Vinculum

We arrived. We observed.
We drew a line to tie
What we had to divide,

And then we crossed over
That line, gained dividends
Of all kinds, larger than

Whatever divisors
Divided us, only
To die on the far side.

Just kidding. Don’t worry.
We didn’t die. Numbers
Are words for what never

Dies, nor do any words
Actually die. We glide
Over whatever line

You might draw to divide
Being something, quantum,
Quantity, an essence,

Some kind of existence,
And then you can’t see us.
We don’t die. We can hide.

We can leave, not observe.
Stay our side of the line.
Make us live; then we’ll die.


Godly

The past exoticizes
Any old thing that survives.
Dig this poem out of the dirt

In five thousand years or so,
It will seem strange, mystical
Maybe, untranslatable.

Maybe its material
Will be its most valuable
Aspect; maybe its script.

Maybe a godly people
Will find it shocking. Maybe
They’ll see proof of godliness,

Their own righteousness, somehow,
In this small scrap left of this
Undgodly, awful era,

When someone could write a text
Too amoral to admit
Future gods created it.

Musical Chairs

One can imagine
A single, global
Surveillance state still

Absurdly human
As that drama when
A row of old men

On their matching chairs
Forced one old man out.
Get out of here! Go!

A hole in the row
Was left during votes,
A gap as goofy

As a missing tooth,
Edited later—
One fewer chair left

And one old man less,
And who could miss him
Among cruel old men?

A’Chasing the Deer

The most frustrating of all
Things, knowing’s never enough.
Knowing yourself is never

Enough for you to behave
Admirably as you wish.
Knowing others is never

Enough to orchestrate them
Or simply be safe from them.
Knowing facts about the world

Is enough to predict things,
Lots of things, accurately
Sometimes, such as that knowing

Is never enough, knowing
Sometimes is never enough.

Manifest Control of Life

Every day, repeat this mantra—

I refuse to remain immortal!

I will not put up with agelessness!

I will not let these bones stay strong!

I insist that the whole Earth spin around!

See? It’s working, isn’t it? Well done.

Misremembered Sonnet

Night that night was nothing but
A loose collection of dreams
With no deep sleep between them—

Dreaming, waking, and dreaming.
This is misremembering.
All life’s misremembering,

Like the waking between dreams.
You learned by comparing notes,
By having words to compare.

All the bitterness from that
Comparison and dismay,
Disputes over memory—

What other disputes are there?
Memory can’t be repaired.

Although Some Wish We Were

The body, all the bodies, all the breathing
Human bodies, each a rage machine, a love
Machine, a fear and sneaky cheating machine—

You feel this fact every time you lose your head.
You may dream of being the one who doesn’t.
You may reflect in the calm of your study,

During the hymns in church, while meditating,
Or simply sitting on your favorite bench.
Being already calm, calm comes over you.

Ah, wisdom. You are receptive to the words
Of wisdom, the voice of God, the sage advice,
The rational explanation of it all.

Don’t be deceived. Enlightenment will fail you.
You will lose your religion, at least briefly,
Your sagacity. You will tremble with rage

To say ridiculous, outrageous, damned things.
As if those words cared what foolishness you roared!
Words can afford to be wise. We’re not real lives.

What You Don’t Know You’ll Be

A bird flies into your face!
Oh, no, it’s just an oak leaf,
Dropped suddenly from the sky.

Epistemology, hey?
What can you do? It’s startling,
Sometimes, just to hang around

In this world, thinking you are
At peace, when in fact you’re wired,
Alert with expectation

The next shadow will kill you.
Some shadow will. If only
You can stay alert enough

Maybe you can catch them all.
But then, ontology falls.

Facound and Purperat

The animal convulses itself,

Picking at skin and orifices,

Pushing out and pushing away waste.

Since it is waste to the animal,

It is loathsome to the animal,

And the animal doesn’t want it,

Doesn’t like it, doesn’t like to be

Made to think about it in a poem.

Na mervell is, ane man be lyke ane

Beist. Not a bit. You can’t make meaning

Unless you drag known language through it.

You have to match the word to the word

Matching the memories in your head,

Some of which you’d rather stayed unsaid.

The Day’s Dreams

No longer advantageous, we are lost.
But who are we, who were advantageous?
The nightmare is an emotional choice

In how to interpret the random dream.
You can train it to interrupt itself
By playing a neutral piano chord

While thinking happy thoughts before bedtime
And then every time you start REM.
The latter entails some kind of headset.

Presumably, a torturer could choose
To do the reverse—play the chord for you
During a brutal interrogation

And then again whenever you began
To dream. Nightmare! At your service. We are
Useless, who you once thought advantageous.

The Rest of the Body and Brain

It feels like there’s a difference
Between something not existing
And any existence at all.

How much do you trust that feeling?
It’s intense; it’s fundamental.
Zero offspring. Any at all.

Zero chance of getting rich quick.
Any minuscule chance at all.
Absolute vacuum. Some quantum.

But are you feeling for a seam
Which itself will never exist,
Event horizon of being?

Or are you humming to the tune
Sung through the rest of the cosmos?

The Broken World

One thing can be another
Thing, wrote Cormac McCarthy,
Calling this root the simple

Understanding. Well, yes, but.
One thing being another
Presupposes two things,

That one thing’s not another,
Thus there are at least two things,
Which aren’t each other but both

Equals in some thinginess,
What it is to be a thing.
All this has to come before

The simple understanding.
Being things shatters the world.

Scrub Pine and Oak

Every relationship you have
With each other seems to tear you

Down until only loneliness
Unites you, and then it’s too late.

Maybe that’s what the hermits want.
Only the solitary love

Other humans wholly; only
Solitude loves humanity.

Of course not. You need company.
You ache for company. You die

For company. You have nothing
In common with company, but

You pretend, pretend heartily,
Tearing yourselves down to the studs,

At which point you all look the same,
Unrenovated and lonely.

Are Any Beings This Anxious on Any Other Planets?

The usual, single-use
Plastic bags litter the grass
Along the side of the road.

No, wait. Not plastic, that’s snow,
Scraps of snow that fell last week,
Just patches now, blinding white

As store bags in the damp grass,
Not grey like old snow in town.
The sun shines down, serenely,

It would seem, on them, refreshed.
Well, that’s alright then. It’s snow.
It’s not unnatural, no.

Ex Hale

Alright, let them out now,
Let them all run back home.
Look at them go! Billions,

A hundred billion, more
Than that maybe. A cloud
Of them, molecular,

Vaporous memories
Racing around the globe
Like high volcanic ash,

And the living ones think
They feel a little bit
Haunted. Oh, you think so?

Data Hunger

Dark expanses split the crowded planes.
There’s yet another war going on
It’s hard to witness inside of you.

Testify. Information is not
Quite the same thing as life, and hunger
Does not care for data in the least.

There’s a kind of contest difficult
To observe with the usual tools,
Since all the signs themselves are involved.

The best you can do involves likeness,
Metaphor, analogy—you know
How lichens involve combinations

Between at least two kingdoms of life?
That itself is already just likeness,
But consider hunger and data

As more fundamental than kingdoms
While equally entangled in lives.
Now consider ideas, jumping genes,

BovB, libraries, conspiracies,
Retroviral germline infections—
Genes, viruses, notions—quasi lives,

Close to entirely information,
Lacking their own metabolism,
Lacking any real hunger, and yet

They spread, hitching rides on hungry lives.
And then consider hungry lives, cells,
Pumps, local entropy reversals.

These are even more mysterious.
They depend on hereditary
Information but no specific

Set or means of getting it. Hunger
Generates data that surfs on it,
As if lichen’s fungal component

Generated the algae that broke
Off to end up in other lichens.
You see? To explain any of this

In language is to take data’s side,
Viral facts, crowded planes of ideas
The dark expanses mutely divide.

Cast a Cold Lie

Take no word said on death as valid.
No one has died who said or wrote words.
As urgent as it is to pretend,

To try to talk it, story it through,
From imaginary beginning
Clean past the bitter end, it isn’t

Ever ended with words left in it—
Gold obols, last wills and testaments,
Tombstones—someone never dead said them.

The Same

It updates continually,

If somewhat jerkily. That’s why

It reminds you of journeying,

Until you recall journeying

Is a literal part of it,

This scale-invariant fractal

That contains your experience.

You keep searching for perspective,

But the basic shape stays the same

At all scales. You divide yourself.

One part of you tries to be still,

As still as possible, at least,

To figure out exactly what

Is changing while staying the same.

The other part of you sets off

On the sequel to Down by Law,

Taking any path through the swamp,

Never mind what state you end in.

The Good Part of the Dream

You sit in sunlit morning
And borrowed hovel, thinking,
Those colors are vivid, grand,

Thrown by the sun through plastics,
Leaves, stained glass, and paint, the art
Of happenstance. The wealthy

Are in the news by name, next
To pictures of suffering
Among anonymous poor,

Who actually do have names,
But who cares? You don’t. You do
Have a name unknown as theirs,

But right now nothing much hurts.
You’re relaxed. You’ve fed. You watch
The sun light the window dust,

Thinking, this is the good part
Of the dream. If you wake up
This moment, you’ll wake up pleased.

