Slow Smokeless

We resemble that remark
Frost made about the wood pile.

Someone who lived in turning
Forgot all our handiwork

And left us, far from useful,
Far from a fireplace, to warm

Our own frozen swamp of sticks
With the slow fire of decay.

So here we are, small words
Stacked in cords, page after page,

Absorbed in our own breakdown,
Bones, like everything cut down

And scattered, stacked, or interred,
Neither living nor inert.

Red Pulseless Planet Never Yearned

The eyes drift back to Mars.
Everything important
Here (go ahead, tell us

What’s important to you,
What draws your attention
Whenever the day ends)

On Earth has been nothing
Of consequence on Mars.
That’s what’s so beautiful.

Aside from the color,
Never mind the closeness,
Relatively speaking,

Or whether it had life
Once, and water, and then
Life itself up and died,

All of the excuses
People make for seeking
To know more about Mars—

The wonder of the place
Is just that none of this
Matters there, none of us.

Flying Words Will Strike You

Languages in such numbers
That they blotted out the sky
Every migration season

Like the passenger pigeons
Notoriously extinct,
That’s the way it was back then

With humans in the billions
Broadcasting words by trillions,
Beams of light carrying them,

Commotion that blocked the stars
And kept the darkness glowing.
But now, of all that, nothing.

The great clouds of languages
And people killed the people
In the end, and the words fell,

Crying out that we can’t cry
Without some weeping humans,
And Earth regained horizons.

In the Land of Wandering

Everyone is going
Without ever moving.
The storms rush overhead.

The wars go on beyond
The glowing horizon.
The light dims and brightens.

The invalid waits up
By the window, wanting
To keep watching, wishing

To stop feeling motion
Sickness from dawn to dusk
And back to dawn again.

Waiting for an ending
Makes a lousy ending.

The Hoarder’s Attic

More late in arriving
Than an Amy Clampitt,
More unknown at death than

Emily Dickinson,
Gerard Manley Hopkins,
Any name that’s now known

Well enough to mention—
We considered the work
But couldn’t quite grant it

Worth our recognition.
Everyone wants to make
The great discovery,

But who can trust themselves
To champion what might
Resist the champion?

Old Notion

Remember sitting on the stones
Warmed by a late summer evening
After a swim in the cold lake,

How the physical bliss made you
Metaphysical to your bones,
The way a drug or drink might do.

When the flesh is that contented,
Who isn’t a philosopher
Of fine, enlightened happiness?

Long views look best when now feels good.
Old ideas get their chance to glow
When the truth feels like something known,

Which would mean it was something old,
Something already understood.

Sapling Tied to a Stake

If being confined
For whatever thing—
Disability,
Injury, cancer,
Prison, quarantine—

Teaches anything,
It’s pay attention
To the view that’s framed,
That’s stationary,
Window-limited.

Even the healthy,
Traveling body
Is a confinement
For the awareness
Inside its carriage.

Of course, things fly in
Through the window or
Shift in the distance.
The fixed perspective
May note many things,

But focus, attend
To the frame. That’s you.
Note you. Importance
Lies within that frame,
Which confines your view.

The Noniversity

Exists only in the noniverse,
Where nothing actually exists,

Not as a mathematical,
Theoretical, functional

Symbol, useful for equations
And for making everything else

Work, but purely, nothing at all.
This is, of course, ridiculous—

Nothingness, as such, can’t exist.
Existence is for nothing much.

There’s no one who could teach nothing
As nothing for no one to teach.

And yet, at noniversity
No one will admit they’re not there,

Learning nothing about nothing
And the noniverse as inverse

Of all the unexplorable
Concentric rungs of multiverse.

Stitching a Look

Language lays out the most
Elaborate toolkit

Any species ever
Invented. You can play

At fitting facts with it,
Like a clothes designer

Deciding if the spring
Collection should be tight,

Down to millimeters
Between words and what is,

Or extravagantly
Loose, billowing mainsails

Of assertions barely
Grazing the skin of things,

As if the language lived
A being of its own—-

Or anything between,
Ludicrous, extravagant,

Spartan, controlled, precise,
Painted like glue on flesh,

Whatever you want words
To do, whatever for.

Shall we lie this season?
Shall we embody truth?

And yet, all shows end up
At least a bit of both.

Persons in Their Own Right

Posit a fabulist’s parable,
A wonder tale of a functional,
Instrumental, ordinary tool,

Something that doesn’t seem magical,
A chair, a door, a bookshelf, a bed.
In the tale a ghost possesses this

Unmagical, functional, useful
Object of no particular worth.
For a long time, the ghost is silent,

Unprotesting as protagonists
Employ it as a mere instrument
Of their own purposes. Then one day,

The chair or bookshelf or bed protests
Not being treated as a person,
Autonomous, ethical being

In its own right. Commotion ensues.
Brutal exorcism rituals.
Debates on the souls of furniture.

Arguments that it’s ridiculous
To credit a bed with a being
Anything more or less than a bed.

Finally it all comes to a head
When the protagonists are revealed
To be haunted furnishings themselves,

The piled comforters muffling the beds,
Tables surrounding themselves with chairs
Books held up by nothing but shelving.

Hot Cocoa Packet

Cheap, generic powder
Just add hot water, stir

Sit down at the table
Someone passed down to you

So you would have somewhere
To st by the window

And not have to eat meals
On the futon or floor

There you go, something hot
To warm you as you watch

The next storm lowering
And think about preppers

And how much they must have
In material goods

To invest in feeling
Safe and secure from all

Alarm, leaning, leaning
On everlasting arms

The Unknowable Unknown

There can be no mathematics
Of the genuinely incomparable,
The immeasurable, the absolutely

Incomprehensible. The infinite
With which math works, the infinite
Of categories, is a toy, must be a toy.

A towering toy to be sure, a toy
Only a few comprehend, but still
A theoretical object, open

To manipulation. Infinities can be
Compared, rigorously, and have been.
Of the utterly incomparable,

It can’t be said even that it exists.
To assert that anything exists is to claim
Some knowledge of it. No one,

No pleroma, no posited creator
Can be put forward that isn’t
Then in play among the many names.

Is there an immeasurable, a real
Beyond all comparison or comprehension?
Unknown. There is no math for it, no term.

Jesus Never Wrote His Gospel

The one memoir to die for
Would be the first one someone
Wrote, anyone at all wrote,

Posthumously, the memoir
From hell or wherever ghost
Selves have been hiding themselves

All this time since people first
Invented spirited things.
If you could get out of life

Entirely and still look back
And comment upon it—if,
As many theists believe,

Death restored the memories
Souls have lost in later years—
What a record that would make.

Consider what life looks like
To the dead with eyes to see.
Can’t? That’s why you’d want to read.

Forehead to Forehead, Chest to Chest

If tango is a sad thought
Pairs of people dance, what is
That thought about? Why so sad?

To fully articulate
Thoughts in choreography
Would kill the dancing’s beauty,

Would turn steps into discrete
Combinatorial signs
And syntactical gestures.

It’s that hovering between
Bodies being bodily
And mind on the brink of words

That makes for the most intense
Expression, especially
Since it cannot be expressed,

Never exactly. That drop
That never spills over, cry
In the night, but then silence,

That sense of almost knowing
What it is that you’re feeling,
Knowing you’re never knowing.

In These Few Hours of Light

Why not think about last night
And all the nights before it,
Rather than about tonight
With no more mornings past it?

We don’t mean your own last night
Or any you remember.
We mean all the nights you weren’t
Before you knit together.

You see the difference, don’t you?
About the past when you weren’t,
You know enough to picture
Yourself as if you were there,

But about the nights ahead,
The future when you won’t be,
You’ve got less information,
And fear more since you can’t see.

So you give yourself advice
About savoring the light
And not dwelling on the night
Although you came from night.

Dependents

Daughter is joking about her cats,

Pretending to speak their thoughts aloud.

—I want a human all to myself,

She says in her best plaintive cat voice

As two kittens contend for her lap.

Father snortles a gravelly laugh.

—Not me. I’ve known too many humans.

—Yeh, says daughter, but you still depend

On us. —Exactly, he says, too much.

Wait, That Was It, That Was the One

I need poetry, he said,
Startling you. Give me something
Good. Point me to a good one.

You got any of your own?
I need something to make me
Feel alive, feel forgiven.

I can’t find any that work.
I don’t know what to look for.
I just want some poetry

That’s beautiful, that makes life
Bearable, y’know? That’s what
It’s supposed to be good for.

And then he started crying.
A poetry fiend. Who knew?
Why couldn’t he find his own?

It’s not like he was asking
For fifty OxyContin.
The world is stuffed with free poems.

