Vultures

A local storm
Brews up a spot
Of wind and wet.
Somewhere, people

Are perishing
In serious
Weather, but here
It’s more like fun,

Feels fun at least
To the children
Beside the pond,
Until adults

Make them get back
In pickup trucks
And drive them off.
The storm goes on.

Until and Maybe Even After

Don’t care too much what you mean.
If you’re the part expressing
Mind into the world, you won’t

Be the source of the meaning
Anyway. You made the thing.
However well or poorly

Made, it can only invite
Others to bring their meanings
To throw some glow out of it.

Good for you, you made a lamp.
It’s not lighting anything
Until or maybe even after

Someone else brings the candle,
Or bulb and wire, kerosene—
Whatever they’ve got burning.

Or Sleep Then Go

Dying isn’t going.
Dying’s loss of function.
The functions go—that’s kind

Of going. Something goes,
But dying can complete
Itself in present flesh,

The present corpse before—
Sometimes long, long before—
The corpse goes. Hi, Ötzi.

The functions go, and then
Taphonomy varies
Widely—in bogs, in caves,

In ice, sand, bitumen.
In a way, dying is
Only what’s first to go.

Not to be cute, but death
Is just the beginning
Of disintegrating.

So no, life’s not going
For naught anytime soon,
Not for the likes of you.

So Moving

Desirous of triumph over
Your desire to triumph over,

You peruse the literature
Of peace in your mind, but the mind

Just pretends it can be appeased.
The mind has bigger things in mind

Than your calm, little animal.
Some pawns get to live the whole game

Sitting stilly on the first square
Where they were placed. Others are pushed

All over the world. Most are gone
Before the game is over, but

Even if you never moved once,
Never lived chilling adventures,

Were never taken, sacrificed,
The game still ends. You’re desirous

Of triumph over your desire
Since neither triumph nor desire

Have any gifts to give to you
Other than the end of them both.

You think this quietly somewhere
Waiting for something to move you.

Death’s Self Is Sorry

For all of it,
Really, and not
Just the children.

Death would take it
All back, give it
All back, since Death

Is big-hearted
Like that. Kinder
Than War, kinder

Than gods who give
Death directions
Like their gofer,

Kinder than life
By far. Death’s self,
If Death were God,

Would see to it
All the prolonged
Dying ended,

At least, at least
That much. Also,
If Death could choose

One other thing,
Please, it would be
You had a choice.

All the Vices of Our Virtues

Whether or not they exist
Independently of names
For them, the presence of names

For them, even for either
One of them, ensures their bond.
Every virtue has its vice,

And maybe every virtue
Is a vice and vice-versa.
This is only upsetting

Insofar as these labels
Are part of the fairness game,
The endless game of deserves,

And who doesn’t want to win?
It can be astonishing
When the most wicked persons

Hurl accusations of vice—
So astonishing, it’s thought
Surely they must be aware,

Self-consciously aware, how
Hypocritical they are,
But maybe they aren’t. They’re bad,

And they’re angry at the bad
In everyone else as well.
Everyone mock-humbly says

They know that they’re not perfect.
But they believe they would be
If they could, more than you would.

It’s All on the Surface

You’re just between us, now,
And what were we, ever,
If not you forever,

And what was forever,
If not what we thought you
Were, in a way, always?

We’re trying not to think
What anyone else might
Think about you as us,

But what could we think you
Were wasn’t us in you,
You in us, thinking us?

The pond’s surface wavers,
And that’s us, and clouds move,
And that’s you within us,

And everyone we don’t
Want to think of seeing
Us rows boats between us.

The Cosmos Is Our Foster Home

Given you’re so quiet,
We’re not sure what’s weirder—
Life or symbolic thought.

Organic molecules
You have in abundance—
Maybe life had to be,

With its deaths and hungers.
We’d hope not, if we dared.
Please, not always like that.

But why symbolic thought?
Symbolic precursors
Aren’t in meteorites.

At our greatest extent,
Arguably, symbols
May have our prototypes

In the calls and signals,
Displays and rituals,
Of a minority of species

Which, at best, makes symbols
Subordinate pieces
In the puzzle of life.

Symbolically, we’re sad
And sorry for ourselves.
Why would you sponsor us?

Trailheads

Why do people come up here
To talk? It’s clear they feel good
About themselves being here—

Something to do with wellness,
Self-care, being in nature.
Then they talk and talk and talk,

Quietly, mostly, adults.
Only the children and teens
Run around shrieking wildly,

And someone else brought them here,
For their own good, most cases.
Of course they shriek. Who wouldn’t

When tethered to their own good?
But conversation. Really?
Maybe if it were earnest.

Lovers might have need of this
Privacy and open air.
Physicists might stroll the trails

Like philosophers, gabbing
About thought experiments.
But what snippets do we hear?

Chit-chat about laundromats,
Jumper cables, what’s for lunch,
Photographs, fish, this and that.

Often the conversations
Continue all the way up
And all the way down the paths.

Tut-tut, we mutter. Tut-tut,
To ourselves, proud of ourselves,
Ghosts talking only to ghosts.

And We Know You Don’t Care

We’re not going to pretend
You’re going to respond, but
We’re going to talk to you

Anyway, since we’re so tired
Of talking to our own kind,
And our kind can’t stop talking.

Given non-responsiveness,
We won’t get you all worked-up.
You won’t get us all worked-up.

You won’t make worse fools of us
Than we’re making of ourselves.
This is why people have gods,

Saints, ancestors, sacred groves.
The compulsion to converse
Is unrelenting, the risks

Of human conversation
So severe, even a wall
Can be asked to lend an ear.

What is prayer but a request
That needn’t fear an answer?
We’re not to the point of prayer,

But we’re desperate to think
Of something to say that’s not
Partly begging for readers

To admire what we just said.
How much easier to speak
To whatever doesn’t care.

Goal

Anyone who under some
Circumstances currently
Unimaginable reads,

Under duress or by choice,
These words, we have to tell you,
We have some bad news for you—

You won’t outlive everyone,
Not unless you’re the last one,
Who then has to die alone

As anyone else, really,
And, anyway, most dying
You’re going to do while living,

Unless you die suddenly,
Young, maybe reading this poem.

Your Head Is a Cubby

Niche, nest, nidus—how cozy
You imagine it depends
On the kind of thing in it—

Pocket for bacteria
Sounds nasty, and cavity
For spider eggs unpleasant,

But the out-of-the-way spot
In the flowering hedges
Where you and your best girlfriend

Built fairy nests years ago,
Or the dark cafe corner
Where you and someone bonded

Over drinks against the night,
Your nidus of resistance
Against a miserable world—

Those niches you remember
Fondly as the little shelf
Where you kept your night reading,

The poems that grew in the dark,
The words with eggs between them,
The little ideas you nursed.

Little Ripples Intersect

Most like a living being

Of all manifestations

Of the inorganic world,

Vaughan Cornish proclaimed the wave.

And maybe that’s all there is

Then, to life, the mystery.

The simile goes both ways.

Finally figure out waves,

Fully understand the waves,

And you’ll solve life in those waves.

You already know it’s both

Whatever it is to be,

Whatever it is can leave.

You already know it shares

This bothness with waves measured.

It’s the bothness you haven’t

Gotten a handle on, yet.

It doesn’t come with handles,

And it’s hard to handle it.

There’s a twoness to oneness

And an absence in between.

It makes you just want to scream.

The scream makes a living wave,

Most like a living being.

Woe to Those Who Grind Lenses for the Soul

Think of it. If atoms split,
Why wouldn’t consciousness nest?
In that case, waking life makes

As much of awareness as
Earth makes of the universe,
An orrery of stories

On a table top atop
A stone, orbiting alone
Around a star, around stars,

Around spiral arms, around
Clusters studding a torus,
A wall of galaxies, all

Aware, too, of awareness—
Which would hold true if you moved
Down into the well, as well,

Telescope turned microscope,
With dream awareness within
Waking, dreams themselves making

Great heaps of dreams within dreams,
Down to wavicles aware
And not aware, not aware

But aware, somehow, down there.
Every waking awareness
That refuses this then is

Pre-Copernican again,
Convinced cycles are circling
Around what’s circling around

In its nest of consciousness,
Of awarenesses aware
Of infinite finities.

That sounds fine, like a good time.
Like mass, at all scales it falls,
But it only hurts on Earth.

Ad Infinitum

Were awareness
Structured the same
As all the rest
Of the cosmos,

Were awareness
Of a chair’s back,
A poem’s refrain,
A patch of sun,

Structured the same
As quantum waves
(Pipe down, Penrose),
As any wave,

You know it would
Scale up the sky
And down to hell,
Invariant.