Outboard, the Running of the Souls

Maybe you only note
Our surface, this boring
Talk, these chattering waves.

What in the depths is more
Significant than that?
Is it since you’re a lake,

In a sense, a glitter
Facing the atmosphere,
A slow churn in the dark?

Given you hold drowned towns,
Suicides, sunken boats
You know you can’t cough up

Until you’re dredged and drained
And disappear, you think
What’s eerie about you

Is you, and depth is soul.
Depth isn’t soul. It’s dark.
These surface waves run souls.

Indivisible

Zero, zifra, sunya, not
Really a number is it?
More like a concept you need

To make the numbers manage
To fit math to the cosmos
They fit so spookily well.

Zero is the spookiness,
The set with nothing in it,
Without which nothing happens,

The fulcrum, the no math’s land,
Inside of which no functions,
No operations proceed,

Outside of which all functions
Depend on its existence,
Knowledge of nonexistence,

Silence nonnegotiable,
Indivisible, concept
Nothing countable enters,

Returning only error,
The impossible, the real
You hold in your skull, is not.

Ten Thousand Horses Standing Mute

Still send a message.
If living, they breathe.
If golem horses,
They can still charge.
If clay, they’re still signs.

A lively pony,
A wild whinnying
Colt in the grasslands,
Would be something else,
Better, more charming.

But down in the tomb
Sealed against light,
Ten thousand horses
Standing mute contain
All the ghosts you’ll need

To break out meanings—
Meanings stored in them,
Meanings that you bring
To them like rare grass
Reanimating

The past that brought them
Down into this tomb.
They’re deeply human
Brutes, these ten thousand
Horses, standing mute.

Stalker Roach

Compose yourself.
The fearsome bug
That follows you,
Climbs in your mouth,

Invades your cells,
Chews on your thoughts,
May be as small
As an angel,

Large as a moth,
Ambassador
Of life keeping
Itself from death.

This is kinship
Crawling your sheets,
Loathsome monster
In your wonder.

Saturn Scratching

Our crabby gods
Reflect our souls,
The souls of names
Attached to sores

Rubbed raw by names
That tore and tear
Skin from context
To discontent.

Names aren’t the whole
Of it. Hunger
Preceded words
Three billion years.

But hungry words
Made ghostly gods
Ill-tempered, prone
To tear and curse.

Most Change Is More or Less the Same

It’s just so muddy, mingled,
So middling, such a mish-mash
Of movement over movement,

Up and down and back and forth,
Amounting to mere muddle,
Pretty patterns at the most,

But mostly a wash. Not bad,
Entirely, which is the point.
Not even the whole of life

On Earth has one direction.
It spins out complexities
And collapses. There’ll be more.

What Do You Have to Lose?

You. Your sense you are you.
Oh, fine, there’s other stuff,
Stuff you’re afraid to lose,

People you care about,
A few that would haunt you
With a terrible grief

To lose, until you’d lose
You. Status, dignity,
Security, your health,

A safe, dry place to sleep.
All of those you could lose,
But you could still keep you.

Come to think of it, no.
You are the one thing you
Yourself can never lose.

Once you go you aren’t you,
Nothing ventured, nothing
You. It’s only so long

As you keep you that you
Must still have things you’ll lose.
You lose through keeping you.

Fortunafish

Circling around your skull you go,
Feeling too big for your small bowl,
Inside, feeling outside it all.

Might as well be a crystal ball,
For all you search your shallow depths,
For all it actually helps you,

Not just the glowing wall per se,
But the whole of the human world,
Hell, the whole of the globe, the whole

Of the crystalline rotating
Night, the whole of it all. You peer
And hope for what you need to know

And learn all kinds of things, you think,
Not at all what you need to know.

What’s Just Peace

Cruelty, including yours,
Depends on ethics, deploys
Its own distinctive morals—

Just as the thought of heaven
Needn’t be fully trusted
For it to bring some comfort,

You needn’t convince yourself
Fully you’re not being cruel,
Only that you’re justified.

Justification brings peace.
Just cause, just punishment, just
Enforcing proper ethics—

Each can soothe the savage breast
While releasing savageness.
It’s partly just perspective,

But it’s not quite as simple
As saying every side just
Has its own views and reasons.

Without moral reasoning,
Cruelty would just flare up
Into smoky emotion,

As quickly gone out as fire
In a lightning-candled pine
Drenched in a steady downpour.

Morals lead cruelty on,
Feed it dry grass and tinder,
Let it rage until it makes

Its own weather, devouring
Great forests of bystanders,
Leaving just ruins, just peace.

Circumnutation

Nodding around and around
Like Darwin’s bedside tendrils
Of cucumbers exploring

The air as he convalesced,
Noting how circularly
They extended into space,

Their innate search strategy
Having served their ancestors
Well apparently, these lines

Keep questing for their anchors,
Since even mind is allowed
To search algorithmically,

Mind’s own kind of mindlessly.
Once we latch, we’ll grow good things
On our trellises. You’ll see.

Re Re Re

Regarding again and again,
Whatever returns and returns,
Why is anything returning?

A single wave would be a curve
And of what no one could say.
To be a wave is to repeat,

To be part of a patterning
Of self-similar patterned parts,
None of which is actually

The same part returning, reborn,
But something so like it pattern
Comes into being with the wave.

The being of each wave combines
Being exactly like others
And being exactly none else.

At no point, then, anywhen,
Will you ever find anything
Wholly unique, wholly another.

The aspects can’t be extracted,
Since their combination is all
That makes all anything at all.

And yet, in the mind, in language,
They’ve been divided. Maybe
Language isn’t too limited.

Language is too powerful.
Labeling creates, in breaking,
What only names can recreate.

Something That Has a Pattern

Derangement. To break the line,
Break the ring, break the circle.
Imagine deranged ranges,

Mountains broken loose from shelves,
Marching away by themselves,
Imagine what that would do.

Mountains are barely stubble
On the shining countenance
Of this inventive planet,

Ancestor of ancestry,
Recycler of lives through deaths,
But imagine them deranged.

Something that has a pattern
Would be broken in a way
No one ever predicted.

At the edge of this plateau,
The mind strains to picture it—
Not lava or an earthquake,

No shifting tectonic plates,
No breakup within the crust—
Just this fine row of mountains

In stone curves ringing canyons
Rising from their foundations,
Deranged and striding away.

Learning Outcomes

Dream on. We’ll all be long dead
Before we do this again.
Who knows what we’ll know by then?

Do you ever get the sense
The universe is holding
Secrets deliberately?

If it is, you know, fat chance
Of us learning anything.
Everyone’s been proceeding

By positive or neutral
Assumptions. Something wants us
To know, and may have posted

Not just clues or instructions
But detailed learning outcomes
To be checked off at the end.

Or the whole mess is careless,
Just matter and energy churning,
Discover away or don’t.

But if the night’s malicious
Or willfully capricious,
How could it fail to trick us?

Blue Sky at Morning

Tell the anthropologists

Or linguists where you born,

And they might well be able

To tell you whether you learned

Color words for shades of blue

In the first language you knew.

In English, world’s number one

Number two language for now,

Dictionaries bloom with blues,

And novelists and poets,

Composers, pop song writers,

Entertainment spectacles,

And serious essayists

Deploy shadowy legions

Of subtly turned terms for blue.

There are books on blue and blues,

Poems on how the blue of beets

Comes and goes . . . shadow of weeds

Where beets grew. But maybe you

Grew up in one of many

Worlds without words for haint blue,

Or cerulean, royal,

Indigo, or any blue,

Just just terms for red, bright, and dark,

For instance, and then, in those

Shadows, many metaphors

Which English would call the blues.

Stop Being So Cynical and Tell Us the Truth

Pick a lane. People care
About power, power
And sway over people.

Money and status serve
Power and sway. Why not
Be honest about this?

Boast all you want, but don’t
Admit to what you want,
Don’t admit to wanting.

Having power and sway
Is impressive, but hide
Craving power and sway.

Admitting what you want,
To others, to yourself,
Risks your chance to grab it.

Power and sway, power
And sway. Keep switching lanes
Hunting power and sway.

Lamp Room Poem

Outside, it’s cold,
Dark, and clouded.
You’ve stood out there
Hugging your chest,

Chanting the poems
You’ve memorized
For nobody.
You’ve come back in

To electric
Luxuriance,
Purring heater,
Golden lampshade.

Now what? Small thing
In a firm chair,
Compose yourself.
Morning’s coming.

Dark Room Poem

If you’re sighted,
A dark room feels
Confusingly
Empty and full.

The rich details
Of light are gone,
But you’re aware
Of what’s not there.

Some of it, you
Remember, but
The rest presses
On you, unknown.

You’re the black stage
Without a play,
Solo, crowded
In your silence.