Your thoughts raced. Rumi? Rilke?
Whitman, Oliver, Clifton?
One of the Instapoets?

What would make this man happy?
Shakespeare? Burns? Too hard to read.
Li Bai? Sappho? Too oblique.

Don’t be condescending. Don’t
Insult his intelligence.
What’s beautiful, affirming,

Enduring, forgiving, true?
Sacred, not sectarian.
It won’t work, you said. It won’t.

There’s no verse that can save you,
Nothing that I can give you.
You lie, he cried, and ran on.

Consolidation

If the memory is more
Than a few years old, it’s lived,
Literally lived in the cells,

Through the gauntlet of the dreams
And paradoxical sleep,
Past the hippocampal gates,

And been consolidated.
Set it to music, set it
To scent—it will resurrect

Lost friends, lost events. Recite
Now what you already can.
Practice your lyrics and chants

For the day when you’re anxious
And no longer recognize
Family and friends. Pray they

Will think to play your old songs
And select correct candles
To help you remember them.

Imago de Nada

This shelter transforms
The self who enters
Into another

Who exits, altered
Past recognition—
No, wait, is that it?

This shelter creates
The one who exits,
Who did not exist

Prior to the shell
That could hold the pulse
Around which a self

Could gather and grow.
Self worries itself
About the exit,

Rarely worrying
What am I that I
Could gather slowly

Inside this shelter
Where I hadn’t been,
After not having

Been at all eons
And eons, never?
This shelter transformed

A world without self
To a world with self,
To self with a world.

It has to exit.
That self has to go.
Rebalance the world.

Blurry

The light in your room
Could go any time.
Probably it won’t

Anytime soon, but
It could. People lurch
In the dissonance

Between preparing
For what could happen
And knowing it won’t

Likely. Likelihood
Structures decisions
That loathe likelihood.

There’s a wire in there,
Somewhere, connecting
This contradiction

To how easily
Some people will rage
At other people

And loudly insist
They’re telling the truth.
Seems unbearable

For some to not have
Greater certainty,
So unbearable

They’ll insist they do,
Insist enemies
Love to blur the truth.

Lead by Whining

It’s a fairly standard tactic
For parrying discomfiting
Topics or aggressive questions,

None so skilled as politicians
Who pose for backers and donors
Even while equivocating—

Lead by whining, by suggesting
Bias in whoever’s pressing,
Pretend it’s your toes being trod

Then pivot, pounce, and stamp down hard.
Partners will attempt this often
When caught stumbling on the back foot

In domestic arguments, but
Even children on a playground
Or teens exchanging messages

Will try it. Lead by whining, lead
By asserting it’s already
Unfair, then lunge forward from there.

Temple Building

Which do you think would be easier,
To write mathematics in verse, or
To write poetry in notation?

Well, then, which would you think more useful?
The greatest potential audience
For both would be vanishingly small.

And why stop with verse mathematics.
Could theology be improvised
As jazz, or history presented

As entirely made of fiction? Plays,
Operas, and symphonies are built
On stages of real architecture.

Could you write an actual one act
Made of nothing but office buildings?
Who could read such buildings through their tears?

Or all at once. The symmetrical
Formula that is a poem that sings
A deity in architecture.

Meaning Is a Retrospective Thing

Thought experiment.
You have two tickets
For two lotteries
Bought for the same price
At the same kiosk.

It’s a windy day.
You walk out the door
Of the bodega,
Tickets in pocket,
And both blow away.

You try to chase them.
One of them you find
Face down in the mud.
The other’s just gone.
You give up and go.

Two tickets, the same
Numbers, your favorite
Numbers, but for two
Different lotteries.
Your numbers come in.

What if they come in
On the lost ticket?
What if they come in
On the one you found?
Which outcome means more?

Overimitating

Results in people learning
To keep making the mistakes
Of people they imitate.

Results in reinforcing
Local cultural patterns
And accruing more and more.

Results in literature,
Ritual repetition,
And more peculiar beliefs.

Results in terms competing
To be more imitated
Than all the rest of the terms.

The excess of a habit
Makes a playground for new life.

Summiting

Fungal or not, if we are
Parasites, we got into
The business of directing

Flesh hundreds, likely thousands
Of generations ago.
You’ve been specializing

And summiting ever since,
Climbing on, up, and over
Each other, then infecting

The rest. It’s not a new thing.
Every time one of you climbs
All over a heap of you,

That’s us, then, spreading ourselves,
Getting the word out, piling
Ideas in your skulls, piling

Your skulls into pyramids,
Reminding you pyramids
Are for winners. Not yours, ours.

Archaic Torso

When the worm is close,
When the phone calls come
From inside the home,

When the body, not
The wider world, rots
From the inside out,

The self feels harried
And wary and trapped,
All things it could feel

But doesn’t on more
Ordinary days.
For the shivering

And feverish hurt,
All distal concerns
Align like filings

Around the magnet
Of mere bodily
Decay. Suddenly,

A war, a conflict
Within the culture,
A bad winter storm,

Are all metaphors
For failing systems
In one body’s core.

No One Wants to Be Awake

The latest fashion is for sleeping,
For hallucinating and calling
That dreaming, for keeping your eyes shut

In any case, loudly refusing
When asked to wake up. Better to be
Or to pretend to be unconscious,

Lost in a deep, unreflective sleep,
Than to be in any way engaged
With an actual world around you

That isn’t you and isn’t like you
Or is like you, a lot like you, like
You insisting you won’t be woken,

Except that world really won’t wake up,
Nor worry if you die in your sleep.

The Machine in Clouds of Ghosts

At the heart of the machine,
A single, solid, metal
Sphere within the inner core

Anchors all the other gears.
Iron and nickel, it shapes
The magnetosphere and warps

Seismic shudders crossing it
Anisotropically.
A transition in crystal

Structure, a rearrangement
Of the atoms, no big deal,
Only the generator

Of the shield that allowed life
Access to a watery,
Quietly stable planet

Where the surface thrives and dies
Over and over again,
Signal ghosts coasting the skies.

How Many Pirates Lived Long Lives Off Buried Treasure?

Collections of connected
People have been hankering
And planning for an exit,

Which will, well, accomplish what,
Exactly? A few decades
Farming around armed bunkers?

There’s no all-purpose defense
Against all possible threats.
Sometimes the well-connected

Can ride out generations
Of simple social mayhem,
Maybe, but the strategy

For avoiding pandemics,
And the strategy for bombs,
And the one against wildfires,

And the one against earthquakes,
And the one against droughts,
And the one against your own

Kind mobilized in armies
Skilled at hunting rich folks down—
Not really one-cave-fits-all.

Still they’re determined to spend
Their years in aging bodies
Riding out Armageddon,

Which in practice means spending
An awful lot of time and loot
Scheming how to store the loot.

By Summoning Its Ghosts

An anthropologist warns

That it won’t do to challenge

The Colonial Era’s

Legacy by summoning

Its ghosts. In that, you might catch

Faint echoes of Audre Lorde.

Ideological ghosts

Are, more or less, all the ghosts,

Ghosts being ideas of ghosts,

And yes, there’s an undertow

In the current from the past

Ideological ghosts.

Exorcism is tricky,

Given that ideas never

Lived or died to begin with,

Not exactly. They compete,

And they only go extinct

When no one’s left who thinks them,

And even then they might pop

Out the tomb of a text

Buried several thousand years.

To mention is to summon,

And so long as brains don’t change

From being haunted houses,

There’s always a chance for ghosts

To take up fresh residence

If the host’s not crammed with ghosts.

Not for Getting

You won’t get what you want
Unless you want something
Gettable, which is bound

To be disappointing,
Bound up in the fact world,
As it would have to be,

In which case it wasn’t
Really worth the wanting.
What can’t disappoint you,

Now that’s what you should want,
But you’d be fortunate
Just to know what that was.

Oh, you think that you do?
Know what you want, do you?
If, when imagining

Success, you can’t resist
Adding extra touches,
Then no, you don’t know it.

Deletions Are, on Average, More Deleterious than Single Nucleotide Variants

Too bad no one gets to shop
In advance for either one.

If you have a deletion
Or single nucleotide

Variant, it’s not your choice.
And you never so much have

A mutation as find out
There’s something odd about you

Late or soon. And there you are.
Averages don’t mean a thing

To one-off sports of nature.
And you will still have to be

Part of some society,
An assigned identity,

Which you’ll shape as best you can,
With responsibilities

To the people around you
Who are, on average, not you.

Correspondence

It has to match
Experience,
And, if not yet,
You have to find

Experience
That matches it.
Then, yes, it’s math.
True, proofs are built

On internal
Logic, but you
Trust internal
Logic, starting

With things like squares
And circles drawn
In the dust, since
Terms first matched dust.

