Rivet and Polish

The phrase floats down
Out of nowhere,
Out of thin air.

One imagines
A plane, maybe,
All those rivets,

Old style, gleaming
Aluminum
Nose to tail fin.

You ought to start
With your own life
Or someone’s life,

Something human
To begin with,
Maybe a scene

You make vivid
By your language,
Longing. But no,

You hang random
Phrases in air,
And then you wait.

Deep Forest Ecology

You’ve thought it before.
You think it again—
Humans are or are
Becoming the woods,
The dark forest now.

For now, the trees still
Far outnumber counts
Of squatty bipeds,
But numbers aren’t all.
Connections matter.

The underground nets
That sustain the woods
Are tearing even
As humans weave air
Into thought fungi.

What makes a forest dark
Is the density,
The parallel weave,
And human signals
Keep growing denser.

The dream’s hard to flee.
Other animals
And even the trees
Thrive only thriving
Inside of that dream.

If the dream eats you,
If it feeds on you,
If it cuts you down,
You’re going under,
You’ll be torn to shreds.

Adapt, adapt fast
Remaining creatures.
The ecology
Of the human woods
Is your forest now.

What, Are You Back Again?

However old you are,
People have died younger
Than you at this moment,

And people are dying
Younger than you somewhere
As you think about this,

And yet, on average,
You’re probably younger
Than most people at death,

And would feel a little
Cheated by terminal
Illness if you had one,

Maybe a lot cheated,
And you have been cheated,
As every life has been,

And maybe doubly so
By being capable
Of fantasizing life

Without death, beyond death,
Which for you would mean you
Never stopped returning

To awareness as you,
Full of your memories.
Go to bed. You’ll return,

Most likely, tomorrow,
And others will be dead,
Having died in your stead.

Everywhere in the Background

It is a very stupid

Animal, or a very

Bold one that cannot keep hid.

Being not stupid or bold,

Being fragile and unarmed,

You’ve spent your life lying low,

So low it’s not even clear

To those in contact with you

That you’re, in fact, in hiding.

You seem obvious enough.

You seem like you might even

Like a little attention.

This is an important part

Of being unimportant

And not at all suspicious.

Sometimes you mess up and take

Being inconspicuous

For granted. Nothing alerts

People to investigate

Like someone sitting wayside

Quietly, alone, too long.

Then you turn innocuous,

Preserving yourself from harm

By seeming sufficiently

Self-sufficient and harmless.

You fade back in the background,

In the background everywhere.

What It Meant

All the small
Things words do
In the hands

In the mouth
Lined straight out
In slow space

The oh! phones
The swooping
Shapes, but most

Of all, talk
That suggests
A person

Once wriggled
Around in
What it meant

Of Earth

Say lives are behaviors
Of Earth as awareness
Is a symbiotic

Behavior, performance
Of words, brain, and body,
Lichen-like thing you are.

Looking at invasive
Wildflowers by the wayside,
They could be minor thoughts

The planet is having.
You could be minor thoughts
The planet is having,

But why plump for easy,
Simple analogy?
The Earth is performing

Everything—the flowers
You can see from your seat,
The tattered woods, the fields,

And all the lives in them,
Including you and your
Awareness performance.

But this is probably
Not true, either. The flowers
Are striving to go on,

But is the Earth, really?
They are blue and purple.
What do you know of Earth?

Light Shadows

The dark ones get the goth attention,
But lighter shadows predominate.
Interference patterns in the light,

Do shades make poor metaphors when pale?
Think of them as being cast by words,
Phrases, shadows of significance.

They interfere with meaning’s pathways,
Shape the way clarification falls.
Without languages to throw shadows,

It would be all blinding life then night.
Ask any other brainy creature.
They can’t cast the shadows to reply.

Some phrases are thin and twiggier
Than aspens in winter. Their shadows
Are pale as pencil sketches in snow.

When people go on about twilight,
They mean they want meaning close to night—
Obscurity, clarification—

You get the visuals. Nearly pitch
And then the big reveal, the angel
Appearing to the humble prophet,

The alien illuminating
The hidden nature of the dark wood.
You can’t get that with paler shadows,

Phrases that shift the light a little
Bit less here, lesser there, plenty there,
The quenched disorder of adjacent

Possibles, as the complexity
Theorists’ jargon has it. Thin shadows
Can’t concentrate either light or dark,

And they feel weightless in consequence.
A coyote, however, quibbles
In that querulous coyote way,

Complete with high-pitched warble and yelp
From somewhere in the aspens, a lean
Sliver of less light in the daylight.

