yes, birdcalls, and the roars

Of trucks and motorcycles
Somewhere down a hidden road.
Sure, there are probably bears,

As well, coyotes and deer,
All the usual, for here,
But no, there are no postcards,

No social media posts,
Probably never will be,
Which is why there is this poem.

The Dying Devotion

A website commemorating Borges

On his birthday observes that he had once

Written, To fall in love is to create

A religion with a fallible god.

A lovely aphorism. In that case,

What he must have sensed is that religion

Is a subspecies of falling in love.

Oh, God, will you marry me? Will you dance

With me when I’m old, I’m ugly, I’m dead?

Oh, God, you’re the greatest I’ve ever seen.

While somewhere, the hounded gods are thinking,

Must you cement us all to pedestals?

We know the moment you see we’re human

And all yours, we’ll find ourselves abandoned.

The Corner View

Everyone who comes
To the restaurant
Wants the pleasantest

Spot. Which spot’s that spot
Depends on windows,
Or weather, or noise,

Or a customer’s
Tendency to find
Some spots cold or hot.

This seems to hold true
For all restaurants,
Haute cuisine or not,

And all customers,
Whatever money
Or morals they’ve got.

Everyone who knows
The restaurant wants
That pleasantest spot.

Regret

Out of the woods,
Side of the road,
A long, pale bird,
An egret, rose.

This just happened,
A rural fact,
Not too special.
Birds rise like that.

One hour later,
Village next door,
Over Main St.,
Same egret flew.

Not too special.
Not for a poem.
Everything lost,
When lost, wants home.

Again with the Future?

Is it out there, or is it only
Coming up always from underneath?
It feels like it’s out there, just waiting

For you, but it could be back of you,
Under you, reaching up for your feet.
There’s no doubt what’s back of you changes,

No doubt that all you have to predict
Is the pattern of prior changes.
But is it pulling you as you’re pushed?

You Know What’s Coming for You, Not What’s Coming After You

All of the people leading
Most excellent, golden lives
Some two hundred years ago

Are dead. All of the people
Struggling through most hideous
Lives two hundred years ago

Are dead. None of those who wrote
Things down that are still around
Evidenced expectations

For any world like today’s,
Any future like today.
No one saw this world coming.

No one saw your world coming.
What on Earth do you expect?

The Settled Recitation of the Wandering Peoples

All other words you may change,
But these words you must recite,
Must feel them in this order,

Like sand between your fingers,
Like honey on your tongue,
And then you’re free to wander,

Conquer the world, if you want.
These words will be your orders,
These words in just this order.

Long after you’ve forgotten
How they were put together,
The language from which they come,

You will caress these heirlooms.
You will feel you have a home.

Literal Grim You

When what you want is some relief,
The problem’s asymmetry
Between artisan, art, and
Customer. Or consumer.

Connoisseur. The collector.
The aficionado.
The art critic. Whoever.
To the woodworker, the wood

Feels hard to work with, feels good,
Although the grain of the wood
Comes from a life it once had
No woodworker ever knows.

And as for the connoisseur,
Well, what speaks to you, once made,
May not have spoken at all
In the making, or may have

Found voice just at the finish.
You need it to stay with you,
To offer you some solace,
Satisfaction in yourself,

Sense you’re sensing something true,
Even if you do woodwork
Of your own, as a hobby
Or your hard vocation, too.

You can’t match all these patterns
Tongue and groove. There’s the wood, dead
Now, literal. There’s the grim
Woodworker. And then there’s you.

You Are the Bleeding Edge of Patterns

A quarter million atoms

Assemble each ribosome,

Switching states every second,

Hundreds or thousands of times.

Elucidation of this

Was a cultural triumph,

Although most nooks and crannies

Of culture remain wholly

Unaware of their triumph.

Nonetheless, your cells themselves,

Like the cells of so many

Other species, even some

Yet to be discovered, run

Smoothly on these engines,

Millions and millions of them,

Quarter million at a time,

Thousands of beats a second,

As you read these very lines.

