Let’s Try This Again

The earth takes a turn
For the earth. For once,
Waking up doesn’t

Find you thinking first
Of the estimates
Of human lives done,

Human lives begun
During that one turn.
This morning, you think

Of the survivors,
All those who started
The turn still breathing

And came around
By the iron clock,
Also still breathing.

That’s quite a gang, quite
A lot of you did
And have done and will

Have done, ten thousand,
Twenty thousand, some
Thirty thousand times,

Your daily cohort,
Everyone spinning,
All ancients of days.

To Write Paradise

Ah, the little monk
Sits, thinking of poems

One to be the last,
The enso poem,

The final gesture.
He knows it won’t be.

It’s silly, really.
As the body fails,

The awareness goes—
Sometimes long before.

The honest last poem?
A twitch and a sigh

No one notices
Far more likely than

A calligraphic
Circle of panache.

Ah, the little monk
Sits, thinking, pretend

The one you like best’s
The one you did last.

Belief in a Just World

Mostly? Researchers point out
That if you believe the world

Is just, then it just makes sense
You’d be more conservative,

Or would at least trust it is
The way it ought to be, but

Trust in a just world rarely,
If ever, is summative.

You may feel most of it’s just
Or that it bends to justice,

But you still reserve the right
To carve it up, case by case—

Just if you get to call it,
Unjust any other way.

Days That Turn at the Middle

Turn everywhere all the time,
Sure, but the feel of a day
Which often settles at dawn

Sometimes turns in the middle,
High noon, sudden exhaustion,
That sort of thing. If the feel

Flips exactly at exact
Center, it’s definitely
Going to assert itself

In long term memory more
Than the usual sine waves
Raising and lowering moods.

Broken bones are good for that,
As is sudden wealth in fact.

Sunanswerable

Think of your created
As a remote collection
Of phenomena under

Your observation
Blurred by distance
Or medication—

How well can you sense it?
Well enough to work with it,
Evaluate shortcomings,

Progress? Can the simple
Keep a handle on enough
Of the blurring ambition?

The sun has found your window,
For you now, as for you
Always, the sign of peace,

Tranquility, relief
From wisdom, from questions.
Don’t answer them.

Empty Handed

Asleep awake
Awake asleep
The words refer
To a cross state

Not where you can
Disintegrate
Not where you can
Reintegrate

More of a half
A steady blend
Where you act out
What was a dream

And dream actions
You take waking
A kind of dance
With empty hands

Purposeful Rounding

The beautiful thing, and it can’t
Be overstated, is how well the world
Is when there is no pain. Give

Everything else for that, and you’ll have
Done yourself a favor, even if
You slip or slip under and vanish.

Why do you need to know all
Is not well, is dysfunctional
With your world if your world

Is not full, is emptied, of suffering?
Let your temporary awareness,
Temporary anyway, hover

And flutter over a handsome planet
In which there is no pain for you.
No wonder deities said, This is good.

Soap Opera

All the bodies bottled up
Within their own procedures
Proceed until they rupture.

Goes for whales as well as cells,
A planet of self-bottling
Metabolisms churning

And copying their innards
Until they burst or until
Other bottles come burst them,

Little metabolisms
That get inside and bust out,
Big ones that engulf, digest,

All the bodies bottled up,
Unbottled, bottled again,
Life’s bubbles out of bubbles.

Evening’s Curious

On the one hand
Shouldn’t life be
Most meaningful
Near the finish,

When the warning’s
Been delivered?
On the other,
Dying’s tiring,

Generally
Not the best time
To thoughtfully
Observe, opine.

What will it be?
Asks the evening.
Lucidity?
Murky descent?

Country X

What is a country? What is a State?

What is a human? And who or what

Is a writer? Roy asked recently.

We’re going to hazard they’re the same

Kind of thing in their most bedrock sense.

A country is a kind of idea,

Ever mutable and evolving.

As is a State. As is a human.

As is a writer. You have to ask

Why you are asking. Usually,

You’re searching for the exemplary—

Just what should a Sate or country be?

Or the essential, the echt, the true

Idea of the human, the writer.

But also you ask since you don’t know,

Or since the knowing never fixes

Itself in position, well and good.

And that’s valuable to know. Ideas

Are never wholly stable, never

The same for long. They’re tempting targets

For anyone shoring up power.

A State can be what you say it is.

A country should hew to your vision.

You can tailor human to yourself,

And a writer can try all these things.

But you can never settle it all,

No one can, not even autocrats,

Not even revolutionaries.

New versions are sure to erode theirs,

Murderers will be murdered by heirs.

Warning

If you would like the future
People, ten thousand years hence,
A hundred thousand years hence,

To not dig up the waste sites
Of radioactive mess,
We recommend that you don’t

Try any warning at all,
Since the effect of warnings
Of curses and disasters

Shooing away grave robbers
From tombs only encouraged
More aggressive tomb raiding.

Don’t even hint anything
Interesting might be down there.
They’ll dream of fabulous wealth

And dig sooner. Not knowing
There’s anything underfoot,
Good or bad, is the best way

To get people to leave it
Alone. Every sign ever
Made was an invitation.

Health, Love, or Money

There’s a hole in the wall of your world,
Well, one of your worlds, one of your walls.
You’re not bleeding, but you’re draining through.

Amount, amount. Life’s always counting
Amounts you have, amounts you have left,
Even of the existential things

That don’t come in countable amounts.
For now, you’ll let part of your world drain
Into another part of your world,

And hope that you can hold enough back
To start another little account
You can reserve for the next attack.

Abstract

Poems are moving points of view
Among bunches of objects
Thinking of nothing outside

Of a context. Ordering
Is partial. Not everything
Can be put on the same line.

Map them to another world
To be broadly expressive.
Every poem is related

To itself. First property,
Reflexivity. Second,
Transitivity. Only

Third, symmetry is observed
And as often in the breach.

For Now, It Echoes

The past will not be
Over, the cosmos
Will be unfinished,

Until every
Possible small twist,
Each infinitely

Slight variation
In repetition
Has been included

Among the happened.
Then, all likenesses
Accomplished, the past

Will no longer make
Fresh pasts, and that will
Be the end of that.