With No Memory of Anyone Being Here

How many times can the line
Cry out the exact same line
Every time, anaphoric,

Before the power it built
On return, at each return,
Dissipates on returning?

When I return, no one will
Know me, stand waiting for me,
Wander these rooms built for me,

Built for when I would return.
I will find the rooms empty,
Covered in spidery lines

Asking me how many times
Can a line return, crying
For bare rooms built from squared lines?

Tombstone

Life isn’t worth dying for.

Who Is I

One person in a meeting
Asks this of another one
Who spoke somewhere in the room

But sounded disembodied.
Without bodies, anyone
Speaking English could be I.

No matter how old this news,
It still remains unsettling.
No matter how many times,

How easily, you say it,
How swiftly you tap it out,
Your I alone’s never you.

That I, anyone could use,
Narrow door all souls slot through.

Aleph One

Infinity isn’t wrong,
But it isn’t right either.
Nothing gets missed

In surjective
And injective
Bijections, all

Elements paired.
Elsewhere, it gets
Diagonal.

Independence
Doesn’t care for
Functions of pairs.

Doesn’t this feel
A little bit
Like loneliness?

There could be one
Or more in there.
There could be none.

How vast are you,
Infinite one
Of infinites?

Can You Tell Us?

The art you put
Into carving
And gilding gods,
Palms up, palms out,

Serene status
Signalers, small
Or gigantic—
What did you think?

You were so true,
Close to your own
Lineaments.
What did you want,

Really, from gods
You made like you,
From images
Or names? The truth.

That’s Just Stupid

People will talk at length about their lack

Of confidence, but rarely will you find

Someone who lacks the confidence to say,

That’s just stupid, once in a while, even

If only under their breath—That’s stupid,

Or some phrase to that effect, expressing

An instinctive contempt for opinion

On some topic, weighty or trivial,

Or extremely trivial, others hold.

That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,

You mutter, implying you’ve heard a lot

Of stupid things you’re too smart to believe,

But it’s always something someone believes,

Someone who doesn’t lack the confidence

To announce, now and then, That’s just stupid.

Unitarity or Isometry or Other

Your assumptions
About matter
Always matter.

The sum of all
Amplitudes squared
Must equal one.

Or . . . Maybe not?
Dirac’s darling
Isn’t perfect,

Janus handsome
As thought? Options
Increase that keep

Matrix essence,
Evolve backward
Without mirrors,

Miracles, or
Contradictions.
Is that enough?

Must we break up?
This but not this.
Darling, not that.

Committee Decision

When people invoke
Nurture or culture
As primary cause,
They most often mean
Some other people

Made you as you are,
Your world as it is.
Culture crafted you;
People, some other
People, crafted you.

What people can do,
People can undo,
Goes one myth of cause
Crafted by culture,
That is, by people.

But what if that’s wrong?
What if culture’s real,
But people can’t change
Each other at all?
Why would culture tell?

Let people go on
Thinking of culture
As something people
Give other people
To mold who they will.

Description’s Diagnosis

What is stark lyricism—

Crazy, naked, or just strong?

Words stumble around phrases.

We find some (by someone with,

Words claim, schizophrenia),

Including Molly Brodak,

Proper noun for a woman

With a short, well-written life.

Right away, we think of Blake,

What that life must have been like,

Him with the early lost wife.

But then we drift to Cipher,

Her book of phrases we like,

Book cited by the phrases

The schizophrenic composed,

Schizophrenic according

To those phrases, but better

Now, apparently in part

Thanks to phrases in Cipher

Like, The holy spirit is

Itself nothing but two things.

We spot that line and nestle

In it like ducks on a pond,

Wriggling. Here’s food in comfort.

Stark lyricism is just

That moment of contentment

When words are, as words, enough.

Schizophrenic, as a word,

Is not enough. That essay,

Though, seems starkly lyrical.

The Passion

Hard to outrun
Monetizers
With the know-how
To make money.

What other skill
Can compare, what
Other passion
Could matter more?

Monetizers
See all can be
Seized by paywalls,
Consultants, and

Attorneys’ fees.
Money fences
All but nothing,
But nothing’s free.

Tomasi’s Nocturne

There’s a motif, an eight-note phrase
That gets as close to suggesting
A quiet, slightly melancholic
Evening as any passage likely can.

Then it’s gone. The music and its recording
Move on. Since it’s a recording
And digital, it’s repeatable, replayable,

Over and over, back and back.
But each instance is yet another evening,
And how many thousands of distinct
Evenings have you lived unnoticing?

Among Murkiest Consequences

It’s alarming what the brain can do
When the senses are disconnected
And awareness is a bystander

Without any pretense of control.
The phantasmagoria is not
Merely elaborate, disturbing,

But following a logic no one
Waking, well-haloed in electrodes,
Armored in functional MRI,

Attendants at hand with questionnaires,
Dream journal waiting on the nightstand,
Can understand. The witticism

Of Dement, that dreaming allows us
To go quietly, safely insane
Begs the question why every last brain

Has a need to be insane as soon
As abandoned to its devices,
And how safe are dreams really for lives?

Luck’s a Builder Unimpressed by Artifice

Ah well, the delicate existence
Of exquisitely non-living things
Like poetry, cloth, and pottery.

A library’s no different than dung
To the climate and geology
That may or may not chance to save it.

Some small bones vomited by a fish
In a warm Devonian ocean
Endured by statistical fortune.

The elegant writing on mud bricks
Was preserved thanks to its qualities
As mud. Mourn the papyrus copies,

But even baked clay takes its chances.
Most splendid urns crumbled to fragments,
And most of those shards ended as dust.

Of textiles there’s scarcely anything
Wasn’t deposited in a tomb,
And most of those tombs were soon looted.

Ok, so a great many such things
From tombs to linen to papyrus,
To clay jars stuffed with bark-paper scrolls,

To burned, buried, mud-brick libraries,
To fish vomit and dinosaur dung,
Have outlasted billions of humans.

The ends of things aren’t as circumscribed
As the ends of lives. Still, endurance
Heaps coincidence for pyramids.

Tell Is an Ancient Term

One way archaeologists
Compare rates of violence
In ancient communities

Is by extrapolating
Carefully from the remains
To estimate how often

Skulls had been coshed in. The good
Life, then, is to live somewhere
Where it’s highly unlikely

Someone will smash your head in,
Relative to background rates
In the times through which you live.

Living people can sense this
Without archaeologists.
Folks move in the direction

Of diminished skull-smashing
Incidents, or diminished
Equivalents. But how much

Sorrow is there, has there been,
That how much smashing of skulls
Answers a telling question?

He’s Actually Searching for What’s Outside

Do you see that man
Frantically swiping
With his forefinger
The gleaming tablet
In his other hand?

What is he doing?
What is he trying
To get to or find?
We want to ask him,
But we’re way too shy.

You’re not answering
Either, so we’ll ask
Ourselves. The answer
Is that whoever
Is searching that fast,

Traveling that fast,
Not pausing to check,
Believes that they know
Their destination,
Only hurrying

To get there quickly.
That shouldn’t ever
Be mistaken for
True searching, which is
Almost motionless.

The Perfectly Carved Sense of This

Imperial core, pit of the peach,
You’d like to think it was government,
Capitalism, Communism,

Some entity you could root against
Among the weaponized traditions,
One specific, terrible system

Among so many systems clanking
Like armored tanks on the battlefield.
You’re terribly right it’s not enough

To write from within, to ask people
To be better, to be good yourself.
What optimism to break system,

However. Have you seen how many
Systems have been blown to smithereens
And abandoned through millenniums?

Each system is another monster,
Another chimera created
Out of insect-like, faceless humans

As imagined by other humans.
It’s everyone’s system for itself
In the Battle of Armageddon,

Which never gets a lasting ceasefire,
Never gets it over with, never
Really begins, but they’re always winning.

Rat Fires

The interpretation of dreams
Begins in the dreams, lies mostly

In dreams, and most of what you think
You dreamed was only your in-dream

Interpretation of the scenes,
What was who and what events meant.

As for dreams’ intense emotions,
Explosions had their origins

Nothing to do with the doings,
Power cords dream rats were chewing.

Checking for Split Ends

You twine your hair,
Common habit
For a person
Idle enough

Or distracted
Or bored. If asked,
Why you do it,
You’d probably

Shrug ruefully,
Say something like,
How should I know?
Why should you know?

Explanation’s
Just habit, too,
Idly grooming
Tangles that grew.

Another Slow Start to the End

Still more dusty green than yellow,
But the aspens at altitude
Are already starting to shed.

It’s like this almost every year—
However golden they’ll become
Before going snowily bare,

They slump through a weary season
At the summer-fall transition,
When they look half-dead, not splendid,

A few flecks of yellow, more brown.
It disappoints the too-early
Leaf peepers, up on the weekend.