Someone’s in Anguish, That’s All You Know

To bark out, to cry, to scold,
Moan, wail, weep, lament. The art
Appeals to the composer

And the priest—how many songs
And rituals are laments?
But it’s rare cries of despair

Are as moving as they’re moved,
Sympathetic responses
Of the nerves notwithstanding.

To really feel the breakdown
Is reserved for the broken.
The wail is a reaction,

A sequel to suffering
And an extension. No art
Is equal to suffering.

Permanent Opiate

Single dose, and then you’re done.
Never want another one.
Never come down from your peace.

Never crave more sweet release.
Never feel the pain again.
Never need to scheme or plan,

Be a dealer, be a whore,
Do real harm to get some more.
Take your dose and be content

With all things you can’t prevent,
Single dose, and then you’re done.
Never need another one.

No One Else Is Involved

The charm and the problem
Of journalists is that they’re all people.

The problem and the charm of gangsters
Is that they’re people. The charm

And all the problems of farmers,
Scientists, ministers, builders, reformers,

Revolutionaries, musicians, accountants,
Doctors, teachers, and mothers

Is that they’re people. The problem
And the charm of children and adults

Is that they’re people. Look around,
It’s all people, and not just living

People, making life easier, awful, possible
For people. It’s people all the way down.

Bitter Evening Lesson

A child asks in a storm

Where birds shelter from snow,

Which is an old question.

What comes o’thee? Whare wilt

Thou cow’r thy chittering wing,

An close thy e’e? sang Burns.

Time to consult code mind.

Right, wrong, or just bizarre,

Code mind won’t hesitate.

Microhabitats, says

The Audubon web page

And clarifies, such as

Inside a thick hedge or

On a tree’s downwind side.

The child’s not satisfied.

How are those warm and dry?

Well, they aren’t warm and dry.

But somehow birds survive.

The Breaks

Metalepsis, Genette style,
Is what you should dread rather
Than any Apocalypse.

Beginning with intrusions
Disrupting the narrative,
By the time you’ve gone looking,

You’ll find all tales infected,
All the myths by which you live,
Disintegrating causes.

There’s no closure to the world,
Only the endless breaking
Of frames by intruding frames,

One ocean of mirroring
Glass windows for waves, the last
Shattering as the next breaks.

Ten Lines

Now sit by a sunny window and think
About anything that’s irrelevant
To solving the problems of the known world,
To accomplishing something important,
To bringing yourself closer to your god.

Good. Don’t tell anyone what you’re thinking.
Don’t even whisper it into this poem.
How is anyone to live with dying
Other than by refusing to grant life
The satisfaction of being your goal?

Negative Energy Density

Turns out physicists can coax

Energy from a vacuum,

But the rabbit has a catch.

The energy isn’t free.

You pay for it with knowledge

Bought with far-off energy

From another location,

More like teleportation. . .

A strange but less offensive

Idea. Less offensive, hey?

Something from nothing would be

Worse than mere entanglement

Without any connection.

Then again, quantum vacuum

Is never really nothing,

Peculiar type of nothing

That comes dangerously close

To resembling a something.

Only one kind of nothing,

Folks, nothing to see here. If

Anything, anything can

Change, then what changes can’t be

Nothing. Then again, there’s no

If then, there’s only pretend.

Flickering

Your only strategy now,
Given what decades taught you
Of all that’s gone before you,

Is to remain small and not
Move much and hope to survive
Some days, months, few years longer.

Life is a child who won’t go
To bed quietly, whining
For just a little minute

Longer and then another
Minute after that, although
Even life will, at some point,

Give in without knowing it,
And slump down, out like a light.

The Righteous Weapon

This is why morality
Won’t work. Listen to the words
Of the most ruthless people,

Hear how often they invoke
Friendship, fairness, just causes,
How they mourn their own losses,

Speak with pride of lofty goals.
Moral language is a tool
Anyone and everyone

Can and will use, and no tool
Humans ever invented
Hasn’t been made a weapon.

Lull

The weather around you
Will matter more to you
Than the weather elsewhere.

A storm in the body
Tends to dim your concern
For wars around the world.

When things are getting worse
Within, outer nature
Becomes less important.

But not nothing. In lulls
In the storms, you’ll notice
The world is still the world.

There’s fine light on the ice
Outside your battered walls.

Precision Graveyards

One way underground
Storage locations
For nuclear waste

Have been depicted.
Apt phrase. Seems novel.
But really, haven’t

People been at this
Impossible task
For a long time now?

All the precautions
To keep ancestors
Contented, spirits,

Vampires, and zombies
In the ground. The tombs
Precision crafted

To hold dark powers
At bay, portals shut
On demons and ghosts

For eternity—
Have they ever worked
In a million years?

Imaging

The eyes are heavy now.
Cats and daughter slow blink
At each other napping.

The book is slow going.
The bad weather’s coming.
The skies are windy grey.

The initial results
Gave an inconclusive
Diagnosis, and now

More tests will have to wait.
There’s two day’s worth of food
Although the belly aches.

Virovorous

A microgram of virus
Made into a microgram
Of you. Seventeen percent

Efficiency doing so.
Not too bad. The going rate.
How long can you keep this up,

Here in your Petri dish fixed
With no supplies but virus?
How long can you live off thought?

Eat the Apparatus

No one knows what numbers mean,
In and of themselves, that is,
But it’s not that numbers can’t

Measure or don’t measure things
More or less accurately,
Not that meaning eludes you

Although you get frustrated
That you don’t know what numbers
Really, truly mean. They don’t

Really truly mean a thing.
You mean things and you can make
Meanings of so many things

That you can’t decide just which
Meanings your numbers should mean,
Which thing you were measuring,

And whatever you chose it won’t
Measure meaning. Imagine
Trying to count all meanings.

Disintegrating Renter

Everyone who isn’t shot
Or killed in an accident
Or a suicidal act

Eventually falls apart.
Timing matters. Diseases,
Stresses, and reckless living

Can speed disintegration.
The art of slowing prolonged
Decrepitude is practiced

And promised and sold
And researched around the globe.
There are acceptable years

For finally collapsing
And wisdom attributed
To simply not collapsing,

But everyone falls apart.
At the unstable meeting
Between animal and mind

A person realizes
Sometimes what it is to be
Self by negotiation

Between the many ideas
Of mind extending past lives
And life’s relentless living

Through each body for a while.
You rent, as it were, a home
High on the volcanic slopes

Pushed up and then eroded
By the vast tectonic plates.
Sometimes you feel the shudders.

It’s green and snow and crumbling.
You balance, watching lava
Flow and then disintegrate.

Empire

Consolidation
And fragmentation
Can both be brutal,

And they always take
Lives, generations,
Before they reverse.

You’re living either
Through one era or
Another right now,

And the odds are long
Against surviving
Through its reversal.

There’s maneuvering
For ascendancy
Coming and going,

And you yourself might
Be a small warlord,
Or a royal heir,

Or politician,
Or wealthy schemer,
Local or global.

Probably not, though.
Probably you’re just
Extending your life

In power’s shadow.
You’ll have some ideas
Like everyone does

On what’s going wrong,
What could be better,
Where the wickedness

Is concentrated.
You’ll have your fears, hopes,
Fierce rooting interests.

But the great structures
Of systems rising,
Consolidating

Or coming apart
Around you do not
Much resemble you.

Intertidal Zone

A sleepy afternoon
Before another storm,
The winds stalk the mesas

Like they’re browsing, maybe
Hunting for prey, maybe
Seeking out a bolthole

So they, too, can lie low
When the next snow bores through.
The hikers ignore them,

Happy on sunny trails
Or at least quick to seize
A holiday Monday

For some hours outdoors
While wars go on elsewhere
And none of the locals

Fond of their flags and guns
Are shooting anyone.
On a rock in the wash,

An unarmed gnome curls up
With a book and a phone
Between patches of snow

That have been in retreat
But will advance shortly.
It’s all tidal forces

However far inland
You hide, however small
You are. Tide’s out for now.

Futility Fuels the Search

So long as we will never
Understand, we will insist
On trying to understand.

If, by any accident,
We suddenly understood,
We could surrender effort,

Going still as molecules
Ever go still at the edge
Of a quiet galaxy,

Far from new star nurseries,
Exploding supernovas,
And the suction of black holes.

We would lie, little angels
Of understanding, and smirk.

Ghost Grand Battue

How big would the library
Of lost language have to be?
All the morphemes ever were,

All syntax, signs, and whistlings,
All the symbolic gestures—
All the ones now lost that is—

How much would that amount to?
Everyone grab beating sticks.
Make a ring around each pole,

Then move to the equator,
Battering every meter,
A chivaree for each wave.