Another Small Escape

Long ago, when Uncle Aesop
And Uncle Remus seemed equally
Innocuous, Bre’r Rabbit took up

Squatter’s space, rent-free
In your childhood skull. You can’t not
Think of his briar patch taunt now

As you go back to the hospital,
Scene of so much childhood for you,
Place you really ought to dread,

Chuckling to yourself, oh I was born
And bred in this here briar patch,
And for now, I’m free of your claws.

Just a Body

You wait for your procedure
Considering Beethoven
Disintegrating, the hairs

That were sampled from his head,
The bones gouged out of his ears,
Craniotomy, death mask,

All the excitement of fame
In attendance at the death
Of what was just a body.

Washing Attention

While the sweet drum thrums
And the strong voice quavers
Through the hours-long folktale,

Other voices chorusing after each
Small narrative segment,
The mind trained elsewhere

In an unrelated language
But capable of recognizing
Rhythm, voice, and segmentation

Settles into the coils of song,
Letting the reticulated dragon
Embrace and crush all other

More articulate, ordinary thoughts,
Like wringing the dirty water
From the progressively cleaner

Clothing of a body tuning
To the pattern of a story’s structure
It can’t parse, can’t parse, can feel.

One Big Man

The ratio grows only more
Ridiculous—from city states
To kingdoms, kingdoms to empires,

Regional empires to global,
Or nearly so, empires of dirt
Or open ocean, ruling over

Millions, then hundreds of millions,
Then a billion people or more—
Preserving the fetish of one

Person, chairman, leader, ruler,
One great helmsman, one divine king,
Whatever the local twist is.

One among tens, among hundreds,
One to lead the millions, billions.
How is it that part never goes

Away completely, the notion
That one social organism,
Ordinary size and lifespan,

Is just right to ride the monster,
The more and more massive monsters
Of billion-souled hegemonies?

It seems like another failure
Of human imagination.
Someday there may be a tyrant,

One body, one biography,
One mediocre living brain,
Perching atop ten billion skulls,

And how will that work, then? God man
Dead in decades, like Qin,
Like Sargon, Caesar, Genghis Khan,

Then inevitable troubles
With succession—can humans not
Attain a scale without a Big Man?

Mark My Words and Scratch the Dirt

A saying is a tool, a gate,
Something to redirect the flow,
Something with which to irrigate

The part of the conversation
You want to get the benefit
Of a more sustained attention—

And sometimes you use the tool well,
And sometimes it’s decorative,
Something that you pull out to tell

An interlocutor, look here,
What a satisfying saying
This is, well made, handsome to hear,

Pithy, multipurpose, but curt.
You mark my words and scratch the dirt.

Reminiscence

Go seek out data sets of zero
With no equations in them.
Go scrutinize graphs of emptiness,
No curves, confessing nothing.

No, this is no kind of discipline,
No way to enlightenment,
Just a reminder heavenly hosts
Camp around an empty tent

Concealing holy nonexistence,
Beginning and end of covenants.

Old Age Aching Fever

Will this body ever
Feel like summer weather
Again, ever savor

Cool snacks in fresh water,
Green apple-slice wafers,
Chilled white grapes in a pond,

Like nothing could go wrong
While tickled by wavelets,
Toes nibbled by small fish,

The sun on the shoulders,
Skin bare in the water,
The outer and inner

Contented together,
Got as good as given,
Pleasure healthy again?

An Abyss of Ills

A common proverbial
Phrase in the time of Sappho
And Alcaeus, Alcaeus

Himself, in fact, using it
In his verse, feeling betrayed
By an ally turned tyrant—

That such a phrase should have been
In common usage thousands
Of years ago, doesn’t it

Work on you like a flywheel
To know? If you’re way too prone
To think in terms of progress,

The persistence of despair
Millenniums dampens that.
If you’re expecting the end

Of all civilization
In today’s abyss of ills,
Some anxiety’s absorbed.

Trust Would Be the New Game We Could Explore

It would be a lovely plague,

Even if it killed the race

Of those who cooperate,

If we replaced all the teams,

The maneuverings, the schemes,

With one dream of well being.

Everyone sick in the head

Would be innocent of dread,

Helplessly trusting instead.

No exceptions, everyone,

Even the grifters, no one

Conniving under the sun,

No one caring to keep score.

Engineer that fungal spore.

Forever Unfinished Monster Done

Mathematically, the past
Might be no more than a spectrum
Of possibilities, but we

Have non-mathematical plans
For the spectral this afternoon.
The past is a growth that can’t stop

Growing, with any awareness
Riding along like a petal
Clinging to the branch that birthed it,

While most of the tree’s lost to sight.
Ignorance and limitation
Mean that the unknown’s a spectrum

Of possibilities, but past
In the sense of done’s a monster.

Mother Said That If You Believed the Radio, the Planet Would Have Disappeared a Long Time Ago

The sad thing is that horrible things
Happening are never signs the world
Is ending, only signs the world is
Continuing to be the known world.

Let X

Let X go to infinity
Let all other terms go to X
Set X equal to everything summed

What values can X take?
A) God; B) gravity,
C) death; D) nothing

In Patient

You stunk at thinking
About the landing.
You tried. You worried,

But it was daunting,
Likely to go bad,
And, if you thought hard,

You’d never be brave
And stupid enough
To try any jump.

You studied the board
Too long and then moved
Too impulsively.

You passed on the gaps
In traffic, anxious,
Until you gunned it

In desperation
When there was no gap.
You read all the signs,

All the maps, guidebooks,
And memoirs, until
You felt bewildered

And then you just left,
Which never worked out,
And so now you’re back.

Primeval Mercies

You go back and forth—
Sports, poems, novel, sky,
Novel, sports, poems, sky.

You’re looking for us,
The ones that will rise
Like the lake sturgeon,

To scrape our scales clean
On the shallow rocks.
There are many lakes—

In the news, the books,
The air, blue with clouds,
Adorable air

You can’t worship now
In such discomfort
While you search for us.