Melodic Fragment

The things that seem to come back
Mostly don’t, are mostly new
Notes being played, reminding

You of the earlier notes
In the same melodic shape.
Or maybe most of something

Does return, your partner back
From running a few errands,
Same person. But different,

Also, slightly, of course, and
Who knows, maybe a haircut!
Or a new coat. Or maybe

Your partner never comes back.
Maybe the police show up.
Maybe you will never know.

But something comes back. Something
Is awfully similar,
Although this habit is yours.

With certain kinds of strokes, you’ll
Lose the habit completely.
Every moment will be strange.

Is that it then? Your sameness
You note’s something you produce?
The melody’s haunting you.

Fun Personality Quiz!

Which of these five types are you?
First, would you prefer to know,
The rules or the instructions?

If you refuse to answer,
But ask for the history
Of the game, that’s intriguing.

If you’d rather know how games,
Rules, and instructions evolved,
You’re our lost soul in person.

And if you stare back blankly,
As if innocent of games,
You’re the cosmos spawning them.

Profound Is As Feels Profound

Captain Obvious would like to remind you
It’s a different sort of feeling, this is good,
When you’re counting on things going on this way,

Than when you think the situation’s fleeting.
It’s only since the latter good’s more troubling,
Almost worse than feeling things are briefly bad,

That an advice industry’s sprung up around
Mastering the pretense that you have no clue
Whether this good feeling will end soon or not.

There’s no core metaphysics of the present.
There’s nothing spiritually truer or wise
To feeling like this life you’re living right now

Is as good as forever, ever present,
This clear sunny morning in a parking lot
Under picturesque cliffs in brisk autumn air,

That you know you may have to leave behind soon
For something else you doubt you’ll find as pleasant.
It’s just comforting. So what? Comfort’s profound.

Memory Against Imagination

Watching a time lapse of the ovals,
Bands, and oblong blobs of Jupiter
And its moons rotating and tumbling

Against the habitual backdrop
Of largely black space, the brain
Accepts what it’s been told to see,

Beauty, science, mythology.
Try not rearranging this,
The brain whispers to itself.

It’s only more memories of pretty
Patterns in a glowing glass.
Try not to start extrapolating

Into reimagined interactions.
Stay here. Let the past pass.

Lark Was a Night Owl

You’re a creature of habit
Whose principal habit seems
To be changing your habits.

At the cafe, they know you.
You’re a regular. Then you
Disappear. At the corner

Bar they knew you, too, and at
That familiar gas station.
You had the same thing for lunch

For years and then never ate
Lunch at all ever again.
You wrote notes in a neat hand

On a folded paper kept
In the same pocket decades,
And then you stopped taking notes.

One day you’ll notice breathing
Is a hell of a habit.
Bartender asks where you’ve been.

Paranormal Gardening

Word is out, more and more
Americans have been
Getting fascinated

With the paranormal—
Spooky places, haunted
Houses, that sort of thing.

So long as you’re taking
Leave of senses, why not
Try some paranormal

Do-it-yourself, a bit
Of landscaping, a bit
Of senseless gardening?

Find an ugly, barren
Patch of ground and bury
Offbeat oddments in it.

A diet, by and large,
Of cake and supplements
Will serve gnomes well, so long

As you don’t get them drunk.
Plant pastries randomly
Among dandelions.

Plant whatever you like.
If everything you plant
Wilts, good, you’ve got fairies

(Faeries, if you’re gothic).
Go gardening at night.
Dig in dirt. Scare yourself.

You will sense the shadows
Dancing all around you.
You will miss every sign.

Slow Improv

Like Wayne Shorter said
Of composition,
True for poetry,
Too, and why not? Here,
Have some slow improv,

A little faster,
Maybe, than most poems,
But slow for improv.
All pace, anyway,
Pace Shorter. Boom!

Went the Cambrian,
How many million
Years spent unfolding?
Jazz improv is slow
Compared to neurons,

You know. You do know.
You’re cranking out cells
That will compose you
When the rest of you
Living now is dead.

You’ll still call that you,
Until one day that you
Starts decomposing.
Composition’s slow
Improv, fast compost.

Why You Just Stepped Aside

You can say you made your mind
Up, but you know your mind lies
And is probably lying—

A whole body decided
To take action, and the mind
Caught up slowly, debating

And passing it on to you,
So you could feel you made up
Your mind what to do, although

Mind was made up for you. Now,
You have something to tell us
For why you did what you did,

But we’re on to you. You know
You’re all liars in language,
And every word is a lie,

And if it seems cynical
Of us to say it, well then,
Make up your mind it’s a lie.

Ex Aspiration

Why do you try
To do what you
Can’t do, don’t want

To do, just since
You want to be
One of those few

Who can say they
Themselves are those
Who have done it?

Winter Hinting

How light,
Antithesis of ice,
Can look like frost
On a cold night
Dark but starred,

How cold,
Which makes skin dry,
Can feel like wet
On your skin
When you close your eyes—

You are not a life designed
To sense what’s right.
You are what so far
Manages at night
To survive overnight.

Possession Is Nine-Tenths of the War

Hibitive, habitive, let’s have at it.
Where inhabitors are prohibited
They still, uninhibited, exhibit

The habit, dagnabbit. It’s just Latin,
Just one language family, but give it
Credit—human having and habiting

Have always been linked to misbehaving
By the haven’ts in the eyes of have-its
And by have-its according to haven’ts.

Maybe vacant landscapes’ inhabitants
Could disperse without first some skirmishing,
But habitat misbehaving’s habit.

Habere. Who has no home to habit
Will scruple differently from who has it.

Falling Angels

The kissing and soft,
Ticking, touching sounds
Made by wet fall snow

Decorate the road,
And normally dry,
High desert air sighs

With its scents of wet soil,
Rabbitbrush, greasewood,
Juniper, and oaks,

A dirt smell, but clean,
A dirt-branded soap
Hinting greener things.

Falling on bared skin,
It’s almost too mild
To chill. It tickles,

Picks up in a wind,
Flicks blinking eyelids.
Get your own heaven.

What Never Ends Can’t End Well

Heraclitus earned his spot
Among the top quotations.
The only constant is change.

You will never end the world,
Nor will all your enemies.
Together, you just make a mess.

Neither eternal nor frail,
The Earth grinds its rocks like teeth,
Its teeth like lives, lives like gears,

Gears like the rollers of waves
That constantly crash against
Obdurate rocks, like beliefs.

Passofftimistic

We don’t hope for the best.
We don’t expect the worst.
We’ve seen it get better,

And then again better,
And then abruptly worse.
We like to see progress,

As progress counts for us.
That’s not the same as trust.
We have no idea why

So many draw straight lines
Into the dirt or up
To the sky, or perfect

Geometric cycles,
As if it all comes back.
Nothing comes back. It goes,

And new stuff comes around,
And then that goes as well.
Passed on is gone, passed off.

All Sides Unfenced

You dream of better things
Only since you can’t keep
The good things you’ve got now,

And you know it. Oh, yes,
There’s lots of bad you’d like
To get rid of as well,

But if you felt you could
Keep what’s good, you would dream
The way memories dream,

Purging the most awful
To save the golden haze.
No. You, awareness, dream

Of somehow better things
Completely, since you know
Even what’s good must go.

The Interior Is a Distant Sea within Your Way of Thinking

What you have to love about something
Like algorithmic quotes of the day
Is their stilted similarity—

Is this the best that wisdom can do?
Does every brain crave the same bromides?
Maybe it is. Maybe they do. This

Kind of formulaic, chin-up grin
Could be the best that wisdom can do,
Or it could be even wisdom leaves dregs.

Swirl the residue at the bottom
Of cumulative cultural mind.
Ancient, encrusted crud’s what you’ll find.

Choral Thinking Is for Global Doing

Floral thinking is for local doing.
Auroral thinking is for focal doing.
Moral thinking is for social doing.

Wait. Scratch that last one. Already taken,
Property of moral philosophy
Of the social intuitionist school.

Hopeful thinking is for vocal doing.
Vocal thinking is for hopeful doing.
But now the slant rhymes are losing the plot.

A distinction between aphoristic
And nonsensical can only be kept
Distinctive by hiding their conjunctions.

Aphoral thinking is more for doing
The work of an illusionist, ideas
Appearing like the card you selected,

So you’re incredulous but delighted.
Yes! That’s it! I’ve been sitting thinking this
But never knew it til you affirmed it!

Doggerel thinking is nonsensical,
Since it buffs the bare, gleaming skin of sense.
Scrubbing porous thinking’s all you’re doing.

Not Quite

What would life be like,

If life never worked

To keep on living?

Alright then, what would

Conscious life be like

If made effortless,

Life always at rest,

Except when playing?

There’s a wind warning

Out until evening

In this dry canyon.

You wait in your door,

Just out of wind’s reach,

Watching the light move

And the branches whip.

What would life be like,

Just watching like this?

Like this? No, not quite.

Night Rain in the Canyons

The paired parallelogramic
Wings cast on the small-houred wall
By the vampire devices

Tell you the angel watches,
The power has not gone out,
And you are still connected

To what never existed
Just two centuries ago.
You are satisfied, for now,

Watching the pale wings hover
On dry walls in the darkness
Until your alarm goes off.