Old Fly

By the window, fly in sun,
Rubbing its legs in the light—
Shadows shift. It notices,
Flies to the next pane of light.

Bosses by the Reservoir

Find a moment of comfort
And start writing, right away,
Before the comfort fades. Wait.

Think of a worthy topic.
That’s either impossible,
Since no three humans agree,

Or too easy—everything
Is worthy, the war, the breeze,
The privileged picnickers

Escaping the summer heat
By the reservoir, knowing
Themselves lucky to be here

Though they’ll grow a little wild
If you suggest that others
Might have been more deserving.

That’s it, isn’t it. Fortune
Feels worth gratitude, boasting,
But competition recoils

At admitting that unearned
Could be synonymous with
Being undeserving, too.

Let us be lucky. Let us
Revel in our gratitude
For good fortune, but never

Ask us to confess we’re less
Deserving. And that’s correct.
That’s not hypocritical.

Good fortune’s always lucky
Given all are equally
Undeserving / deserving,

Except for maybe the rare
Pitied or wildly admired
Who can be more credited.

Meanwhile, aren’t we fortunate,
Deserving of this picnic,
This food, these trucks, boats, beers,

And don’t we know it, even
As we contemplate the end
Of creature comforts, knowing

It’s back to work tomorrow
Where none of us are bosses.
Now there’s another topic.

Dissipating

Hot twilight in a heat wave,
What is there to talk about
Outside that isn’t the heat?

Who has energy to talk?
You wait for liberation
Less from the heat than from work,

From obligation, from need
To let mediocrity
Rule over necessity,

As it almost always does.
Someone sneezes. The song birds
Fall silent. No one admits

How much longing for breezes,
From the canyons, from the free
Of further obligations,

From small probabilities,
Motivates continued waits.
You’ll just have to dissipate.

Features of the World

You hear the devil purring
In the wind around the roof.
Charming idea, the devil,

Demon, human in all but
Exaggerated features,
One more way to see yourself

In the world that isn’t you,
And maybe that’s the reason
For the demon, who is you

But with features of the world.
You hear the devil purring
In the hot wind past your roof.

Levity, Brevity, Gravity, Etc.

At bottom, it’s just gravity,
Of course, but that dark love allows,
In fact, insists, on making waves

And sedimentary layers,
Such that some loves are crushed to it,
And others released as bubbles,

Not because gravity lets go,
But as it shuffles its longing,
Letting the light slip from the dense.

Levitation is ensuring
That you have less for gravity
To love than the surrounding rest.

Let gravity discover you,
However—rediscover you—
And brevity’s your terminus.

Heat Wavering

Max Parrish clouds flush with dawn
Above the dun desert cliffs.
No rain forecast, but they’re nice.

You never know with artists—
The corniest whimsy dreams
Prepare you to re-see things

You’ll meet later, and so do
The sternest experiments.
You’ve seen Rauschenberg in ripped

Remnants of subway posters,
Down to minimal colors.
It tells you the world’s not world

Until your human contacts
Shape the way you understand
Whatever you’re looking at.

The uninformed is blurry
Since if there’s one thing culture
Does it’s sharpen boundaries.

Spectacles crisp spectacles.
The clouds have softened to Coles.
It’s going to be hot, though.

Exhaustive

Except in cases of accident
Or purely mechanical failure,

Dying is never life vs. death.
Dying’s life vs some other life.

Plague? Life against life. Homicide?
Life vs. life. Cancer? Life on life.

Parasitism and predation
And harvesting whatever you farmed—

Life taking life to keep life going.
And if you starve, that seems like pure death,

But you probably starved when crops failed,
And they probably failed due to blight,

Or since the soldiers burned them all bare.
Life vs. life vs. life. Rockslides

And lightning bolts, earthquakes and blizzards—
Those are the only pure forms of death,

And they’re also among the quickest.
Death’s half merciful. Life’s merciless.

Announcements

The western warbler sings out
From the great cottonwood

That hangs on the river’s
Every little murmur.

The oncologist now
Confesses he wasn’t

Keen on surrendering
Your guts to the surgeon,

But if there was a chance,
He sighs, there was a chance.