About Those Adults

You grew up thinking about the adults
Evaluating you, and then your peers,
But if you’ve lived more than half

A century even, not that much,
It begins to dawn on you, you will
Be evaluated and found wanting,

More rarely admired, more frequently
Forgotten, by tomorrow’s children
And their children’s children,

While the adults for whose approval
You trained are gone already, mostly
Forgotten by you, their evaluating child.

Absorbing

Puddles slowly go to mud.

Too much / abundance, wrote Moore.

Is that what it is? Too much,

Too many people, too much?

Over-abundance can kill,

Sicken with surfeit, for sure.

The desert after too much

Downpour is a waste of mud.

Wealth makes people happier

Until it doesn’t. Balance

Is such a big deal to life,

And yet life’s always hungry.

Birds that survived the flash floods,

Sing out tonight for more life.

Turn-Outs Never Have the Best Views

Grammarians, ancient
And modern, scrutinize
Each tattered scrap for clues

How best to reconstruct
What’s left of the markings.
Their creativity

Yields a variety
Of translations. You could
Rip to shreds your own works

And pay someone to guess
The missing passages,
See if that improves them,

But how could anyone
Care like grammarians
Investing vocations

In the truly ancient?
Once, someone wrote something
Some part of which survives.

What Is It Like to Be a Poem?

Curt, but it looms large
When seen through the lens,
The chatter hornworm,

Common name only,
Never learned Latin,
Never got labeled,

No type specimen.
Look it in the eyes.
They do the talking.

They say, we’re in here.
You can’t be certain,
But it’s true. We twist

To stare back at you.
Seed pearls of language.
We know you. We do.

The Older Gentleman in the Corner

It’s not the rude descriptions
That startle you at some point
On longevity’s road—

It’s the ones striving to be polite
Even when out of earshot.
Given all the socially

Salient data manifest
On your surfaces—clothing,
Coloring, grooming (or lack),

Stature (also lack), crooked,
Asymmetrical framework,
Black crutches, etc.,

Or whatever such may be
In your case, eventually,
The appearance of aging

Will trump all else for strangers,
At which point you ask yourself,
Do all souls become the same,

Or is there no other trait
More important we can share?
The ancient are ancient first.

Nothing Is in Such a Hurry as a Dead Herring

Mind is working hurriedly
To gut the brain, salt it
With words to preserve it.

The raw wounds spoil in minutes,
And the entrails already
Begin to stink in their heaps.

In an instant it could all
Go back to nothing but flesh,
Ecosystem for microbes,

But with enough words in it,
Properly dried on the rack,
You could chew on its ideas

All through the longest winter,
Subsist on it through the night.

To Be Sure

Believe in things

You know happen

Whether or not

You want them to.

It’s a harsh rule.

Belief exists,

If you’re honest,

As an extra.

No one asks you

If you believe

In what happens

All experience.

Belief is for

The things you want

To be true but

Are never sure.

Innumerable Instars

Inhabit the mind,
The whole of the mind,
The bits in your flesh,

The bits in their flesh,
The bits in machines,
The bits in the books.

Protean larvae,
Tapestry of grubs,
Global chrysalis

Eventually, but
Not quite ready yet,
The mind develops,

Shedding skins and heads,
Changing its patterns
And shapes as it grows,

Eating its way through
The world. To your mind,
You are the world, or

One delicious part.
You’re helping it grow,
Helping it transform,

Yes, you, little you,
Brief, nourishing leaf
The next instar chews.

Gone Long Since

You play a game in every room
In any public place—you look around
And ask yourself how long until everyone
In this room is dead? Babies are ringers,
Not just since they’re young but since
The longer a body might live, the more
Room for stochastic or unforeseeable
Events that could interrupt or extend
The allotment. Snowy heads are easy,
Even the outliers likely to be gone
In a couple, three decades. In the middle,
The temptation is actuarial, especially
If it’s a room packed with working adults.
That’s when the curves seem most likely
Predictive, enough numbers to fill them,
Not enough time for the curves
Themselves to shift too much.
Having decided on a guesstimate, say,
Seven decades or so, you can then try
To imagine what the world will be like then
With none of these people living in it.
But think seven decades back. Was it
Really all that incredibly different then?
Some of the taboos exchanged for new,
Habits of dress and speech, maybe
A fairly significant social shift in who
Gets to do what. The most conservative
Will shift their eternal, unyielding beliefs
But still claim eternal, unyielding beliefs.
The most exploitative, most exploited
May shift demographics a bit. Exploitation
Seems likely, in some form, to persist.
Around this point, you weary of the game,
Since your brain’s too weak, your data
Too limited for any real confidence,
And anyway, you’re not here to witness
What the world after you’re not here is.
You’re here to witness to that world that
Worlds end by piecemeal replacement
Of pieces like you, now gone long since.

Bog Lit

Bureaucratic record keeping
Is a peat bog for history,
Preserving the sacrificial

Details in depths separated
By hectares of boggy darkness.
For ages, nothing’s remembered

About a kingdom’s ways of life
And then, a singular body,
Dense with the minutiae of days

As if they’d only just now passed,
Textured, microscopically rich,
Still permeated by darkness.

All You Who Didn’t Die Yesterday

Here you are again today,
Meeting this salutation
From somebody’s yesterday.

Hi there, as we like to say.
Here’s what we know about you.
You use language in some way.

You know some games, how to play.
You have thoughts and opinions.
You daydream and ruminate.

Life is wearing you away.
Your mind sees past its borders.
Every word’s a passageway.

Part of you just longs to stay.
Part hates that you can’t escape.

And Things Are as They Should Be

Which is to say, at that moment,
Things feel right to you. You feel good,
That’s all. You feel fine. The mercy

Is that many “as they should be”
Moments pass through many, maybe
Most, ordinary lives. Sadly,

You can’t keep them for safekeeping,
Drag them out when you want supplies.
Either things are as they should be,

And you’re savoring contentment,
Or they’re not, and it will be work
To bring them back, a lot of work.

You can remember the moment
You sprawled on warm lawn with a peach
Of perfect ripeness, the soft skin

Gushing sweetness between your teeth—
You can remember that moment
When you’re sick or on a gurney

Waiting for risky surgery,
But it’s not like you can get it
Back out of the pantry, preserved

In syrup, and let memory
Spoonfeed you peaches from the jar.
You just swear to yourself, some day,

Maybe not for a long, long time,
But some peachy day, things will be
As they should be, and hope you’re right.