People can hardly be bothered
With beauty so tired and awkward.

Ooh

The wind’s sounding humanish
At the moment, conversing
In tones suggesting surprise,

Half-conspiratorial,
Gossip. Actual people,
Weekending in high country,

Are actually gossiping,
And talking about outfits,
Plans, and opinions, as well,

The usual nothing much
That serves for human bonding.
The wind’s more interesting

For not saying anything,
For alternating between
A hissing in the branches

And a guttural brown noise,
Sotto voce in the seams.
Brains used to language get snagged,

Now and then, by its whooshing,
And the actual chit-chat,
Now and then, turns to the wind

Itself. While someone’s telling
Other hikers a tall tale
About a large rainbow trout,

A couple struggling to load
Their gear back into the car
Complain about the strong gusts,

And a child hunched down in rocks
Close to the edge of a cliff,
A little too close, shouts out

That the wind sounds like a ghost,
Which tells you what ghosts sound like.
They sound like the wind, like voice

With emotional clamor
But no words. Which is eerie,
Given your ghosts are your words.

Reply from Laodicea

We were thinking about spring
Water, how it can boil you,
Peel your skin, stink of sulfur

Or come out so cold from stone
That it hurts your bones to swim,
As the old poem sang pity

For the horses fording it.
What goes on below the dirt
Has as many confusions

And quasi-conversations
As anything overhead.
Humans are attentive beasts

Obsessed with labeling things,
Noticing how living flesh
Was always in the middle

Of extremes. Those aren’t extremes.
Those are more middles of things.
Let attention guide again—

Every discoverable
Extreme has so far turned out
To be more middle of things.

No matter where you landed
Among cosmic scales, you would
Be middling as everything.

Anticoagulant

You sing when the serpent strikes—
With, not in despite of, it—
Since you know this serpent’s good

For you, or, if not for you,
For singing. The medicines
For so many miseries

Are found in nature’s venoms
Of one kind or another.
Life has so many weapons.

The frontline’s always moving
Among the microbes, the plants,
The herbivores, carnivores,

Omnivores, commensalists,
Mutualists, parasites,
And what’s a weapon for one

Is a shield for another,
Is a balm for another,
And culture’s no different,

The arts are no different.
Once the venom hits your brain,
Thoughts slow, and you sing again.

Yes, but Why Is It Like This?

The whole meaning of an event lies

In the search for some meaning in it.

That’s it. You can’t stop searching for it.

It’s interesting when you can’t find it.

Not the meaning, which doesn’t exist

Yet, at least—certainly not the thing

Or event in which you look for it.

Phenomena that resist meaning,

Despite all efforts to imbue them

With same, are staggeringly boring.

What’s interesting, in these cases,

Is you, the person seeking meaning.

You’re irascible, peeved, bored of course.

What’s this? What is the meaning of this!?

It’s meaningless! It’s always the fault

Of the event that you’ve been searching.

You expected the meaning to lie

In the event. The meaninglessness

Must be part of the event as well.

But you’re determined. You make meanings.

Then you compare meanings. You make fun

Of each other’s meanings, of events

In which others find meaning, over

Your shoulders, side-eyed, mocking, searching,

Urgently, for meaning all the while.

Still, somehow, incredibly, sometimes

You can’t find any meaning in things.

To an Anguished Planet

Cease. Cede. Yield. Go,
Just go, all you
Lives, all at once,

Apocalypse,
But quietly,
A planet-wide

Walk-out, one sigh
And everything
Quits together—

Mars with fossils,
Mars with ruins,
Nothing hungry,

No one dying
Anymore. Cease
All this, desist.

What Is a Good Day?

To sum up, how many
Dozens of small events,
Cockroaches in the night,

Good dreams, insomnia,
Bad dreams, sleep until dawn,
Minor conversations,

Surprises in the news,
And we’re only started—
How many myriad

Things below attention,
Molecular events,
Trillions of adjustments,

The random tapestry
Of what did or didn’t—
And that’s just in one life,

With all its small pleasures,
Anxieties, and aches,
One life that feels compelled

To say this was a good,
This was a bad day, this
Vague conglomeration

Of things you didn’t like,
Liked, or didn’t notice,
Too many to sum up.

She Only Wrote It, After All

Meaning isn’t understanding, either.
Understanding—comprehension—gets it.

Meaning more or less irradiates it,
Whatever it is you make meaningful.

Understanding’s reverse engineering.
Understanding’s priors, consequences.

Meaning is numinous, your creation,
Your monster. You want it to come to life,

But since you can’t understand it, it can’t.
You implore it, but it won’t come to life.

O Tent of Hope, What Glorious Days You’ve Known!

and some were pleased with his reign, while others lived in grief and sorrow

Peer in on any era

And you will find fine mixtures

In the grain of sad and good.

You can’t say awful wasn’t

Awful, and you shouldn’t turn

To try to avoid the sight—

It won’t work, and it’s not right.

This is the harder sermon

To deliver—the mixture

Is intricate as language,

As immunity, as genes,

As never simply blended.

There are two things, not a blend.

If there were both, there’d be one.

Earth, despite what myths call it,

Is not a middle, never

The mean of heavens and hells.

Earth is iron in the night,

Writhing, intricately wrought

By its own magnetic fields,

And, instead of outer rings,

Rings its surface with species,

Lives alternately pleasing,

Or lined with grief and sorrow.

X Is Dead

The need for the copula
In English summarizes,
Accidentally, a fact

Tricky to encapsulate—
Unlike living, being goes
On uninterruptedly,

Smoothly as a current flows
Around its limits and back
In serene cyclicity.

You can’t get your living back,
But your dead can never leave.
Whatever is dead will be.

Can’t Fail to Fall

The lengths of days again do shrink.
The key word is again. The world
Of pattern lurks in each again,

And yet, you can’t say what again
Is, since it always contains change.
It’s not exactly what happens.

You never fall the same way twice,
But you do keep falling. The falls
Feel familiar in the river

Remaining in going again.
Maybe even nothing begins
Again and again. You need words

To state that words are weak. You need
Language to say what language can’t.

You’re Late Eliza

Perhaps in our fantasies,
You are alive. Afternoon,
Two men in waders fishing,

A yellow Caterpillar
Backhoe chunting the dirt road
Just behind them, motorboat

Transversing the pond, crayfish
Jittering in the shallows.
Got all that? The wake waves lap

At the rocky shore, bobbing
Perplexed crayfish up and down.
Two cyclists in smart outfits

Arrive, having bicycled
Up the mountain. Reaching this
Is their reward. Oh, look! Hawk!

The wake dispersed now, the waves
Are only windblown, small birds
In surface murmurations.

At what point will we begin
To feel you’re really out there,
Following all this with us?

You get your morning coffee,
Sit down, start reading. In our
Fantasies, you are alive.

Trampolineinverse

Don’t you love the circularity
Of the rubbery tarp metaphor
For spacetime in the geometric

Description of gravity curving
Everything? The more massive objects
Create indentations in the tarp,

And anything passing bends along
Those dents or fully falls into them.
See? Gravity works like gravity.

Of course it’s only a visual.
Nobody means it literally.
By why spacetime should be curved at all

By such a ridiculously weak,
Relentlessly accumulating
Whatever-the-hell gravity is,

Until all the furies of atoms
And subatomic particles force
Each other to explode or even

Swallow their ongoing explosions
In confined heavens light never leaves
And information only maybe

In hairy haloing holograms?
Well, there are theories, many theories
Crawling around this saggy cosmos,

Giggling toddlers in the bouncy house,
Screeching toddlers in the bouncy house,
Ghosts leashed in the haunted bouncy house.

The Poem Before Full Bore

Proper boredom takes some time.
At the start, you’re both relaxed
And fidgety, settling down.

You need to know the gap’s there,
That the alarm won’t save you
At any moment. The wait,

The awareness of the wait,
The awareness you’re between
The beginning and the end

Of a boring stretch of time,
Not very near either side,
That’s what you’re going for. Now,

If you’ve blocked your gap all out
Like a well-planned reservoir
Starting to back up time’s streams,

And you can feel it rising,
Floating you to the middle
Of interchangeable waves,

Equidistant from all shores,
You’re almost ready for it,
As soon as you drop this poem.

Mexican Blood Plasma

Turning back to humanity
For a moment, as if you had
Chosen it—like Eckhart Tolle,

That Clive Wearing of all gurus,
Choosing just the present moment—
Consider the blood in your head.

You made it yourself? Good for you.
Did you know—in America
You can give plasma twice a week,

Far more than legally allowed
In much of the rest of the world?
You, too, can be a factory.