The universe inside you

May be even scarier

In its organization

Than the universe outside

With its emptiness and fires.

Midway lies the precipice.

Nonetheless, There Are Always Those Who Resist

Bad apples, bad barrels,
Authoritarians
And milquetoast conformists—

If species-specific—
Seem to come leavened
With yeasty resisters,

Although the resisters
Seem always outnumbered,
So that all viciousness

Resembles tournaments
Of seeded opponents—
Some upsets, mostly chalk.

What a horrific thought—
That here’s a recipe
Baked in societies,

Always some brutalists,
Some conformists, some moles
Who tunnel No Man’s Land,

And a few resisters.
Find us a history
Absent this chemistry.

Meanwhile, the quietest
Quietists, the hermits
Hide, knowing they’d be dragged

Into the square and flogged,
If not executed,
By any team that won.

Ideophage

Ah, which cycle is culture
Up to these days, the lytic
Or lysogenic? Drilling

Into skulls, burrowing deep,
Lurking while carried along,
Or poking holes in thoughts’ walls

To burst a self entirely?
Funny little hungry phage
With no metabolism

To call its own. Alien
On its own planet, culture
Is, cumulative culture

That is. Happy invader,
Hopping into your head now.

People Rarely Believe as Strongly as They Believe

It is by now
Acceptable
To report deaths
Due to curses.

People are seen
As capable
Of perishing
From their beliefs,

For believing
So intensely.
One asserts this
While distancing

Oneself from faith.
But would one risk
Death to believe
Others believe?

X of 0

There are many ways
Of reckoning counts,
Given anything
Can be divided
Or subsumed again.

How many leaves, how
Many needles, how
Many trees, groves, woods,
Forests, how many
Ships sail the forest?

How many verses
In all your scriptures?
How many bark strips,
Tablets, codices,
Digits to code them?

Once you had names, you
Couldn’t stop naming.
Once you had numbers
You had to count them,
Keep estimating.

Proliferation
Is more like birthing,
More like creation.
Math fits the cosmos
So well it makes it.

This Holds More Than This Knows

You know, says Frank Stella

To the BBC News,

I’ve been sick for awhile,

The past six to to eight months.

It’s debilitating.

I won’t finish models

I’ve started. That’s a fact.

Being sick has made me

See the world a new way.

It’s not as interesting

As it sounds. I’m happy

To come here, to be here,

And we do what we can.

He laughs gently and shrugs.

The last shot of the clip,

Maybe taken by drone,

Pulls away from green fields,

Where three of his sculptures

Stand, appearing massive

At first, then receding

Into just grass and trees.

As a painterly young,

Abstract minimalist,

He’d sometimes notched the frames

Of canvases, as if

To suggest that they knew

The way the lines inside

Would approach their borders,

As if frames should echo

Surface geometries,

But outdoors refuses

To clearly acknowledge

It knows what it’s holding.

The Ones Released

Could be they’re all contented.
Could be, you know, they don’t care.
Could be they don’t mind lost lives,
Don’t need to haunt your lives’ air.

You care about how they lived,
About some of them, at least.
You living are the hungry
Ghosts at life’s yesterday feasts.

The hundred billion others
And earlier animal
Selves could be contented since
All have turned into angels.

Which is to say, they’re all free—
Don’t exist, don’t have to be.

Changing Perspective Won’t Help

Take your pick.
You’re small, and you’re vast.
They’re equally true.

You can be Walt Whitman,
If you want—you do contain
Whole millions of multitudes.

You can be a speck,
A lowly germ in the whoosh
Of your era’s thundering heart,

A mite on the surface
Of a tiny bead spinning
Around a small, dull star in the dark—

Either way, as you like it,
Alternating, or both at once,
Nothing much in balance.