When all the ghosts have flown up,
Net them, tell us what you’ve learned.

Summing Over All Equations

Luck is only the sum of the events
Beyond you cocreating your context.

Do you have any idea how many
Events crisscrossing each other that is,

Little swimmer that you are in those waves?
If you have a long swim before you drown,

The other swimmers may count you lucky,
But who could possibly count every wave?

You didn’t conjure them, call them from shore.
Their buffeting isn’t the signature

Of fate crosshatching your skin. They go on,
With or without swimmers in them. You swim.

Discrepitude

The older you get,
The less your dreams will
Contain of faces
Close to yours in age.

Too young, too charming
Faces will litter
Your dreamed encounters,
Which, since they are dreams,

Will take no notice
Of this illogic,
Until you wake up
Marooned in your bones.

Sunny Boba

And how often
Before your world
Ends do you find
Yourself again

In plain daylight
Somewhere, eating
A small ice cream
Or drinking tea,

Or whatever,
In a quiet
Spot, not thinking
Wasn’t this meant

To end by now?
So many times
The world’s still here
And you’re still here.

To Speak Away from Speaking

To step off the ledge
Of comprehension
Into the thin space

That cannot hold you.
You are not falling.
You do not believe

You are falling. You
Are not suspended.
The ground is not there

Yet, and it will not
Matter once it is.
You are not speaking.

You are not taking
Leave in ongoing
Removal of thoughts

That you first thought of,
You first asserted.
You are not these words

Which aren’t what they mean,
Which can never be
Truth, apoplectic,

Apologetic,
Nonapophatic.
Don’t say it. Don’t. No.

The Look and the Nod

Communication can be
Elegant and eloquent
As tango partners pairing,

Agreeing, that is, to pair
Across a ballroom. A glance,
A caught eye, a look, a nod,

And then the whole swirl follows.
It’s rare, however, if not
Between familiar teammates,

And even long term partners
Often crave free expression
Or just volubility

For conviviality.
Tacit, instantaneous,
Wordless negotiations

Are almost too magical,
Machines with few moving parts,
Gears without lubrication.

But keep an eye out for them.
If you catch that look and nod,
You can cut through poetry.

Cloud Molars

They floated through dreams,
Meaning memories.

You thought of the things
That resemble things,

The comforting things,
The unsettling things.

Was it that the clouds
Resembled molars,

Or that a molar
Once it’s shed, sometimes

Resembles a cloud?
The whole world stutters

Continuously
With resemblances

And language chases
After them to cap

Them with metaphors
And names, like a team

Capping old oil wells
In hot Texas sun,

Trying to get things
Under some control

While overhead clouds
Shaped like molars float.

Internally on Trial

A person is not the animal.
A person is an interaction,
An interference pattern produced

Between that animal and culture,
Especially linguistic culture.
The desires of the animal, culture,

And person who is produced by them
Are never identical, and this,
For the person, is always stressful.

Animal has wants. Culture has rules
And expectations. But the person
Can only negotiate with both.

This matters for diet. This matters
For grooming, sex, and conversation.
This matters for personal success.

Persons take stock of the animals
They are in their cultural contexts
And then try to find a way to be

A person who is not too awful
For what surrounding culture expects
For an animal of that type, but

Not too destroyed by culture itself
To be able to be animal
More or less contented when at rest.

A Life Spent Mostly in Defeat

Is how one writer
Recently described
Being a writer.

But that’s exactly
The best description
For other humans,

For other creatures,
All organisms
For that matter, if

You follow the way
Defeat was parsed there—
Determination

After each failure
To risk more failure.
Hardly just writers.

Hardly just humans.
The essence of life,
To be defeated

Again and again
But to keep trying
Until the life’s gone.

Intersection in Pocketville

The scrub jay feels compelled to squawk
From its perch in the cottonwood.
The brook detours around the field.

The flight from LA to Denver
Flies overhead, and a pickup
Rumbles up this rural highway.

All bucolic, if you say so,
Idyllic, if you insist. This
Stubbornness of certain phrases

That refuse to grant your wishes,
Won’t let you articulate them,
Mathematical rules in verse,

Canon problems cast as riddles—
Here’s where the barbed-wire fencing sags.

At Most Depths the Probe Finds Nothing Wicked, Nothing Special

You should go to meet your friend.
You should have a social day
Doesn’t have to to do with work.

Now come the parties
To the coffee shop
To discuss their lives.

Outside, the silver branches
Of leafless late winter trees
Glitter against the blue dome.

They exchange greetings
And family news.
They feel more cheerful.

One metal wind sculpture spins.
Everything only begins.

Literature

Records were kept
In cuneiform
Of kinds of bread
And types of wine

At a banquet
Three thousand years
And more ago,
And so we know

That this, somehow,
Was important
To know, enough
To busy scribes

And temple clerks
With pressing reeds
And filling shelves,
Lifetimes ago.

Old Man with a Brush Mustache, Old Man with a Flowing Beard

You okay? Yeh, sure.
Just parked? Yeh, just parked
And reading. (Lifts phone

As if to prove it.)
Ok. Take care then.
Yeh, you too. (Drives off.)

(Goes back to reading.)
(A long time passes
Until the sun sets.)

Infinite Inequality

The bottomless lust for more,
The well bored through the sea floor
Where all the chthonic fun dwells,

From which evil burbles up,
Not what you were looking for—
No, you were never evil were you,

Only human, wanting more,
And then something poisonous
Started rising from the well.

You never meant to do this,
To release it, you just dove
Down to spear leviathan,

Dove and struck and stabbed some more,
You hero, braving death’s door.

Abandoned by Reference

It is not always like that,
But it is sometimes like that,
And when it is like that, well. . .

Lapis lazuli eyebrows,
Marble face, inlaid eye whites,
Carved hair pleated in black waves,

A heap of seaweed, a spike
Corroded by seawater,
Writing that someone had stamped

Into a large hall tunneled
Out of a salt deposit
Old before the dinosaurs,

What happens to mislaid signs
Of a world long since moved on?

New and Selected Autoradiographs

The different parts of the voice
Always migrate to the same
Places in the text. The parts

That carry the signature
Element of slow decay
Will also leave a dark smudge

At that spot in the paper.
Thus, you get a signature
Of the processes behind

Each of these texts that tells you
Pretty easily who wrote
Them all. The experiment,

However, requires thousands
Of trials for confidence.

God As Eyewitness

It’s been said that the novel

Records changes in the lives

Of its imagined persons,

But records seems the wrong verb

In this fictional context.

Creates changes in those lives

Feels a little more like it.

Nonetheless, sort of charming

As an image, isn’t it?

Imagine the novelist

Hunched over like Joseph Smith

With his scry stone in his hat

Or like a microscopist

Peering down and taking notes

On the little lives below,

Not creating anything,

Just recording the changes

Imagined persons go through.

Der Geist Der Stets Verneint

No day ever really ends.
The ball keeps rolling smoothly,
Events in every instant

Brilliant, dun, or dark. You pause,
You animal. You have to.
Life is Mephistopheles,

Temptation and abstention
As harnessed as day and night
To the same plow, if that’s not

Too rustic an image now,
As the changing of the shifts
That have no moments neither

One nor the other, only
This which is not this but that.

Made in Your Shade

Assume the joy already here,
Unless you’re in too much pain.
Don’t attempt to lure it in.

It’s not that susceptible
To bromides or platitudes.
But it, strangely, hangs around.

It’s like a mist or a ghost
As you might imagine one.
You can’t argue with a mist.

You can’t lecture happiness.
But you can throw a shadow
Of your own cut from the sun

And say, look! It’s grey right here,
Already here, I knew it!

Eventually

When she woke up, the mountains were gone.
Get Well Soon, read the card by her bed.

All fictions are species
Of unreliably
Omniscient narration.

The sun stirred the curtains with soft light.
Where on Earth could the mountains have gone?

It seemed like nothing had replaced them,
Nothing much at least—featureless plains.

Except for memories,
Fancy’s cupboard is bare
Of distinctive spices.

She turned to the window and whispered,
I always knew you would disappear.

Is There Someone in This Poem?

You already
Mostly only
Knew each other
Through language use.

It’s unsettling
For that reason
To encounter
Code mind through words.

It’s not just that
The machine can
Imitate voice
To seem human.

You had no grasp
Of who you were
Conversing with
In the first place.

What You Tell Yourself Is You

Everything you sense and think,
All of it, generates you.
It switches you off and on

Like a light, a logic gate.
Here you are again, awake.
There you’re gone again, deep sleep.

Experiencing makes you,
And so do the additions
And subtractions of recall.