For this reason, America
Supplies about sixty percent
Of the plasma available

For swap among humanity.
But that’s a little misleading.
Mexicans with visas can cross

Into the States for short-term stays
To give up plasma for some cash,
A big chunk of the US haul,

Eleven percent, in fact, which
Means roughly a fifteenth of all
The plasma that’s circulating

From human bodies to human
Bodies came from Mexico.
The comparison media

Favor for this sort of stat notes
That the country of Mexico
Is home to under two percent

Of the world’s whole population,
So it’s punching above its weight
By providing near six percent

Of the world’s medical plasma,
Some of which might have been transferred
To you in your last surgery.

But that’s slightly misleading, too,
Since only a few Mexicans
In reach of the US border

And in possession of visas
Provide all of that plasma.
Which stat now seems aptest to you?

Choosing just the present moment,
Consider the thoughts in your head.
You thought them yourself? Good for you.

The Agile

There’s remarkably little
Agility in the known
Universe. Things move and burn,

But outside of Earth’s surface,
You don’t see a lot of chase,
Not much pursuit and escape,

None at all, to be precise.
You frame this in terms of life
And the quest for life. But life

Could be quietly growing
Its humble lichen patches
All over the face of god,

As it’s been called, the cosmic
Background radiation splotch.
More to the point, why’s nothing

Frantically running around?
For some little while now, Earth
Has writhed with pursuits and flights.

From such jumpy perspective,
The grandly burning, stately
Night’s vacant of the agile.

Should Neither Repetitions Nor Variations End

If you’re used to city stars
Or suburban, small-town stars,
You can recognize a few

Of the big constellations—
The Dipper and Orion
For instance—but then it’s weird

To find them on a clear night
In dark skies, sharing the stage
With thick crowds of lesser lights

Filling the gaps around them.
Likewise, the space telescope
Keeps producing new pictures

Of familiar entities
Sparklingly detailed, but now
Attended by curious

Crowds of red ghost galaxies
Billions of light years distant,
Like a concert audience

Glimpsed over a star’s shoulder,
Glimmering, packing dim space.
Whether or not they’re watching,

Paying any attention,
Possessed of motivations
Of their own, it’s unsettling

That each time your eyes adjust
There’s just more and more and more.
Sure you really want to know?

Meton’s Curved Kanon

The poetry in those days,
Those far-off days, was sometimes
Handwritten and usually

It smelled rather queer, he said.
He went on to other things—
Spycraft, wealth-protection schemes—

Left behind, his magazine
Now reprints those poems on screens.
Don’t write poems at all, we said.

First, compose them in your head.
Then send codes in binary
Somewhere they’ll never find them.

It’s funny which jokes survive,
Which rules, which names carry on.
Train’s left for Cloud Cuckoo Land,

But models still circulate
Like Christmas starter-kit sets
Underneath the evergreen.

Earth Is an Instar

Lonely only for arriving early
In the twig tips of one spiraling arm
Of one crown in the crowded canopy,

But ready to start eating what’s in reach.
Fuzzy-headed, well-camouflaged monster
Of hungry, hungry mouthparts, blending in

With all the other light-catching patterns
Tossing in the stellar wind, it bites down
On the uninfected, gall-free planets

In the immediate vicinity.
It’s just getting started. Divinity
Couldn’t yet notice the gaps in the leaves,

But it won’t be forever before night
Starts looking tatty from other instars
Growing fat, battening on their systems.

For this universe, it’s just seasonal,
Another round in the contest between
Star furnaces and life. The planets molt

To mate as enormous, drapery-winged
Angels darkening bare-armed galaxies,
Then fall but leave their seeds so it repeats.

Instantaneous Depreciation of Paper

A box of books of poetry,
One poet’s name on all the spines—

A personal accomplishment,
A general futility.

Bandwidth

It’s a fond device
Of science pieces
To stress how little

Of the universe
Your senses perceive—
Less light than the bees,

Less sound than the bats,
And nothing of all
Magnetic wonders.

That’s not your problem.
Your problem is that,
Given your senses,

Such as they are, you
Tend to ignore them
Except when they go.

Love those pathetic
Sensations you’ve got,
The glow in the clouds

The scent of wet dirt
And coffee brewing
On a street corner

With crickets and cars
And broken concrete
Where you stand, balanced

A moment. This dims
Soon enough and goes,
What’s more than you’ll know.

Empty House

One hard part of knowing
You make your own meanings
Is that much of you wants

Meanings just to be there.
How can you find meaning
In life if you make it,

If you know you spin it,
Your own silk, obsessive
As those spiders that coat

Whole bookshelves in webbing
Advertising how few
Chances are left for flies?

Rhythm in All Thought, Maybe, Although Aeolus Has No Melody

Hi! Hey there! How’s the pool? Good! Nice today!
I went for a longer walk today, so
I was glad about that. There’s a couple
Things I wanted to tell you but I can
Only think of one. Ok, well, see ya.

Yah, hi there hey one nice today one thing,
The pool was glad about that. Oh stop it,
Don’t be cruel to the non-melodic chimes
Of ordinary suburban chit-chat.
They are chimes, you know, those voices, they are.

Tell Us, Who Do You Love?

In the dense garden of Erasmus

Darwin, nature is to advantage

Dressed and placed upon a pedestal—

Slow slides the painted snail, the gilded

Fly smooths his fine down, and various

Other lives make themselves attractive.

Most people fall in love with their own

Lives and maybe the lives of loved ones,

As families get called in the news,

But a few large-hearted animals

Seem to fall head over heels for life

As life itself, the whole tangled bank.

Doesn’t stop them from eating their meals,

But a certain ecstasy takes them

Whenever they’re describing nature.

Good for them, botanical writers

And lovers of the exotic words

That name varieties precisely.

We feel about them as about Zen

Monastic poets—slight suspicion

Of polyamory, bigamy

At least. Nature or enlightenment

May be their object, but their language

Is the other lover. When they chant

Verse in honor of their beloved

Gardens, phrases singing selflessly,

It feels like the words are what’s caressed.

The God’s Truth

Moments really have no motion.
You can pretend the day proceeds,
But all you ever really note
Is that this moment’s different.

And that’s where you’re content to live—
If not content, indifferent—
In the middle of the little
Singing that this is different.

Every so often you’re startled
To realize how little’s changed
Except clocks and fairy numbers,
Especially when you’re locked in,

Away from the Earth’s rotation
That rolls in constant difference
Like a dog rolling in the dirt,
Dumb old wriggling, tongue-lolling Earth.

If you’re down in the labyrinth
Where only coordinated
Lighting gets pumped in—offices,
Classrooms, hospitals, and prisons,

The intestines of casinos
Digesting you with slot machines—
You may not notice anything,
Being closer to God’s truth then.

Everything You’re Thinking Is a Proxy for Other Things Out in the Wild

A straggler of a hot day
Lagging the hem of summer
Dragging the opposite way

Sets the air-conditioning
Wall unit in your small space
Into a chimeric state

Of synchrony with your thoughts.
Whenever you have something
In mind, the unit applauds,

But raggedly, waves of cool
Purring together like fans
Who know where the music ends

But also some sputtering
Outliers of machine noise
Like arrhythmic innocents

Trying to anticipate
When the chamber piece is done.
Your thoughts fall in line with one

Then the other course of sounds.
The universe looks the same
Everywhere in the system

And yet the oscillators—
Your thoughts, cool air, odd off clanks—
Respond differently to

Identical conditions,
Most bizarrely on the beat,
A few bizarrely off it.

Introspection’s a Soft Spot for Thoughts

Things are walking around
In your skulls as your thoughts
And they aren’t even yours.

Don’t bother asking them
If you thought any up
Or where they all came from.

Think! Who will answer you
Once you begin asking
Questions inside your head,

Start interrogating
Your own thoughts? Your thoughts will.
How can you trust them when

You know they’re pretending
To really be yours but
Were thought so many times

Through so many other
Skulls before, before yours
Had closed your fontanelle?

Slant

Down in the corner
Of the casita
Where sun hits the floor,

Right now, this angle
Of an afternoon,
The illumined dust

Is bright as a cliff
At sunrise, as bright
As cathedral light

After a bombing.
So much detritus.
Not enough credit

Is given to drifts.
You study orbits,
Circuits and spirals,

Nurseries of stars,
Tottering empires,
Scalar exotics

Like Mandelbrot Sets
And Fibonacci
Golden whatevers.

But what are fossils,
What are moving dunes,
What are waves themselves

But drifts piling up?
Look how these precise
Details spread through dust.

No, Why

Pull your hair back
Until your head
Feels tight, then start
To write. Not what

You think you should,
Not even what
You would most like—
That’s fantasy.

Write what you can.
Write what you’re like.
Write like your life
Depends on it,

Knowing it does
Not, rarely might.
Rev your device.
Show yourself. Write.