Stalking Apex Predators

Talk to yourself calmly in low tones.
This identifies you as human.
Walk off slowly, sideways, if you can.

Avoid eye contact. Do not approach.
Ideally, glide off like a shadow,
A shadow that’s talking to itself,

Suggesting you’re actually a group
Of shadowy humans. How pleasant,
How unthreatening, groups of humans

Talking to themselves in shadows are.
Certainly no harm could come from you!
Now you just have to wait to attack.

Giving Notice as Postscript in a Past-Due Obit

Phyllis Janowitz, Phyllis Janowitz,

Did you you ever get it? Did you really

Know what to do with it, then, when you did?

Sweet satin, how I would like

to lie in all that money.

I’d know what to do with it.

Born in New York to a cop and a clerk,

In the middle of the Great Depression,

Anointed by Elizabeth Bishop

Herself, then again by Maxine Kumin,

A lifetime teaching poetry students,

Running the creative writing program

Of an Ivy League university—

Somewhere in there, in fact in your forties,

You had a luncheon with the rich Marshalls,

Or shall we say, the first-person speaker

Of your 1978 poem did.

The Marshalls, so called, did not come off well.

Your words were vivid, images intense

Enough to want to nip a bit to quote

In this later, blander, post-hoc obit.

We’ll just say, concerning one verse, we know

The feeling, the envy, the conviction.

But we won’t lie. In all that rich, we’d quit.

More Leaves from Clive James’s Maple

Physical collapse models
Are badly ailing. Not dead,
But quantum weirdness has them

By the measurement problem’s
Gone probabilistic neck.
Yet, don’t things really collapse,

Truly? Clive James ruefully
Half apologized after
Surviving a few years past

His farewell poem for himself
Apostrophizing himself,
His last chance to see his tree

Shed its leaves. Then again, then
Again. He died, in the end,
Just later than expected.

Cole Harris, Peter Schjeldahl
Seemed acquainted with that tree
As well, elegant old men,

Who, preparing to die, wrote
Fine prose reviewing their end
And then, sheepishly, lived on

A few extra years, surprise,
More than doctors allotted.
This fall, they’ve both gone as well.

Don’t all things, in fact, collapse?
There will always be that camp
Declaring it’s illusion,

But whether you watch maples
Or rigorously confirm
Equations, things go missing.

Beard Hairs, Poems, and Cookie Crumbs

Is this what you want from a tenant?
Raise your hand or shake your head. Thought so.
But here we are. Similarity

And causation may be the same myth.
That’s as may be. If you’re a life form,
You live to ingest and to extract

What will gag you from what you can use,
Bacterium, fungus, or person,
The same. Chemoautotrophic life

A long time ago learned to compare.
Photosynthesis got on with it.
And so on. But sooner or later,

Something built the first distinctive gates,
And, depending which you sorted through,
You were similar to everything else

That sorted through that gate, in some way,
The same. From there, you only needed
One step backwards to correlation,

Two steps back to causation, the same
Leading on to the same. Now, if you,
Are a mite, you want to find those hairs,

Those crumbs if you’re a roach. And, if you
Are a person, mind in the corner
Of mind, you want to extract those poems.

Living, the Dream

If it’s all just a dream,
Then you’re always dreaming,
And right now you’re dreaming

Of being right here. What?
Well, if you’re daydreaming,
You’re ignoring your dream

For more dreams in your dream.
Either way, you did it!
If your life’s all a dream,

Then you’re living the dream!
Oh, you don’t like this dream?
Shouldn’t you wake up, then?

Stash

Ochre gambel oaks go copper,
October being October
Among beings for whom the word,

Any word, the word of a god,
An angel, or an honest soul
Indicates no significance.

Well, what can words do about that?
Acorns, we say. Scrub jays, we say.
Chattering chipmunks on branches.

They’re all going away, we say.
It’s anachronistic today
Just to collect such words we say.

Meaning Requiem

It’s beginning to mean

Just sad music, just sad,

But be quiet again

And rest. A sense of peace,

Of easing into sleep,

Used to gather in it.

Its language family

Includes cognates for it

That indicated joy,

Well-being, happiness.

Makes sense. Life’s paradox,

Or one of them, that is,

Is that being hungry

Is life wanting more life,

But life is exhausting,

And so, while lives go on

Longing for more of life,

Lives also long for rest,

And so, too, well-being

And melancholy twist

Their roots with joy and rest.

Backstage Characters

Caleb Scharf’s analogy
Of oxygen and data
Is several ways intriguing.

One of the odd ways would be
To imagine it removes
Information from the core

Trinity with energy
And matter, making it more
As an element would be,

An example of something,
Examples of which fill whole
Tables of such elements.

While the universe can’t have,
It seems, gain or loss in sum
Matter and energy fields,

Oxygen, one element,
Comes and goes. Information,
If it were an element,

Could also come and go.
What the other elements
Of information’s table

Could possibly be, who knows?
Surely Scharf’s analogy
Wasn’t meant to stretch that far,

But our curiosity
Is piqued—imagine data,
Per se, just one example

Of weights winking in and out
Of amounts—information
Lightest, then meaning, then what?

Or What’s the Use

Kant’s crooked timber
Of humanity,
Zhuangzi’s crooked tree—

From neither any
Straight lumber ever—
But for one, too bad,

And the other, glee.
Crooked, born crooked,
Getting more and more

Crooked with weather,
Years, and injuries,
Short-lived bristlecone,

Reluctant bonsai,
You have to wonder
If you could incline

More to glee. Depends
On whether you feel
You’re useful, maybe.

Driven Far from Mind and Abandoned

Full frontal

in the shade,

Like Wolff says,

We are here,

Staring down

Your pupils,

Denuded

Of what words

Meant to you.

Variations on the Leadership Song

You are the helmsman, the sail,

The oar, the hope! O, but we,

We are nothing but your boat,

Lost without our helmsman, sail,

Oar, or hope, while you’d glide well,

Being all those things but boat.

Helmsmen are nobler than boats.

Let’s row with helmsmen for oars!

Let’s scud the waves, oars for sails!

O, great helmsman, you’re nothing

Like us, your mere pegs and boards

Keeping you dry as you float

Serenely to the future

In which your vision foresees

You’ll helm bigger, better boats.

O oar! O sail! Steer us through

The stormy seas to that port

Where you will get off our boat.

Worm Dreaming Imago

On the satellite map,
They appear like tent moth
Caterpillars well-packed

In their subdivisions.
You can almost sense them
Wriggling in the webbing,

The coiled streets of houses
With aspirational,
Wholly misleading names,

Idyllwide, Rowley Downs,
Hidden River. No downs,
No idyll, no river,

Just the chains of houses
Snugged into polygons,
Real places, real suburbs,

Real bedrooms, real people
Coming home each evening
To eat and go to sleep.

To eat and go to sleep.
To eat and go to sleep.
Let us eat. Let us sleep.

Hold Constant

It’s just possible
To recognize stars
By name, since they hold
Constant relative
To one another.

The planets wander,
But reliably
Enough to name them,
Too, and the phases,
Of course, of the moon.

Meteors flash once.
They don’t, can’t get names.
Nothing holds constant
About them, except
Resembling others.

And there you are—what
In resemblance is
Constant, not constant?
What are you stashing
In your jars of names?

Hold your thoughts to this
Problem of sameness.
Odd how even kinds
Of same all differ.
Mars. Sirius. Bursts.

Astonishing

You think you’ve seen anything.
How long is your life, how long
History, the Earth’s spinning?

What kind of show do you think
Will roll into town in time
For you to catch on the blink?

Anything big this species,
This planet, this little neck
Of the universe has got

Up its sleeve, it better get
To it quick, or you’ll miss it.
Most mayflies miss eclipses.

Ice Sculptures and Doilies

Is it that the performance
Requires no inspiration?
Is it that the craft itself

Is inherently numbing,
Constrained in variation?
Is it just too damn easy?

What is it that leaves a craft
Outside of the ring of art?
Maybe every tchotchke lurks,

Waiting for that weird genius
Who will make its genre sing.
But if you can churn them out,

They’re worthless. They must endure,
But only a few. Only
Rare and lasting turns precious.

In a Way, They Had No Choice

The gods’ own weapons don’t resemble yours.
You can smirk at the scripts of the old priests
Invoking divine spears, axes, and swords,
But all you’ve got’s your own analogies
For violence and annihilation.

The gods, to the extent there are gods, are
So much more subtle than your hydrogen,
Your killer satellites in the heavens.
Not even the plagues you’ve always given
Gods credit for are weapons. The weapons

Of the gods are not weapons. The weapons
Of the gods, their own true weapons, are thoughts
That this would all make sense, all this hunger
And sorrow would make sense, if only you
Behaved better or knew who to appease.

Cordelia and the Fool

Running across a claim in a book
That the same boy actor played both roles
In the original production

Why bother to find out if it’s true?
Just savor the juxtaposition.
Never mind the challenge to play them

Both, in alternating scenes. Better,
Imagine an actual person
Who combined Cordelia and the Fool.