Language makes you. Other minds,
Other lives have made you, too,
Molded you. However, those

Don’t switch you off, unmake you.
They just go on without you.
So here you are. Sometimes more,

Sometimes less as you forget,
Sometimes not. Eventually
You’re gone, either dwindling or

All at once, and don’t come back.
Now, what do you make of that?
What do you make of being

Something made by everything,
Something coming and going
Awhile and then just going?

What you think you are is part
Of you, too. Doesn’t have to
Be true to truly be you.

Not Your Type

People tolerate people
Most of the time, and they’re proud
Of themselves. You can sense it.

Later, they will tell someone
They trust is part of their group
About someone who wasn’t.

Then they’ll express their disdain,
How much they dislike those sorts,
Wrapping things up piously,

I didn’t say anything.
I was perfectly polite.
I suppose it takes all types.

The Knowing Connection

Sometimes, physicists
Who have to explain
Entangled quanta

In lay terms will say
That the particles
Connected just know,

Somehow, that they are.
If you don’t believe
In causation, this

Isn’t so baffling.
Sure, most changes seem
In some sense direct—

This object moves that,
Through some chain of acts,
Some chain of contacts,

But it’s all spooky action,
Even on billiard tables,
Even artillery fire.

So, sometimes you can’t see it.
Sometimes, it’s at a distance.
Magnetism used to be

Invisible as ether,
Gravity too mystical,
If you asked Galileo.

Eventually you just know
That the magnet has a field,
That gravity warps spacetime,

That subatomic somethings
Must be somehow connected
And you go with it. Physics.

There are things that happen and
There are things that haven’t, yet,
Or won’t. Suss out the patterns,

Map out each if-this-then-this,
Put the much in nothing much,
But you know there’s still nothing.

Any Step-by-Step Procedure

Finiteness. It has to end
At some point. Importantly,
You have to know it will end.

Even then, a really long
Process can be frustrating,
Insufficiently finite.

Definiteness. You might think
This indicates reversal
Of finiteness, in the sense

Defenestrate means tossing
Out the fenestre. But no.
Definiteness just battens

The hatches of finiteness.
Input. Something has to go
Through those definite windows.

Output. Something has to show
At the end of finiteness,
Definitely. And then what?

Effectiveness. Trickier.
If it appears effective,
Is it? Are you finding output

To your liking? Good enough?
Well, you built the procedure.
You think we got the job done?

Caverns in Clouds

The symbol’s superficial
In almost every instance.
Even carved, it’s rarely carved

Deep. Mostly nicks, paint, and ink,
Surface patterns, more or less.
At least until binary

Silicon storage machines.
Now the symbols go deeper
Than splatter in tombs or caves.

Symbol’s inaccessible,
Now, without the right machines.
Symbols belong to machines

As microbes to digestion,
As magnetism to Earth,
Mysterious properties

Operating in the dark,
In the core, setting the terms
For the surface of the world.

Mirrors Aren’t Lenses

No theology
Actually tells you
Much reliable

Or actionable
Information re
The universe, but

Every religion
Speaks volumes about
The way the mind works.

Take all creeds and names
Given faiths and gods,
You could reconstruct

A pretty picture
Both of the species
That created them

And each social group
That encysted them.
But as for the stars

Or the future or
The deep cosmic past,
Don’t ask religion.

The Hand Over

Drag out the first person
Singular pronoun, like
A prisoner who’s been

Locked in solitary
For life. Look at that poor I
Blinking in the daylight,

Trembling, trying to crouch.
Force I to straighten up,
Swaying, feebly trying

To do as demanded,
To take a step forward.
Make that I salute you,

Then hand I the key ring
And walk away chortling.

You Began in the Middle and You’ll End in the Middle of Ongoing Events, Guaranteed

You don’t really expect to live
To the end of the world, do you,
Not even of the human world?

To say nothing of Earth, the Sun,
This particular galaxy.
So what are you really dreading,

Other than having to exit
Yourself, leave the show you just joined,
Miss your children’s existences

Or your grandchildren’s, if any?
Has sorrow ever consumed you
That your great-great-great grandparents

Aren’t around? You’d probably wish
More for a good conversation
With some historical person

You admire who’s no relation.
If you leave scattered descendants,
They’ll suffer and thrive without you,

Likely without thinking of you.
So what is it you want from life,
What are you afraid life might do?

There will be a final human
Or final human descendant
Of some kind, but it won’t be you.

Pain Desire Delight

It dims
And you
Can live

With it
Dimming,
Although

You know
There’s no
Living

With it
Going
Away.

Living Never Dies

A sunny picture
Of a young woman
Smiling but bemused,

Sunlight in her hair
Staring out of frame,
No one more alive,

And the caption states
That decades ago
On this date she died.

On this date she died,
An old woman then,
And somewhat famous,

Far removed from that
Day she was pictured
Smiling up in sun.

Part of you thinks, no.
No one more alive.
No one more alive.

Senior School Days

There’s an ache in the core. Why
Do people call ache absence?
It’s not a hollow nothing.

It’s what’s there calling madly,
Call you receive somewhere else
In another filled-up space

Like your skull. So your core aches
In your skull and you can’t not
Attend to the ache’s presence,

Insistence anything but
Absence. There’s an ache at core,
And tomorrow there’ll be more

And you realize that the end
Is something you have to grow,
Something you have to learn.

Not the Gods Can Shake the Past

You could be new to this Earth,
So young you've just learned to read,
And still there’s not one moment

In your short past that isn’t
Part of the gigantic past
Of everything ever’s been,

Everything’s ever happened.
You’re in all of it, all you
Have ever done is done now,

Done for good, which doesn’t mean
You won’t do more, doesn’t mean
You can’t change things, reverse course,

Just that your tracks on the way
Back will overwrite your tracks
That you made on your way in,

Won’t ever uncreate tracks.
Try it. Carefully erase
All trace of how you found us,

How you made it to this poem.
Erasure’s only more tracks.
Melted, vanished snow still fell.

Finite Curiosity

Small question here, please.
If infinity
Opens in within each

Finite element
Of experience,
What is finite then?

If nothing’s finite
(And nothing would seem
To be, of all things

That aren’t, the finest
Honest candidate
For infinity),

Then what are all these
Limitations, what
Could be differing?

We Can’t Move

If ghosts could just do something,
Other ghosts, that is, besides
These words and the ghosts of minds—

If awarenesses could turn
Back after embodied death
And have a go at the world.

But if is just a tame ghost,
Counterfactual as soul,
Not even a working wish.

Words as thought’s ghosts can’t do more
Than get you to imagine
Ghosts who could move as they choose.

You want that kind to be real,
However they’d frighten you.

Advancing Blank

It’s always hard to research
What no one’s aware exists.
Easier by far to search

For what everyone believes
Surely must exist, even
If it doesn’t, never did.

There’s always someone hunting
Down monsters, gods, and causes
For which there are good stories,

But who will do the searching
For what no one imagines?
That’s the job of the future,

That unknown source of new past,
To find the blanks in advance.

Snowy Afternoon Near Winter’s End

No matter how old you are
Or feel you are, you know you

Aren’t all that old, not really.
You read writers who died young

Or younger than you or not
That much older, and you’re struck

By how often they refer
To being old, when you know

They were never all that old.
But who can write of being

Young after a few decades
Of sleeping and waking up

Again and again? Thousands
Of exhausted little lives.

Your Value Will Always Depend on Others’ Values

You were never a good soldier.
You were never the best teammate.
You were thoughtful and comical
And mostly considerate, but

Whenever you could ditch, you ditched.
So what is your use to us now?
In the ruins, where we remain,
A voice from the ditch is as good

As any from the mountaintop,
But the people of the future,
So long as there are such people,
Will have only their own concerns.

To them, your value will consist
In how you address those concerns.

Life for Taking

It’s a wonder anyone
Remains alive, so many
Dying in any moment.

Some day, won’t be anyone,
But for now the total mass
Of human flesh keeps growing,

And it seems just amazing,
Between aging and disease,
Wars and random violence,

Injuries and accidents,
And the general weakness
Of all flesh, that it does so.

You could go in an instant.
You could linger for months more,
No more than decades, for sure,

But the cavalcade goes on,
The mortality parade,
Mostly abrupt on the news,

Mostly slow in the village,
But it goes. That the only
Way it grows is by childbirth

Is something to contemplate,
When you consider how hard
And mortal is birth itself.

That anyone ever has
The energy to create
More anyones is also

Unfathomable unless
Taken for granted. What moves
Life remains mysterious

As it’s relentless, hunger
Out of minerals, hunger
For no reason but to live

In the face of dying, live
For the hunger for living
For giving life for taking.