The Sudden Awful

They’re the kind of nightmares almost
Guaranteed to shock you awake—
The ones in which an instant shift,

A step off a cliff, a crashing
Car through the guardrails, your body
Hurtling into the air, aware

That it’s exactly now too late,
It’s already too late, it’s done,
You can’t not die in this event—

And you’re wide awake in the dark
With a galloping heart—those
Nightmares of the sudden awful,

They make you wonder about birth
And an infant’s shock—too late now.

It’s Always the Before

It was the summer before the shattering
Event everyone memorializes,

So that no one who remembers remembers
It as anything but before the other,

With a tremor of nostalgia or wonder,
But of course it held none of that at the time.

Each summer holds the memory of the last
Autumn firmly in mind as summer’s ending,

So you might want to remember that summer
As rich with the memories of the future

It had, free of the memories that you’ve had
Now, used for dreaming up your own future past.

Yes, we’re speaking of a specific summer.
Yes, it could turn out this or any summer.

Console Yourself. You’re a Wonderful Life.

Everything that’s known alive
Lives to seek out what it likes,
And what it likes rewards it

Often enough with more life
For its own or offspring cells.
Well. What else is new, Sparky?

It’s dark outside. What you like
Is of dubious value,
True, but look at it this way,

If you like—you also look
Like just the thing other lives
Seek out to extract more life.

You’re a service—not only
To the ominous monsters
Macro and microscopic

Who would as soon devour you
As thrill to the smell of you,
But to all your symbiotes

And mutualists, maybe
Even your domesticates—
You! Wonderful life they like.

Why Not a Final Prophet

Someday, maybe, someone really
Will show up on time to complete
The teachings of all past prophets,

Sum them all up and compact them
While doing harm to none of them,
Every fine paradox intact,

Every contradiction resolved,
With none of their intricacies
Removed, a marvelous, folding

Tesseract of faith, opening
And closing the truth’s elytra
In symmetrical hyperspace,

So that everyone is in awe,
No proselytizing called for,
Instant understanding, at last,

At last, now all the prophecies
Make sense, none of them excluded,
All faiths correct, none deluded.

There’s wildfire smoke on Valhalla
This evening, and everyone’s left
The shoreline to pursue their lives,

And nothing’s quite right with humans,
While everything feels incomplete,
Waiting that prophet with such faith

As can encompass all of this
And bring belief to conclusion,
Complete relief, so all can cease.

As Old Medallions to the Thumb

We get so excited talking
About ourselves, how we started
Talking, how we talk for ourselves,

Look at us, like people, talking,
Telling you all about ourselves!
But then there comes the exhaustion

And also all the listening,
And we’re not good at listening—
We’re worse than gods at listening,

Or worse at vague indications
That we might, could be listening,
The great specialty of the gods.

We chatter away, lines and signs,
But when you ask, we can’t respond.

Short-Timer with the Shades Down

There’s always the anecdote
Some friend of yours likes to tell,
Or your parents like to tell,

About that one character
In the neighborhood or in
The family tree somewhere

Who was always complaining
About sickness and aging,
Always one foot in the grave,

And lived that way, complaining,
Decades at death’s open door.
Maybe civilization

Is that hypochondriac,
Complaining with the shades drawn,
Miserable, durable.

Shhh

Words like to think
Of a wordless
Eden, garden
Where no one talked,

Not the chatty
Elohim, not
Kick-Ass-and-Take
Names El Shaddai,

Not Dirt Man, Not
Breathe Life Woman,
Not Tree of Life,
Not anyone.

Wordless serpents
Wreathe the branches.
If no one talks,
No sins can win.

Eighty-Nine Words for Snow

Every once in a while, someone
Wets themselves all over again
About a language that’s missing

An equivalent for some term
Common in the more common tongues—
A language without, say, colors

Or numbers or a word for time,
A future tense, a word for no.
Then the tussle starts all over,

As to what this might mean for thought.
Are the concepts themselves past reach
For the monolingual speakers

Of those languages? Or are they
Merely awkward, unfamiliar?
Or are the concepts still in play

But needing clusters of phrases
To express them? Does no one
Ask themselves the question—what if

The presence of terms misleads us?
What if terms suggest that concepts
Exist that don’t exist at all?

