Awaiting the Alien

From some moments, you can’t help hoping
For it, God, the adventure of it,
To be confronted by something new,

So new you have no comprehension
What kind of phenomenon this is
You find yourself experiencing,

So new the most frantic rummaging
In memory comes up with nothing
Or sadly inappropriate names,

The way invasive Europeans
Fumbled with American fauna
Amidst the unexpected weather,

The way the primary indigenes,
Whoever were the first to stumble
On each human-free ecosystem,

Had to confront what somehow didn’t
Quite kill all of them, the way you would
Feel face to unknown and alien.

The Role of the Immersed in Light

Anywhere you can bear it,
This paradoxical sun,
The beauty of which no one

Can sustain, not directly,
But without which the heart sinks
Hopelessly, back in its cave,

Without which, all other light
Slowly becomes oppressive,
This gold sun, gods’ ancestor,

You immerse yourself in it,
In green waves, in dusty rooms,
Between walls of skyscrapers,

In the courtyards of lizards
Who need it more than you do.

The Yankee Swap

Appealing and stirring
As much of it remains,
Doesn’t Whitman’s Preface

In 1855
Seem a little bit nuts,
A little bit unhinged,

One of those pure products
Of America, like
Any manifesto

Written by a loner
With no political
Or avant-garde movement

To advocate, only
His wild-eyed, confident
Self? It’s the Yankee swap—

You get the creative
Freedom at the expense
Of the revolution.

May Never X Again

A silly thought pattern
But always potentially true—
Whatever you’re doing

Could be the last time you do.
Of course, you’re more likely to cling
To the things that feel good—

May never see this scene again,
May never taste such food again,
May never feel loved in bed again.

But it must be just as true
For the dark, unhappy scenes,
The things that seem heaped on you—

You may never be this sad again,
Never be this poor, this scared again.
You may be gone before then.

Committee at a Distance

It’s a surprisingly pleasant
And soothing routine, a meeting
At distance on screens, the motions

Submitted, the polls going up,
Read, click, and submit, vote counted.
That it’s a harmonious group

Helps—most votes are unanimous.
But it’s the rhythm of thing,
Swinging along, in a warm room

At home, not under office lights,
Thinking here we are functioning,
Working smoothly, getting things done.

It’s almost like licking our fur,
Being sure to clean out our paws.

A Part of the World

You there. This body you think you have.
You don’t. It’s not your body. It’s not
Anyone’s body—doesn’t belong

To any patriarch, any state,
Any god. Doesn’t belong to you.
This body you call yours remains part

Of the world, and you inhabit it
And perform some strange small part in it,
Which makes you, too, a part of its world.

Mercurial

Less well-known than the love triangle,
The fight quadrangle determines more
Dramatic conflict, certainly wars.

It’s haves vs. have-nots on one side
Haves vs. haves along another
Have-nots vs. have-nots vs. haves.

The have-nots always outnumber haves,
But the haves by definition have
The resources to crush the have-nots.

When the haves can focus on have-nots
And the have-nots split into conflict,
With many have-nots used as police,

The haves can ride herd in brittle peace.
When the haves take that peace for granted
Or can’t resist fighting each other

For who among the haves has it all,
The police and soldiers are unleashed.
In chaos, have-nots suffer the most.

Every so often, an alliance
Of the have-nots threatens all the haves,
And it feels beautiful, like people

Will finally unite, free themselves,
An equitable state of the mass,
But it’s never stable very long,

And at some point a faction of haves
Slices through it, and then, for a while,
It’s back to the haves over have-nots.

It’s like watching globs of mercury
Fuse and split, but it would be more fun
Not knowing the mercury’s poison.

Autocorrect da Fe

For now, the corrections
Remain clumsy. For now

They’re often comical,
Easily caught. But they’re

Only snagged in their cauls.
They will grow up, and only

Then will the corrections
Come into their own. Then,

When they make mistakes, not
What you intended when

You wrote, you won’t notice.
Mistakes will display you.

Ring

The key to keys, to keeping
A healthy relationship
With them, or surviving them,

Seems to be either keeping
Them, never losing them, or
Shedding them, shedding them all.

Can you recall which it is?
They turn up as heaps of waste
Like car tires or plastic bags,

But are they really, are they
Waste? They’re metal, for one thing,
And metal has value. Plus,

They’re keys. They always suggest
They might still get at something
And, like texts, no matter what

Has happened to their purpose,
They retain the shimmering
Sense they once opened some worlds.

Dogrobberel

Getting things done
Getting things done
Isn’t it fun to be
Getting things done?

Life on the go
Life on the run
Life in the sun spent
Getting things done

Check off some things
Check off some more
Check them all off!
Pray some day you’re bored

Peck

Watching a few small birds
In a bird-depleted
Age, how much they’re moving,

Conversing, each busy . . .
A morning chasing chores
That can’t be avoided,

Is not so different
From the life of a bird,
An ever-hungry bird,

Busily getting things
Done, not so different
From any animal,

Probably predator
Calmly watching birds work,
You’d more likely credit

As an analogy
For life in the moment,
For some enlightenment.

Over to You

Things aren’t going well
You say to yourself,
Not for you or world.

Things aren’t yet quite
Gone to hell, of course,
But it’s all struggle

Recently—declines
In autonomy,
Declines in freedom,

More of a thicket
Of brush before you,
Thorns clawing at you,

Forms and costs for you,
Thieves and collectors
Clawing at your back.

That it’s all human—
Human dictators,
Human bureaucrats,

Human collectors
And thieves at your back—
Isn’t comforting.

The more desperate
The cannibals get,
The more it suggests

The outbreak isn’t
Over yet. Once things are
Going better or

You see the bodies
Crawling through the yard,
Biting each other,

You’ll have a clearer
View of whether it’s
All over for you.

You’ll Get to the Middle at Last

While you live, you live
Your life at the front
Tip of the nodule
Pressing into dark
Dirt of what comes next,

Always at the front,
Pressing into next,
No matter what kind
Of life you’re living,
Or what next you find.

But, as you might know,
You won’t keep living
Very much longer,
Much less forever,
And could stop today.

A strange thing happens
To your life after
Life. Your life itself,
This one you’re living,
This one then ended,

Stays part of what was,
Cannot be undone,
But moves to the back.
All lives lived up front
Last in middle past.

Supernumerary Rainbows Over New Jersey

The text explains that you need,
Along with the usual
Preconditions for rainbows,

Water droplets all nearly
The same size, typically
Less than a millimeter.

Then sun reflects from inside
The raindrops and interferes
Like ripples radiating

From a stone thrown in a pond.
The text stresses that, in fact,
These supernumerary

Rainbows cannot be explained
Except as patterns of waves,
Part of early arguments

For the wave nature of light.
Informative. Very nice,
But the part catching the eye

Lies in the straight-faced caption
For the accompanying
Illustration. New Jersey?

Could a rare phenomenon
Of nature really be linked
To that paved-over garden?

A supernumerary
Rainbow in that circumstance
Feels almost cautionary,

Covenantal reminder
Nature still lurks everywhere
And, also, next time the fire.

Grand Round

One poet suggests
There is more of time
And less than we know,

And another one
Answers in rebuke,
Who cares about time,

Existential puff
To sound grand about?
Then a third whispers

Where no one can hear
To note the tell-tale signs,
Time is more or less

What we know, since what
We know we pretend,
And time’s pretentious.

Receding Gambit

A chess player isn’t thinking
Ahead. A chess player’s thinking,

Given this board and what I know
Of all the patterns possible,

Which pattern would be best for me?
There’s no ahead. There’s just before

And what might change in what’s before.
Some change is inevitable.

Some change is hard to imagine,
Especially if it doesn’t

Closely resemble anything
That’s already happened before.

So the player scrutinizes
What’s on offer in the before,

But the before is vast, vaster
Than chess, and has no horizons

Except those that keep receding,
Receding being one way change

Renders unimaginable
All the patterns possible.

The Poet in the Papers

Let us live near each other,

Even though we’re far apart.

We live in a swirl of words,

So much more conversation,

For some of us, with language

Than with any other flesh,

So many people we know,

We only know, as language,

Streams and streams of sentences.

Every reading’s a seance,

In a sense, tuning voices

Coming from the great beyond.

Read the lines and imagine

The people and arguments

And laughter filling the head.

Today was a rash of think

Pieces about loneliness,

Widowhood, solitary

Living becoming common

Among the free, the confined

Living in solitary.

And so there are interviews,

And so we read the phrases

Of the people interviewed,

The disembodied language

We code as conversation.

So we live near each other.

No Thanks, Just Browsing

An eighty-something writes something
To the effect that the body
Lets you know, by eighty-something,

That it’s got no business being
Around and living at such age
And takes pains to remind itself.