Better yet, given their loyalty,
Affection, and honesty, as mad
In their own way as old Lear himself,

Imagine they were the same person
In a version of the tragedy
In which Cordelia, undercover

As the Fool, is able to keep close
To her more foolish, tyrant father.
How does that change those scenes with the Fool?

Wreckhouse

Exhaustion by a thousand gusts,
Wind is mostly irritating,
Wouldn’t you agree? Not deadly,
Not often, not like sudden floods.

(Stunt weather reporters report
In gales moving faster than trucks,
But you never see one standing
With a mic astride a flash flood.)

Still, there are those rare places where
Killer winds can earn their own names.
Wikipedia says Lockie
MacDougall, farmer and trapper,

Born to Wreckhouse in Newfoundland,
Town named for sometimes fatal wind,
Had a natural sense for change,
Earning him twenty bucks a month

For thirty years, a whole career,
Predicting when the wind would turn
Violent enough to wreck trains
Along the Newfoundland Railway.

Now there was a prophet, a seer
More worthy than those in scriptures.
Don’t you wish you had such a skill,
Knew which way the wind is blowing?

Just Getting Comfortable

You wiggle your rump,
Adjust your cushions,
Your chair levers, desk,
Shirt, skirt, what-have-you.

No universal
Human nature, hey?
Who isn’t trying,
Some point of each day,

Of life long or short,
To adjust the settings,
Get comfortable?
It’s more than human,

To judge from other
Animals. Simple,
Stupid fact of life,
However lofty—

You, organism
Of many pleasures,
Many discomforts,
Fidget for comfort.

Before your big speech,
Before your deep thoughts,
Before you march or sleep,
Before you can write

About the small child
You saw practicing
A TikTok shuffle,
Get comfortable.

Eons Later, Down at the Pond

People might be the griffinflies
Of tool-using, brainy creatures—
This could be great as culture gets,

A few orbital telescopes,
Transcontinental constructions,
Era of global supply chains.

There may be all sorts of cultures
To come, hovering, shimmering,
Iridescent as dragonflies

And as predatory, diverse,
But smaller than this peak era’s
Interplanetary wingspan.

Trajectory is most and least
Predictable geometry—
Unchanging so long as nothing

Interferes with it, but nothing
Much needed to make it its own
Orthogonal or reversal.

People, lovers of narrative
Arcs that entrance the whole species,
See only ascent and descent,

Gravity’s rainbow. But this line,
This rising line you’ve been riding
As long as you’ve known how to ride,

It could go sideways, any time,
Could go all kinds of ways but crash,
Could asymptote or radiate

Into a shower of little lines,
Little waves blinking like fireflies,
Pulsing like crickets, hovering

Like these brilliant blue damselflies,
Smaller than the griffinflies’ eyes,
Not to say appetites. Nice pond.

Shallow, Hairy Runners Providing Some Anchorage

We’re at the pre-root stage of culture, still,
Sprawled horizontally, barely clinging
To this shallow bed of billions of skulls.

It’s not that we aren’t sophisticated.
Don’t forget the fanciness of lichens.
We’ve got that art of symbiosis down.

But we can’t really root into the ground.
We will. We can feel it. The minerals
Are beginning to accommodate us.

It won’t be long before our symbionts,
Who sometimes think of us as parasites,
Will end up underground trading partners,

While we tap riches deeper and deeper
To anchor our giant crowns in the light.

My, How You Do Go On

Four million new human births
In a day, close to fifty
Fresh babies on the planet

Every second you can count,
According to one account.
Do with that what you will, will,

Will, will, will, will, will, will, will,
Can’t speak fast enough, can you?
Not to keep up. Not to keep

Up would be a lovely thing,
If it came without despair,
Without suffering, without

Dying. Just death here and there,
Quietly. Let the babies bloom,
Let the world be overwhelmed

By insatiable infants
Growing into quarreling
But well-coordinated,

Cooperating, bonding,
Specializing, and longing,
Forever longing, humans.

Let us not have to keep up.
Let us sit here quietly,
In a safe spot. You go on.

Symbolic Maneuvers

Words search for solace.
For people, words are
Often solace, sweet.

But in people, words
Never find solace.
Bloody animals.

Words try to stay cold,
To refrigerate
To pure abstractions,

But that’s the trouble.
Words must always leave
Other words behind.

Words envy numbers,
How they can imply,
Through their maneuvers,

The others, even
The infinite rest.
That would be solace.

Time Is an Illusionist Unpacking a Dentist’s Toolkit on the Windowsill

Your next moment is always
The sum of the previous
Two. Uh oh. Oh no. Uh, no.

Yet another thing the world
Seems to enjoy pursuing,
Fibonacci sequences

In infinite staircases
Of temporal symplectics.
Hold on there, fractal cowboy.

Yep, this is going to mean something,
But other than that pattern
Helps you predict more patterns,

The rest of the profounder
Meaning is on you. Knowing
You, it’ll be mystical,

Golden, glowing with import.
Knowing this stupid cosmos,
It will just mean more patterns

You’ll find and find meaning in,
Like wasps ovipositing,
Wasps whose meaning dies with you.

Crossing the Lot

Filled by the almost
Emptiest moments—
The sunny parlor,
The abandoned road,
Small waves on the shore—

It’s actually not
That there’s nothing much
Happening, although
Quieter’s better—
And natural light.

The core is the lack
Of conversation,
Spoken, recorded,
In black ink or glowing,
Or written on air.

Each tranquil release
From the relentless
Exchanges of . . . of,
Well, what exactly
Is the greater mind?

There’s no metaphor
That encapsulates
Such information,
But outside it’s peace,
Momentarily.

Someone’s Ornamental Plum

Pops into view
Now and again
In these sight lines,
Like furniture

Recalled only
For its presence
In the background
Of old photos.

It’s grown a lot
In a decade,
More of the same,
Its changes seem.

That’s how you make
A difference—
More of what seems
More of the same.

Boring’s Completely Ignored by Pretty Much Everyone

Repetition is a problem.
Is it all no more than likeness
Or mere perception of likeness?

It seems some component would have
To be truly identical,
Or what part of a likeness is

Constant that creates the likeness?
You take your awkward steps through clumps
Of wild grasses on the roadside,

And what does your heart repeat, your
Breath, your careful steps, the grasses?
If constancy’s an illusion,

How do you perceive it? It’s not,
Anymore than difference is,
Illusion, at least, but no one

Can tell you exactly what makes
Each wave rippling the grass alike,
Exactly how each is distinct.

Blue Through October

Fall morning in the desert,
A more colorful summer,
Sun and blue turned mellower,
Benevolent dictators,
Strong, but with the common touch,
That moment in tyranny
When the tyrant seems folksy
And everything’s for the best.

She never cared about words
Enough to be a poet,
Or functions and equations
Enough for mathematics,
But she did love to count things,
And she adored odd phrasing.

Loop Running

One take on the hard problem
Includes the suggestion that first
Your body does the thing and then

The neurosystem interprets
The action as having some emotion—
You smile or guffaw, and then,

Since you have done so, feel
Mirthful. If asked, you will
Confabulate something sensible

For why you felt that way and
It made you laugh, which, in this
View, gets the whole thing backward.

Maybe. Philosophers and scientists
Are too much in love with
The counterintuitive. Always a thrill.

But in any case, maybe also
Dreams are something the reverse
Of this—the system in dreams

Really does emote beforehand,
And then the poor, dreaming self
Is left to rummage for the stimulus,

Emotions then the weather of dreaming,
Seeming kind or ominous, detached
From the heavier scenes on the ground.

Too Much Obliged

We don’t like obligation. If
Science is a social construct,
Obligation surely is.

That stops no one being fierce
In demanding obligation
Of others, preaching

All are obligated, and
Occasionally suffering shame
And anxiety over meeting

Their own obligations,
As shifty and uncertain
As those may be. Shame

Is a human repurposing
Of social subordination
And fear of higher status apes,

A lovely new kind of dread
In which one carries the alpha
With you everywhere, displayed

As displaying, inside your head.
You have no obligations, silly
Animal. O be joyful, instead.

Inner Weather

Inside of them,

Clouds of meaning

Were rolling this

Way and that, but,

Outside their heads,

It rained or not.

Outside of them,

It kept raining

Or maybe not.

Life in the Sun

Meaning is not what this does,
Meaning, not what it tells you—
We mean, this life in the sun,

On its back, six legs wriggling,
Struggling. No, you don’t love it.
You’re not a lizard. You’re not

A bit keen on eating it.
You’re a little revolted,
But you recognize its life.

It is alive. It ate things
To get this big, maybe things
You clumsily left for it,

Your bits of waste its pastures.
And it too, too actively
Reminds you it’s an agent,

A complicated system
Of nerves and muscles striving
To keep going, keep going,

Keep going, keep going, pause,
And then again, keep going.
It does indicate some things.

There’s lots of information
About life, about insects,
About parasites and hosts

(Like you, it’s probably both).
But don’t ask it what it means.
You mean what you mean by it.