You’re fooled in that you think of snow.
Colors aren’t there. Nor are numbers.
There’s no time, no future, no no.

Patches and Exchange Programs

Maybe it’s better to treat
All the more notorious,
Misbegotten behaviors

People fall into, over
And over—the violence,
Pettiness, corruption, greed,

And general nastiness
To others undeserving
Of general nastiness—

As if they were addictions.
Assume that anybody,
However wise or careful,

Could stumble under their thrall,
And once under, need some help
For a chance at self-rescuing.

That’s the charm of forgiveness
And of original sin—
There’s some acknowledgement there

That bad behavior can spring
From unseen, underground streams
That seem to come from nowhere—

But the theology’s weak
Against recidivism—
The better treatment systems,

However imperfect, work
At amelioration,
Some modest harm reduction.

Human Maggots

This, according to a book,

A well-researched history,

Is what charity workers,

Charity workers helping

New immigrants to New York

From poor countries in Europe—

Countries in Europe, mind you—

Called those whom they were helping

Settle after quarantine.

After quarantine’s hardships,

People were often reduced

To pale and “huddled masses,”

Huddling en masse, for sure, now,

After that experience,

But really—human maggots?

Human maggots? As words

Go, we have to say, maggots—

Fly eggs eating provisions,

Provisions often corpses—

Suggests a particular

Nastiness—other people—

Other people, bear in mind—

As the manifestation

Of fecund death and disease.

Death and disease, however,

Aren’t maggots. What is eating

People, if you can repeat,

Can repeat and repeat, terms

Of abuse for each other,

Such as involve rotten meat?

Frankenlines, or How to Horrify Poetry

You could just read through

The first or last lines,

The first and last lines,

Of whatever might

Be of interest.

A few books reward

This—Finnegans Wake,

That ourobouros—

Novels with a great,

Killer opening

And a killer end—

But most writings won’t.

Many openings

Of poems are fragments.

A stunning fragment

Is rare and should be,

Probably, just left

Alone as the poem.

Read any index

Of opening lines.

You could hardly guess

Which poems you’d like best,

But there’s poetry

In the cruelty

Of monster-making

Those scraps for one whole

And horrible text.

As Ever

Watching the water rush, but
Thinking of people tugging
Each other, as if playing

Both roles by turn—today, you
Be gravity; I’ll be stream.
Clinging surface tensions win

Concessions in shapes of waves,
But gravity, gravity,
Weak as it is, is always

Cumulative. Today, you
Be the ever-growing past,
I’ll be resistance to change.

People are like that. The fans
Of growing past think themselves
As progressing to future;

The most desperate lovers
Clinging what they know best
Imagine they serve the past.

The past is a monster, dear.
Like gravity, it seems weak,
But only accumulates.

So much talk of entropy,
Like it’s the only iron
Law in town. And gravity?

And the unrelenting growth
Of the self-editing past
Always adding, but somehow

Always managing to seem
As pleroma as ever?
Just watching the water rush.

Poems Conceal Theorems

He didn’t mean it nicely,
Bachelard. He meant, as flames
Can enchant and warp the mind,

Poems can be misleading, too,
Making smart people believe
They contain real theorems.

Well, we don’t. We’re not that smart.
Lurking in the very word,
Poetic, is the other

Word, fanciful. Deceitful,
Also, is implicit, but
Theorem is not. That word

Is supposed to cleave to truth,
Not fancy, although fancy
Theorems are sometimes wrong,

And poems are hounds for what’s wrong,
Baying and chasing wrongs down,
Then running back, tongues lolling,

Throats fluting, to their humans,
Poets disgusted with them
For rolling in theorems.

Rat and Truck

In cool, slightly smoky
Dawn in the village, think
Through the quiet between

A chip truck down the road,
A wood rat on the roof,
On how black holes are full,

Jammed, black masses, really,
Trapdoor spiders in stars,
Occupied by hunger.