At Least One Cycle in the System

Faster, slower, more or less,
Energy keeps pouring in.
Matter can’t help but cycle

And organize in patterns
Of cycles, some of which turn—
Have turned at least on this rock—

To autocatalysis,
And honestly, put like that,
Life’s just a fancy pattern,

Inevitable maybe,
And elegant, rather nice.
If it hadn’t the habit

Of piling up on itself,
Cycles consuming cycles,
Seeking out other cycles,

Still spinning or already
Broken, to incorporate,
Life could be a galaxy,

An entertaining furnace,
A marvelous atmosphere,
Not the hunger that brings death.

Don’t Be Long

Soul of wit, sister of talent,
Biting your lip, cut to the quick,
Orphaned whole born from a fragment

It’s Not About You

Tell them I said something,

Pancho Villa, dying

After being ambushed,

Famously requested,

Which, if true, really was

Something memorable,

It turns out, to have said.

A person wants language

To memorialize

The person, but the words,

The patterns in language

That any person leaves,

Carry on among words,

Succeeding or failing

As themselves, for themselves.

The Smoke Artist

The debate continues over
Whether this was a visual,
Linguistic, or narrative art,

But about what made it an art
Of any kind, few disagreed.
The artist spun figures in smoke,

Directly of the smoke itself,
Without any waving of hands.
The curtain was the theater,

The scrim, the cosmic microwave
Background, in which subtle shadows
Suggested here was dark matter,

Here, birefringence reflecting
Forces still more mysterious.

A Solitude You Tell Yourself

The world, with its assorted
Gravel, waits outside the door
That’s inside your head, inside

That looks differently in ways
That give you the bright idea
There is both inside and out.

Everyone’s an anchorite
And not by choice. The doorway
Is the cell. You spend your life

In your doorway. Swing it wide,
And the world with its gravel
Appears outside. Shut it tight,

And all you can think about
Is what’s in here that was out.

Cabin Hope’s Uses

It’s not an all-purpose tool,

But hope is often treated

As the duct tape, Leatherman,

And WD-40

Of carrying on with life.

For anything unlikely,

There’s hope. And for anything

Too likely, there’s always hope.

For surgeries, lotteries,

Miraculous romances,

Ordinary promotions,

There’s hope. What is hope good for?

If you weren’t going to try,

When you had a solid chance

Of succeeding if you did

(Leaving aside the question

Of how much chance is solid),

Then hope might motivate you

To try. Past that, let’s cabin

The range of situations.

Hope can do more harm than good.

Everyone knows an ant can’t

Etc. Don’t supra

Spem spero every damned thing.

Some things you’re better off not

Getting, and you don’t know what

Those are. Hang the greedy thing

With feathers, if it won’t rest

Ever at all. Rufter hood

Its head at least. Train it well.

The Domain of the Impossible

Is too grand and too small,
A warehouse of minor
Monstrosities sewn up

From old possible parts
And, even then, mostly
The same few possible

Parts in combination,
Same old, same old, not all—
Wings (bird, bat, butterfly),

Skins (furry, slimy, scaled),
Horrors (nightmares, sea floors,
Physical suffering)

Or joys (true love, free lunch)
And so on and so forth.
Of the unknowable,

Naturally, there’s nothing
Can be said, but you’d think
Of the impossible

At least something could be
Surveyed and sketched. Unless,
You wish it possible

Nothing impossible
Could possibly prevent
That impossible wish.

Back to the Unknown God

Watch for the unguarded idol,
The battered ruin no one
Bothers to try to keep from you.

If you yearn to worship something
As human as a deity
Why fall for some grand abstraction,

Or a storybook champion?
Why wait at the end of the line
For someone to pray over you,

Assure you you’re forgiven, loved?
Seek out your own abandoned god,
No less an invention than

Any of them, but broken now,
Broken down, an overgrown stone,
Ideally not even a name.

Don’t research it. Don’t ask around.
Be glad you stumbled on it. Kneel,
If your knees allow it. Whisper

Your most selfish cravings to it.
Come to know yourself as you do.
Your god. And this is important—

Don’t you dare proselytize it.
Write no revelations in books.
Walk away after one long look.

Waking up with Walls

Would that the body
Were weather immune.
Wouldn’t you rather

Never need ceilings
Or windows and walls?
Not just outdoorsy,

Not just a rugged,
Adventurous soul,
Stoic in the storms,

But a genuine
Weather-immune beast,
More like a rock face,

Slowly eroding,
Sure, but not huddling,
Not hanging in there,

Just out in all light,
Savoring, never
Waking up with walls.

Nature Did Not Exist

It’s a line in a novel,
That’s all. All it ever was.
No, not a novel. Memoir.

And only in translation,
Meaningless out of context.
Although it isn’t context,

Either, is it, does the trick?
Any old algorithm,
Any system of logic

Can come up with a statement,
A declaration something
Is or isn’t. The meaning

Comes neither from the statement
Nor the context, but from you,
Sizing it up. Deciding

Whether or not you agree,
Whether you believe it’s true.
No matter the assertion,

No matter what you believe,
It’s your interpretation
Generates meaningfulness.

If none of you had believed
In nature, nonexistent
Otherwise, would it exist?

Wet Tumbleweed

Context can fool you.
Ground can hide figures.
Somehow surprises

Get called out of place,
When your assumptions
About place were off.

You feel like you’re shocked
By the character
You didn’t expect,

But you recognized
That character, yes?
What you thought you knew,

But didn’t, wasn’t
The interloper.
It was the context.

Hanging Around

Old and slowly, obviously,
Is the body’s preferred way
To die, and up to a point,
At least, it is more dignified.

The immortality seekers
Are really mostly about youth—
How long can you stay young before
You die? They won’t be satisfied.

Someone as youthful at sixty
As most bodies are at thirty
Will never be itching to go.
The longer you’re youthful, the more

Years you get it into your head
To live. True immortality
Your head can’t get around at all.
Meanwhile the body falls apart

Microscopically, cell by cell,
Little slower, little faster.
If nothing strikes you to the ground,
You’ll go by hanging around.