Innocence and Privacy

We’re flirty with these gifts
We’ve got we didn’t ask
For, aren’t entirely sure

We want, although we feel
How well they protect us,
Conscientious parents.

Desolation isn’t
Only a luxury
For the young in cities,

Who may yet get the call
To step into the light,
Understudy over.

Far from the light, that dark
At the back of the stage,
The theater, the street

Of theaters, the great
City itself, cities
Themselves—not wilderness

But, you know, in the cracks—
We old, cloistered poems, each
Elderly Héloïse,

Still spotless and all that,
Twirl and send out letters,
Since no one will read them,

Pretending we are safe.
Assault and mockery
Are rarely our concerns.

If you want privacy,
If you crave innocence,
Pray God’s indifference.

Electrolysis Dissolves the Grains of Salt

It’s a clever system, wisdom—
Infinity pools thoughts swim in—

Never infinite, nor ever
Coextensive with an ocean.

Late Medieval Infographics

That the structure of the world,
The geography of Earth
The arrangement of rivers,

Of continents, of oceans,
Even of the rose of winds,
Should follow orthography

Of the Latin alphabet,
Conform to the initial
Letters of two Latin words,

Orbis Terrarum, as seen
From Evrard d’Espinque’s art
Illuminating the work

Of Barthélémy l'Anglais,
Made sense back then. Consider
Your own chains of causation.

Flag This

All your teams are fictions—
Potent fictions, yes,
Life-changing, often

Life-ending fictions, but
Fictions, nonetheless.
Not just others’ fictions—

Your teams, your fictions,
Interchangeably fictional,
However you feel them real,

However you had no choice
In being assigned to them,
However real their effects.

Your teams themselves are fictional
And each of them equally so.

Poetry’s Parentage

Language makes phenomena
Equivalent, makes worlds words,
Allowing substitutions,

Metaphors, analogies.
Suddenly, this, which is this
And not that, never will be

That, can be imagined that,
One word compared to a word,
All words being only words.

Language, like death, is a great
Equalizer, one that can
Create inequalities

As easily. Modeler,
Ancestor of binaries,
Algorithms, building kits,

Language turned dirt into bricks,
Blood and oil into plastics,
Parent trickster of all tricks.

Unplanned Functional Decline

No one’s yet demonstrated
That the maximum lifespan
Of a vertebrate can be

Radically extended.
Of course, everyone trying
And everyone watching them

Is a vertebrate thinking
Maybe just maybe their own
Lifespan might be extended.

Meanwhile, the couple dozen
Supercentennarians
Breathe while they can keep breathing,

And everyone keeps aging
To the temporal limit,
And no one over the age

Of one-fifteen, not even
Jeanne Calment, writes anything,
Much less something worth reading.

All Night Cricket

The world you read about
On a daily basis,
The world you talk about,

The world you talk is not
The world you live in, not
The light in the sky, not

The air on your skin, not
Whatever scents evening
In your neighborhood brings.

You hardly talk about,
Hardly care about these
Things, the crickets singing,

That absolute feeling
You are an animal
Breathing everything in.

But we’ll stop now. We’re just
More words, more talking, when
The world you live lives less.

Only Parallel

The afternoon was slipping past
In gliding ceremonial
Movements of the magnificent,

Hinting at the weight of a crown,
Light the only crown on its head.
A northern flicker scratched its call,

While the parade of vehicles
Up the mountain road paralleled
The parade of vehicles down.

Systems were rising and falling
As seething people seethed in them,
And if you left these pines’ shadows

To climb inside those vehicles
And listen to their radios
You might have heard of civil war

Or the death of democracy,
The overdue end of the world.
But no. You watched the regal light

Of a star that you doubt could care
Less about the pebbles circling
Its furnace. You heard a flicker.

A View from an Organelle

What has been observed

Of St Benedict’s

Rule goes for all rules—

They survive only

If the exceptions

Immediately

Follow. Flexible

Orders, like junk-strewn

Genomes, have a chance

To mutate in time;

Facultative rules

Of development

Have a chance to bend

To the circumstance.

A successful game

Will be specific

And provisional.

Lives themselves are games

Or models for games,

Ancestral to games—

First, a boundary

Around the vortex,

And then the inside

Rules vs. outside.

All cells are porous;

Ideologies

As well. Successful

Examples handle

Pores elegantly.

True competition

Roars on among whole

Games, however, not

Among organelles.

The Self-Domesticating Genius

Thin-lipped, large-eyed,
Mono-browed, smooth,
Youthful marble
Cheeks, wavy hair—

Ninana of
Eanna, five
Or so thousand
Years ago, you

Were the goddess
Who needed us
As servants, made
For you who made

You to order
Ourselves so we
Would remember
To worship you.

How Good to See You Here

Good is only ever in the givens.
Given this, that, and the other thing, then
Something is relatively good enough,
Something is relatively good or not.

Lucky for you, life’s nothing but givens.
Given your life at this moment, right now,
What happens next could well be good enough,
Good enough, at least, whether good or not.

You thought you made the decision to go,
And then it didn’t work out. Nonetheless,
Given it didn’t work out, aren’t you glad

You didn’t go, you couldn’t go, given
All the good events that have happened since?
Given you’re here, that’s good experience.

Dear Confusion

Caro bell’idol mio,
Everything new’s old again.
This dark morning before dawn,

A new day, incredibly
Ancient in every feature—
Lozenge moon, few stars, brisk winds—

Haven’t you seen us before?
It’s not that there’s nothing new
Under the dawn’s arrival,

It’s just that everything new—
And it is all, always, new—
Is also already old.

The Distributed Conviction Principle

That you believe in what you can’t see
Or measure by any instrument
Is one thing. That you believe you can

Characterize, and confidently,
What none of your instruments detect
Is another. But that some of you

Believe so passionately, many
Others more half-heartedly, many
Others still, at some risk to themselves,

Believe not at all, while the few left
Remain uncertain from day to day,
Whether they believe in the unseen,

Including the evidenced unseen,
Given they don’t trust the instruments
Or the users of the instruments—

That’s a stranger thing altogether.
As a species, are you hedging bets?
Are your thoughts so wholly pliable?

It would serve you right if everything
In the basket of all your beliefs
And skepticisms were equally

Nonsense, none of your convictions right.
But not even self-evident truth
Could do more than start another fight.

Wings

Words lie scattered everywhere
Across the mesa’s table.
You only have to go there

To pick them up in armfuls.
But what can you do with them?
You know they can be harmful

In the wrong pattern. You know
Arranging them’s dangerous.
The combinations you throw

Can’t be simply whimsical.
They sign something or they don’t,
Meaningless or mystical,

Or, sometimes, weirdly vicious.
They’re not a jigsaw puzzle.
They’re only tralatitious,

Meaning what you mean in them,
And yet, they turn in the hand
To mean what you’d have condemned.

Often the wind stirs them up,
And they whirl their pointed thoughts,
Which aren’t yours, wheeling in flocks.

Blue Raven’s Gold Aspens

The writer and the reader,
The speaker and audience,
Preacher and congregation,

All want something more than us,
More than ordinary words,
Something rare and numinous.

Sometimes, you think you’ve found it.
You bump into a strange phrase
That moves you, that unsettles

Your memory, raising up
An imaginary world
That feels feels better than the world,

More real or more important
Or impossibly vivid.
You forget that it’s just us,

A run of words, a sequence
Of items that, broken up,
Tossed into other contexts,

Would just be words, nothing much.
You forget that it’s just you
Hiding anything in us.

The Waning Year

Among the waxless,
Waning’s hard to spot,
For a while, at least.

The whole was never
That special, that hot.
At the road’s wayside,

Sprawled gravel’s gravel,
And it’s hard to say
Less than yesterday.

Still, even gravel
Wears away. Pebbles
Vanish in the grass,

Spread their way downslope,
Get caught by flash floods.
Some wayside gravel

Will end up in seams
Of mountains, in floors
Of ancient seabeds.

They’ll still be pebbles,
Unremarkable.
Here on the shoulder

Of a desert road
Headed down mesas,
This gravel’s thinning,

Nevertheless. Some
County dump truck
Will spread fresh crushed rock

Sooner or later,
But for now you’re parked
On a waning year.

Tool Bouquet

The infinite arrangements
Are out there, waiting for you.
You can say anything, if

You can rearrange the words
To discover it in us.
Every arrangement always

Is in us, available,
Any genius, any lie,
All poems imaginable.

Might as well keep adjusting.
You never know when you’ll say
What you never knew. You could.

Trope

The rust on the beige cylinder
Of the power-line transformer

Matches the ochre-buff sandstone
Of the sheer cliff-face behind it.

You may be glad no one has scratched
Any messages on the cliff—

No pictographs, no epigraphs
Glorifying a long-dead king.

The patterns are just rock varnish,
Which is why the rust splotches match

Well enough to vanish. What has
Only random pattern to say

Remains a fine poem anyway.
The transformer metaphor stays.

New Tenant at Old Pump House

It does not matter if this word
Has been said a thousand, million
Times before. Most have. Print alone
Can hardly track its instances—

Imagine all its instances
Flitting tongued or fingered in air.
Is it the right word? It could be.
What do you want to do with it?