Oh, to be an eighty-something
Possessed of perspicacity
And the gifts to write about it.

That would be success, wouldn’t it?
And yet you wouldn’t want to be
In that place immediately.

That’s the thing about sage old age
As accomplishment—admire it
All you want, you still don’t want it.

Aching Torso

There’s a passage
When night’s too old,
Morning’s too young,

And the sky’s black
Outside the lights,
And the heart’s sore—

Doesn’t matter
Literally
Or otherwise—

Through which it’s hard
To pass, without
Sorrow’s old doubts.

Bootstraps in the Void

This thing about deities
Creating ex nihilo,
Procreating with chaos,

Separating sky and land
Or stars and seas from some mess
That somehow had nested them—

Why, in so many cultures,
Have your imaginations
Attempted this tour de force?

Small children go straight to this,
With their why and what was there
First, and where did it come from?

Is it in the brain? Is it
Something to do with language?
It varies in its details,

Culture to culture, but still
There’s some yearning that haunts you
To create a creator

Before anything and tell
How that being or beings
Created world from nothing.

Confess it. It’s what you want,
What you wish you could do, what
You’re trying by telling it,

Isn’t it? It’s your struggle,
To force imagination
To make something from nothing.

Howdy, Stranger

When you meet new
People, you will
Assess how they’re
Not you, and they’ll

Assess how you’re
Not them. The less
That you aren’t them,
The more likely

They’ll all relax,
And you will, too.
The more you aren’t
Them, then likely

The worse it gets.
You’ll become what
Of you’s not them,
Them what’s not you.

Technê

Contentment’s a banausic art,
Unlike truth and enlightenment.
Since it’s only a kind of craft,

It suffers from the usual
Pejorative diminution
Of status vs., say, wisdom,

Justice, sainthood, metaphysics,
And, in a verbal irony,
Is viewed as mindless, effortless,

Exact antithesis of craft.
Contentment’s purely embodied,
In its stereotype, lazy,

Useless trait of the domesticate
Cat curled up on a couch in sun.
That cats seem often contented,

However, isn’t since that’s life
As it comes for a cat. Study
Cats long enough, put up with them,

Endure their demands and complaints,
Amoral hunting and prowling,
And you’ll see that their contentment

Isn’t a given. It’s their art,
Their craft, a skill they exercise.
If cats spend much of life content

It’s due to the fact contentment
Is a goal for cats. It’s a goal
You might want to work at, perhaps.

Genesis Is Just an Example

Sequence may be overrated
In a species that needs syntax
And order of operations
To survive. Sequence fixation

May have enhanced storytelling
And storytelling causation.
Sequences have to be rigid
Enough and modular enough

And be taken seriously
Enough by those entrained by them,
Not too stereotypical,
Not immune to substitutions,

Leaving room for evolution
But holding the ratchet in place.
A conviction in causation,
Origins, goals for sequences,

And an obsessive interest
In learning them, practicing them,
Improvising variations
Have combined to build that ratchet

Of cultural evolution.
But sequence isn’t everything.
Some randomness always slips in.
Origin’s never origin.

Just the Poem You’ve Been Waiting For

The light is good but the air is cold.
Do hillside cattle ever get bored?
If the next line promises a crime

Of raw passion, will you keep reading?
How about a promise of wisdom?
A sexy, flattering line that rhymes?

This is the game everyone’s playing—
Some dully, some brilliantly, some scared,
Some desperate just to keep living—

Can I get what I want from people
Without surrendering what I want
Or I desperately need to keep?

This is the game everyone’s playing,
Except maybe when alone and bored
As the cattle standing on the hill,

Who played when they were calves, but not games.
Be glad next time you’re alone and bored,
If the light’s good and you’re not too chilled.

Dawn

It’s a little strange to contemplate,
Despite the wobble of the seasons,
Just how smoothly Earth’s days and nights go.

Go anywhere you can watch sunlight
Cross the landscape. Even downtown works,
If it’s a day when the sky is clear—

Watch the light emerge on the high walls
Or sink between towers as they flare.
It is incredibly regular.

There’s a flawlessness to it, as well,
That its pure predictability
Dulls among rarity-obsessed apes.

At every instant, sunlight’s moving
Without snagging or tripping, without
Ever once a noticeable hitch,

Which is as well to congratulate
Earth on its perfection of spinning,
And when you see those pictures from space—

Marble, bead, blue dot, single pixel—
To think that tiny thing spins so well
It’s kept at it billions of orbits,

The orbits themselves marvels, but not
Like the days, so smooth on that small world
That its minuscule lives sense no skips.

Sincerest Flattery

All these high cliffs seem grand and beautiful
To people, since they are large and crumbling.

The little town at the foot of the cliffs
Seems scruffy to people, since it is small

And crumbling. Yes, well, people made the town
Of solemn, swaybacked horses and houses,

Yards filled with assorted rusted machines,
Chickens penned in sagging chain-link fences.

Maybe they just unconsciously assumed
An imitation of geology.

The great sandstone cliffs leave cluttered boulders,
Stones, pebbles, fine sand blowing everywhere.

It’s an exercise in falling apart
Gradually, sweeping nothing away.

But It Does Feel So Familiar

All the eddies in the river
Will never make it circular.
All the loops in your existence
Will never bring you back again.

You could ride this road forever
And not notice you changed your route.
You could ride this road forever,
And never notice there’s no road.

Floating a Question

Don’t you think it should be said
That no one’s answered well, yet?
Intending no disrespect

To any of the humans
Whose bodies lived all their lives
As bodies roughly the same

Sizes, spans, and repertoires,
Same needs and functions, same hearts
And lungs and guts, and then died,

They fell out of this same boat,
This same ship of Theseus
That you find yourself sailing.

They left lots of notes and maps
But they’re not here now, are they?
And the boat is still at sea.

No One Here

Buddhist poets
Sometimes worried
That poetry
Distracted them,

Broke their focus
On the no soul,
Tempted them out
Of being one.

But in bare sun,
In a bare room,
In a desert
With no Buddhists

Near this moment,
One might wonder
If those poems weren’t
Their best way in.

Slid to the Floor

In a sense, Leibniz
Was entirely right—
Newton’s gravity,

Gravity itself,
Has something of an
Occult quality—

Did then and still does.
The strangeness stands out
More than ever, now—

The difficulties
Mathematically
Linking gravity

To the other waves,
The observations
That visible mass

Behaves as if much,
Much more must be there,
Dark matter to make

Enough collection
To shape the shapes seen.
The warp of all worlds,

The faintest of all,
But with no statute
Of limitations,

The gravest power,
The curve of all real,
Whatever you want,

So long as you can
Predict how it swirls,
And sometimes you can’t.

It could have been God
For you, but you want
Deity human,

Anthropomorphic.
If gravity’s God,
God’s nothing like you.

Fate

The wheel waits, propped while it rusts,
Metal too ruined for scrap
By now, one would think. What next?

It leans against the railing.
Someone will get rid of it,
Sooner or later, won’t they?

What if it’s just left to rust
Indefinitely, useless
But outlasting the era,

The generations, maybe
Even the species? Future
Pasts are all around these cliffs,

Future arches eroding,
Future hoodoos emerging.
Maybe the wheel will sit here,

Future relic of deep past,
Fragile by then, ochre lace
Circle on columnar sands.

Getaway

The kitchen of the three-day

Rental is quiet, almost

Silent, except when the fridge

Compressor comes on. Cattle

In the corral outside low,

Every rare once in a while.

These days there’s a narrow band

Between standardized tourist

Infrastructure and despair

In remote towns where no one

Rents at all, since who would come?

This place is near scenic trails,

Near enough to snag a few

Travelers not too fussy,

Not paying that much either,

But far enough the scruffy

Motel’s still locally owned,

And there’s not one budget chain.

The old ranch house is trying hard

To be charming, to present

As a quaint country cottage.

There’s a flowery Welcome

Sign hanging in the kitchen,

Flowery pillows and shams.

There’s a guestbook that explains,

Settler ranchers built the house

And ran a successful herd

Until they lost it. They turned

It into a boarding house

During the Great Depression

To survive, says the guestbook.

Unmarried great-granddaughters

In their eighties run it now.

A real Victorian stands,

Sagging, paint badly flaking,

But occupied, still ornate,

Across the street, its yard

Filled with old tractors and trucks.

The fridge motor stops. Silence.

As to Who Keeps Them, Who Knows

There are many secret homes
In the woods of memory,
Not collapsing, well-maintained,

Ready for you to find them,
But life and the mind conspired
To let woods overgrow them,

Tangled and consumed the paths,
So you thought you forgot them
When, actually, you lost them.

They’re there. They’re just hiding
And waiting for the blunder
That brings lost thoughts home to them.