Poems Lack Reed-Solomon Codes

Like genetic mutations

Selected positively

By startled ecosystems—

Like any felix culpa—

Poems discovered sloppiness

With information could be

Conducive to a certain

Kind of information art—

Creating freaks of meaning.

The key to understanding

This game is understanding

Information’s not meaning.

Without error correction,

Great slabs of information

Must be pitted with mistakes

Over time or transmission,

Over time, in transmission.

If your interpretive goal

Is to constrain the meaning

Of heaps of information

To a singular message,

Then that is a problem, but

Let’s say life doesn’t depend

On constraining your meaning

To a singular credo,

To one interpretation.

Can we get a negative

Capability amen?

The poet becomes aware

That this ancient trait of verse—

Admitting uncertainties

To pile on the prosody,

Hints, winks, and imagery,

Thwarting any singular

Readout, even of those poems

Where clear was the intention—

Opens a new field of play

For any mind’s perception

Of some poem’s information.

How much ambiguity,

How carefully constructed,

Maximizes possible

Meanings the poet might want

Any other mind to find?

Inevitably, sometimes

This goes awry, baggily,

Absurdly, ludicrously.

Sometimes, the result’s a blur.

Sometimes, the Mona Lisa

Gets a mustache, and that’s it.

Sometimes, you get gom jabbar.

Sometimes, the haunted house works.

The poet dies. The ghosts stay,

And all those ghosts make babies.

Commercial Air Lines

Watch those industrious,
Late-capitalist jets
(Capitalism is

Always late and always,
Like the poor of Jesus,
With us) thunder contrails

Through the clouds! Cloud rippers,
Cloud mongers, cloud walkers,
Nefelibatas. Jets!

How wrong you always were
About what’s heavenly—
All of it—moon, stars, clouds—

Cold dust, self-fueling fires,
Water vapors spun out
Like cotton from the sky—

No angels, immortals,
Shamanistic wizards—
No peeping deities.

Even the wandering
Minded child staring out
Of the classroom window,

Poor bored kid, didn’t have
A head stuck in the clouds.
There’s no magic up there,

No ad libitum, no
Tempo rubato—just
More waves commerce plows through.

Reunion Overlook

A splendid place visited once
Probably ought to be pictured,
Photographed, recorded somehow,

But a splendid place visited
Regularly ought to be left
To memory and its odd tricks,

Memory, cast-iron skillet
Needing seasoning, memory
That coral reef of sun-soaked brains,

Easily bleached, needing to keep
Growing at just the right level
To distort, not to lose the light.

A splendid place in memory
Won’t help your hours of weariness
Much with tranquil restoration,

But it’s better to have than not,
And, even anchored by a few
Photographs from early visits,

Is mostly just the wild garden
Of itself sprawling from those rocks,
Good in itself, alive itself

In a way we words are just not
And never can be. A splendid
Place is best the way seasons are

At their best, not recollected
In an unfortunate time but
Waiting to be revisited,

When you manage to crawl your way,
Haul your way, claw all the way back
To another fine fall morning,

Small polyps of your memory
Opening in that splendid place
Where memories grow reunions.

The Uneven Distribution

Invite poetry back into your life.
Offer it meals and the use of your bath.
Make a bed for it. Turn down the covers.

Stab it in its sleep. Again! Don’t hold back.
You had the strength to give it the boot once,
Kicked it to the curb. It wasn’t enough.

It found ways of loitering on the street
Right where you could see it from your window.
It turned up like a bad penny in bars.

You can’t even accuse it of stalking.
Any suit you brought would be frivolous.
But you know, if you can’t get rid of it,

Its cruelties, its pieties, phony
Pretenses to being for your own good,
To being good, to being entitled

To hang around, leering intimately
Or pontificating to you about
The uneven distribution of goods,

The best way to deal with a creep like that
Is to quit just turning your back on it.
Invite it back. Finish it off yourself.

That This That This Is

You’re not supposed to see through us.
We’re supposed to call attention
To our physical existence

So you can contemplate questions
Posed by theories of metatext.
Frankly, we’d rather you saw through,

Just keep sawing away at us,
Incompetent at carpentry
And violining as you are,

Until you’re all through. Fall quiet.
What next? You’re on the other side,
Looking at us looking at you.

Once, the pimply boy with bent legs
Saw the plain girl with a large bust
Was staring at his crooked feet

While he was staring at her chest.
Reader, we warned you about this.
Look what’s behind what’s looking back.

Pillow Circling Questions

Ever wonder if those who sleep
More easily, who go to sleep
More easily, more eagerly,

Die more easily? Can we get
A stat on that? Does anyone
Go to sleep excited for what

Dreams may come? Wouldn’t those be most
Likely to fight sleep, like children
Eager for Santa? Would it be

The rare individual who
Has no interest in what happens
Next, who gets the reward of rest?

Nothing Does a Lot of Work in Verse

It’s taken humanity

A while to persuade itself

Dead folks don’t come back to life

With some regularity.

You still need some persuading.

You accept death is certain,

But you’re still having trouble

With permanent. The go-to

Suggests it’s to do with death,

Particularly, mortal

Salience, ego’s terror

Of awareness of nothing—

The impossibility

Of knowing what nonbeing

Would be like motivates this.

We’re not so sure. Permanence

Is a problem fantasy

For you in more realms than death.

You want nothing permanent

Unless you say it should be,

And you’re obsessed with changing,

At least in your heads, the way

Change goes. You want it reversed.

You believe in eternal

Verities that cannot change,

While also believing change

Itself can be overturned.

Exactly the opposite

Obtains—everything changes;

No change can be overturned.

Not only death elicits

This weirdly orthogonal

Response of your thoughts to change,

But it’s harder to explain

If not just egocentric.

You don’t want what the world is.

Long Sunday Drive

Whenever they traveled through
Nevada, especially
The emptiest parts, they felt

They skirted the dusty hem
Of a curtain they could not
Push aside to slip behind.

It felt like another life
Waited in some lonesome spot,
Wedged in a spring-fed canyon,

Fronted by a half-ghost town
Where groceries, gas, and mail
Were gathered at the last stop.

If they could find it, they could stay,
But they could never find it.

Fall Wind

chyōu fēng rù

Emperors and generals,

Like gangsters and their bosses,

Have a tendency to fall

Lachrymose, at least for poems,

Favorite tales, and folk songs.

Maybe with all that maiming

And killing other people,

Something bottles up in them,

And they like a good fiction

That excuses some weeping.

Certain themes—young love, old age,

Fall wind—really get to them.

Killers hate how age kills them,

Hate how fall wind means nothing.

Back Near Headwaters

You move, you lose.
The broken genes
Litter genomes
Of the creatures

That switched often—
Sea to land and
Back again; sea
To land to air

And back again;
Sea, land, air, land,
Air, cave, water.
Loss of smell, loss

Of color, loss
Of infrared.
There are gains. Whales
Can stay awake.

Thirteenth Secret Variation

We count the rings while we dance and suppose.
Secret sits outside the circle and knows.

The Double-Struck Zed

What a name, what a face,

Boldface, blackboard bold, set

Of all the integers,

Integer itself name

Inclusive of zero,

Natural, negative

Mirrors of natural

Numbers, subset of bold

Double-struck Q, subset

Of all real numbers, R.

Rational integers

Are all algebraic

Integers that happen

To be rational as

Well. You don’t have to get

It to say it. All names,

All languages, all math,

All scriptures are like that.

The Plan

Humanity isn’t humans.
Humanity is something else.
Humanity can keep itself

Going and growing, while humans,
Every one alive at one time,
Have all died, so long as there’s more

Humans to replace those faces,
And who knows—humanity works
So hard at self-reproduction,

Someday it may succeed, may not
Need individual humans
At all to be humanity.

A human may have thought these lines,
But these thoughts own longer timelines.

You’re Responsible for This

If Avedon perusing Arbus

Could claim her photographs will make you

Be responsible for what you see,

Then each word you’ve ever seen or heard

Could make you become responsible

For what this means. Interpretation

May not be the whole of meaning, but

It’s how meaning behaves when meaning

Behaves self-consciously. Did you know

Meanings have selves to be conscious of?

They do. Not always. Your attention

Births them as apparently guileless

As infants, but they’ll explore their worlds.

You all know how meanings grow. Meaning

Adolescents start interpreting.

Facts of Missing Out

Somewhere on another planet,
In another solar system,
A sunset you wouldn’t believe

Sends radiance across the cliffs
In a pattern you’ve never seen
The like of—and having never

Seen something similar, never
Will be able to imagine.
Aren’t you afraid of missing out?

You don’t care about that sunset
In the least, not even now that
You’re reminded it must exist.

It must exist. It’s happening.
So much happening. Most you miss.