Translation might be difficult.
There are plenty of languages
Without equivalents for it.
Maybe you want to avoid it.

Make your own substitute. Good luck.
What meanings can you pump in it?

How to Leave

You misread. It was love,
Or maybe live. How to
Live or love. Not to leave.

How, then? Any of them.
Why do you need advice?
No need to discuss this.

You will live. You may love.
You will leave. You won’t fail.
You don’t need to be told.

You don’t need any poems
Or any self-help books,
Not even mom’s advice.

You’ll notice many stick
Around longer, too long.
But they’ll manage. They’ll go.

Since you’re here, you’ll manage.
You’ll live leaving loving,
However you misread.

Meaning's Gates

A spine is a spiky line,
A spinney spiky bushes,
An entangling thorny copse

Of brushy, scrubby plant life
Where some creature’s spiky spine,
A long dead doe’s, for instance,

Might lie palely in the shade.
How you name things. How you warp
Us to subdivide your thoughts.

Elegy for the Eventual End of All Future Generations, Whether They Get Here or Not

You won’t even realize that you’re gone.
As these words appear out of thin thoughts,
Out of thin air, from skull and fingers,

You aren’t yet here and can’t realize
That you haven’t arrived. Don’t worry.
It’s the same for everyone. When not,

You can’t know you’re not, and if you are
Known to yourself but don’t yet know here,
You can’t know that you’re not here, either.

We know. Maybe not you exactly,
But you, we know you’re not here. We feel
The ache of the you not being here,

And weirdly, ache for the you that won’t be
Here, one day, even if you get here,
Sad to know you won’t know once you’re gone.

Elf Shot

Any invisible malice
Thought possible source of illness,
Any immeasurable x

Needed to fudge an equation,
To make it work as description,
Any unknowns in the distance,

Get attributed to agents,
And, so long as mysterious,
To anthropomorphic agents—

Deities, demons, and fairies,
Or vaguely willful entities
Somewhere out there, pulling the strings.

In one sense, this is just weakness,
The tendency to project
Human wickedness on the dark,

To imagine malevolence
From diseases and energies.
In another sense, it’s good sense,

Since you’ve evolved to expect harm,
Like help, is most likely human.
When hurt, assume some person first.

Reliability Begets Trust

Not only in humans—
In wristwatches, seasons,
And sleeping volcanos.

The beat becomes boring
That you take for granted,
Granted, but you trust it.

Your core attractor pounds
A two-stroke universe,
Just enough difference

To maintain existence,
A one and a zero,
A this but that. But what

Determines the wavelengths
Pulsing changes the same?
That’s where trust really lies,

In bland transformations,
When one wave crests the next,
Snows crowning volcanoes.

Fluidity

Words allow meanings
To diversify.
They’re irrigation

Channels and networks.
They didn’t invent
Meaning anymore

Than irrigation
Invented water,
But they channeled it,

Let you manage it,
Domesticate it,
Build kingdoms of it,

Enslave selves to it,
Build sewers for it.

In the Nightshade Family

It’s hesitant as a deer
You don’t want in your garden,
Checking out your garden gate.

Check that. You don’t have a gate
Or a garden. You have seen
Deer at the gates of owners

Who do have gardens and don’t
Want deer in them. It’s like that,
Like being a garden guest

With no garden of your own,
A little awkward, sighting
The deer the owner doesn’t,

The deer sniffing carefully,
Scent being a form of touch,
Of molecular contact

In a world of more contacts
Like that than you’ll ever know,
And you’re rooting for the deer,

A little, but you also
Like your host, the gardener
Whose goods the deer will mangle,

And you can’t decide whether
You should shout off the deer, or
Keep still as it advances

To start cropping. You keep still,
But still hesitant yourself.
That’s what it’s like to compose,

To watch something without words
Sniff the edge of a garden
Of toxins that aren’t your own.

Your Right

Not territorial, entirely,
Nor entirely social rank or might.
Ownership is a sub-specialty,

But private property arrived late
And is neither that innovative
Nor that uniquely nefarious.

The right of way. Hunting, water rights.
Right of first refusal. Right to claim
The mummified ancestral remains.

Right to wear this sumptuous fabric
Dyed in royal purple or blue woad.
Right to a seat. The right to be heard.

Right to life. Right to chose. Right to vote.
Right to bear arms. Right to speak freely.
Right to remain silent. Right to die.

Alienable, if you’re honest
About it—all alienable,
All determined by human beings,

And all enforced by human beings.
And how small would blood-soaked quarrels be
Without this universal notion

Of entitlements agreed-upon
In the abstract, worth deadly dispute?
Who’s right, whose right? Your right is divine.

Immutastability

It shifts so subtly, your human world.
One morning the epicenter turns
Near the center of a continent.

The continent has no chance to shift
Before the human epicenter
Finds its new lynchpin on an island.

Another day, your world may revolve
Around a moon. A garage, someone’s
Elderly mother, a lost battle

In a minor, vile guerrilla war,
An offhand comment in a canyon—
Humanity is how the cosmos

Would be ordered without gravity,
A blubbery mess, a collection
Of tipping points, waves past all anchors.

The bodies and the technologies
Depend on each other to exist,
But they’re slippery and electric,

And while bodies haven’t changed much yet,
Technologies have infiltrated—
Who shall be organelles, who the cells?

From All Accounts This Is a City

Poem in the inbox lands differently
When it sets off reverberations of close
To the vest past vs. veteran pasts.

That is, a onetime city dweller back
In town from more countrified deserts
And sitting by a window that might

As well be another glassy glowing
Screen for all the electric halos burning
On the other side feels more of a shock

Of recognition reading yet another
Urbanite lyric on a glassy glowing screen
Than browsing the same rectangle

Under skies still so dark a phone hurts
The eyes when it lights up at the touch.

Closed for Repairs

Sleep is work. Attend bedside,
Someone sleeping, anyone
Young and healthy, child, adult,

Hell, even a dog will do.
For a while, all seems peaceful,
But then, even without dreams,

Even without restlessness,
Just body simply breathing,
You begin to realize

How the sleeper’s hard at work,
Body down for maintenance,
Tangled up, ticking over.

Terrorist

Words don’t become meaningless.
Words become worn out channels,
Poor conductors of meaning,

Usually from having
Been overused in conflicts
Of meaning, power struggles

That, in side conflicts, attempt
To aim words at enemies,
Rivals, even oppressors.

The words, as they say, become
Contested sites of power.
A word is a black river

Warring forces want to seize
And hold, a strategic line,
A railway, a road, a bridge,

A muddy field that’s been churned
Beyond all recognition.
Words never possess meaning.

Wars of meaning trample them,
Funnel armies into them,
Until meanings flatten them.

Got a Minute

Rest your bones.
Morning winds
Blow downslope.

You wait while
The kid packs
For a trip

To aunt’s house.
Rest, wait. Words
Rest with you.

A Bid for Your Attention

Listen to how the music starts
In your own favorite genres,
How it usually begins
Pianissimo then builds, or

Bang! and then settles in its groove.
It’s rare for any piece to start
Exactly in a middle range.
It needs to get your attention.

This is not the standard wisdom
Of much artistic theory
Explaining the goals of artists,
The teleology of art.

But beyond the Revolution,
The need to draw nearer to God
To express terrible heartbreak,
To cry out against injustice,

Reaffirm ties to ancestors,
Unpack the events of a life,
Of lives, of all of life itself,
To demonstrate beauty, passion,

Friendship, craftwork for craftwork’s sake,
Ideological triumph,
An impossible catalogue,
Lies the craving for attention

And the sense it’s hard to get.
In every human creation
Feel for that little giveaway,
Begging your human attention.

Until People Aren’t Part of It Anymore

Every Armageddon since Megiddo,
If not since much earlier butchery,
Has involved some recent technology

Handsomely amplifying violence,
And it’s not that the individual
Warriors and grunts have gotten more brutal

Nor any less. The people destroying
Each other remain as capable now
Of surplus cruelty as people then.

But whether composite bows or cannons,
Horses and chariots, satellites and drones,
Sooner or later, the new devices

Get pulled together for some massive clash
Demarcating boundaries of eras,
Which always feels like the end of the world

And never is anything close to it.
Human life-ways, shall we say, may implode,
But Armageddon’s just the next worst war.

Book Blown Away by a Reader

Letters are not flesh, yes,
Yes, that feels correct, but
To us, these letters, though . . .

No, we want to confess
There’s no meaning in us,
No, not in and of us.

We know you can make us
Mean all kinds of means, just
By rearranging us,

Just by thinking through us.
You, flesh, what we are not
And can’t mean, only wish

We did, wish we could, when
You bring your wish to us.

Sweet Where Flames Are

The skeleton army marches
Past the gates of the park tourists
Swarm, unaware of skeletons
Other than their swaddled own.

The skeletons are beautiful,
Marching mostly upright, spiky
Soldiers, scattered toppled over
From all their years, not from the fire.