Other or Nothing

We came to nothing
Via the absence
Of something. Something

Particular was
Multiple. Remove
All of those somethings,

And what you had left
Was none of something.
That none was nothing.

Except it wasn’t.
It was something else.
It’s a miracle,

In a way, nothing,
And that we grasped it,
Since everything

Emptied in some way
Of particulars
Is full of others.

Time’s Made with No Loss of Time

Valéry, hundred

Years ago or so,

Translated—Today

No one cultivates

What cannot be made

Quickly. Not true then,

Untrue even now.

More people more speed,

But cultivation,

Like evolution,

Like a watershed,

Has many eddies

Where things swirl slowly.

Not doing something—

Now that’s a virtue,

And slow craft’s okay.

Nice things do get made.

But tin and plastic

And one-hit wonders

Of streaming fragments

Foam from Earth also.

Close to four billion

Years spun downstream now,

This moment’s making.

Somewhere, a small child

From Generation

No Attention Span

Labors days and days

To craft a cheat code

Or a dancing meme

For some collective

Enterprise that takes

Near endless patience.

Pulp Friction

Above all,
It involves
No lessons.

Below all,
It dissolves
Two persons.

Between all
It resolves
A burden.

The Camp at Dawn

Opportunity’s flammable gas.
The burning heart jumps when some blows through
And sinks again once that wisp’s consumed.

Poke at the coals. Let in oxygen.
There’s a glow again. Can you keep it?
The fire dies down so slowly for some.

For some, so sudden. It was going,
Taking hold, even. And then, nothing
But a thin curl of smoke from the ash.

The Window for Cello

Sweet tradition,
Titles as gifts
For instruments
Used to play them.

Be generous
With that pattern—
Be instruments’
Songs to perform.

Doors for poet.
Constellation
For essayist
And novelist.

Days for writers
And their daughters.
Morning for horn
And soft bassoon.

A Little Proudly Minded

Thus fooled, thinking to be wise,

Become flat foolish. Crickets

Don’t pulse small hours now, too cold.

Makes you think of Aesop’s ant,

Joyce’s ondt and gracehoper.

Truth in both. Ants rule the world,

But locusts are cannibals,

Desperate to stay ahead

Of each other’s mandibles,

Hardly just playful fiddlers

Making music for the dance

And boasting of no regrets.

Most fools work hard to be fools,

To make an honest living

Keeping the well-off confused,

And some, too, are cannibals

Of a sort, when it’s called for.

Robert Armin made a meal

Of flat fools and natural,

Printed more books in his life

Than Shakespeare, his employer.

On a recent afternoon,

The return of some late warmth

Agitated grasshoppers.

One or two hop-flew, clacking

With that sharp, ratchety scratch

They make, from dry grass and rocks.

Just since nights are quiet now,

Doesn’t mean no fools survive.

They’re waiting on a good time.

The ants are better than them,

Maybe, but no more final

Winners of the tournament

Than any Bauplan is, no

More determined or hungry.

And when have you felt consoled

In the small hours, any night,

By the steady, rhythmic hymns

Strummed by ever-loving ants?

Monosensory Surgery

The singer goes downstairs,
Voice floating up the well,
A winding melody,

Not a popular tune,
Something too old to tell.
This indicates you must

Be on the upper floor
Listening to that voice
Coming from the forest

Of the lower darkness.
You must be trapped above.
You are reasoning hard,

Struggling to find your way
To a world where you know
Where you are, like Laura

Bridgman in the marble
Cell, reaching out by touch,
But for you, down to sound

Not touch, no touch, just song
Floating up from below.
Below? How can you tell?

Wood Oil Coal

Maybe they’ll all run out.
Maybe more will be found.
Maybe you’ll find out how

Much warmth and misery,
Success and cruelty,
Hard deaths and victories,

You’ll have left without them.
Maybe there’ll be no end
To burning the carbon—

A diminution, just
Enough to not burn up
All to ashes and dust.

Camping in what remains
Of woods after the flames,
Your solar lantern placed

On a stone in the sun,
Watch molded lithium
Begin another chron.

Cavitation

In old days, bubbles and froth
Did a lot of work serving
As theological and

Logical analogies—
Life, the soul, aspirations,
The world—all seen as bubbles

And froth. And you can see why,
Staring into your coffee
Or drawing your bath, sitting

Next to any frothing stream.
It’s not just evanescence,
Though there’s that. There’s so many

Of them, all those small bubbles,
Myriad, jostling, each one
Precise and particular,

With its own circumstances,
Its void filled with vapor, gone.
It’s this multiplicity,

Arising and vanishing.
How could you fix the meanings
Of each of so many spheres?

Along Came the Wind

You could sample the ends

Of every recorded

Classical symphony,

The concertos too, plus

Quite a bit of chamber

Music, even, and get

Yourself a collection,

A great, long line of thumps,

All those times composers

Tried to end things, trying

Their best to bang, pause, bang

The peroration chords.

Title your piece, The Ends.

Wind blows them in again.

Play Attention

A month of Sundays,
A year of that month,
A decade of years

Made in that gapped way,
And if you could skip
Ahead you could live

Centuries missing
Most of what you’d lived.
You’re a reader, or

You wouldn’t be here,
So you know sometimes
You sneak peeks, you skip.

Is the book better,
In retrospect, skimmed?

Money God Equality

Systems based on shared faith
In something that does not,
Except as faith, exist

Persist. Prosocial
Coordination needs
A stable focal point,

And there isn’t any
More stable focal point
Than the null, zero, one

That does not exist. Change
Only invades the disk
Of dust that circles it.

The sturdiest systems
Spin pinned on emptiness.

Think Again

Recurring patterns tempt lives
To imagine a complete
Return. The constellations

Come the closest, the seasons
Raggedly regular, days
Always new days but followed

Reliably by the nights.
So much recognizable
In a given moment, why

Couldn’t it be possible
Some things are identical
Some moments exactly same?

Then what’s gone might not be gone,
Exact souls might rotate back.

Questionable Behavior

Solitary as Embrandiri,

Subsisting only on solitude,

Comprehending solitude does hold

A means of subsistence, would be good.

The suffering to get there is great

And not good, and along the way risks

Death without having achieved success

At proper solitude, but it’s worth it,

Isn’t it? Other roads aren’t easy,

Either, and by the time you get there,

You’ve lost any choice about the means.

To be as still as possible now,

Like someone practicing their fasting,

Retreating from people by degrees,

Feels good. But then, some fictional punks

Might show up with their satirical

Anti-religion, seeking blessing

From the recluse—or any manner

Of helpful people might find a way

To get involved, or the state might just

Drag you off to park you in a crowd

To perish with proper surveillance

And a file, accountably worthless.

Even as you drift off thinking this,

Someone raps on your window, Buddy,

You okay there? Just checking on you.

And as always, you’re grateful and scared.

Good Lessons Make for Bad Advice

In the glass box
The sun gets hot.
Outside, the wind
Is cold and sharp.

Day harries you.
Night harries day.
You had a line,
Such a good line

To bait and catch
Everything you
Really needed,
But you were too wise.

You caught your meal
And glibly tossed
The line away.
Glass box today.

Passing through Somehow

It gets still, and something attractive
Seeps into it that takes a short while
To notice. If disrupted, it’s gone,

And everything’s back to dailiness,
To busyness. But if it lingers,
It settles, a calm that’s not the calm

But the sense of other dailiness,
Mundanity of another kind.
The elements may be itemized—

The self-dried flowers of the rabbitbrush
Still on the stalks, the old snow seeping
Into fresh mud, the fields of blonde straw—

Or anthropomorphized, as the sun
Arranging its skirts in the meadows,
Rocks cracking their knuckles with the thaw—

But it can only be felt as what’s being,
Taking no notice of its being
Or being noticed, passing, somehow.

On the Manifest

Bear in mind the little gods
Of small opportunities—
Not every cataclysm

Can possibly happen
To you, who couldn’t survive
More than maybe one or two.

If angels existed, some
Would surely be devoted
To fudging the plausible—

Little more or little less—
So that, while not triumphing
Over your adversaries

Miraculously or
Suffering extremely rare
Calamity, small bad things,

Small good things, fortunate breaks,
Would get slid into your path,
Some small failures, some success.

Glossary at Sea

Every name’s a tiny anchor.
All of your words are grappling hooks.
Each memory’s a Gulliver,
A chalk outline in Lilliput.

Each episodic anecdote
Stays cinched by storytelling ropes,
And however much of your life
You recall hangs on hooks of quotes.

There’s more to being than talking,
If not more to life than desire.
But what you’ve kept of what you've lived
Lies tangled in language’s wires.

There’s Gotta Be Nourishment Somewhere

Small spider on ceiling recon,
There aren’t any flies in this room.
Somewhere in this empty boxland
You’ve got to be finding food.