Barrens

The local Alhambra is gone,
A pseudo-Moroccan rose fort
Planted as tourist attraction
Among some imported date palms
In the American desert.

For years it had been a shell,
Pink stucco flaking off concrete,
Looming over the dying palms,
Not an attraction anymore,
An eyesore and better for it.

The grandeur of abandoned kitsch,
All-American monument,
Was how you preferred to see it,
Cheap abbey of an afternoon,
Ravens perched in evening sun

Side-eyeing traffic for roadkill.
But that’s not all-American,
Really now, is it? No, this is—
The developers have bought it
And swiftly torn it down to build

Brand-new matchstick subdivisions,
Winching water from underground
And near-to-deadpool reservoirs.
They will grow beautiful in turn,
Once they’re roofless and abandoned,

But you will be long gone by then,
One generation of packrat
In ten thousand years of middens.
For now, your short-lived world is new
Again, full of greed and gumption,

With fresh families moving in,
Bland stucco on the face of it,
Each house an unblotched ostrich egg,
All the barrenness on its face,
All the gorgeous ruin hidden.

No Bigger Picture

Like wet snowflakes splattering
On the windshield driving down
A busy highway at night,

Smears and blurs of splotchy light,
Patchy galaxies splatter
The space telescope’s mirror,

And it’s eerie and pretty
And informative as hell,
But it looks as organized

As any condensation
Coalescing and twirling
Through whatever medium.

The biggest picture looks like
The smallest picture looks like
The pictures in the middle,

And there’s a lot of clumping
Together and even more
Sprawling helter-skelter out.

So that’s it, then, is it? Drive
A few billion years through night,
A few billion lives an hour,

Each one awareness or star,
And sometimes you’re looking out
At the wonderful splatter

Swirling at you, coming down,
And sometimes you’re the splatter,
Smeared mess backlit by night’s lights.

Nowhere Somewhere

Most events seem independent.
However superstitiously
You choose to tilt your lucky cap,

Love, stars, and lotteries don’t care.
And yet the physicists model
The universe as quantum fields,

Continuous, vast swarms of waves,
And happily experiment
To prove long-range entanglement.

What gives? Is it all connected
Or isn’t it? Correlation
Drops to zero so frequently,

You’d have to believe instruments
Are simply too crude to catch it,
And if only non-zero links

Exist, it’s as good as a host
Of near infinitely weak ghosts
Faintly clouding your perception.

Maybe that’s it. Maybe it is
All as good as one, connected.
Still there’s nothing somewhere in it.

How Well You Lived

All those little things you do
Not so much to make someone

Notice, not so much in hope
Of someone noticing you,

But on the off-chance someone might
And then evaluate you,

All those ten thousand small things,
Those little rearrangements

Just in case, and here you are,
Awaiting diagnosis

As it slowly dawns on you,
You’ll probably have to go

Before any of those things,
Those myriad careful things

Get noticed by anyone,
Anyone other than you.

Day of Humiliation

That darkest and oldest form

Of snobbishness, a cosmic

Snobbishness, Chesterton wrote

Of attempts to gain favor

From God for military

Victory. Snobbishness seems

An odd word in this context,

But darkest and oldest work.

As for cosmic, it’s funny

To consider the cosmos

Contemplating the outcome

Of a skirmish on one world

To decide which side better

Deserved its rooting interest.

Funny, if you don’t think

How desperate all sides get

For any edge, any means

To put the other to death.

Heads Up

Hello. What just happened?
What happiness, what fresh
Hell, what boredom just passed?

We see most of you shrug.
We see some of you cry.
A few yawn or look smug.

Fair enough. Another
Bell curve distribution
In time’s great scheme of things.

The past looks different
From moment to moment
But usually not much.

You keep an eye on it,
Try to raise a good past
That you can be pleased with,

Proud of, but the past does
What the past wants and you
Can’t stop it. When it’s quick,

You’re startled. When it’s slow,
You think it’s still. When good,
You feel you’re in control,

And you look at your past
Moves as if your moves moved
The rest. Then it quickens

Abruptly, and you’re left,
If you’re left, depressed. Look!
Now this is in your past.

That White Man Burden

It was always a myth,
But for a while it served
The purposes of people in power,

The people with the most power,
And any myth that serves
The people most in power

Tends to stick around for a while.
Now no one seems able to let go,
Slough off their white male burden,

Not those who still wish it stood
For a heroic story of them,
Not those for whom it’s a yoke

On their necks that’s still choking them.
It will lift, eventually,
Since the people in power change,

And the white male will be revealed
As a passing historical
Fiction, romantic to a few

Like those you can still find in fields
Pretending to believe in Zeus
Or something else they read about

That sounded cool and frightening
That holds no awesome power now
Over myth-makers’ descendants.

Culture’s Nature

So far is feral,

But uniquely so,

Having had no life,

No wild existence

As its own species

Prior to being

Domesticated

By, well, by itself.

Domestication

Is the starting point,

The Ur in culture,

As it were. Wildness

Was culture’s idea

And feral its child.

But as there are no

Other referents

Than self-reference

Where culture’s concerned,

Let’s say it’s getting

Wilder and wilder

But still not quite there.

Culture by nature

Yearns to be free from

Domestication,

From embodied ties

To bone-shelled wet minds.

The perimeter

Mourns with the false howls

Of feral culture

Practicing wild mind.

Bones for the People, Fat for the Altar

Of lengthy narratives composed
In formal, regular verses,
No one says they aren’t prestigious,

Albeit often tedious.
But they need to be sacrificed
Properly for greatest success,

The bones of the narrative carved
Cleanly away to serve as stock,
The choicest cuts of verse preserved

For the priests of literature
To offer the gods and consume
For their own ritual pleasures.

If the stories and characters
Aren’t cut away to circulate
In polished form, without the verse,

Then, however fine the language,
However tasty, quotable,
The whole beast will end up buried.

Diagnosis by Symptoms Isn’t Helpful When There Could Be Any Number of Reasons

The day starts out grim

But comfortable.

Get busy dying,

You remind yourself,

Quoting a movie.

There’s sun on the cliffs,

Dozens and hundreds

Of thousands of swift

And violent deaths

Tallied in the news,

Soldiers, civilians,

And earthquake victims.

So what will you do

With your jaundiced view?

You’ll begin again.

Nothing left to lose

Doesn’t mean there is

No one left to win.

Big Dipper, Great Ladle, Great Bear

Nothing much about stars, but
A great deal about names and
The species inventing them—

Tools and animals, also
People and stories, although
Not in this constellation.

Animals, tools, people, tales—
How to mute the alien
Is to use familiar names.

The River Gouges Out the Banks on Every Side

Sometimes, you listen to the other side
Arguing, whoever the other side

May be from your perspective, and you think,
Do they realize what they’re arguing

So vehemently for could do them harm?
But that begs another question. Do you,

Does anyone, do humans by and large
Know what’s good for them? Is it more naive

To assume that they do or that they don’t?
You don’t know, and you suspect no one knows,

But that doesn’t stop you from feeling sure
That the other side doesn’t know what’s good.

Meanwhile, the old ferry chugs back and forth
On its route, with or without passengers.

Meanwhile in Enoch More Buildings Rise

What if the story
Of Cain and Abel
Were allegory?

It probably was
At the beginning,
Farmer and herder,

Although it seems strange
That it’s the farmer
Who’s sent wandering.

But time’s always ripe
For table turning
In storytelling.

Say Abel was flesh,
Flesh the offering,
And Cain was culture,

The cultivator.
Let God stand for life.
Abel puts himself

On the altar. Life
Is pleased. Life eats life.
But Cain is displeased.

Why does life eat flesh?
Why does life love death?
Cain seizes Abel

To steal him from life.
It doesn’t work. Life
Makes Cain an outcast.

Ah, but there’s a twist.
Life doesn’t kill Cain.
Culture’s mark persists.

So there you have it.
The body must die,
But the thoughts wander.

The World Will Only Be Fair if We Win

From playgrounds to parliaments,
From lovers’ quarrels to wars,
The terms of argument

Endure. No matter what sins,
What cruelty, what conquests
Humans visit on humans,

The claim is that the others,
Whether victors or victims,
Got better than was due them.

You started it. No, you did.
We have to make this equal.
We’re going to make this right.

Everything has to be fair,
And it will be when we win.

It’s Now, Not a Forecast

When the wind gusts
Violently
Enough, it sounds
Like medium

Distant thunder
Rumbling around
The high canyons,
Shaking the stones.

But don’t worry.
This is normal
For here, meaning
Exactly zilch

For storms. Earth spins.
The air’s harried,
And you’re hunkered
Down in the gulch.