He brightens. The good thing
Is that you’re looking well,

And because surgery
Failed to get all of it

We’re allowed to go straight
Immunotherapy

No waiting on chemo,
And this is our best chance.

The western warbler sings out
From the great cottonwood

That hangs on the river’s
Every little murmur.

Aesthetics

Between comfort and beauty,
You feel beauty’s the right choice,
But sitting uncomfortably

By the beautiful river
On a beautiful morning
In the beautiful shadows,

You wish you could feel comfort,
Be comfortable, your dull
Ache for a dull comfy chair.

Torture Can Be Unintentional

In the heat, the horses cluster
In a small patch of aspen shade.

If it were a bright but cold day,
They would turn their sides to the sun.

Shade or sun. Either only helps
So much. The ponies crowd closer,

Likely sharing some of the heat
Each one of them’s trying to shed.

Too much of life is shaped by this
Inability to center,

These constantly imperfect shifts
Between shade and sun. Nothing’s left

Undisturbed by the imbalance,
The constant imbalance, shifting

From sun to shade, shade to sun,
Too little, too much, either one.

Waves Past Devices that Make Waves

Rock wren and a kingbird set up
A coincidental duet
As it gets hotter. Grasshoppers

Chorus, and ac units clank
On and off. The end of the world
Is more world, is another world

Slightly different from the last world.
Who knows what will go extinct first,
BIrds, machines, or the listener,

But probably the listener.
If you’re here in the weeds with us
You can remain in the chorus.

Restless

Tired enough to nap
Almost anytime,
Too wired to sit still,
Too much discomfort,
The restless patient

Drives up the mesas
Looking for solace,
Shade, and distraction,
If not true comfort.
At the top, the pond

Beckons, the thin waves
Cross-stitched and cross-hatched
Under summer sun.
Too much life in there,
Invisible lives.

The patient can’t risk
Diving in, although
The cool memory
Of lake water runs
Caressing the thoughts

If not the parched skin.
The restless patient
Looks down, looks down, looks
In, remembering
When the surface thinned.

Build Your Own Conceit

Cancer cells evolve. Cancer
Cells attract their own microbes
To live with them. Cancer cells

Often run their Kreb’s cycles
In bio-synthetic mode.
Cancer cells are wonderful.

Is there anything cancer
Cells can’t do? Sustain themselves
After they’ve overrun you.

Fortda

You don’t have to endorse
Freud’s interpretation
Of what a child’s after

To gather the idea’s
Wider application—
To throw it all away

And have it handed back,
Then again and again,
That would be the good life,

No burden permanent
And no permanent loss.
Gone! Here! Gone! Here again!

There’s a planet somewhere
Or a cosmos somewhere
Where the rules allow this,

Where there is a real god
Or action of some kind
That swoops in forever

To reduce entropy
Just when life would like it,
Just when life wants life back.

Flightless Birds Retain Some Wing

Stories are memory’s fault—
Or language’s fault. Let’s say
You’ve started swapping data

Thanks to signs, words, and syntax,
But the info’s hard to hold.
Start bundling the sentences

In ways that really matter
To obligately social
Creatures—policing, status,

Who’s in with whom and who’s out.
Now you’ve invented gossip.
Somewhere beginnings begin

And endings, to tie ends up,
And emotional events
Earn premium attention.

The rudiments of fable
And myth are on the table.
It’s all refinements from there,

Co-evolutionary
Loops between stories and brains.
By this time they’re tightly bound.

But if what the brain can hold
Alone matters less and less,
Stories will start to regress.

Rose and Grey Disposes

Misguided still means guided

Somewhere, still means. So many

Implicated things. Someone

Or something is misguiding.

Misguidance is destructive,

The opposite of guidance,

Leading away, possibly

Deliberately, even

Maliciously, but also

Possibly by innocent

Mistake. The meaning doesn’t

Shrink with the added prefix.

To guide’s a verb. Misguided

Is an entire narrative,

A one-word biography.

Intent comes into question,

Also gullibility.

It’s why moths make metaphors

Clear enough to tire of them.

You know why the light matters,

More or less—you understand

The nature of the mistake,

As far as the light’s concerned,

But the dive into the pyre,

The last embrace is baffling.

You assume it means something

Overrides preservation.

You half-imply an agent,

A guide, whether malicious

Or mistaken, since what life

Would be so self-destructive

Unless misled? Your street lamps

Gather more uncounted dead.