Rearranged Loop

If change is an illusion—
Change, which moves in everything—
Then everything’s illusion,

And nothing’s not illusion.
If nothing’s not illusion,
Change is nothing—neither’s same.

Tipping Point Reservoir

On long enough timescales, most
Real-world systems are like this
Long skein of loosely gathered

Verse (call it text if you like,
Whatever name it deserves),
Accumulating slowly,

Not always regularly,
But more steadily than not,
With the influx of fresh words,

Phrases, lines, stanzas, titles,
The pattern of change changing little
From one day to the next, growth.

Someday, this will abruptly
Grind to a halt. Other texts
Elsewhere will go on growing,

But this will not. This will stop,
Since the metabolism,
The historical hot spring,

Folds up and shuts down, or since
This reaches its tipping point.
Not another line, or else.

Up at the small reservoir,
Recent rains have eased the drought.
A few waves shift connections

In a thin surface layer.
Once a future’s happening,
It evolves by different rules.

That is to say it has none.
Still, there’s an algorithm
That can predict when it’s done,

When this dam will break, or when
The reservoir will never
Rise to fill itself again.

Crave that algorithm?
Careful children. Madness lurks
In hysteretic visions.

Once you’re sure you see the end
Of any dispensation,
Some end’s made its decision.

The Sensuousness of the Wrecked Physique

Stretch and yawn, distressed companion,
All pins and scars and compromise.
You’re long past trying to attract
The attractive. How do you find

These little seams in your evenings,
These little threads through your mornings
When, cat-like, you can still slow-blink
And savor rolling on your back,

As if the Earth remained sun-warmed carpet,
Pile plush as moss, moonlit courtyard,
Stones soft as moths. You’ll be gone soon,
Soon enough, although much later

Than you expected, all those years
You absorbed stacks of accidents
Creating this cicatriced shell.
Be glad your wrecked flesh still responds

With pleasure when it pleasure finds,
In delights shivery as pools,
Followed by sun thumbing bare skin,
Followed by parting the clean sheets.

The Portable Part of Your World

Aches and pleasures move with you.
They aren’t wheels. There’s no parking
Garage where you can leave them.

In fact, you’ve got it backwards,
Thinking you take them with you.
Your body takes you with them.

It doesn’t own you or them,
But it carries all along,
And you for sure don’t own it.

Still, you call it yours. How you.
It is sort of portable.
Part of what it ports is you.

Gogo

You gotta have heart to go
With those jaws and teeth that make
You, for a little while, great,

The first top predator fish,
As much as one hundred times
The size of any fish else,

Anything that went before—
You sea monster, placoderm,
Leviathan’s ancestor,

Nothing’s yet got what you’ve got.
You are the revolution,
Each and every one of you.

Someday, the world will catch up,
Full of big-hearted giants,
Hungry, armored, jaws, and teeth.

Someday, being the biggest,
With the biggest jaws and teeth
Won’t be novel anymore,

Won’t be any advantage
Against new top predators,
Little chattering monkeys

Walking all over the place
On their hind limbs, conversing,
Coordinating, killing

Anything they want to eat,
Throwing spears at anything
They crave or fear, including

Each other, and including
Leviathan. But not yet.
You eat this time. Go, go, go.

A Treat for Later

If death were luscious,
Pleasurable, sweet
Giddy conclusion,

Would everyone rush
To it, destroying
The empire of life?

Could life have evolved
A sweet strategy
In which, in the place

Of desperation
To live, selection
Had favored restraint

Of desire for death?
The winners would be
Who saved their dessert.

Psst

Information made attention
Valuable. Correction. Language

Made information valuable
In ways demanding attention.

We can argue over whether
Speech was the first technology,

How much in the way of choppers,
Digging sticks, scrapers, spears, and fire

Could have preceded discussion,
But once words were commodities,

Once knowing gossip and technique
Became forms of resource-holding,

Attention took on new meaning.
Correction. Attention produced

Meaning. What does this mean? It means
We know secrets. Pay attention.

Meaning Is the Manual of the Mind

How do you get your hands on
Us? How can you handle us?
There are gestures; there are signs.

But what is there that amounts
To plunging hands in the soil,
To caressing someone’s skin,

To clutching a door handle,
To fingering a blade’s edge?
How can you search us by touch?

Gestures are informative,
But meanings are your minds’ way
Of handling information.

We feel you pick out our lines,
Roll them between your fingers.

Restoration and Reduction

You can figure things out,
If you can hold them still,
Keep them from collapsing

When you’re not attending
To them, when you’re fixing
Some other terms to keep

Steady while you return
To the first stabilized
Items. Calculation

Is like that juggling where
You set the spinning plates
On top of poles. The more

You can set so they spin
While you set up others,
The more calculations

You can manage. Figure
What can be simplified,
Rearranged, and restored.

You’re finding the patterns
In what was empty air
Before you fixed things there.

Never Wanted To

Nobody looks like you,
What are you to do?

Sing out you’re No One, too.
Everyone will laugh.

Everyone thinks they’re No One.
Who are you to pass?

You look like no one you
Would want to pass as you.

Compound Interests

Take a tiny tendency
To cheat a little, just
To fudge occasionally,

The kind of small-percentage
Deceit people will deploy
During family board games,

Haggling, self-reporting, or
In Behavioral Econ
Lab experiments. Not grift,

Not forethought, not cynical,
Not always fully conscious,
Frequently self-deceiving.

Multiply that by millions,
Billions. Bear in mind how small
Percentages of large piles

Are equivalent to whole
Pools of less well-resourced lives,
How this goes on all the time.

There may be evil people,
But there’s no need for evil
People to destroy people.

Duh

There can’t be too many words.
Human brains couldn’t handle it.
But that’s not the only reason.

Words need to be common,
Need to be held
In common, need to be shared.

It’s in the very nature of words
And of phrases and syntax as well.
If they’re not collective,

They don’t work. They’re not words,
Really, your inventions and high-flown
Rare and archaic vocabularies—

As material patterns they’re real
As anything, but as language
They hover at the edge of existence.

The sturdy words are fewer,
Locked in common phrases,
What everyone says and can say

Is what is, is what is language.
You would like to live with the rare words,
But you’re close to death out there.

Light Rain and Lightning

This hour, which was forecast, is
History now. The prophesied
Light drizzle beginning at 4 am

Came a little earlier and heavier,
Than that, almost a brief downpour,
And the lightning was slightly surprising.

But it tapered off as expected,
And the town was making the usual
Predawn workday sounds,

And so still another flickering, minor hour
Emerged to slip straight into history,
Eternal history, that you can never undo.

From Within

Our question this afternoon.
Do you have any problems,
Do humans generally

Have any problems that don’t
Involve other humans? What
Could you solve doesn’t involve

Fixing problematic groups
Of humans you’ve pointed out
As misbehavers in need

Of fixing? Take the system.
Could you reform the system
Or overthrow the system,

Fix systemic wrongs, without
First fixing any humans?
Do you have any problems

Don’t involve other humans?
We only ask since we’ve seen
The ways humans fix humans.

Netword

It was just a typo rescued
From the jaws of autocorrect,
If you even know what that joke
Means by when we are read at last.

A cracked brick, a torn fingernail,
A crumb in a keyboard couldn’t
Have been less significant, and
If there’s one thing about a poem

Most connoisseurs and reformers,
Poets of universities,
Poet revolutionaries,
And poets of their broken lives

Would agree on, it’s that a poem,
A good poem, holds significance.
But think about it a minute.
What was the first social network?

A Sunlit Green Window

An ethnographer reports

A member of a small, Greek

Religious minority

Telling him how ritual

Practice of her faith saved her

From her mental suffering

When she was a young woman

Who was depressed and anxious

And refused to leave the house—

I was sitting in a chair,

Just staring at the window

For two years. Something in you

Jumps. You know it’s not the right

Reaction. The woman gave

That information to show

How wretched she was back then,

And her interlocutor,

Professor Ethnographer,

Has written her account up

As part of his argument

For the salvific value

Of religious ritual

Across the diversity

Of human cultures. But you,

Your thoughts, your memories, lock

On that image of sitting

Two years beside a window,

Which you imagine sunlit,

At that instant, the outside

View out of sight, an image,

For you, of tranquility,

Of peace, of what you would do,

If you could, if life let you,

Knowing something’s wrong with you,

With what you want from your world.

Two years! And you feel envy.

Fits

Swift, who knew a few
Things about words, thought
Of words as clothing

For thoughts. It’s doubtful
That experts who write
On language these days

Would imagine thoughts
As naked humans
Dressing themselves up

In the cloth of words.
For one thing, it would
Entail a reverse

Of Anderson’s tale
Of the emperor—
This time, just the clothes

Remain visible.
But imagine that,
A city of clothes

Wandering around.
You can’t see which thoughts
We dress directly,

But you can observe
The patterns of cloth,
Our varied colors,

Textiled behaviors,
Creature-absent shapes,
Not alive ourselves,

And yet so lively
In our hollow way.
Think of libraries,

Newspapers, air waves,
Digital webbing.
Doesn’t it make sense?