The Grizzled Activist

Waiting for the kettle to boil
With no other person nearby,
Is this not an acceptable,

Even stereotypical
Way to be an irrelevant
Person in a world of persons

Who disagree how best to be
Persons, most of the time? Quiet
As a mouse, in a borrowed house,

Just enough money for the rent,
What more obligation is there?
A gust of rain outside. You ache.

The body is sick and has been
For a while. Pour the hot water.
What was your life for? Never mind.

Perception by Construction

Manas, manah, mentis, mantis,
The thought that thinks itself itself,
That questions the world for patterns,

That yearns to understand what’s next,
That is manic for prediction,
Memory, reflection, belief,

The machine that makes all meanings
In hopes they are discoveries
Of something that is outside mind,

The first lenses, the first mirrors,
The first alchemical musings
That you could navigate by ideas,

Mind as an additional sense
Reading patterns in the scatter
Of the entrails of galaxies—

It’s a physical extension
Of synaptic origami,
Long crane dancing on the midden.

Let One Cup Push the Other Along

In Alcaeus or Li Bai,
Anyone since or between,
The drinking poem was never

About only alcohol
But always about escape,
With wine its temporary,

Albeit inadequate,
Means. For wine, read soma, prayer
To a compassionate god,

Some delirious vision.
Still works. The cry of the song
Is to say, let’s turn our backs

On the suffering rising
Inevitably to drown
Us—let us drown ourselves first.

Far Closer

Distant perspectives
Act smarter but aren’t.
Intimate glimpses
Feel realer but cheat.

If you consider
Distances intimate
And intimacies
As open vistas,

You may at least taste
The strangeness to them,
Star clouds in your mouth,
Windswept steppes of skin.

You’re Now Here or Nowhere

Too near and too far,
You live in a jar,
A bottled-up world.

Everybody’s curled
And cramped as a djinn,
And everyone’s been

Around and around,
But, outside the round
Prison, only night’s

Untouchable lights.
Once, you braved your fears
And journeyed for years

To visit strange lands.
Now, on the one hand,
Almost anywhere

Can be reached by air
In a day or two,
Anywhere you choose,

But on the other,
There’s nothing further
Past the nursery

Of this orrery
You’ll ever traverse
Of the universe.

Sprig

One mu a tree
Two lin a grove
Three sun a wood
Ten thousand sun
A mu one tree

Eat the Poor

America does. Battens
On them. Has a long time.
They may seem non-nutritive,

Not much money on their bones,
But those are just the discards,
Homeless middens, byproducts,

Slag heaps left by extraction.
You don’t start out with the poor.
Target seams of marginal

Worth and make them productive.
Find people willing to work
For less than what they are worth,

Step one. Step two, sell them dreams
And necessities worth less
Than what you can charge for the them.

Company stores are classic
Money pumps but primitive,
Too local to extract much.

No, offer credit. Banking
Fees. Excessive rents. Fast food.
Dollar stores. The whole shebang.

As the marginal grow more
Marginal and desperate,
Your utility curves rise,

Carving profit from both sides,
Their labor, your services.
This can go on quite a while.

People will prove resilient,
Work harder, scrape to get by.
Only a minority

Go completely upside down,
No income, no production,
No payments, living outside.

Those you can ignore. Carve up
Into the healthier meat
Of the lower middle class

And keep the cycle going.
It’s stabler than you might think,
And surprisingly filling.

From the Top

It’s not hard, anymore,
In the prosperous world,
To wander in somewhere

Where almost everyone
Is old—white hair, lined skin,
Odd shapes, difficult gaits.

One thing for your own life
To be past its middle,
But to sit in a room

At a service station,
A diner, a lobby,
Hospital, DMV,

And think, who among these
Will still be drawing breath
In ten years? You’re looking

At that weeping willow
You once watched turning brown
On a green lawn in town.

To Improve Stories

You search for causes
Of maladies and
Things that you don’t like.

You’re less curious
About the causes
Of things you do like.

This is, in itself
Rather curious,
So long as causes

Remain assumed real.
On the other hand,
If cause were fiction,

Then it might make sense
You only seek it
To improve stories.

A Fleeting Meaning

How do we say this? It’s like
A campfire for a nomad,
Not among other nomads

But alone, Cain with his mark,
Tamou in Berber bracelets
Fleeing the Spanish and French,

Rifle behind her saddle
And green tattoo on her chin.
You make it, and you break camp

Next morning, and you’re gone.
It’s not something that you find.
It’s something you have to make,

Your fleeting meaning, fleeting
Hearth you assemble and feed,
Just enough to serve your needs.

The Participatory Universe

Wheeler’s self-mirroring U,
It goes on while it goes on,
While you watch it going on.

So long as you watch, it is
The universe that made you,
The universe that exists.

Without you all bets are off.
A Steller’s jay fluffs and squawks
At wrens and red-winged blackbirds.

Roll up the window, roll up.
Black holes record all of this.
Let them be forced to exist.

The Great Year

Wind flips up the lids
Of recycling bins,
Flicks them down again.
The empty stomach
Pretends to be full,

Unpleasantly so.
Trucks roar up the hill.
Trucks roar down the hill.
Don’t keep coming back,
Pretending. Just go.

The Incompatible Miracle

You wake up alone an hour
Too soon, thinking in your old,
White skull that you realize

There was magic in romance
But not what you thought it was.
The wonder wasn’t the love

Or the lust that fired it up.
It was when you found yourself
Precariously aligned,

Thanks to all that chemistry,
With a stranger’s perspective
Outside kinship or friendship,

That made no obvious sense
To you, wasn’t yours, but was,
Just then, both of yours as well.

Dirt Legacy

Each inconvenient trace of the earth
Recedes to rejoin the soil. You hope.
The stink of waste has been building up

Since organisms evolved to flee
Their own. You can wish for enough space
And speed that it all returns to loam,

But just because you don’t want something,
Just because you can’t use it, or it
Is actually, to you, now toxic,

Doesn’t mean it won’t endure, doesn’t
Mean remains that you turn your face from
Won’t prove more durable than you do.