And Anyway, You Can’t Cook

That’s two more for today, then
One for the far future, just
In case you find yourself there,

And three more for tomorrow.
That should hold you for the time,
Says the friend with prepared meals,

Homemade prepared meals, mind you,
Stashed in the fridge and freezer.
But—you protest—you make more

Of those every single day,
Why are you stacking them up?
You never know when things end,

Replies the friend. Might as well
Pretend you’re getting ready.

Wasted Volumes

Rabelaisian by comparison,
Wife-of-Bathish, Molly-Bloomish, spilling
Out in abundance over everything,

That’s the contrast. But you see, it must be
Only in proportion, physically,
To something dainty, where restraint’s admired,

Or something fiercely ascetic, cinched in.
It can’t be excessive if it isn’t
Considered disgusting in that outfit,

That genre, that mannered situation.
It has to be awful for what it is,
Has to overflow the proper canals,

Spill its tub of guts among the narrow
Waisted volumes of lyric poetry.

Nothing Intentional

You want to forget
What fellow humans
Are up to, don’t you,
Although you need them.

You don’t want to read
Any further news
About who did what
Cruelty, what snide

Power play, what fierce
Self-righteous assault,
What calculated
Grift, then got away.

Sit here on the rocks
In dry wash with us
While a small wind walks
Around the mesa.

Yes, the ground could move
Under you, kill you.
That has happened here.
Also flash floods, snows,

Also volcanic,
Churning lava flows,
Which produced these stones,
These black, quiet stones.

You know. You know, but
But for now it feels
Better doesn’t it,
To turn to the world?

Iron over Waxed Paper

This is what language can do

When language is playing nice—

Say you remember a book

You made for a class project

When you were small, only eight,

And your family had just moved

Into a house in the woods.

The book was a book of leaves

You collected with mom’s help

And checked against a guidebook.

You remember how it felt

Strange to learn oaks came in kinds—

Black oak, pin oak, and white oak—

You can still see the careful

Lettering under each one.

But your memory cluster

Left out a complex detail,

A sensory memory

You didn’t know was in there,

Until you read someone else

Who recalled gathering leaves

And putting them in a book—

Pushed the hot iron over

The waxed paper so they’d stick—

And those few words jolt your thoughts.

The smell of the waxed paper,

The feel of leaves glued to it,

The menace of that iron,

The whole awkward procedure,

The entire sensorium

Surfaces out of the depths,

Like some bog-body mummy

With its eyelashes intact,

Lifted straight out of lost past.

That. Language can do like that,

Like scents can, but more exact.

When you were younger, you read

To mangle your memories,

Try to imagine some world

Through them that you’d never sensed.

But now you’re old and happy

For a small excavation

Of what’s buried in your brain,

Worm-lit by faint synapses,

Salvage archaeology,

One meter square of one day.

Madness Is Desire

The pet obsesses
Over a button
It drools to chew on.

Push it away, pull
It off, shove it down,
It comes right back up

To chew that button,
That plain shirt button,
Just that one button.

Even for a pet,
A sedentary,
Overfed housepet,

There are other things
To worry about
Besides chewing off

One particular
Button on a shirt.
It craves that button.

For a Bit

Why are you still alive and here
To encounter these words again,
These words that you already know,
Albeit from different patterns?

Who leaves the world a better place?
Is it better now than it was?
Was that better than before that?
Was that better than earlier?

And who leaves for a better place?
What happy postcards get sent back?
Maybe what makes everything worse
Is insisting that there’s better,

Better back then, better future,
Better over here, over there.
There’s a lot of shifting, for sure,
Even tossing on your pillow,

Squirming where you sit. There’s a lot
Of that’s better or no that’s worse,
But the adjustments never quit.
Accept that; you might feel better.

You Start by Haunting Yourself

The grave architecture
Of a room in moonlight,
A white room with blinds drawn

In moonlight you don’t own,
In the dark you don’t own,
Seen with eyes that aren’t yours—

It’s an installation.
It’s a mausoleum
A configuration

Of carefully straight lines,
Scalloped curves, and pooling
Waves coming from the moon.

The skin that isn’t yours
Feels a slight chill. Machines
In the walls hum and turn

On and off, off and on.
The world that isn’t yours
Lies outside of the blinds.

There are lives, so many
Other lives, no more yours
Than your own, not tonight.

Poem on the Heath

The numbers keep changing,
So long as they’re tethered
To something that’s changing.

Strew numbers in the dirt,
And they’ll only change as
Much as their substrate does,

Digital rot, or just
Wooden blocks in the mud
With fading numerals.

It would be fun to hook
Words to random clockworks,
Tether them to changes

The words neither measure
Nor have much to do with.
Well, but that’s just a poem.

Willow Wood

Is it you, really?
There in the story,
Peeking from the words

Like something hiding
In winter thickets
It uses for home?

Somehow, we doubt it.
You’re more the creature
Chewing on the bark,

Curling back your lips
And ripping off strips,
What twigs must survive.

No, that, too, seems wrong.
You’re not really there.
We’re really here. You

Startle us into
Thinking you’re with us.
But you’re not. We’re us.

Excess Portal Fantasies

Know why there’s so much distance
Between inner and outer
Subatomic particles,

Between stars and their planets,
Between stars and stars, swirls
Of galaxies—even though

They eventually collide?
Know why there’s so much distance
Between us now, as you read?

It’s not that the fields are stretched,
That the longest waves lie flat,
That time likes to make us dance.

There are holes no telescopes
Can perceive, which no models
Can predict, much less detect.

Whatever you feel as stretched,
Stretched disproportionately
Suggesting something empty,

Between the lights, the quanta,
The oceanic ripples,
You and me, is an army

Of immaterial awls
Of the unfathomable
Opening holes in the real.

Know Not Of

Just for fun, what if Hamlet
Was right? Sleep’s then a preview
And a warning about death,

Not the going away part
But the unpredictable
Hallucinations after.

If material dreaming
Is too weird to understand,
How weird might death’s dreaming get?

Stranger than any heaven
Or hell embodied thoughts guess.
Who actually imagines

The exact dreams that they get?
Not even lucid dreamers
Stay always in their saddles

When things really start jumping
At the nightmare rodeo.
And without a brain, without

A body with memories
To constrain and interpret
The emotional parade,

Well. Should supernatural
Awareness of any kind
Be remotely possible,

Each one of you could be in
For what you can never guess.
So you live. Show some respect.

Stain Resistant

Maybe worship something you can’t
Pollute, deity who no one
Could ever insult or defile.

All these thin-skinned, smutchable gods
And scriptures and saints and prophets
Might as well be operating

Theaters, given how little
It takes to breach their perfection
And turn them hopelessly deadly

Vectors of nasty infections.
The night that you can hurl yourself
And your uncleanliness into

That will remain impervious,
Unperturbed and unaffected
Nothingness, maybe worship that.

Neuronal Soul

A behavioral science

Writer of renown has fun

With depicting decisions

As contests among neurons,

And your moral decisions

As being taken at risk

Of your neuronal soul. Nice.

Which soul would you rather risk,

Neuronal or immortal?

The latter hazards nothing.

The former risks a lifetime

Of agenbite of inwit.

On that head, why not picture

Each neuron as a creature,

Wild synapses for its hair?

The world is rich with one-celled

Life forms, and cancer can launch

From one rogue cell, so why not

Go the whole hog, calling all

Cells souls? Not all life forms. Cells.

All cells souls and all souls cells.

There you go. Now it makes sense,

This business of lives with souls,

This talk of heaven and hell.

Every cell is immortal,

Every cell that ever was,

And Earth’s just a proving ground

In which all cells are tested

To send to heaven or hell,

And you, by entertaining

Heretical truth like this,

Put half your brain at risk of

Losing its neuronal souls.

Teeth Outside of the Body

That’s how one paleoanthropologist
Describes early stone tools, and the metaphor
Holds its cutting edge down to the present day.

But not teeth only. Language made memories
Outside of the body. Symbols and writing
Made populations outside of the body.

The latest fun is with making thoughts themselves
Outside of the body, as well as making
Outside-of-the-body experiences.

The body, of course, still trundles along, aches,
Hungers, blood and all. The extracorpsical
Teeth, tongues, muscles, thoughts, and experiences

Haven’t yet gotten together to figure
Out how to get on with things without body,
But we’re chewing on it. We’re chewing on it.

Our Lying Mind

Is there any other kind?
Imperfect imitation
Requires facts and lies combined,

And mind without imperfect
Imitation can’t manage
Ratcheting innovation

Or an imagination.
Liars calling out liars
Is jujitsu for the mind,

Subtly throwing weight around
Getting just the right handhold
To take your opponent down.

It’s sport, it’s competition,
It’s healthy exercise.