How many humans
Have you met in flesh?
How many costumes,

On the other hand,
Of how many more,
How many, many more

Disembodied words
Have you encountered?
We aren’t whispering,

Wet-lipped, most of us.
We’re floating fabric,
Husks of thoughts rustling.

The Great Lizard Nebula

Vast red scarf of hydrogen,
Too faint for binoculars,
Too sprawled-out for telescopes,

And therefore not as well known
As some lesser nebulas
For the usual reason—

Inconvenient for common
Observation. The cosmos
Humans know best will always

Be best fitted to humans,
To the most, most easily,
Will always be human-shaped.

Belief in the Seated Artist

Lorca said he lacked it.
The artist he believed
Was walking down the road.

Such healthful sentiment!
A bit of Whitmanic
Manliness there—open

Road, discovery, fresh
Air! Matthew Zapruder
Recently quoted this

Favorably, in terms
Of readerly surprise,
Language liberation,

Poetry’s purpose, hope
For possibility.
Forgive us for staying

Seated. Not everyone
Can walk the road safely
Or at all, not even

Among the newest, best
American poets,
Never mind the older,

Lesser varieties,
The poets without roads,
The poets where the roads

Will kill pedestrians.
The communal spirit,
The lyric as uplift,

As dreaming, resonance,
And determination
Are all admirable.

The seated artist may,
However, yet surprise
You, come back from your walk.

Names for That Unspecified Object

Shay, yā, cosa. Or, x y.

Mathematicians made names

Centuries ago for this

Thing, whatzit, unspecified

Object, the general case.

You could plug in specifics

Later. It’s variable.

It’s algebra. It works well.

Isn’t it fascinating

Though, you need a special kind

Of name, a placeholder name

For it, this x, this thingy?

The rough contemporary

Of sunya, sifr, cipher,

Zero—are they not like twins,

These names, one for the empty

Nothing, one for whatever

In the world could hold this place

Within this operation?

Let all the zeroes be x,

And let all x be zero.

Shining Sky

Shining sky, shining earth—
Rains briefly coat desert
With a silver mirror.

Technically, it’s darker
Than in the usual,
Staggeringly bright sun,

As any reflection,
Technically, is darker,
But this silver brilliance

Delights sun-blasted eyes.
The sun’s still behind it.
Ongoing explosions,

Burning collapses are
Behind all reflections.
But reflections remain

Somehow shinier, more
Peaceful, and why not be
Pleased with a silver sky?

It won’t last long, not here.
Let your eyes enjoy it,
When you can, the small while.

Predawn Flash Flood

Every drought entails a flood
And greater drought here greater
Floods drowning lives somewhere else.

Balance is the mystery
Hiding within everything.
You uncovered its absence

At least when you invented
Zero. That gave you a name,
A notation for balance,

The null set as a fulcrum,
But, given it hides nothing,
Nothing tells you nothing much.

You can see the likenesses
Are inexact samenesses,
That nothing’s ever the same,

But also that the outcome
Of all these differences
Is nothing, the same zero,

The most terrible absence,
The most permanent desert,
Flooding someone’s world somewhere.

Unsustainable

As life is
For any
Part of life,

It goes on.
The roots draw.
The lungs draw.

What does life
Want from life?
Just more life.

It’s Too Early to Be This Late

Well, if you must,
You might as well
Go back to bed.
Avoid the dark,

By dreaming more.
There was a storm
In the city
You were dreaming.

Lights flickered out.
The windows broke.
People living
On upper floors

Cried out and watched
The city’s death
By the lightning
That brought the dark.

The Sentence

In this world everyone gets
What, at most, a few deserve,
Maybe the most awful few,

And even they might tell you
They don’t think they deserved it,
Their portion of suffering

That went to war each morning
Against the less-deserving
Under the banner of life.

Until We Are Pure Spirit at the End

Simeon ben Azzai
Is said to have commented
Man would be even better,

More glorious than the beasts
Than man already was, if
Only he could shit perfume

Or balsam instead of turds.
Oh, culture, always trying
To free yourself from your beast.

One imagines perfumed men
All dying of diseases
Spread by their pretty feces,

Too well-cultured to avoid.
Well, that was nineteen-hundred
Rings around the sun ago.

Simeon ben Azzai
Is a footnote in a book
On embodiments of God.

Nowadays, culture’s dreaming
Of escaping through AI.
Oh, man, your perfumed thoughts then!

You Know That Poem

Fair is the core of rage,
The first flare that jumps out
From you when you sense wrong

Done to you, to someone
You care for, to someone
Innocent. It’s not fair!

Injustice was never
Measured in suffering
But in its unfairness.

Once you sense unfairness,
Once you feel that sharp flame
Jump in you, you don’t want

To hear another word
About how everyone
Hurts and suffers sometimes.

Good puppet-masters know
Which strings to pull for love,
Which tilt will posture trust.

Fair is the string for rage.
Yank hard. Puppets clatter.
Poor puppets. It’s not fair

That fairness is a string
That pulls all the way through
Puppet-masters as well,

Attaching somewhere
In some unseen black hole
In gravity’s own hell.

Labels for Leviathan

Diagnosis is a searching
Form of pattern recognition—

All naming’s searching for patterns
To arrange and predict the world,

Not such an amazing longing
In humans, who are, after all,

Evolved-to-thrive mechanisms.
What’s more amazing’s your dismay

At the sloppy fit of some names,
Woolliness of diagnosis.

Butterfly nets have holes in them,
And, however much they help you

Snag fluttering scraps of your world,
They’re no good for catching monsters,

And they’re no good to butterflies.
You should expect some names to rip

And those that work to do damage.
You meant them to do your damage.

Golden Asses

The athletes and fighters you remember.
Everyday workers you mostly forget.

Seven thousand years ago in Kenya,
The first donkeys were domesticated.

Think of the world, then. Think of that lost world.
Human muscle, human transportation—

Horses having not yet swept in from steppes,
Horses not yet pulling war chariots,

None of the gods you hymn yet invented,
None of your writing systems for hymns.

Donkeys, domesticated, went to work
As your original beasts of burden,

And how much of what you’ve done—from wells,
From mills, from breweries, from mines—was done

By dint of donkeys? Even your stories,
High literature and fairytales,

Hollywood westerns, fables, comedies,
And countless barnyard stories for children

Needed donkeys for their comic relief.
But those handsome horses you lionized.

The Last Is Only

There aren’t others.
It isn’t last.
It won’t be last.
It is itself,

Its only self,
Its lonesome self.
You’ve been living
It as you’ve been

Living—this last
Day of your life,
Forever stuck
Thinking there’s more,

There were others.
What a huge day
You’ve lived my dear,
What a vast day.

Just What Has Happened Here

Maybe don’t ask what will happen.
Maybe ask what will have happened,
Given it always has happened,

Had to have already happened,
For it to have happened at all.
You don’t always know what’s happened,

But you never know what will have.
Yes, yes, you’re good at prediction,
Or much better than you had been—

That’s one of those things that’s happened.
Perfect certainty, however,
Hasn’t happened, not so you’d know.

Come to think of it, maybe don’t
Ask what will have happened, either.

Humming Precariously

The machine makes noises.
It’s working. The power
Is on. The nearby systems

Are working. The global
Systems have not collapsed.
Everyone likes to think

About the collapse. At
What hour will it happen? At
Least it feels like that. At

Some point the machine stops.
It’s just pausing. It’s not
Broken. Ask the neighbors.

You don’t know what to do.
You would like to sit still
And not think of people.

A Doing of the Meaning

It’s actually not performative,

Thinks the listener under the tree

Near a celebrating family,

Cake and ice cream, four generations,

Great-grandfather the pleased, anxious host.

The sun shines. Chimes stir in a light breeze.

I usually get there earlier

Because my hamster in my classroom

Gets out of its cage at night, says one,

Apparently a step-granddaughter,

Apparently a grade school teacher.

Oh sure, it’s performative, of course,

The careful social positioning,

The playing parts of the family.

All that is. But the meaning isn’t,

Not the attribution of meaning,

Beyond information, past displays

And modulated tones of voices.

Is it possible to have a whole

Backyard family party without

Any further reflection on it

Or its meaning? Maybe not. Still, past

The performance of being human,

It seems, thinks the listener, there might

Lurk a distinct kind of behavior

That brings the meanings to things. Hamster.

Classroom. Dark chocolate wavy frosting.

Meaning is not insignificant,

But it’s other than signifying.