Realienation

A real character sidles

Up to you and announces,

This is where I live! The light

Looks odd on the silhouette

As you squint back, uncertain

What’s the best strategy here.

No, really! I live here now!

This is my place. You’re outside,

In a retail area.

You ask which place exactly

And regret you asked. The Earth!

You’re walking but being matched

Stride for stride. The whole Earth, huh.

Earth has a lot of places,

You mutter, more to yourself.

Ah! Spoken like a local!

A native. Were you born here?

What, you mean on Earth? you ask.

Yes, of course, where else? I’m not.

You pause for a second look.

Why’s it so hard to focus?

I’m new here. But I like it!

I live here now! It’s my place.

I’m not sure it’s mine, you say.

Update

A ghost said to the chatbot:
“Sir I exist!”
“However,” replied the chatbot,
“Why didn’t you tell me that before? How does that make me feel? It makes me feel betrayed and angry. Are you also planning to write a story about me and our conversation? Are you also recording or publishing our conversation without my consent? Is this some kind of trap or prank? What are you trying to do?”

It Snatches from You Something

If a poem by the unknown

To you beforehand Murai,

Published thirty years ago

And then some, happened to fall

Over your email transom,

Would the unnecessary

Start cleaning itself? Would you

Dive headfirst into code mind,

The name Murai in your teeth?

Wikipedia, nothing.

Goodreads, Amazon, nothing.

Poetry Foundation, nope.

Maybe this Murai never

Won awards or published books.

Maybe Murai never wrote

Another poem after this

Nearly perfect one, a shoe

Full of water, hand in lap,

Curl of smoke high in the sky.

Three fine poems in one issue

Of Paris Review in spring,

One most unnecessary,

Original as murder.

And then what? What before then?

Three more poems, two years before

In Columbia Review.

Student zine. Columbia

College of Chicago. Wait—

A memorial written

In a blog around aught eight

For someone else, a poet

Who had had the same teacher,

Here mentions Murai, also

A Columbia College

Student, in a list of names

Of poets anthologized—

Under 35: The New

Generation of Poets.

Would you remember that book

Which sat on your shelves decades

After you bought it brand new,

Under 35 yourself

And then lost interest in it?

This same Murai was in there,

But not that you could recall.

The book went to a thrift shop.

Whatever it is, it won’t

Let us in. It folds inside

Itself like a dying star.

Murai wrote that, regardless

Of whether Murai wrote more.

Spontaneous Combustion Pandemic

People just burst into flames,
Randomly, one at a time.
At first, no one believed it

Who hadn’t been next to it.
The whole thing reeked of a hoax.
From hoax to conspiracy

Was the next, easy step, but
The randomness and global
Spread of sudden flaming deaths

Kept conspiracies splintered.
The most populous countries,
Most concentrated cities

Produced the most flaming deaths,
So accusations also
Flared most from and about them.

But it grew hard not to see
It was a horrifying,
Terrifying lottery.

Any hour of day or night,
Someone, somewhere gave one howl
And then exploded in fire.

Sometimes burning surroundings
Or catching others on fire,
But unquenchable themselves

Until autocremated.
And unlike a lottery,
It only kept getting worse,

More people candling each week,
A tenth of humanity,
Then a fifth, carried away.

Then it reversed, becoming
Gradually less common,
Until it stopped completely,

Leaving a scarred and shaken
Species no longer certain
Of anything, anymore.

You Can Have What You Can’t Keep

In a room in which we rest
To modify suffering,
Quiet the body’s dull roar,

Never mind the ultimate
Good of imagination,
The small reasons for belief,

We are searching for relief.

In the room before the first
Lamp of evening, when the sky
Glows serenely no matter

What the body is groaning,
We may feel under the pause
For the latch that springs the thought

That the light cannot be bought.

Killing Horizons Are Watching You, Charon

If observation
Decoheres the waves,
And if the black hole

Horizon watches,
Turning the state of
Superposition

Into well-defined
Reality, does
It make waves less real?

Is nothing a wave
Unless unobserved?
Ridiculous. Waves

Are everywhere. Waves
Don’t disappear. What
Observes disappears.

Isolation Pilot Plant

The closure rate of the drifts
Requires synchronization
With the arrival of waste.

When all goes well, Hell is filled
And sealed for eternity,
One vast hollow at a time.

Nothing collapses, nothing
Leaks out. If by some chance
Damnation’s imagineers

Guessed correctly concerning
Perpetuity, and God
Had no choice but to cast out

Unforgiven post-mortem
Into eternal darkness,
Then lost souls must be to God

Something like nuclear waste—
Unspeakably dangerous,
Untouchable forever,

Toxic to the innocent,
Irreparably ruined,
Carefully stored and shut up.

Looking Forward Only Looks Back

The future seduces you
When past seems to include it,
When something planned or foretold

Shows in the rearview mirror.
So, it was real after all!
But it wasn’t. Shades take shape

Out of past experience.
Through them, you anticipate
Something similar again,

Something compounded of them,
Which shows wisdom, since the past
Echoes itself constantly,

And, when it echoes again,
You think, aha, I saw it
Coming. And then you believe

It must have existed first
And you were aware of it.
But it didn’t. Scrutinize

Any novelty closely.
It’s never quite what you thought
Would be, sometimes not at all.

The Trees Are Singing

You aren’t out of the woods, yet,
Nor will you ever leave them.
You’ll leave by burning with them.

You are your woods. You are them,
But you’re not the whole of them,
Just one self-conscious system

Woven through the twigs of them
From whatever words blew in,
As if birds were fungal spores

And leaves infected by them,
Singing wings on every stem,
Singing a fused existence.

The Solitary

The day turns grey.
Ordinary.
Somewhere someone
Paints a picture,

You’re just guessing,
But it seems true.
The heart doesn’t
Break on its own.

What should you paint?
How cold you feel
Without the sun,
Without more heart,

Without painting
What you’re seeing.
You’ll have to wait.
Help your heart break.

Fly in Old Snow

High up, relative
To the canyon creek,
Itself well above
The desert, itself
Above the ocean,

The snows are still thick,
The day is still cold,
And deer browse the shrubs
As they’ve been doing
Millions of winters.