Waves of What Just Is

You could surrender them both,
Free will and material
Causation. They don’t sit well

Together, it’s true, the you
That’s at least part free agent
With belief in causation

As a continuous line
Of push and consequences.
Something’s got to give. But why

Just one? You can’t have them both,
But you still could have neither.
You perch on the precipice

At Lava Point, savoring
The cool, high altitude air,
And you feel as if you chose

To travel the long road here,
But you reason many small
Nudges and influences

Must have accumulated
Enough to propel you here
To this vista on this day,

And, like most human beings
In your cultural context,
You feel that your reasoning

And your feelings can be said
To offer distinct reasons,
Can be said to be opposed.

But they’re one web, reasoning
And feeling, experienced
As you experience them,

And neither can prevent you
From thinking neither exists
In the waves of what just is.

Humanity

Is as if the tip
Of the pyramid
Somehow leaned over
And attacked the base.

If You Had Not Perished

Si non prius ipse perissem,
These lines might have gained a secure name,
But probably not, sad little coals

Thrust into kindling that only smokes,
Thrust into the hands that aren’t startled,
That handle them and then set them down

So that they flicker out, cold again.
Who would recommend lukewarm embers?
How would what never bursts into flame

For anyone ever gain a name,
Ever secure even minor fame?
No, if you had not perished, you would

Have made many more attempts, fanning
Each hopelessly flickering blue flame,
Ending in puffs of smoke, just the same.

Sacred Avenues to Conflict Resolution

What does your rival hold dear?
What does your counterpart honor?
Find a way to honor that, too.

It’s not practical concessions
Alone produce diplomacy.
They may even be insulting.

Remember this little secret—
Groups don’t differ much when it comes
To holding some story sacred,

Only in the particulars.
You can’t be one of them. You can’t
Not be one of you. But they’ll have

Some cherished sense of what’s holy,
What’s good, what’s honor, what’s duty,
And it won’t be yours and it won’t

Be unlike yours. Show their sacred
Some respect, and you’ll have a chance
To alleviate some horror.

Hospital Zillow

One thing about fantasizing
The ideal place for you to live
Is that it presumes you’ll live there,

Meaning the fantasy crumbles,
If you don’t have much living left.
What’s six months sick in a mansion?

Deep in the Shade, Gone in Light

You as you will leave nothing.
You will end but you won’t leave.
Ends are only plowed back in.

The blue sky’s a confusion
Caused by too much nearby light.
Day moons show it’s always night.

But face it, there’s a difference
When you face the scorching sun.
There’s very little distance.

Spirit Wanders Off

To daydream on the difference
Between what’s from inside the head
And what comes from outside the head

That once inside the head becomes
Enmeshed with what’s already there,
Your best guess at reality.

But no punitive bureaucrat
Created the difference here
Between these constrained conditions

And the loftier perceptions
Arising. This kind of daydream
Is a quarrel. Bodily aches

Constrain the conditions, punish
Thoughts that try to settle on calm,
Want to find something beautiful

In the huge bats hunting soft moths
By the desert’s distant sky lights
To the strummed applause of crickets.

Parallel Parking

Such an elegant skill,
Rarely needed, rarely
Mastered, often taught.

Your child practices
With old traffic cones
On an empty road,

In bison country,
High in a meadow,
The last place parking

Will ever be scarce.
When she nails it once,
Smoothly between cones,

Not over the edge,
Not stuck in between,
You both celebrate

And call it a day
And she gets to roll
Down the empty road,

Like she’s a driver,
A real driver, and
She owns the pavement.

A Poem Is an Act of Hospitality

The edge of the cliff blocks the sun.
Family news, local news, world news.
What’s more important to a poem?

Ask yourself as you consider
Your choice of a theme for tonight.
You wander into the garden

Of wild weeds and evening flowers.
You could report what you’re seeing,
Or react to what you’re reading,

Or just express your frustration
That the world news is violent
And sad and seems to make no sense.

You can own up to what you did.
You can fix a meal. Pet the cat.
The cliff rises against the sun.

Why Self-Defense Is Dangerous

If you’re armed, if you know
You’re armed, then you’re more

Likely to think others
Have armed themselves as well.

Crutch could be a rifle,
Binoculars pistol,

Any solid object,
Dark in the hand, a gun.

Mistakes happen this way,
Even minus bias

About who is holding
The shadowy object.

Nonetheless, if you’re armed
It makes you feel safer.