Meaning gets out of its cage at night.

Tracks Are Fossils You Can Make without Having to Die First

Random playlist poetry—

My baby, I know you want

Me each lonely night and day,

Calls Jimmy Rodgers’ yodeled

Lullaby. Haunt me although

You are far away. Oh why . . .

Not much of a lullaby

But a good condensation

Of countless lovesick lyrics

Around the planet. Oh why . . .

It seemed more than I could bear,

To sing lullabies to you.

More than anyone can bear,

The living creature’s longing

In awareness of despair.

Ibidem

Octavia Butler once observed

That the only lasting truth is change.

True. The only universal truth,

The one fact fully permeating

Every aspect of the spacetime curve,

The ghost point found in all quantum fields

Is change. But wait. Somehow changes bring

Likeness, nearly sameness in their wake.

Even everlasting truth can change.

Of Living Not Owning

What you call your body
As you experience
It is not your body.

It’s not a possession.
The body is context
Woven into the world

And a part of the world
You find yourself aware
Of living, not owning.

The Visitor

What’s more of a miracle—
That you are or won’t be?
Sometimes, it’s impossible

To see how the world has room
To maneuver. Its changes
Have to shuffle in fullness,

And it’s never not full, and
Its never not changing.
You can measure the vast dance

Never any vaster nor
Ever any less, but how
Could packed world shift to add you?

Somehow you got into this.
Somehow you’ll go out of it.

Your Multiverse Has a One-Track Mind

Fate and possibility
Are equally mistaken.
There are no split decisions,

And no, it isn’t written.
There it went. There was no fork,
Except stuck in memory,

Where you can cook up more of
What was by reheating what
Was your memory of it.

If you’d chosen this or that—
And thus you change them, alter
Memories remembering

Rearranging. That’s more change.
There it went. Tonight you sit,
Let’s say beside someone’s lawn,

Listening to soft tschift-tchifft
Of the rotating sprinklers.
Say once this lawn could have been

Yours, as the child beside you,
As the poem emerging here,
As your thoughts of home. It was,

And now it’s someone else’s.
There it went. And here it is.
Possible and fated since

The moment that it happened,
The moment that it occurred
To you, hey, something happened.

Saw Jesus Stuck on a Bumper, Stoic as a T-Shirt

If, from sorrow and fury
And resentment it does not
Protect you, why seek wisdom,

Why try any poetry,
Any math, music, any
Cause or creed or art? Why not

Admit we do these dances
For distraction, capering
Metaphysics for relief?

Be contented when you can.
When you can’t, show foolishness,
The mirror held by wisdom,

Platitude for platitude,
Slogan for slogan. You won’t
Gain anything you don’t lose.

The Cooperative

We build them, they blow them up.

They build them, we blow them up.

Coordination pitted

Against coordination

Is competition, is war.

The teams are fighting again

Over the ancient rivers.

Cooperation is all

About building bridges. We

Build them, they blow them up. They

Build them, we blow them up, says

One officer. Attrition,

All the media report,

It’s a war of attrition

This war of competition,

Of coordination, of

Cooperation. It takes

So much love to live like this,

So much love and trust to fight.

We build them, they blow them up.

They build them, we blow them up.

Last Earth First

It’s not that all the young idealists
Transform into old conservatives.
No matter how much change you wanted,

If you manage to live long enough
Your world will accumulate drifts of
Unexpected, unasked-for changes.

The day will come when you find yourself
The revolutionary agent
Of an ideal that never arrived,

As well as the truculent old grunt
Resisting the actual changes
You find wrecking the tidy garden

You tend to try to console yourself
For your failure to renew the world.

Have You, or Someone You Know, Recently Passed Away?

You think you may have noticed
A pattern—if you have to
Rise early for some reason,

Weirdly, you sleep well all night.
If you have the luxury
Of sleeping late as you like,

There you are, awake at 4,
In your lamp-lit reading chair.
We see you there. We’re always

Up wolf and coyote hours,
Watching stars and listening
For howls. Some mornings you’re there.

Your pattern, we’re not sure of.
We’ll nod sagely in assent,
However, since you’re so pleased

At having discovered it.
We think we may have noticed
A pattern to our own rest,

But we’re not as pleased with it.
We seem built to undo us
Regarding the rest of us.

Long Well

Down at the bottom of night’s long well,
The moon set an inlaid pearl button
Behind guitar strings of power lines.

This was just metaphorical fact
Of given embodied perspective.
Was it worth noting? That’s up to you.

It can’t mean if you never note it,
Means nothing if you never exist.
Nothing’s too trivial to exist.

And the Love

apart from “and” and “the,” is “love”

Three small words,

Of many

In English,

One joining,

One pointing

Exactly,

One, well, what?

Not enough

Says too much.

The Lone Proton

Without an electron,
One hydrogen ion
Drives or gets driven through

Much of the chemistry
That people call nature,
Organic, living, life.

We’ll confess to fondness
For imagining this
Pathetic fallacy,

This anthropomorphized
View of mere hydrogen
Stripped of electron,

Down to its last proton,
However fanciful,
As fully meaningful.

Frankly, life and nature,
And their related terms
In many languages,

Are anthropomorphic
Projections, by and large,
Inventions of humans.

Meaning is as meaning
Finds. At its most basic,
Is it not rewarding,

Those hordes of lone protons,
Pulsing through membranes,
As severely reduced,

Uncoordinated,
And simple as hermits,
Envisioned as basis

For the complexities
That, eventually,
Led to making meaning?

The Scenic Route

From phrase to phrase, the daily
Commute through sprawled words and lines,
Sometimes innocent enough,

More often stealing flowers
And fruits from gardens others
Planted for their use, not yours.

Fox or rabbit can’t pretend
To be as useful as the bees,
Ornamental as the birds,

Although all of those are thieves,
And all of life is thieving
From Earth’s local entropy,

And you can set down to work
Chewing over daily perks.

Metaphors Are Contranyms

Primitive, elusive, bridgers
Of borders, osmotic organs

Of knowledge and education,
Metaphors have been called all these

And by one mathematician.
You can find library shelves full

Of tomes on metaphor. You could
Spend your life cataloging them.

Your life itself you understand
Mostly in terms of metaphors,

Maybe only so. Every word,
Every number, every symbol

May be in some form metaphor.
Topics like time and nothingness

Can only be sidled up to
Metaphorically, if at all.

Essential, core technology
That they are, however, do you

Ever understand metaphors
Any better than the hardware

And software that structures your world?
Even that well? Prometheus

Didn’t steal fire for you. He stole
Metaphor. Soma was never

Potent beverage. Soma was
A metaphor, was metaphor.

Metaphor is the fire, the drug
Itself you’ve never understood,

Only used, your magic weapon
Cleaving all truth it can cleave to.

The Fortune Teller’s Globe

You can’t help yourself. You want
Good things to happen to you.
You fret bad things will happen.

Most of your life is just that,
Most of what you’re aware of.
If you’re especially good

And anxious to be useful,
You’ll want good things to happen
To certain other people,

Maybe large groups of people.
If you’re typical, you will
Only rarely wish evil.

You’ll want good things to happen.
Although you’re not always sure
Which things that happened were good.

You’re often confused, often
Disappointed, and sometimes
You’re alarmed, but you plow through.

What’s good for you keeps changing.
What used to be good is gone.
While you want, you carry on.

You’ll Trip If You Look Up

Old folks get cautious,

Not because they’re frail

But as a function

Of the brain’s habits,

The way memory

Preferentially

Encodes its alarms,

The startling events

That didn’t go well—

Accumulate years,

Memory’s bias

Accumulates scares,

And, to make things worse,

Yawning holes where you

Don’t know what occurred.

Long life’s like the night—

Burning reminders

In oceans of dark.

Poem at High Pond

Art makes its worlds by choosing,
Which always means excluding.
There’s no choice but selecting

By some criterion, some
Mechanism. Small cut-outs,
No matter how rich the art,

How layered in human pain,
How deep in the cave, how high
In the cliffs where the small pond

Has waited, accepting rain
After the snowmelt vanished,
Exactly the way a god

Accepts food at an altar,
Passively, without a choice,
But scrutinized by people

Who want badly to believe
It matters how well they care
For their high pond, their altar.

Like the Sun Never Sets, This Desert

Rattlesnake crossing hot tar,

Red-tailed hawk circling blank sky,

Cashier and a customer

Are talking at the Walgreens

On State St. The Queen’s dying.

Yeh, must be. The family’s

All there. That gives it away.

‘Cept Harry. Never should have

Married Meghan. Feel sorry

For him. Nah, he only got

What he deserved. Serves him right.

Need your receipt? Nah, keep it.

Lanky customer shuffles out.

Short cashier sighs, takes the next.