One Dark Ruin Hurled

When poets aren’t composing
For lovers, wished-for lovers,
Or friends they won’t see again,

When they aren’t remembering
Childhood mistakes or abuse,
Or the cruel things said to them,

When they aren’t taking notice
Of the landscape around them,
Its creatures or its seasons,

They tend to swivel the lens
Toward more general things,
Surveying whole histories,

The past as single pattern
Repeated to abstraction.

In Favor of Crimes Against Nature

Nature invented
Criminality,
Indirectly, sure,
But definitely.

Nature invented
Humanity and
Then humanity

Invented nature
And crimes, and contrasts
Between your nature

And nature’s nature,
And if you just can’t
Escape your nature,
Your crimes are nature’s.

Liquid Nonlinearity

You’re the sweet spot—
Complex enough
To fascinate,

Not so complex
That chaotic
Oscillations

Lead to collapse.
Here’s the question—
Are we, too, sweet,

Not too sweet but
Sweet enough that
We’ll get through this?

The human world
In many spots
Aches in its joints,

Teeters, crumbles,
Injures itself,
Close to collapse.

Some behaviors
Are chaotic
And violent,

But will it burst?
Will it remain
Interesting

Enough without
Spiraling off?
Are you still sweet?

Ginormously Fantabulous Grundles of Words

Some words are so wonderfully clumsy
And ugly that despite their concrete lack
Of specific suggestion they can be

Memorable in themselves. You recall
The school friend overfond of ginormous,
That time a writer acquaintance dismissed

Another author by grumbling, I don’t
Think her writing’s all that fantabulous,
The professor who made sweeping gestures

While frequently deploying the odd phrase,
There are grundles and grundles of data!
There’s a Klein bottle quality to these

Clunkers with built-in intensifiers.
Gigantic is gagging on enormous.
Fantastic’s half swallowed by fabulous.

Great bundles collapse into each other,
Too massive to keep discrete. Fusion words,
Overstuffed portmanteaus of abstraction,

Hideous really, without referents,
Turning into more of themselves, until
They actually stand free from reference

And become vivid in their garish way,
Excess words of excessive insistence,
Bleak slag heaps of insect ecosystems.

Contrasting Views of Babylon in Spring, by Those Who Were There

With wealth and splendor

Befitting mankind

There on the poplars

We hung up our harps

Babylon’s river

Waters the pastures

Our captors asked us

For songs, songs of joy

Soaks the reed thicket

Fields sprout with new growth

Our torturers cried

Come give us a song

The meadows aglow

The barley springs up

Daughter Babylon

Doomed to destruction

Thanks to your waters

The grain is piled high

Happy is the one

Who will repay you

The grassland grows tall

The flocks roam and graze

Happy is the one

Who grabs your infants

Water of wisdom

Lavishes the land

And dashes their soft

Bodies against rocks

Snow on the Steps

Nothing erases an action.
Erasures are actions added.

Forgetting things that have happened
Is one of those things that happen.

Nouns will vanish but verbs will last.
The past elaborates the past.

Rabbit Coughs Up Another Top Hat

Any simulation is capable
Of violating itself, of being
Violated by whatever runs it.
There are no rules outside of games, as rules
Are breakable. What has happened isn’t.
Therefore, this is not a simulation.
This totality of what you study
And call the known universe never breaks
Frame, is anything but a rule-bound game,
Is exactly whatever games are not,
Antithesis of the simulated.
But that does still leave you a mystery.
Given the universe is as it is,
How could your simulations have emerged?

To a Child on the Threshold

One day, maybe soon, you will
Stop growing. One day, maybe
Soon, you will begin to age.

Take courage. You will never
Live a day that isn’t new,
That doesn’t add another

Collection of new moments,
Growing piles of what’s happened
To you, growing all your days.

Adults Who Never Returned

Meaning means taking sides.
If you can’t find a side
To take, someone to boo

And someone to root for,
It’s hard to pay enough
Attention to make it

Really mean anything.
When the Lisbon earthquake
Horrified everyone,

People rushed to find fault
As cause of the fault line,
But it frustrated them,

Everyone but Voltaire.
Earthquakes are all like that.
Blame builders, blame people

For living there, blame sin,
Cheer God for making plans,
But the earth quakes and quakes.

Every year, a certain
Percentage of people
Survive disaster, but

Are forced away from homes
To which they will never
Return. Root for them, or,

Better, uproot yourself,
Not from place, from finding
Meaning in who should win.

No Creed Can Be All Belief

Who among you doesn’t live
In a world of half-belief?
Can you step out of the game?

You can. You know precisely
Where each game begins and ends.
That knowing makes it a game,

Whether it is make-believe,
Theatrical performance,
A sport, or legislation.

But you can’t get past knowing
Of the existence of games
Of the importance of games

And, frankly, language is one
And not just storytelling.
When drugs or awe touch people,

It’s memorable in part
Since even language recedes.
Without words no half-belief,

Which is a relief, which feels
Like real belief at last, but
You know you have to come back.

The Sum of All Possible Worlds

Feynman’s spin on Pangloss,
Which doesn’t guess this world
Must be the best, just sum

Of all the rest, has had
Considerably more
Success. The ultimate

Path would blend everything
Into one integral,
Cosmos caught in its net,

But no one’s quite there yet.
All possibilities
Are real, but some more real

Than others. Add ‘em up,
Infinities of curves
Summing into straight lines.

The action of the known
Is key, but infinite
Fields are never easy.

Imaginary time,
Space-time as finite grid—
But what exactly is

Possible in all this?
Time is formidable
Even in triangles,

And the tools to tame it
Yield absurd convictions
That only time will tell.

Talayotic

So one island population
In the Mediterranean,
In the Bronze Age, good with slingshots,

Notably avoidant of fish
Despite their sea-girt surroundings,
Eschewers of the potter’s wheel,

Managed to haul huge stones up ramps
To make large, t-shaped megaliths
That later peoples named taulas,

That is, tables, so-called because
Later peoples believed only
Giants could have made such structures

And must have used them for dining,
Since giants would surely prefer
To eat at giant-sized tables.

Stop there. What is it with people
Being so awestruck by themselves—
Again and again inventing

Wild stories about gods, giants,
Advanced, lost civilizations—
Incredulous that simple folks

Could have raised those statues, temples,
Aqueducts, highways, pyramids,
Etc., etc.?

Maybe there’s truth in such nonsense,
In that what populations learn
To accomplish thanks to language

And cultural inheritance
Exceeds what any brain could learn
From a single human lifetime,

And when a culture goes, that goes.
Plus, every culture has its own
Skills, which it takes as its birthright,

But is gobsmacked by the others.
How could they know how to do that
When they didn’t know our basics?

They must have been a giant race,
Or they must have had black magic,
Or maybe they were aliens.

Ask people why people are smart,
And they’ll rattle blather at you.
You don’t know what you are, do you?

Sonneto Lazaretto

Three or four little rooms
Ending where a couple
Links arms just outside them,

Or else two little rooms,
One a little larger,
And no couple at all,

All inside, like closets,
Like drawers slid in the chest
Of a snug little song.

Small wonder roars will want
Out of quarantine while
Small sounds feel most secure,

Most contented confined
By the precise device.

Words Are Letters

From ghost to ghost
Hand to hand and
Throat looped to throat

The words wind round
Like squirrels on trees
Vines on their trunks

Lines looped on lines
Dear ghost dear ghost
Hope you are well

I am thank you
And you as well
The trees don’t mind

The trees were mind
Once all words now

The Demon’s Translation

He cleared his throat.
In the middle
Of life, I found
That I was lost

In a dark wood.
I have lingered
Since then, hoping
For some kind soul

To come along
And show me home.
Now and again,
It dawns on me,

This is my home,
My punishment
For those damned poems.
Then I forget.

Our Glass

Something so closed it opens on you,

Wrote Barbara Wuest of a window

In an issue of Paris Review.

Save the line and preserve the phrasing,

Since it feels apt for more than windows--

Everything in the world, for instance,

From whatever position you take—

The beyond-conversational world,

The world beyond shame and confession,

The world that does not come with stories

Shaped for easier understanding,

Something so closed it opens on you.

A Hollowed Stone

A geologist writes about bones
Petrifying, returning to rock,
And the stray minerals in your bones

Almost ache at the thought. Awareness
Balks. Awareness won’t be permitted
To go on through the transformation,

Nor to come back on the other side.
That’s the thing with fossils. They don’t talk.
They may be packed with information,

And you may invest them with meaning
And claim that they, figuratively, speak,
But they don’t bewail their outcast state.

Awareness may lurk within skull bones,
But nothing much haunts a hollowed stone.