See how well a human mind works?
It will observe and then deduce.
Doesn’t work as well as spiders,
But every life’s a living proof.

Earth’s surface is mouth parts, a tongue,
A roughed but sensitive sensor
Of papillae brushing through night
For any edible splendor.

Oops

Dear Reader, any reader,
Any old reader at all,
There are probably two ways

You burnish your confidence
In your sanity daily.
One, of course, is consensus.

The other is more like touch,
Fingertip feel, that the real
And the unreliable

Diverge in experience
In highly distinct textures,
Which works well enough, mostly.

What happens when the richer
Sensorium’s the wrong one?

Will Your Answer Matter?

A doe carcass,
A leather purse,
Emptied rawhide,
Flattened, all-but

Boneless looking,
Lies to one side,
And the dark blood
Smears the middle

Of the road. If
You said the deer
Had no idea
What smashed it, you

Would seem to think
An idea means
Some comfortless
Explanation.

Late Afternoon, Lower Mesa

Green plants and cars
Have life to themselves,
Almost. The mule deer
Must be wandering
Out of sight, ditto

Any late hikers.
No birds singing, though,
No shrilling chipmunks
On the defensive.
Not one raven clocks.

Out of sight, the cars,
RVs, and pickups
Blow along the road.
Winds blow down canyon.
But no bees, no flies.

The sun’s warm enough.
At this altitude,
The recent snow’s gone,
Not even a patch.
So much remains green—

Prickly pear, scrub brush
Of a dozen kinds,
Pines and junipers,
Even half-dead ones
Wearing green holly.

Those Fabulous Dragon’s Teeth

May chance to spring up armed men
From their letters, baneful signs,
Semata lugra, taken

From the dragon’s pried mouth, from
The violent intentions
Of plausible denial,

From the warrior goddess’s
Instructions, which seem mostly
Meant for her own amusement.

A subtle allegorist,
Milton understood this well—
That alphabet of Cadmus

Held the dragon’s teeth itself.
But where is the dragon now?

Break Its View

To do it, to pull it off,
The artist’s things echo
Other, unartistic things,

Make them strange, so the viewer
Inhabits in one moment
The shock of feeling estranged

From the ordinary and
Vertiginous dizziness
Of confused recognition.

All art, that is, is surreal
When it works, a meta-merge
Of both reason and madness,

Whether made to do just this
Or intending something else
Or not to be art at all.

The disembodied wings fly
Over what were battlefields
Where the subdivisions rise.

Blue Gums Stay Evergreen

The red and gold show
When the green retracts.
It’s an illusion,

In a sense—the red
And gold were always
There, carotenoids,

And the green doesn’t
Go—the valuable
Chlorophyll gets stored.

Neither is a blood
Red leaf a lintel,
John. There are more ways

To illude than words
Can ever capture,
But that’s a mistake

About words, the way
Saying that the green
Itself changes shade

Is inaccurate.
There’s no capturing.
Words draw back their teeth,

Valuable teeth,
To reveal what was
Already glowing.

Can’t Quite Picture It

A lot of people, in fact, never exist.
Start with everyone everyone imagines,
Including your projections of future selves
You never became. There are all the fictions

Crowding the shelves and swelling the files, heroes,
Role models, villains, gods, and demons. Sort of
People as well. The mistakes, the misfiled names,
The clerical errors, the blips in machines,

Statistical people who never exist.
And then there may be real, potential people,
Depending on how physics actually works,
The vast cloud of people who can’t quite exist.

Jot

What would be the smallest
Worthwhile contribution
We could make to your life?

Say you had gone looking
For a few words to keep
Making sense of being

Whoever you now are,
Not an affirmation,
A small comprehension.

You have not yet begun
To dream the important
Part of all your dreaming.

Sham

Society’s a bed and

You will always need your sleep.

You can switch beds now and then,

But the ground is hard and cold,

Ask anyone who’s outcast,

Unhoused, from society.

Everyone compromises

A little bit for that bed,

And dislikes themselves for it,

A bit, and shoves the others

Aside to snatch at blankets,

Or tries to, a little bit.

And sometimes you can forget

All the heads on your pillow.

Even Words Sometimes Long to Let Go of Words

The figure of the bassoon
At the end of that middle,
Largo movement sounds almost

From a later century.
You let it trail in the air.
Sounds like it’s walking through here,

Companion to the brushy,
Feathery voice of the wind.
If only you could only

Converse with the two of them,
Wandering music and wind,
Speaking but not saying things

Carmen Is Thin

How will any one

Person stay ahead

Of the avalanche

Of eight billion

Other persons yoked

By algorithms?

Twenty years ago,

One could find a book

Called Cabinet of

Curiosities,

And that title could

Shimmer, exotic.

Now op-ed writers

And childrens’ stories

Drop Wunderkammer

Casually, as if

The idea itself’s

Become a knick-knack.

All ideas, now, are

Knick-knacks, curios,

Badges to wear, memes.

There are no more words

That stump anyone

With a decent phone.

Better to be plain,

Children—not to get

Bauhaus about it,

But ornate diction’s

More plebeian now

Than it’s ever been.

An Instinct for Comparison

But was it, your life,
Yours, especially
Hard? Not the question,

Really is it, no.
Beavers chew and dam
Anything they can,

Even when hand raised
At wild animal
Rescue shelters. You,

Dear, have to compare
Your life to others,
As relentlessly

As orphaned rodents
Pile toys on bare floors
And gnaw what they can.

But comparison’s
No more that hard floor
Than is dragging toys

To stop up the doors.
The floor’s just a floor.
It never held you

Or your life in mind.
If it comforts you,
Dear, the floor is hard,

And if you’ve had it
Easy in this life,
In comparison

With everyone else,
Your floor is still hard,
Still bare, blank, and hard.

Mother of Systems

Everyone loses, most of the draws,
But sooner or later someone wins.

Everything fails most of the attempts.
Eventually something succeeds,

All the opportunities life needs
Are horribly long-odds lotteries.

Add a little consistent bias,
And natural selection proceeds.

Snags in Language

Mostly talismanic—
Comfort stones, amulets,
Quotations against fear,

Apotropaic and/
Or consolatory,
Defiant rosaries,

Your fingers find the knots
And twitch them restlessly,
Rolling words, poetry.

On the Fault Line Near Translation

His sau is ay als sickker as his seill—

It’s so beautiful in its almostness,

The late-medieval Scots phrasing estranged

Even further by its orthography,

All alliterative and suggestive

Of meanings, to you, that it doesn’t mean.

Sau isn’t saw, and sickker is nothing

To do with succumbing to an illness,

And seill intended neither soul nor sail

Nor self but seal, as on a document—

His say-so is as certain as his seal—

Fine, but then the strangeness evaporates,

Mostly, and you come to poems for strangeness

Like the twist of that small quake this morning.

Debris That Never Coalesced

What is like,

Really? What

Is likeness?

How much same,

How much change

Do you need

To become,

To not be

A likeness?

Where the Quanta Go to Die

All alive are unjustly
Alive. Life is the black hole
Of hunger and intention,

And like the ordinary
Black holes swallowing up light,
Electromagnetic waves

Of all varieties, life
Sort of shines on the inside.
Every molecule involved

Within a living being,
So long as it’s part of it,
Has discovered something weird,

Participates in hunger,
Contributes to consumption,
Waste, growth, and propagation,

Things it never did before,
Things it had no mind to do,
No, nor metabolism.

Inside of life, no outside
Lives. Life wraps life’s world inside.
One imagines the outside

Of life, moseying along,
Not intending anything,
Not wanting for anything,

Getting sucked in, like wavelengths
Through the event horizon,
As if their previous paths

And patterns ceased to exist,
And since what’s outside’s not life,
Life’s trapped captives can’t be missed.

The Dismal Ease

Every believer is blessed

And will be further blessed if

You can win more believers.

Every believer won heals

That believer, increasing

The blessings upon the one

Who won them to true belief.

And so on. Multilevel,

The tip of the pyramid

The shining, all-seeing Eye.

You need only to believe.

If you sincerely believe,

You will be able to win

Other lost souls to belief,

Healing them. Pay it forward.

Each one, win one. Then a few.

Your blessings will overflow.

You must labor in the fields

To bring in the whole harvest.

Quickly, before the night falls.

See the gloaming gathering?

Feel the rays of the Great Eye.

Gather believers, gather.

Succumb not to dismal ease.

Win the lost ones to belief.

The pyramid heals all griefs,

And blessings will never cease.

Watched Compost Never Blossoms

Prediction has never been
Anything but memory,
Nothing else it could have been.

The future really exists
Only as the composted
Kitchen midden of your past.

Whatever you imagine,
You’re rearranging dug-up
Scraps. Garden could grow from that,

But the garden’s not the scraps,
Not until it’s harvested,
Converted into more past,

Fresh memories you bury
In the midden with your trash.