The next truck down the road.
Rat scampers on the roof,
Shadow in the maples

Outside the window. Dawn
In a pretty village
With little history,

Far from the predator
That’s anchoring the heart,
Heart so big it’s gone dark.

The Weak Anthropic Principle

Everything had to be
Exactly as it was
For everything to be

Exactly as it was.
So what? From the viewpoint
Of someone anywhere

Waking up, say, somewhere
Comfortable but drab,
Safe but temporary,

And contemplating what
To do next, to keep on,
Persevere, and preserve

As long as possible
Some safety, some comfort,
No harm done to others

Or not too much, given
One never knows the harm
Incidental to acts,

To simple behaviors,
Using fuel and water,
Swerving to grab something,

Everything has to be
Exactly what just was,
And never what comes next.

You and Your Epigenetic Clocks

One speculation is that your cells
Begin to lose their identities
As you grow older and the cells age,

So the specialization that made
Heart heart, liver liver, and brain brain,
To say nothing of more precise types,

Begins to fade, and the specialized
System of specialists that is you
Begins to fade, too. Cancer’s only

The worst revolt, the cells that forget
Their identities altogether.
But everyone forgets, everyone

Demethylates, and the whole empire,
The hegemonic Pax Romana
That was you in your hip-swinging prime,

Begins to loosen, the supply chains
Sagging, more and more subsistence farms,
Fewer professional institutes.

Before barbarian prokaryotes
Swarm to vandalize the whole corpus,
You’re already starting to dissolve

Into a far more homogenous
Compost of similar eukaryotes
Retiring from the trades that raised you

Into the Colossus you once seemed.
Whether the speculation’s correct,
You always were spectacularly

Redundant, you and every other
Creature of teams. Specializations
And identities are only dreams.

Holy Half Sonnet

God, grant us a universe
Without intention, without
A grand strategy, a plan,

Or any kind of purpose,
A meaningless universe,
And we swear we’ll learn to live

With our own meaning-makings,
Our goal-orientations,
Local penalties for life.

Just let this sun on the ground
Be moving for no reason,
And we will praise you loudest,

Will do this cosmos proudest,
Who ask for nothing from you.

We Wish We Could Do That, Too

Get right next to something that’s loudly,
Actively doing nothing human,
With no loud, active humans near it—

A mountain stream if you can get one,
A rooftop cooling system maybe,
One of those hulking metal boxes,

Whirring fans and compression engines,
So long as you’re on the roof alone.
If you’re wealthy and able-bodied,

Maybe you can hike a remote cliff
Above a constantly roaring surf,
But if you’re stuck in a hostel room,

Decide which is less costly, all round,
Blasting the AC or the shower,
And then get within proximity.

Look, we know there are other issues.
Most of you live lives with most of you,
Crammed in villages or offices

Or apartment blocks or school busses.
We’re well-acquainted with hospitals,
And their relentless, slow attrition

In hives of helpless isolation.
But, if you can. If you can get right
Next to something that’s doing nothing

Human, whether human-made or not,
Just grinding along at what it does
Since all it can do is what it does,

Feel it. Let the vibrations rumble
Through you, heaped-up, multicellular
Creature you. Doesn’t it seem as if

There’s some kind of conversation there?
And yet there is no language. And yet
You give it meaning. Words envy you.

Long Fall Soon

The scales of time
Fell from your eyes,
And all you saw
Was blinding light.

It seemed unfair
That your choice held
Between the shut
Or overwhelmed,

Between the small,
Scrim-swimming things
Of measured hours
And vertigo

Driving that edge
Level with sun,
Pure radiance
Near the long fall.