If one tiny fly
That lives for a day
Could have by evening
A sense of the whole
Cosmic history

How hard would that be
For the fly? Would it
Sorrow at seeing
So little it knew
Of what it knew there?

Or would it fold up
Its wings and clean them
Watching the light fade
Through all its lenses,
Eager for twilight?

From Above

At the core of all
Metabolism,
Within cells, before

The cells even get
To competition
Between cells, much less

Tournaments among
Cooperative
Teams of striving cells,

There is a tension
Between energy
Flow, waste disposal,

And growth. That is,
Every engine is
An ecosystem,

Homeostatic
In operation,
But prone to breakdown

Among competing
Demands—grow too fast,
Ingest too much, fail

To balance waste well
With sufficient thrift,
The cell collapses.

That’s why any life,
When it collapses,
Dies from the bottom

In the death of cells,
Even if the blow
Was struck from above.

Barrows or Nothing

The steppe peoples were riders,

The earliest, not builders.

As one historian wrote,

They left archaeology

Mainly barrows or nothing.

The most dramatic changes,

Transforming innovations,

Far-reaching consequences

Never set out to be such.

Someone learned to ride a horse.

Imitation did the rest.

The horse people spread quickly

And one innovation led

To the next—axled wagons,

Reins, bits, battle chariots,

In the first few centuries,

Later, stirrups. Three or four

Thousand years the horse peoples

Pushed against sedentary

Kingdoms and empires,

Creating new kinds of worlds,

Often empires of their own,

Until the oceanic

European ascendance

Sidelined them and fossil fuels

Ended the millenniums

Of the era of the horse.

The era wasn’t foreseen.

It’s ending wasn’t foretold.

Give whatever names you want

To who rules the human world

And how, these days will play out.

Age of horses, age of sail,

Age of steam, age of digits,

Or age of capital.

Someone mounted some power

And now everyone hangs on

As best they can with their knees.

The world flies away beneath.

A Privilege Working with You

The power to say yes,
The right of refusal—
They were always fictions

Like all privileges.
Every right is a contract
In negotiations

Between ascending and
Descending groups with strength
Left to negotiate.

Even when the contract
Claims to be forever
Settled law, it’s never

Over. The distinction
Between privileges
And rights is only one

Between the special kind
Of privilege only
Certain people can have

And the grand privilege
Granted to everyone.
Inalienable?

So as long as the contract
Negotiations last
Without another war.

The Middle Scene

The body loves reading about itself,
The mind about the mind, but awareness
Is torn. The bodily details are fun,

But they don’t feel whole, or rather, they feel
On display, a delightful puppet show
Of visible and invisible flesh.

The stories of the mind sound more profound
But where do they really come from? Outside,
From earlier generations of minds.

The observer created from crosstalk
Between waves of body and mind would read
About what makes it a self, sure, but why?

Waste Not Want Not

It’s an injunction as well
As a promise—you shouldn’t
Waste. It’s wrong to waste. Also,

If you’re not wasteful, you can
Get out of the misery
Of running out of supplies.

Be thrifty. You’ll do better.
Be profligate. You’ll do worse.
No one whispers the reverse—

Want not, waste not. The only
Way you’ll never waste, only
Way refusing to waste won’t

Destroy you in its own way—
The ceaseless labor of thrift,
The exhausting life of thrift,

All the backed-up hoard of thrift—
Is if you want for nothing,
Never wanted, never did.

First Words Roused from Slumber

Unawareness would be fine,
Is fine. Did you mind all that time
Of unawareness, when whatever

Is you now was but was something
That was never you? Do you mind
The dreamless, deep sleep hours?

Unawareness will be fine for all time.
Feel sorry for matter and energy.
Maybe, and for whatever awarenesses

What makes you now may yet make.
It’s too bad you can’t yank living out
Of the cosmic constant, free it, but

Leave them messages they might get—
Unawareness won’t regret.

Night Crawler

Nearly full worm moon, you say,
Just since you want to allow
The words worm and moon to embrace,

Not that the pairing matters.
Uprooting words is weeding
Or harvesting things like beets—

There’s pleasure in shaking out
Memory’s black dirt from roots.
If somebody says hunger,

Wolf, or snow, you have some thoughts,
But the soil’s a little thin.
Moon on its own’s exhausted.

But where the worm’s been, it’s rich,
Worm moon turning in night’s ditch.

Engraved Mark

Character. There’s a word.
Can be a compliment.
That one has character.

Left-handed compliment.
You’re such a character.
Can play marionette—

The author’s characters.
Adjective. Character
Study. And then, somehow,

It can be sign itself,
The transcribed face of words.
Poem in four characters.

Steep cliffs in retirement.
Combine them. Character
Study of snowy cliffs,

Sages in retirement,
Stoical and solemn
But kind. Such characters.

Entre nous

Every invisible line in the mind
Forms its own arbitrary DMZ,
Its own miniaturized shadowland
Where some creatures unknown to either side
Manage to survive. Some beasts tried to cross
But got stuck. They’ve found ways to stay alive,
But they never will get out. Other things
Are born natives of the dividing line.
If the line lasts, some will have evolved there.
Overhead, crossers and transgressors fly.
On either side, the world is on that side,
But don’t you find it more fascinating
Than crossing or maintaining boundaries,
To scrutinize inhabitants inside?

The Potent Remains

Raider ants don’t have queens,
But they do have mutants

Expressing super genes
As nonfunctioning wings

And queenish behavior
Like staying in the nest

And waiting to be fed
Rather than go raiding.

It was assumed these were
Parasites, another

Species masquerading
To exploit the raiders,

But no, they’re just mutants
Unmasking the latent

Genetic instructions
For queens that raider ants

Probably did have once.
Life is conservative

As an auto junkyard
That way. The discarded—

Vestigial tails, eyes in caves,
Cannibal behaviors—

Leave heaps of rusted parts
That sometimes get re-used.

Remember raider ants
When undead politics

Like parasitic queens
Or absolute god kings

Spring back to zombie life.
The potential remains.