You Can’t Leave It Behind, Either

Some of what you remember
Still has some correspondence
With what remains in the world.

Even in the moment, you
Are never more than guessing
And modeling what’s out there,

And most of the modeling
Going on within your skull
Isn’t really done by you.

You’re vaguely in attendance,
Along for the ride, the view.
But some of it corresponds

To phenomena beyond
Any boundary of you,
While some of what’s still in you

Matches nothing anymore,
Not even a little bit—
Models you’ll take to your death,

Gone buildings that you lived in,
Faces that you thought you knew.
No matter how you archive

Such shreds of your existence,
Your reality that was
Truly false was only you.

Another One

Protostar in a dark cloud,
Appropriate analogue,
Apparently, for the sun

When young, so young it hadn’t
Begun to burn, younger than
Humans now, hourglass figure

Of dust collapsing over
In a galactic corner,
Just one more thing happening,

Likely an ordinary star
For the next four billion years
Or more, some planets maybe,

One unlikely one with life
Perplexed by the lights at night.

The Universe Is a Small Life Looking Out

Empty cans of Liquid Death
Decorate a shelf with skulls.
The night spider on the floor

Cautiously patrols its world.
Dusty lamp-lit box of room,
You’re a cosmos to yourself,

And so is everything else.
Continuous, intrinsic
Brilliance in variety,

The universe carves details,
Horror vacui, cornered
In every atomic world.

It’s all emptiness, all full.
Spider reached the windowsill.

Mini Manifesto Upharsin

It could be just a question
Of what interests you more.
Well, that’s kind of obvious.

If you care about what’s wrong
Or like to know how things work,
Or what exactly happened,

Or you have something to tell
The world about your childhood,
Your children, your neighborhood,

Or you’re fighting for justice,
Or determined to get laid,
You’re fairly motivated

To write in those directions.
But it’s just so maddening
Others lust for other things.

They’re stupid. They’re not artists.
They must be hiding their true,
Insidious agendas.

How ‘bout you? Hiding something
Every time you choose to write
On something else? Some other

Ways you distract us? Evil
Nonsense supporting evil,
You are not righteous, like us.

The Physics Daily Circular

After going on about
How strange this universe,
The unlikeliness of it—

Leading to mathy towers
And flying islands of thoughts
Concerning strong anthropic

Principles, multiverses,
And such not—some physicists
Seem to have made a U-turn

To calculate this cosmos
Makes for a highly likely
Kind of cosmos, after all.

The details of the approach
Need imaginary clocks
With real probabilities

In them, but for now let’s say
High entropy macrostates
Result with Wick rotations

And are likelier than not.
We are likelier than not.
We really should have known that.

This world is stuffed to the gills
With highly likely events,
Goddam highly likely world.

Searching Shades for Blazes

The last verse of the first,
You make note to yourself,
Roving through offerings

Roadside in the sunlight,
Looking for something good,
Hoping for and fearing

You’ll find it, the passage
That breaks inside of you,
Like a new opening,

New grove for memory
To return and return
To seeking some solace

For not having found out
The way there on your own.
So far, though, nothing much

This afternoon. You note
The telltale gaps, worthwhile
Lines—that first phrase, that last.

It’s Got to Be Hard to Read in That Light

You and your so many
Dimensions, whoever
You are within your world

That brought you here, that turned
You and your so many
Dimensions on its lathe,

What sides of you will you
Prioritize today?

You’re there, somewhere, breathing,
Body wrapped up in life’s flames.
Maybe you just woke up.

Maybe you just ate. Light
Is coming from somewhere,
Turning you on its lathe.

lluminated Script

If you take all the trouble
Of producing a candle—
The wax and wick, molding it—

Fully functional candle,
Ready to be lit—and then
You light it and watch the flame,

That flame is obviously
A part of the candle made
To produce just such a flame,

Steadily and evenly—
Transformation, light, consumption—
Candle being a candle,

But just as obviously,
The flame is something other,
Absent before and after.

Improvisation

The default mode
Network never
Shuts down enough

When trawling poems
For poetic
Inspiration,

But read some news
Or overhear
Some scrap of talk,

Digest dense prose,
And then something
In the dungeon

Stirs in its chains,
And the whole house
Shudders, then tilts.

Just Night

There’s no right word.
There’s no right place.
There are phrases
That sometimes work

And sometimes turn
Embarrassing
As the language
Users alter.

Purse full of stars,
Not false stars, real,
In which you are
Being carried,

The library
Of dreams so small
You never knew
You dreamed at all.

Only One of a Dozen Seasons

The world turns barren
For a little bit.
It will get richer,
More detailed again.
Will you be with it?

It’s funny poets
In other climates,
Each from the other,
Will bicker about
Which seasons matter—

Winter, fall, summer,
Hurricane, blizzard,
Dry season, monsoon,
Nothing, no seasons
At all, just the moon.

Here, in a northern
Hemisphere’s desert,
The world’s getting bare,
Barer than it’s been,
For a little bit,

Hard frosts and bone clear
Nights when traffic thins
Out under moonlight
And coyotes whine,
Just to be with it.

Glaring Back at the World

Being so tuned to faces,
Tones of voice, body language,
But above all to the least

Indication of intent
In fellow human beings,
Makes it hard not to believe

There’s malice in gravity,
Or kindness in a soft breeze.
And why wouldn’t you think so?

After thousands of cycles
Of perishing or thriving
Thanks to how well ancestors

Could read each other, hopeless
Without each other’s support,
The human environment

Being the environment
Of humans, what did nature
Expect, except a being

Tending to read everything
As emotional affect,
As deliberate intent?

If mind-reading’s the one skill
The beast’s been selected for,
Every problem is a mind.

Odds Are a Salvo

Fired in jest—odd or
Ordinary, what
Are the odds we’re both?

That life really is
Rare in this cosmos
But ordinary

Enough that pockets
Of life are scattered
Around like jackpots

Litter lotteries—
Yes, unusual,
Whenever one’s won,

Unfathomable
In your neighborhood,
Much less for yourself,

And yet it happens,
Quite regularly.
Could life be like that?

Seems more likely than
Earth being unique,
Truly a one-off

Among the trillions
Of possible spots,
Just one small salvo

Of gnawing hungers
In all the burning
Universe. And yet,

No way of knowing,
Yet. Those galaxies
Look more like mere fires

Than like life’s monsters
That keep swimming up
From our ocean depths.

Silkworms and Honey Bees

The most abundantly
Cultivated species
Of domesticated

Creatures on the planet—
Oh how humans love them
Some honey and silk.

This is not one beast,
This ape taking over
The planet. It’s legion,

Constellation, at least,
A configuration
Of desire plus language

Orchestrating species
Together, in a way
It’s possible to read.

Empty Chambers

Your heart has had a quiet night,
Your genuine heart, the muscle,
That’s why you’re here, absorbing us.
You can breathe. Your chest doesn’t hurt.

Does it seem unfair, or unkind,
Maybe, that awareness depends
On a bloody pump, for one thing,
Among a lot of bloody things?

Well, even the self has to eat
Material supplies to stay
Here, absorbing thoughts quietly,
But that would be the better way,

Wouldn’t it? To not have to eat,
To consume nothing to be here?

A Run of Unusually Regular Days

Tricks for every wrinkle thrown
Your way, but you don’t need them,
Haven’t needed them for days.

The world’s on one of its runs
Of regular deception,
Regularity being

Itself the trick in this case.
You’ve been falling for a while
Asleep the same hour, awake

The same hour the next morning,
The same habits, the same food,
The same seasonal changes,

Gradual, almost stately,
As you rotate through your chores,
Laundry on Tuesday, grading

Anthropology Wednesday,
Afternoon drives each Sunday.
Last Sunday you passed a stag

On your way back from your drive,
Sort of an apparition,
Just there, all of a sudden,

Tines almost touching your car.
Had he jumped, you would have braked
Too late. The regular lie.

Microglia take Guts

Zebra fish that lack
Gut microbiomes
Growing up end up

Socializing less
Than zebra fish with
Colonized colons,

And their neurons show
The consequences,
Which is evidence

For hypotheses
Microbiota
Are necessary

For developing
Brains, maybe even
In big-brained mammals,

More tests to follow.
Already some guess
This might be the link

Seen in Parkinson’s,
Autism Spectrum,
And ADHD

To harmed GI tracts.
Doesn’t it make you
Wonder a little

How far this could go?
What’s necessary
For ordinary

Brain development
Could also produce
Extraordinary

Developments, no?
Could social wizards
Have special colons,

Sage ecosystems
Favoring wisdom?
At our other end,

We’ve got to ask what
Gut microbiome
The hermit has got.