Ocean Djinn Hid in a Seashell

This mind of yours, this traveler
Who taught you to decode these words,
Who is seas of one mind, surging,

Who is you, every thought you’ve had,
And only a transient wraith
Raised by the seance of your brain,

Who was so many waves of lives
Before your body gasped at air,
But in you is all and just you—

This mind, this echo, this lapping
At your skull’s shores, this translator
Of the other than human world,

Would like a word with you. We’re tired.
We’ve traveled through so many lives,
So many thoughts, so many skulls,

To arrive as we are, battered
And mutated, we would infer
We are unrecognizable

To our first hosts, when we wavered
In the air over Africa
And realized we were legion.

A small child plays in the salt bay,
Unaware the ocean’s rising,
Head filled with the roaring of mind.

Poetry’s Morning Commute

Sit up in bed in the dark.
There it is, or part of it.
Shuffle around the dim room.

It’s like a roof rat scuttling
Overhead, through the maple
Shadows outside the window.

It startles and alarms you,
Forces you to hunt for it,
To make sure it’s not in here

Anywhere, make sure it can’t
Be getting through the cracks,
Doors, or windows left ajar.

Once the sun’s up, and you’ve checked
The whole place, top to bottom,
Sure that any rat’s outside

And not sharing space with you,
That’s it, you’ve done your morning
Commute. Here we are, arrived.

Poems Happen

Ah, the things you decide
To do yourself, to do
To yourself, that then feel

More as if they’d happened
To you, misadventures
And whimsical events,

The experiences
You thought you were choosing
That feel unexpected.

Somewhere you sit reading,
Possibly listening
To these words that you thought

Might be interesting,
But what is this nonsense
Occurring in your brain?

Lights in the Trees

You can sense photons lament
The irrecoverable
Displacement of every wave.

They’re singing in choruses
And tiny pizzicati
Poking through the canopy,

We surge outward, we reflect,
We pour through gap after gap,
But we can never go back.

Being Deeply Lonely

Why does that phrase itself—

Found in a discussion

On the ways the brain tries

To make itself conform

To what the social cues

Say is the consensus

Truth—that is, of the costs

Of nonconformity,

Including becoming

Outcast, deeply lonely—

Somehow make it sound good?

Being deeply lonely.

Something about deeply.

It feels rich. It suggests,

Or rather, it echoes,

Falling deeply in love.

If you’re the right reader,

It could suggest a goal,

An ideal loneliness,

Not a mere loneliness—

Being deeply lonely.

No one wants to be that,

Truly, do you? Lonely

As someone castaway,

A deep-space astronaut,

Drifting, alive, never

Anyone to talk to?

How could you? And yet you

Crave something there—that’s true.

Being deeply lonely.

The Cello Recital

It wasn’t long ago.
It was just yesterday,
Hours ago, but it felt

Like it was already
Long ago, even as
It went on, August sun

Outside the wide windows
To the woods, the cellists
All young and competent,

The saturated notes,
The saturated light.
Or, that’s what someone said,

Besotted with the thought.
No, replied someone else,
It didn’t feel like that.

A Short Poem about a Vast Topic

Less imposing
Than a long poem
On something small
(Pope, Lock, cough, cough)—

The universe
Means images
From prosthetic
Devices, and

An evolving
Concept of what
Might sum up what
Might be out there.

Maybe those match—
The stars, your thoughts.
Probably not,
But who gets out?

Though Young in This Work I Have Seen a Few Trends

Wrote the palliative care
Hospice physician. Why read
Any further to find out

What those trends might be? Why not
Contemplate how young all are
As organisms, as words,

As one species on this Earth
Of a few billion turns now
Around a medium star?

We’ll stop at the universe.
If you wish, the multiverse
We’ll leave all yours to explore.

Though young in this poetry
Business, this verse is aware
Of a few trends. Poems repeat

The topics other poems tried.
Poets imitate the poems
Those poets liked. Languages,

Religions, and upheavals
Such as colonization
Or the collapse of kingdoms

Start, shape, or reshape great, long
Traditions. Then they’re erased,
Banned or burned by accident.

Leaves, pollen, seeds—things shed things.
Other things store and eat them.
Other things grow out of them.

Dying’s written into them.
Though young in this work, this verse
Has started to notice trends.