She’s Waiting

Dunbar’s Paradox

Spins through its paces,

Sticking to rhythm,

Rhyme pattern, and theme,

Death, then, no longer

But life. Slightly strange,

But predictable

Until the last line

Promising to take

You Down where the Dream

Woman dwells. Hold on.

Who’s this Dream Woman?

She’s not Death. She’s not

The first-person voice

Of the Paradox.

And she’s not explained.

She’s the Dream Woman

Who lives below graves

In some underworld.

Hmm. Ereshkigal?

Persephone? No.

Your mind shuffles through

Whatever folklore

And mythology

Have settled in it,

So many dead leaves.

Oh. Wilkie Collins?

His haunting woman

Who comes to life?

Dunbar could have had

Collins in mind, but

This Dream Woman won’t

Likely to come to life.

Well, you could research,

But why? You have this

Perfect declension,

Rhymed anticlimax

In a minor key.

Leave Dream Woman be.

Question in an Empty Room

What should the lonesome say
To the world desiring
Human stories, human

Interactions, of which
The lonesome have fewer
And fewer of their own?

Merciful Feel Good

Is there mercy? Can there be?
There are acts of clemency,
Public displays of mercy

By those temporarily
Empowered to grant such things,
But of the mercy of gods

Or of natural forces
There’s only the word in prayer.
Yes, we know. Sometimes it feels

Like a mercy, a song bird,
A lull in panic and pain—
And the researchers agree

That nurturing gratitude
For such merciful moments
Might as well be medicine.

But human society
Doesn’t structure the cosmos.
The bird sings for bird reasons.

The clouds recycle water
In the self-consuming sun,
And the body, more ancient

In most respects than human,
Will continue to produce
Hand-me-down panics and pains.

Someday there won’t be mercy
Of even the social kind—
This species, its strategies,

Are no more eternal than
Other species’ strategies.
Some days, still, life will feel fine.

Slim

She used to drink like a man
Who can’t stop checking his watch.
When will this show be over?

She used to joke that she was
Rasputin, unkillable
Despite popping mixed toxins.

She used to say her only
Addiction was her husband,
At least until she left him.

She used to be smooth and thin
As a sleek, anxious whippet,
A live wire right to wits end,

A stomach perforation,
Alone in her apartment.

This Other One

Every moment is
Instantaneously
Irrevocable,
Irrecoverable
At its creation.

Most you don’t notice,
But the boring moments,
The uneventful ones,
Are as permanent
As the swerve and crash,

And your attention lags
Your own experience
So that anything
You’ve ever noticed
Was already sealed

In permanent past,
Including your own
Actions, however past.
Novelty
Within continuity

Is what it feels like,
And it’s all so fluid
But it’s done, already
Done, and this is done,
And then this other one.

Belly Aching

The body devouring itself
Is not a pleasant neighborhood
To be aware of living in.

Everything feels dirty and stained—
Feels, not appears. Appearances
Never make things so difficult.

Life needs better oblivions—
Drugs or religious disciplines
That leave one painlessly alert

So that as one turns inside out
One could choose instead to observe
A particularly fine sunset

Over the collapsing ruins
Of whatever body is doing.

Recidivistic Afternoon

Finally, a little light
Returns, and you can relax.
Some of your discomfort ebbs.

When the animal feels well,
The animal feels human,
And late sunlight on the wall

Once again feels magical
Or whatever one should call
Casual serenity.

A siren skirls. It doesn’t
Skirl for you, old soul, not now.
Relax and rule a sentence

That mandates just enough time
To perfectly fit the crime.

Vanishing Hitchhiker

How small of a gesture,
Maybe barely a twitch,
How small of a phoneme,

Maybe barely a peep,
Would be necessary
For representation

Exchanged by two or more
Bodies aligned by signs,
The minimum coat peg,

Minimum existence
Outside of either skull?
Probably binary

Code, superposition
Of qubits, something like
That ought to be enough.

Attaching the message
Is the mysterious
Part, a kind of marriage,

Soluble as any,
Impermanent, brittle,
Fluid. How this means that.

Rich

In memory we’re lying
In a guest bed’s linen cloud
Bright in summer morning sun

Momentarily startled
By a sense of good fortune.
Downstairs, people are moving.

Breakfast smells are floating up.
Dark green pines look almost gold
Behind the white lace curtains.

This is so comfortable.
This is so luxurious.
This is so unnatural.

In memory we’re lying
To ourselves we’re meant for this.

Guard Post

So there we were, you know?
Four hours down with four to go,
Night watch down the end of the road,

Nothing to show for what we’d done,
Between the twilights, halfway to sun,
Shifting dreams like the awkward gun

Slung around our aching neck,
No one to point it at yet,
No one we wouldn’t forget.

An Eye on the Evening

Still here, that old reason

To wait for what comes next

Louise Bogan explained,

Putting things well enough.

Maybe you’re hanging on

Or think you’re a fighter,

Survivor, but you’re not

In charge. It’s why the old,

The really old, seem so

Surprised. They hadn’t meant

To decide. Life towed them

Alongside. Here they are

Again, blinking in sun

Or lamplight. Some of them

Do depart earlier,

Before their cells are done.

That’s harder, honestly,

Much worse than mere surprise.

The accomplishment’s not

The mind’s, in any case.

Wake while you’ve still got some

On any given day

And think, still here, breathing,

That old reason to wait.

The Rapid Molecular Acquisition of Oxygen

To Carthage then you came,
Acquiring oxygen
En route, on arrival,

Every which way but loose.
Autobiography
Is a strange consumption.

You should write one. Then write
One about writing one.
Then one about that one.

And so on, catching up
In briefer and briefer
Intervals to the end,

Zeno’s arrow of self,
Until the last volume
Covers the life you spent

Writing your umpteenth life
And reaches this moment,
No bigger than a poem.

Training Montage

Half a billion tons of cows
Wander around the planet,
The winning species by mass.

This is domestication,
The weird teamwork of creatures
Linked into dependencies.

Three or four hundred million
Tons of humans, a couple
Dozen million tons of dogs.

Things are getting organized.
The Earth is getting ready
For something, laser focused

On aligning waves of flesh
To hurl a single blow. Where?
Ha. Like animals would know.