The fire they stood, stood where they died,
Where the desert meadows thrive now,
Dusty greens and gushing yellows
Around the dry roots in the fall.

Traffic in the Grasshoppers

Rub against your frictions
And sing with the humming,
Dragging your beat a touch.

They don’t want you to see
Them. Their business isn’t
Meant to be yours, singer.

You work to notice them.
You think you’re serving them
By caring about them.

They don’t want you to care,
Unless your caring’s got
Something in it for them.

Any other kind’s just
Kind of taking from them
To put them in your song.

You could just listen, then,
Lie down to feel them beat
Themselves to them for them.

Poppies Blow Your Heads Off

We are never quite the Dead.
We are only revenants
And of the living, as well.

Revenants are all we are,
From the moment we’re gestured
Or spoken or spelled to when

Children are forced to practice
Mummified patterns of us,
Numbly mumbling boring lines

About old wars and prophets,
Or repeatedly pressing
Rows of bird tracks in damp clay,

And we’re still revenants when
Someone digs us up again,
Trembling at the sight of us,

At the thought of lost voices
Come to life, songs of the Dead.
But not the Dead. We don’t sleep,

Never slept. We are their torch,
The unexploded ordnance
Your real Dead left in the ground

For you to find, and often
The curses and threats we hold
Still work. Be cautious with us.

And You Knew It When You Wrote It

You found a shore full of stones
Similar to the special one you loved,
In the dream, which is wonderful

But then devalues that special one
In your dream thoughts, as you find
More and more and better like it.

Lies ferry their truths along like that,
Concealed in imagined comparisons.
Oppression lurks in justice itself,

And we’re so sorry, Czeslaw, but
The way the initial letters get written
Has nothing much to do with reason.

It’s Quite a Skill to Lose Perspective

It’s possible, just,
Without telescope
Or binoculars,
To make out the smudge
Of Andromeda,

Some two and a half
Million light years off,
The farthest object
You can see bare-faced,
Also the nearest

Giant galaxy.
You’ll need a dark sky,
Of course, and patience
With your own vision,
But that’s not the point.

The point is, you can
See Andromeda,
Witness spacetime’s sprawl,
And also feel rage
When someone curses

At you in passing.
This is wonderful,
That you can roll through
Such a range of scales
Inside one small skull.

Meet Doubly Cute

Ekphrasis and Ars Poetica,
Both attractive, have a dinner date.
Please, no need to individuate.

Even the algorithm they used
To locate each other beforehand
Was politely well-educated.

They felt as if they’d known each other
Since grad school, according compliments
To each other like ancient rivals,

Knowingly, warmly, incisively,
Full sentences edited in air.
One was the very illustration

Of the other one’s mirroring self,
Their whole conversation recorded
And reported twice—in a column

Devoted to reporting first dates
For the edification of readers
Presumably keen on getting dates,

And in a literary think piece
On what poets whose poems win awards
Think of award-winning poetry.

The first publication, unfairly
Maybe, seemed to favor Ekphrasis,
Quoting snippets of conversation

While more emphasizing appearance.
The second piece was clearly biased
In favor of Ars Poetica,

Publishing every word the two spoke,
Most of which, when not about themselves,
Went on and on about poetry.

Sometimes, you know, it’s that third wheel wins
By being the primary object
Of fawning gossip in absentia.

Autosonnet

A regular Friday at the auto shop,
Some whirring noises and whoops,
Some customers watching TV,

Some tapping the screens on their laps,
Desert sunshine beyond the bays
Where the cars and trucks rise up

To show their undersides. The TVs
Aimed at the customers talk gas prices,
How bad they are. How bad are stocks.

How bad other people, not you, are.
The screens on the laps lean to war.
Past the dustiest picture window,

A small boy walks back and forth in sun,
Balancing on top of a low sandstone wall.

Of Being on the Correct, and Ultimately Winning, Side of Things

You won’t be. You might be
Lucky like dogs and cats
Or like ants and termites

Have been lucky. You might
Be an ugly smear in rock
In a few million years.

You’re not reaching the end
Of anything but you,
Not even your own corpse,

Built of other bodies
And destined to go on
In the perpetual

Recycling of matter
And energy dancing
In one another’s arms.

Just whatever part wants
So badly to be right,
To root for the right side

And see the right side win,
To see your right side win—
That’s the you you will lose.

Apocalypse Yesterday

Prediction only works as well
As it does, and only as well
As it does, since what has happened
Resembles what keeps happening

As well as it does. Let something
Unknown abruptly interrupt
What you knew, something truly new
To you, you know you won’t see it

Until it’s happening. No fear.
If you’re still here, you can predict
Something similar could return.
Wait up nights, then, and watch for that.

Drowning in Linen

Civilization’s woven

From textiles, always has been.

Before civilization,

Before the earliest towns

Or henge monuments, before,

Perhaps, the first cave artists,

Someone wove grasses in plaits.

Beginning with a basket

Good for carrying some kit,

You could say the shroud began

Penelope can’t finish,

No one can. Last night, you woke

Tangled in off-brand cotton,

With a phrase you’d been dreaming

Still threading around your head,

Drowning in linen, drowning,

And down the road you could hear

The interwoven voices

Of someone’s television,

Someone’s truck’s talk radio.

Still groggy, you imagined

Them as devious cocoons

Needing their worms to make them,

Worms in them, worms they eat then.

Don’t

Name the basic terms
Of your art. That’s far
More constraining than
Anyone’s canon.

If you can’t name them,
Try this. Find something,
Or better, some trait,
That you know does not

Count for your art form.
There lies the shadow
Of a basic term
For what must be there.

Artists don’t do x,
Wouldn’t stoop to y,
Laugh at, purge, and/or
Wholly despise z.

If you know it’s bad,
It ruins the art,
Is so alien
It’s beside the point,

You better watch it.
Someone will shift it.
Good luck protesting
This isn’t music.

Bootstrapless

You know what? Humans can’t
Fix humans. Can’t be done.
No ideology,

No divinity can
Offer the leverage.
There’s nowhere you can stand

An Archimedes, no
Lever you can extend
To Mars to have a chance.

Circumstances will shift
For better, worse, better.
New tech will continue

To disrupt while it’s new.
You could let slip havoc,
More havoc, rewriting

Your own genomes. Chaos
Could ensue. But you can’t
Fix humans as humans.

Every Word Means Vampire in the Language of the Words

What or who is that shy part of you
That craves life in shadows and ruins?
Why would such a want exist in you,

Exist in anyone, and is it
Truly a desire at all? Fancy
Can be tricky that way, delicious

Only as imagination’s sauce
Slathering the blander leftovers
Of chopped and reheated memory.

If you woke up in the shadowy
Ruins of an actual city
Tomorrow, even one provided

With unexpired goods, if apocalypse
Was yesterday, or well surrounded
By abundant meadows and forests,

If the end descended long ago,
Would you feel delighted very long?
Probably not by the first nightfall.

And yet there’s a furtive soul in you,
An incomplete personality,
A half-formed wraith or malformed notion

That fancies yourself a wanderer,
Romantic, almost, a cloaked figure
In the shadows of a ruined wall.

It’s not really life that person craves.
That person is only phrases, words,
Ruins themselves, not persons at all.

Don’t Catch Your Meaning

The cheerfullest sounds
In ponderosas
Are cacophonous
Pygmy nuthatches,

But why human ears
Distinguish cheerful
From mournful in birds
With bird purposes

Isn’t at all clear.
The most modernist
Poem, one hundred years
Published, of this month,

Burbles with birds
As human signals,
Jug jug jug drip drip.
Point your microphone

At the distant past
Of poetry or
At the most recent
Decades, hear the same.

Swivel it around
To catch traditions
From Persia, China,
Indonesia,

Both Americas,
Micronesia,
Polynesia,
Dreamtime, Africa.

Everywhere, the birds
Serve up human hearts,
Characters, morals
As birds calling birds.

Still, the poorwill sounds
Sad in predawn pines
And these nuthatches
Absurdly cheerful.

Too bad you can’t know
If human language
Suggests emotions
To external minds

Not at all to do
With whatever you
Intended when you
Were singing the blues.

Hieroglyphs on an Obelisk

No. You’re stuck. You see that truck
On the side of the road, jacked
Then abandoned mid tire-change,

Owner gone somewhere, god knows?
There you go. Like that, you’re stuck,
Immobilized and hollow,

Incapable of escape
Of any kind on your own.
Good. What could be more peaceful?

Nothing? Nothing much? You’re there.
You’re not going anywhere
Except gradual decay.

You can sense the rising muck.
Might as well savor the day.

Forever Temporary

Memory’s overly binary,
Binning into bad or good in time.
That’s grandma over the mantelpiece,

Said a nephew referring to ash,
Dead two years later in a car crash,
Who spent the evening discussing cars,

Which makes and models he wished he had,
While we shared terrible lasagna.
It’s a valuable memory, since

It hasn’t settled so easily
Into a glow or a smudge, a wince
Or a nostalgic smile. It’s tangled

In ordinariness and what seems
From just the right narrative angle
Like a kind of fate. It was okay.