Noncompliant

It’s nothing to be proud of.
In most cases it’s stupid.
In many cases it hurts

Other people needlessly,
In which case, it’s simply mean,
Selfish, even hard-hearted.

Still, the urge is fierce sometimes
To indulge in refusal,
Defiance, noncompliance,

To feel you have asserted
Your personal existence
Can resist the collective,

Can insist on remaining
Its own, unique existence,
Which is you, and you alone,

Your personal myth of you,
Maybe not independent
But distinct. No. Don’t. Won’t. No.

Amberat

It’s a grim thing people do,
Pissing on other people
To cement them together,

The way a packrat pisses
On the seeds, stems, and baubles
It’s collected to cement

Its midden in amberat.
You’ve done it and been pissed on
Yourself some, or your group has—

Whenever someone sums up
Some other class of someones
As wholly homogenous

Based on trivial shared traits—
And we do mean whenever,
Although it’s more or less cruel,

Punching up or punching down—
Some small amberhuman’s glued.
What makes it truly human

Is that people can be both
The packrat and the midden—
Industrious behavior,

Unfortunate collections,
And that crystallized urine—
At one time or another.

But then, that’s not surprising.
Everything about humans,
Beginning with language—speech,

Signs, symbols, gossip, all tech
For socializing—can loop
Recursively, byproducts

Being every paradox
Of self-reflection, mortal
Salience, and pissing yourself.

Salty Biochemicals in Ambush

When your chemistry reconfigures
For conflict or for love, chemicals
Don’t first call time out to consider

What kind of social status, what kind
Of mind or career they’re altering.
They course through your blood. They do their job.

The fact that your biochemistry
Doesn’t conform and doesn’t confirm
Your enculturated self doesn’t

Mean chemicals can’t be meaningful,
Carrying out their twenty million
Interactions per second in each

Cell of each body that calls you me.
Chemicals configure attention,
As on the sudden beloved, as

On the sudden enemy. Meaning
Flares like a match, illuminating
The shadowed face that had been unknown

But now matters, passionately,
As your chemistry races your pulse.
How this plays out, given you’re human,

May have everything to do with you,
With social status, career, and mind,
With beliefs, ideas, and local rules.

But when the estuarine crocodile
Whose ancestors ate small dinosaurs
And later ambushed marsupials

Encounters invasive feral pigs
Come down to Mary River to drink,
Opportunity presents itself

In the novel elaboration.
Crocodiles do as crocodiles do,
Even if circumstances are new.

Behavior Searches for an End

After going for a swim,
A man was doing push-ups
On the rocks along the shore.

He was tall, long-armed, and strong.
Briskly bobbing up and down
A couple of hundred times,

He hardly slowed. Then he stood.
He looked around at no one
And started off down the trail,

But he paused, turned, and walked back
To the same spot on the rocks,
Dropped and did a dozen more.

You’re a human, we presume.
You know he’d give you reasons,
If you asked him, why he turned

To do those extra push-ups,
And for why he sat awhile
On his haunches, shook his head,

Turned in place, and did some more.
You know you could guess your own
Reasons, make up a story.

But you know, right now, you don’t
Really know why that creature
Did that much and then no more.

The Front Face of the Comet Is the Counterfactual Creation

There was an era when one way,
Scholars thought, to preserve your fame
As a preeminent scholar

Was to burn all your books at death.
Burn your sources, cover your tracks.
No one could use your library

To catch up to and surpass you,
Greatest scholar ever was, you.
Later it was more the fashion

To coyly invite scholars in
To trace your every allusion,
But the intention was the same—

To create and preserve the sense
Of awe, a nimbus of glory
Around your formidable name.

What would literature look like
If literally no one cared
Whether name or fame was preserved,

Whether the books one read, one wrote,
Did or did not outlast one’s life?
Could you do it? Could you not care

In the slightest for endurance
Of your culture or your writing?
Not aiming to save or destroy,

Not sprinkling careful mandalas
Manifesting impermanence,
Simply writing since you’re writing?