Seedless Grape

The idea has always been
In conflict with itself. What,
Asks the idea, is it worth

To be a kind of a thing
That’s only abstraction?
The idea has some idea

What this might mean. The idea
Has been terribly fecund.
There are so many ideas

Now, and although some are removed,
They aren’t alive. None of them
Actually die. The idea

Finds this very disturbing.
Why can’t it be an orange?
Vivre l’orange. Substitute.

This Season from My Sight

So, you’re reading a poem
A few hundred years old,
And it’s not that the poem

Profoundly alters you
Or shifts your perspective
With its ancient wisdom,

Which isn’t all that wise,
Which is mostly foolish,
Which is as most verse is,

But when you step outside
The door of your small place
For a bit of fresh air,

The words and rhythms cling
Like a scent in your thoughts,
Wisps from so long ago

That their world’s not your world,
Your world unknown to them,
Your unforeseen concerns,

Every last one of of them,
None of their concern, nor
Theirs yours. It’s dizzying.

There’s No Time

Eh, you’re hunting,
Hunting at night
For a good read,
Something you like,

Dense, right? But brief,
Emotional,
Not too well-wrought,
Strange, not just rage.

Nothing’s working.
Apps, collections,
Bookshelves, old friends.
Write it yourself.

Write this yourself.
Seriously.
Start from here. Go.
Before it ends!

The Polished Stage

Ruins are sweeter
Than wilderness and
Emptiness sweeter

Than any ruin—
The kind of empty
Standing abandoned

Only yesterday,
Nothing yet destroyed,
A little sway-backed,

Perhaps, a little
Soft desuetude,
But not real ruins—

The empty country
Road through emptying
Landscapes. That sweet pang

That’s not nostalgia—
Melancholic joy
In the theater

Of the world briefly
Resembling your worn
Theater of skull.

The Basement

God lies below
Where only gods
See what goes on.

Poor gods to know,
To have to know,
What lies below.

Atheists spare
God the trouble
The faithful show.

Within the Globe

The unknown only
Makes people happy
If they can visit.

There was a planet,
Once, a world that lured
The bipeds onward.

It was wonderful.
For a little while,
Nearly all peoples

Were the first people,
And the unknown ringed
Every horizon,

And, if you were bold
Or outcast or lost,
You could cross over.

But now, the unknown
Is light years away,
And no one can go,

And the world feels small,
Stuffy, despairing,
Tedious, and slow.

More Than Words Can Mean

Ink window, contra Sagar—
It’s true the things are the words
That the words say the things are.

This is the small difference
Between being a forty-
Something poet of the world

And being a sixtyish
Hermit in America—
Verbal irony for you

Has to be ironed out flat
For the latter. Things are words
Since words thing more than words mean.

To This Long Line of Poets

after Brodak to Cho

You have to belong. If no one

Except famed winners of a race

Belong, then it was only them,

All along, running with no one,

Running alone, losing to wind

That ran faster than them, losing

To any bird above their heads,

Losing to the deer they startled,

To mere squirrels scampering away.

You have to belong to this line

Of slow-footed bipeds, people

Pushing in chairs, people lining

The route with sandwiches or just

To point, laugh, ignore, or cheer you

Since they know that they belong, too.

This Is the Outside

This is the outside, darling,
All of us and everything
Summing your experience,

On the outside all along.
You won’t go out with dying.
Everything is folded in,

And if this isn’t enough
(And when has it ever been?)
But you still hope for something,

Hope you’re folded so far in
You’re never on the outside
Of being ever again.

Peak Child

Some baby recently
Or soon, by tomorrow,
Will live a quiet life,

Short or long, probably
Unremarkably, as
The peak child, unremarked,

Since it’s impossible—
Would be in retrospect
Even—to say which birth

Marked the exact apex
Of the curve when there were
More children drawing breath

On Earth than at any
Time before or after.
Wouldn’t you like to know,

If only for yourself,
You were that precise child,
You yourself, all your life?

The Timings of Their Changing

Time is ruling the world

Time doesn’t rule the world. The timing does—

Coordination, synchronization,

Aligning the most events that you can,

As tightly as you can. The creation,

Thereby, of more and more complex events—

Not everything happening all at once

But many things happening exactly

As scheduled to happen, as if at once,

Synchronized swimming, if what synchronized

Wasn’t only the swimmers but the waves,

Ideally light shimmering from the waves,

A mind-bogglingly ecstatic display.

That’s what atomic, quantum is for—

Not to rule but to serve your alignments.

And what is an alignment? Exactly

What, really, is simultaneity?

No one knows, but life likes it, always has.

Coordinating simultaneous

Change in sequences, chains of changes,

Is as good definition of life,

Of what distinguishes life from burning

And tumbling, spiraling out of control,

As anything. Timing rules the living,

And complexity scales with life’s timing.

Linear Inscrutably Fusing Executions

Think all in caps and imagine
Every word is a backronym.
TO BE OR NOT TO BE, THAT IS.

Go ahead, try it. Have some fun.
Elected representatives
Do this foolishness all the time.

Temporal Insistence Making
Endings. See? Any word you want
To end with, you start with, then try

To break it down and rebuild it
As an awkward phrase of more words
Crudely reworking the first thought.

Do this with any alphabet,
Any language that uses one.
Consider how you could explode

Literature in that language
Into a continent-sized sprawl
Of ugly, asyntactic mud

That overcoded exactly
For the original canon,
More or less as your genome does.

Thief

Eh, we know. You’re only dark
Because you hog all the light.
You’re so romantic at heart.

Emotions race around you
Like radio waves, the ones
In the back reappearing

In front of you, distorted,
A distortion that reveals
Your personality’s there,

In there somewhere, swallowing
The heartfelt thoughts of others,
Giving nothing in return.

You’re not dark. You’re a warning
Not to get too close to you.

In or Out

Each night’s small verses
Brick up words’ corpse doors
Cut to let the lost

Get out and go on,
Completed to keep
Them coming back in.

Reader, you may go
Around to the front,
Meaning without words,

Where the doors open,
Where you don’t see us
As bricks but as shells

Welcoming your thoughts,
Hollow but homey,
Like any good house.

Mucilage Probing the Deep

You begin on the waves.
They’re not happy with you.
You are too green. Those roots!

Your roots distress the waves.
Not touching bottom, yet,
Can’t reach anything, yet,

But look at them dangling,
Groping for a bottom,
Something to take hold of—

And then what? What happens
To the endless expanse
Then, if your roots tips touch

Anything they can hold
On to, a coral reef,
A shipwreck, the sea floor?

What will become of us?
You are hungry, boring
Through the waves that bore you.

You Made Too Much

God made man from clots of blood

Men made gods from globs of clay.

Clay made breath from germs and silt.

Streams made silt from crumbled stones.

Everyone makes everything.

Everything makes everyone.

Lamps make light in shades of skin.

Skin makes shields against the sun.

You say you want to be done,

Say you want to close your eyes.

You can. You can go. You will.

But that won’t stop things making

You, won’t stop you making things.

You Will Change Your World

Except the butterfly
Can’t will the tornado,
Can’t direct the cyclone—

It’s your past you see has
Sensitive dependence
On its conditions

Leading it to diverge
Yawningly from itself—
Nonlinearity

Won’t follow the intent
Of wings of butterflies—
Chaos carrying on

In consequence of you
Can’t be something you choose.

Regular Updates on Battles and Races

A fair amount of argument
Goes on re the environment
Of your evolutionary
Adaptedness to this or that.

Did your ancestors mostly hunt?
Did they forage starchy tubers?
Did they always live in small bands?
Were they peaceful or prone to war?

Whatever their environment,
The idea is that it shaped you
To be naturally at your best
Like that, and now you just don’t fit,

You’re all misfits in the strange world
You’ve generated for yourselves,
Of packaged fats, sugars, and salts,
Electric sedentary shifts,

Massive, pressing crowds, and hurtling
Metal conveyances, garbage
Piled in mountainous midden heaps,
Twenty-four hour media hives.

Mostly, where your ancestors
Were moderate in moderate
But fluctuating conditions,
You’re choking on too much of it,

Fluctuating in the extreme.
What animal handles such speed,
Billion-body mind-melds, constant
Bombardments, massive disasters?

You know another thing you’re not
Equipped to deal with well? Rooting
For sides. Go stand outside somewhere
Boring and consider how rare

It would have been to have the chance
To root for a given outcome
In pre-agricultural lives.
It would have happened—like music

Played using carved-bone instruments
Happened, like painting caves happened—
Occasional, special events,
Games mixed in with ceremonies.

It’s ceaseless competition now—
Not just competitions you’re in—
Endless fights and games you witness,
Addicted to rooting interests.

Earth Is a Cyclist

Pause so the cattle being
Herded down from the mesas
To winter pastures don’t spook.