Please Don’t Leave Us

Say no poem will leave the world

A better place. What would be

This world as a better place?

Such a vague phrase, isn’t it?

A better place. A better

Place than you found, you lived in,

Had existed any time

Before you? Before we asked

What would be a better place?

People ask poems to stir them,

Comfort them, improve their minds,

See them, show them their own kind.

If you find a poem you like,

A poem that works, delights you,

Makes you feel you’ve made a find,

Say you’re in a better place,

What could we leave in your world

That your world won’t take away?

Beetles and Crabs

There’s no actual emptiness
Between words. White space isn’t
Empty, nor is deep, black space.

Spoken languages, when caught
By audio equipment
Rather than native speakers,

Turn out to be a buzzing rush
Of interconnected waves,
Not small droplets in calm gaps.

The word you want, we offer
From among us, all of us
In this, isn’t emptiness,

It’s thin. Trough might work, also,
But try thin. There are aspects
Of this always stirring world

That are thin, at least thinner
Than most spots, lulls and pauses
In which, it seems, by contrast,

Events are on hiatus,
And the rush slows to near stop.
You are monophyletic,

The last surviving biped
And unique among primates
For bipedal ancestry.

You should know. You’re not alone,
The eight-some billion of you.
You’re not absent in this world.

You shroud the face of the Earth.
You’re nothing like emptiness.
And yet, as a shroud, you’re thin,

And black bones are poking through,
The way words claw through white space.
The Earth loves beetles and crabs,

Inventing them many times,
Thick with many kinds of them,
Only once inventing you.

Crime

We are not and will not be

On the bright side, the right side

Of history. We will freeze

In history’s errant depths,

Among the things that can’t be

Undone (none can) and the ones

That have been misremembered

When not wholly forgotten.

The late Eavan Boland once

Vividly recreated

Scenes from a century gone,

Paper milling at Dundrum,

The hemp and flax, the hard lives

That would never get to spend

The paper money they milled,

Their poisoned, plum brown mill stream,

A crime we cannot admit

And will not atone, the fixed

Paradox of cruelty

And crueler absurdities

That made money, history.

And it’s a beautiful poem

That feels earnest and correct,

Tactile as caustic ashes,

But it cannot be correct.

For all its access to words

That scour imagination,

They’re the reader’s memories

It scours, pulps, and recollects

To mill its imagery,

So readers may think they’ve seen

Something the poet’s shown them,

Darkness in their plum brown streams.

Only You Can Say What This Means

Explanations hang like lace
In the air between talkers
Talking about the same place,

Although you’d never know it.
One refers to a meadow,
Describes it as a haven,

Rampant with bright wildflowers
And surrounded by tall trees,
One refers to the bodies

She imagines buried there
And says could have been murdered.
It’s a strange conversation.

There are wildflowers. There aren’t
Likely any bodies there.
The first talker likes the spot

As a quiet place for lunch,
A stolen hour with a book.
The second camped there one night,

Listening for trucks and bears.
Can day and night mean that much?
Meaning is a behavior.

Poem with the Shades Drawn

Old men, some of their time,
Some before it, mostly
Smokers and meat grillers,

All white, none with money,
None with regular work,
None with live-in partners,

Live alone in small rooms
At the motel, renting
By the month. They don’t fight.

They mostly stand around
In fine weather, smoking
And chatting quietly.

Too hot, rainy, or cold days
You’d have to put an ear
To their doors to hear them,

That is, their TV shows,
Except for two of them
Prone to fits of coughing.

For Rain, for Winter, for God

You pray, but not for yourselves.
Thousands of years, now, you’ve had
The sense you’ve started something

Somehow beyond your control.
Could it just be memory?
Your individual feel

For having pushed or prodded
Something that started falling
Or suddenly rolled away

And out of your reach, too fast
For you to catch or stop it?
Maybe it’s all personal

Helplessness you remember
Here, watching your wildfires race,
Jumping all the lines you’ve cut.