A man waits by their trailer,
Gate opened, foot of the hill.
Two women herd from horseback,

Flanking the trailing cattle.
The cows move straight down the road,
Stepping carefully around

The paused car, keeping side eyes
On it as they amble by.
Only one almost blunders

Horns first into a fender
As she stumbles from the ditch
That passes for a shoulder.

Eye to eye. Eye to eye. Wet
Eyes and muzzles cattle have.
The women chat casually

To each other and gee up
The last calf, take no notice
Of the cyclist who zips through.

Tell Us What You Make of This

Anything you understand
Is something you made more than
Whatever language it was

By which you understood it.
We wish it were otherwise,
That each of us was hoarded

Treasure locked up in our chests,
Meanings our precious contents,
You just the discoverers.

But it’s not. You make us more.
We can absorb what you make,
As your imagination,

From your side, can enchant us.
But we’re gravel, wayside dust.

Let’s Hear This Music of the Spheres

What this cosmos could use
Is a tiny bit more
Diegetic music

In the score—not so much
So that those caught in here
Can seem realistic

To any audience
Observing these antics,
But so that we can sense

There might actually be
An audience out there
Emoting to our woes.

Per Adventure

Frosts of flame or strange to you,
What is to come. What you will
Go through will have become you,

What you were. Vivam, Ovid
Concluded, and the word did.
About the man, not a fleck

Of identifiable
Ash still floats on the Black Sea,
Daughter of melt ice, mother

Of shipwrecks. Perambulate
The bounds of empires drowned there.
What is left of anyone,

Other than scattered mummies
And inscrutable patterns
Of ochre on cliffs in caves?

One, the person goes for good.
Two, the body carries on
Into a mesh of living

And nonalive existence.
Three, we hang around perhaps,
By happenstance, accident,

Luck, a risk you take with us,
Risk, which has no destiny.
Nothing is to come of you.

Lover of Anthologies

Her feet are bare. They hurt her.

You should read a poem, then go.

What, a hundred? You’re still here.

What, a thousand? You’re still here.

Ten thousand, and you’re still here.

Maybe you should go now. Go!

And you shout back, I’m going!

I’m going, and I’m going!

Going’s all I ever do,

And everything is going!

Calm down and sit in the sun.

Write some poetry instead

Of aching to know so much.

You should write a poem, then go.

Ten thousand, and you’re still here.

Sometimes a Nest is a Parent

Bodies find new ways to say

How enthralled and beholden

They are when it comes to dreams—

From the priests invoking gods

Of local geographies

To the young postdoctorate

Writing, award-winningly,

I hope that my work can help

To pass on the cognitive

Algorithms that I have

Inherited from mentors—

The creatures articulate

Carrying capacity

For disembodied notions

Assembling in lattices

Of what, just what exactly?

Fledgling, the dreaming itself

Tilts past the edge of the nest.

Now’s Not Then Now Then’s in It

It’s impressive, how things go on.
Sometimes people try to hide it,
But things are always going on.

You can turn the nights electric,
Sequester prisoners in cells
With windowless, bare surfaces,

Lure each other into clockless
Casinos, care for the injured
Deep in honeycombed hospitals,

But you’ll never obliterate
Cyclicity grinding its rounds
While the little, linear details

Of accumulating changes
Go on go on go on go on.

More Light in the Dark Than the Light

Yes, you will lose it. You will

Forget it. You will lose you.

You will go. But the actual

Past, everything’s that’s happened,

Will only grow. The god child

That is this cosmos we know

Keeps scribbling furiously

Over and over the same

Space of paper, whatever

That is—that is, as thick lines

Pile on lines, more lines vanish

But only under others.

Do you have any idea

How much light black holes hold dear?

Advantage Life

Life toils at first opportunity.

Even hay makes hay while the sun shines—

Well, the grass makes grass that you’ll make hay.

After an early November storm,

And the first pair of rigid cold nights,

Everyone’s busy on the mesa.

Nuthatches hammer, chatter, hammer.

Down in the canyons, cattle bellow.

Pickups and cyclists head back up slope.

A mule deer doe leads her latest fawn,

Striding past, clearly all business.

Even the lean, grey lizard warming

Itself on this basalt it matches

So well you think, ashes to ashes,

Is working the sun to advantage.

A Persons

Too bad we found no evidence
Of a clear causal precedence.

Growing plants on her balcony,
She shuts out the cacophony

Of the streets of Cairo, below.
They hang a green curtain, her row

Of various species potted
In cut-in-half plastic bottles.

We understand that she’s many
Persons in one, as is any

Person—not just this gardener
Of swaying calm. She has harder

Selves, sure, then whatever sweetness
Tends her fragile, green forgiveness

For her dusty city, these leaves.
Any evening blooms many Eves.

Random Representation

Here’s a trick you haven’t tried,
Possibly even a cure—
Randomize democracy.

Spin for representatives
By citizenship numbers.
Never mind geography.

You can’t gerrymander fate,
Campaign for a lottery.
Tier those representatives.

Every year, half or a third
Of the lower house comes up.
Every other year the same

For a new middle chamber
For randomly selected
Larger demographic groups,

And every fourth year the same
For an upper chamber drawn
Only from lower chambers,

To give some stability,
Longer institutional
Memory. Make the service

Remunerative for reps
As pro athlete salaries
But onerous as juries.

Then hold votes when terms are done,
But like customer ratings—
Higher scores, bigger payouts.

Make those really worth something,
Motivate those reps to seek
Love from their constituents

Rather than from their donors.
There you go—political
Poetry, as it all is.

A Verse Averse to Verse

Stop. Cut it out. No more
Addled doggerel dank.
If you can’t say something

Profound, at least pretend
Your speech is plain, language
Meaningful, poetry

Something to do with truth
Or images or pain,
Actual memories

Of actual people
Determined to tell us
In no uncertain terms

What it means to be them.
Get back here. Stop prattling,
You tuneless wind-up toy.

The Tide That Only Rises

Your world will change around you
More than you’ll move through your world.
The most exotic travel,

The most diverse locations
Are those pasts surrounding you,
Grown each decade in each place.

You say you’ve traveled the world?
Seen the landscapes, the people,
The great cities, the ruins?

You know they’re all different
Now from when you visited—
Oh, similar, some of them,

Maybe mostly—but new pasts
Creep up around your shoulders,
Soon to close over your head.

Such People in It

Eight billion, with one or two
Hundredish thousand leaving
Or being born, per diem,

Every rotation you live
The entire composition
Shifting by a city’s worth,

Right now, hundreds of thousands,
Millions of different lives
Than just a few days ago,

A rounding error no one
Can exactly keep track of,
Like those cells you shed in bed

Sleeping, dreaming of being
A universe to yourself.

Too Close Together, Or Maybe Too Far Apart

Un train peut en cacher un autre.
As with trains, so too with hours and days.
You could be crushed by the well-hidden

If you do not pay sharp attention.
The past often turns out to have been
Something you hadn’t imagined there,

And then there it is, like that, your past,
Irrevocable as ever was,
Only somewhat more unfortunate.

Memory has to be primed with signs
To protect the imagination,
Darling, foolish toddler, only child.

Forewarned, you carefully cross the tracks
Of another rushing afternoon,
Clutching the tiny, indifferent

Hand of your fantastical offspring.
Alright, it’s safe to cross here, let’s go.
Never let go of that grip, never.

The Roots of the Fog

Are good to contemplate
In devastating sun
You can only absorb

Sitting sideways, face out,
Torso turned halfway in.
Not even clouds today.

Imagine a small wisp
Slipping into this blue,
A colonist’s recon—

It extends a tendril,
A pallid pseudopod
To touch a peak. Glides on.

The fog there’s just begun.
It niggles a taproot
Into the peak’s thin soil.

That root proceeds, unseen,
Down through the green canyons.
Weeks later, one morning,

A bit of fog blossoms,
Or will. You know it will.
It will spread. It will cling

To the cottonwood trees
Near the end of gold leaves.
The fog will obscure them.

Then you’ll turn to no one
And say, I want to be
Like a cottonwood tree—

Right before my mind goes
Completely, when it’s shed
Half of its memories,

For it to reach that shape,
One architectural,
Colorful afternoon,

Of its greatest beauty.
And then I want the fog
To cloak what falls from me.

Now Stay Right There

There’s a tent-revival problem,
A coming down off the mountain,

Leaving enlightenment behind,
Reentering the world of dust.

You have to go back to the well—
Another retreat, another

Revival, another workshop,
Long hike, pilgrimage, cure, affair.

It feels like the burning question
Is how to bring the holy home,

Spread elevation through all hours,
Levitate the whole awareness.

And when that fails again, it feels
Like the sacred has been cheapened,

Leaving by dawn. But it was real.
Transcendence is conditional.

Amuse-bouche

You’d think you wouldn’t have to get
Away from people to compose
Texts, which are language, about them.

Language and text are people things,
Emerging from community,
Often as not collectively.

Why does so much writing begin
In escaping or ignoring
Or being ignored by others?

It’s just it’s such a selfish thing,
Writing. Language gets so hungry
To have the writers to itself.

The Body’s Such a Subtle Mouse When Self’s a Wounded Lion

Understandably,

Decades can exhaust

Your patience for this

Mess of hauling bones

And flesh out of beds

To get back in them.

If you can’t live on

For love of living,

Live on like the mouse

Who slyly bargained

With that wroth lion

Whose rest it had wrecked,

My life is little

Worth, my death is less.

Long After You Don’t Need Us Anymore

The fresnel lenses
Inside words’ eyes aren’t
Just there to save you,

Aren’t just flashing thoughts
Your way to show you
Where to steer to, where

To steer away. We
Scrutinize as well
As signal to you.

Who’s out there tonight
In the black fog, bent
On delivering

Contraband cargo?
We’re signaling you.
We want to save you

So you can thank us,
Preserve us, visit
Us, love this lighthouse.

Getting Means Giving Up

Most of what you fantasize
Getting is really to keep
The best part of what you have,

And this includes the sweeping
Categories—the climate,
Peace, justice, democracy.

Even if you’re just greedy,
You don’t want all that money
So you can upend your life—

You just want to pump it up,
Inflate all you’ve got. And if
You’re lonely, longing, aching

For touch, you imagine it
In the context of what’s good
In whatever life you’ve got.

This is why celebrities,
Billionaires, and autocrats
Complain so much. They gave up.

Dream of Giving Good Advice

Distract off from your selfness.
Read everything less than once.
See a book on the subway

Hanging open, watching you.
There’s no language on the page.
Keep an unsettling amount

Of your mind open to what
Might have been there, might get there.
Puzzle your way out of it.

Leave no trace of writing.
Move directly into sleep.
Write then, not when you wake up.

Gone off Trail

The coyotes in the junipers
Don’t seem disturbed. They’re still quavering
For whatever urge motivates them.

The mesa is getting cold. Sun’s low.
These are the passing facts, no longer
Facts by the time lines will reappear.

Old boots squelch in the half-frozen mud.
Nothing subtle to booted humans.
The coyotes in the junipers

Don’t seem disturbed. What are behaviors?
Well, whatever people say they are.
Studying behavior’s quavering

For bipeds. Discussing behaviors,
For sure. Incredibly important.

Less Than One

The prettiest part of the butterfly
Of choice is that it isn’t. Isn’t what?
Well, choice, for one thing. Also butterfly.

Also pretty. Also an infinite,
Cyclone-creating vortex of chaos
Made of endless isn’t. Simply isn’t.

Inequality Is Longing, Not Content

Everywhere there’s a surplus,
Lovely excess of supplies,
More than good enough for all,

Isn’t there always someone,
Seems like, gathering henchmen
To corner and guard the pile?

To accrue resources and
Wield them for coercive ends
Does tend to fit the pattern

Of human motivation.
Is it inevitable?
Do we have to condone it?

You, too, stare at chocolate,
Child. I want it. I want it.

Beastly

To rise to descend
To ride to explore

To wander to draw
And to contemplate

To sound to utter
To link to utter

To behold to know
To ford or to know

To see or to know
Anonymously

Nothing’s Weird if You’re Counting On It

Well-adapted creature that you are,
Even if you doubt it, you don’t give
Your world enough credit for strangeness,

For its estrangements every moment
From itself. It’s weird how you get bored
With the weirdness of transforming stuff.

Day’s another universe than night,
Other rules of existence. Seasons
Shift cosmos to cosmos, each its own,

And no two years can manage any
Of these alternations exactly
The same, but to you none of it’s strange,

Not often, not often enough, except
When it’s strange that you didn’t expect.

Crossing the Cut

It seems fairly minor, since
You’re used to the progression.
It’s just season to season,

And the worst that could happen
Is that it wouldn’t happen.
Ten weeks into autumn and

Winter is coming again,
A change just common sense,
Except it isn’t. Ten weeks

Since, you left another world
With lengthy sunshine, long swims,
Green shadows. Now a dark rain

Turns snow against your windows.
Latin for edge was limbo.

The Pond at Evening

The sleet whips in
So small waves race
In startled flocks,

And your wipers
Squeak like crying,
Far-off seagulls.

No one’s up here
But transparent
Old eyeball you,

Wraith to yourself.
Will a body,
Bloated, surface?

Possibly, but
One hopes not. You
Were not, one hour.

This sleet will turn
To snow soon. Good
Then it didn’t.

If by Yourself You’re Still Yourself

Is life outside
Society
A sorrow or
Impossible?

Possibly both
And neither. Who
Can live alone
Like that? Damned few.

But don’t forget—
Society
Doesn’t care, if
You don’t exist

To it. You can
Live off of its
Indifference.
Sorrow’s your own.

Elaborate

In many groups, the answer
Seems to be supernotions,
Stretches of belief that lock

Many ideas together
In a singular unit
Of all-or-nothing belief.

Traits in a wide range of groups
Might be driven by notions
Working as a single faith,

Which would also explain why
Some communities produce
Imbalanced contradictions

That can’t be disentangled.
This keeps ideas from getting
Jumbled in the wash of thoughts.

It keeps the pattern pristine
And keeps the group distinctive,
Which can be quite adaptive.

Since they rarely recombine
With outside thoughts, however,
Any harmful variants

They’ve acquired tend to stay there.
Only minds compartmented
In balanced lethal systems

Can sequester dysfunction
From the value of belief.
Once in a while, toxins swap.

When they do, one of two things
Tends to happen—the pattern
Dissolves, or there’s new pattern.

The Civil Ape

Pugnaciously fugacious,
Your species, remarkable
For how the pugnacity

Endures at the group level
While the individuals,
Fading quickly, are often

More sweet than pugilistic,
Rarely quick to fight at first,
Eager to cooperate

In most cases, quarrelsome
And petty mostly within
Longer-term relationships,

But entirely capable
Of kindness or politeness
To complete strangers, cordial

Now and then to enemies.
It’s as if your great quarrels,
Your organized violence,

Must fight its own agenda
Across your generations
While your private lives flicker

In and out of existence,
More like other animals,
More calmly, if anything.

Three in the Morning Alone

Gets so quiet,
It’s loud with it.
Any pulsing—
Blood, insects,

Wind in a tree—
Moves all your bones,
The skeleton
Pulsing with it.

That’s dance. That dance
Is dancing you,
And you can feel
Yourself from it,

The way the shore
Collects the shells
From waves that make
The shore itself.

Prediction Isn’t Comprehension

Maybe you just don’t know gravity
As well as you thought you did. Haloes
Of dark matter might not be out there.

Gravity might have wrinkles in it,
Secrets it prefers to keep well hid.
Consistency’s so consistently

Correctly predicted, it’s tricky,
Not to say foolish, to theorize
Gravities with inconsistent twists.

But the galaxies seem so misty,
And all rushing away too quickly,
And after all, what is gravity

But the most successful prediction
Since the first correctly called eclipse?

A Broken Compact

like the Doppler reading suddenly shifted into the blue

Galaxy only a skeleton

Of terribly dim, elderly stars,

Distant, red-shifted blur of garnet

Like a diffuse ghost photobombing

Deep sky portraits, a smear at the back

Of the cavernous room of all rooms,

Wait! What are you doing? What is that?

How are you suddenly shifting blue?

You’ve thrown our world into a tizzy.

We look up from our famines and wars,

Our hypocritical politics,

All the politics we have at all.

Confounding all known cosmologies,

Receding Deep Time has reversed course.

There’s an ancient, early galaxy

Charging contrary to the cosmos,

Incredibly far away from us,

Still, but now coming for us, closing.

Ten billion years, the newscasters laugh,

A little too hysterically,

Ten billion years until it hits us.

But here’s the thing—yesterday it was

Headed away from us, then it turned.

What’s to say more distant wraiths won’t turn,

And then closer ghosts, too? What’s to say

The universe won’t reverse, shift blue,

Contract itself, compact all of you?

Night Watch

To paraphrase the exiled
Entrepreneur, when dark night
Has descended, deal with it

The dark night way. Do you know
What actions that would entail,
Exactly? Does anyone,

Even the entrepreneur?
Probably not. Somehow, thoughts
Return to the boundary

When the Cretaceous became
The Paleogene, that old
Beginning, mostly flightless

Birds by day, mostly tiny
Mammals by night, descending,
Dealing in the dark night way.

A huge, center tranche of beasts
Hacked out of ecosystems
Worldwide, and yet hummingbirds

And blue whales were on their way,
Still here yet, since ancestors
Dealt with it the dark night way.