Beautiful Old Man Rabbit

Rises behind the highest
Peak from canyon’s perspective,

Tiny new metal whiskers
On the chin this given month,

Not that you could make those out
From this far away on Earth.

Another night, another
Moon, another summer done.

You may only get a few,
But you get enough to feel

Their many-ness. That’s enough,
Beautiful old man rabbit,

More befitting those names than
Anything you’ve named with them.

Your Rebirth Culture

Say it runs the other way,
And you’re approaching your birth.
You don’t remember the date,

But you’re sure it’s getting near,
Possibly in a few months
Or maybe another year—

How long will you stay aware?
How long will you be yourself
Behind your babyish stare?

You know there’s nothing for it.
You’re headed to when you weren’t
You and nothing before it.

Just Another Ichnofossil

Although they’re often more haunting,
Even more poignant than the bones,

It’s true the fossilized footprints
And the outlines of empty homes

Tell you less about the bodies
Than the bodies themselves could tell.

What about texts and inscriptions?
No, they’re still less information,

However complementary,
Telling you what the corpses can’t.

Would you rather have Bronze Age scripts
Scratched in bones for divination

Or the desiccated remains
Of Ötzi, the bronze-skinned Ice Man?

That’s a tough one. Turn it around.
Imagine a skull still holding

A peat bog’s idea of a brain—
That would be a real fossil find.

But what happened to its thinking,
Its inheritance of language,

The living mind that occupied
The skull now nothing but a trace?

You Humanly Useful Thing

This collection of water
Is ready to shrink or grow,
Add additional life forms

Or lose them. It’s been a ghost
More than once before. Recall
That fall the whole pond drained out

And became a muddy bowl
Quickly colonized by grass—
The ghost of a reservoir.

Recall the spring the freshet
Drowned the boat ramp and the bridge—
Monster of a reservoir.

That’s all ghosts and monsters are—
Absence you sense as absence,
A presence that’s too present.

What’s the tidy in-between?
This humanly useful thing,
Not haunting, not threatening.

Beliefs Are Post-Colonial

Sin traveled from Ur to Harran,
The Buddha from Balkh to Chang’an,

Christ everywhere from Bethlehem,
Faiths dragging their holy names with them.

Don’t you love that word, faith? Belief
Doesn’t suggest the same release

From the urge to stay rational.
Faith’s ruthless, aspirational—

Those who have it still pursue it
While afraid they could still lose it.

Faith is belief with less reason,
More trust, more longing, more meaning.

Belief keeps the temples open,
Keeps the old, soothing prayers spoken,

But faith is a god on the move,
Colonial, won’t be refused,

Drags Buddha from Balkh to Chang’an,
The Moon God from Ur to Harran.

Certainly Love, Certainly Salt

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To read about

More—emotions,

Wisdom, the moon,

Motherhood, loss,

Injustice, trees,

Or none of these?

What comforts you?

What’s truffle-like,

What’s a tasty,

Wafer-thin mint?

What’s poetry

When you think of it,

When you think that word

And what lurks in it?

The Honey and the Venom Are the System

Blaming a life for being

Unlike its art’s a bit like

Blaming a bee for being

Unlike its honey. Minus

The honey, complications

Are all that’s left of the bees--

At least for you consumers

Of that sweetness—buzzing, stings,

Frequently unpleasant things.

But never forgive bees’ lives

For offering you honey.

Bees don’t offer anything.

Bees pollinate the flowers

Of the world, a mutual

System of exploitation,

And the honey’s not for you—

It’s just good, so you take it.

What steals bee’s honey shapes them

As bees shape pollination.

Pollen and honey are good,

So their sources defend them.

The flowers trick with nectar,

The bees come armed with weapons,

And you come take what you can.

Notturno

The evening isn’t the end
Of anything but sunlight
For a few hours in that spot.

Even at the poles, it’s not
The end, beginning the long
Winter night. It’s the middle,

As morning is the middle,
As everything is middle,
Some with faster happenings.

The fast-happening middle
You feel as a beginning
Or an end. The slow you don’t.

Things change more in the evenings,
In the sky, with the lighting,
And you notice and respond

With turning on your own lights,
Or getting home before dark.
After that, everything goes

Through the middle of the night
Until the morning finds you
Thinking about the evening.

All in the Past

Mosquito says
It’s time to go,
So down the hill
You drive on home.

Why you hurry
From A to B
When you’ll get no
Further than D,

If that, you can’t
Quite say for sure.
Dean Young is done,
But his poem floats

Around. It says
It’s to future
Readers. Reading’s
All in the past.

Cambrian Two

In evolutionary terms,
It can’t be such a promising
Pattern—a genus rapidly
Pruned of its few species.

But that’s the story of bipeds
For the past million years or so,
Dwindling from a modest handful
Of species to one example,

Which, hilariously, has both
Found out about its lost cousins
And exploded around the world
In monophyletic triumph.

Can numbers prevent extinction?
Ask the passenger pigeon, or,
Better yet, ask a trilobite.
Still, those are faint comparisons.

How about mitochondria?
The secret of their long success
Was becoming permanently
Enmeshed in nucleated cells.

Those cells diversified wildly,
And multicellularity
Transformed the possibilities
For what lives could be lived on Earth.

The mitochondria followed
Their lineages, numerose
In each individual cell
But whittled down, simplified, spare,

Much the same mitochondria
In any species, anywhere—
There’s one option not extinction.
Maybe people will continue

Not as a free-living species
But enablers for evolving
Cultures of massive artifice
To blossom, small prerequisites.

Other Magical Beliefs

Supernatural, paranormal,
Scriptural—when you observe your world
Do you sense some unseen agency?

Are all the patterns you see a scrim
For some theatrical puppetry?
Is any other species maddened

By its awareness that its senses
Are necessarily limited?
The madness is imagination

Is limited, too, by memory,
And memory by experience
And its unstable storage systems.

So, you’re sure that something must be there,
But what is that something? An agent,
Agents, some sort of social beings

With intentions (you have intentions)
And rich communication systems
(You have communication systems),

But invisible, behind the scenes,
Mysterious, given many things
Are mysterious—thus the agents

Behind them must be mysterious.
The mysterious part is the key.
Supernatural explanations

Are rarely posited in cases
Of the banal and most obvious,
Such as that your cup of coffee cooled

After you left it on the counter.
Maybe God invented entropy,
Maybe there are spirits of cooling.

The possibilities for other
Magical beliefs are limitless
In number, if not diversity.

A Mind Is Never Clear

Or you could give it a rest—
Go on disintegrating;

Give up on the heartbreaking
Effort to tie it all up.

Some departures are abrupt,
Thanks to things like car crashes,

Shaky ladders collapsing,
Someone trying out a gun—

No last words of advice. Done.
Linger, and you’ll whisper rot

When you offer your last thoughts,
Blue’s too dark—all silk is best—

Song and Dance

The ducks are clearly audible
On the pond, once the traffic’s gone
Back down the mountain near sunset.

The airborne news won’t reach up here,
Not yet at least. You can forget
Checking your media and texts.

You listen to the ducks, knowing
They have their own social issues,
Violence, and competition,

But they sound peaceable enough
On the pond in the evening air.
With autumn around the corner,

Maybe you think of Yeats’s swans,
Or maybe you marvel again
At how the old hermits managed

Without music except their own,
And with very little to read—
A few books, over and over.

What really happens to the mind
With that much solitude and time?
Stonehouse wrote that fantasy ceased,

But a torrent of daydreaming
And outright hallucination
Seems more probable. Or perhaps

Real solitude, away from words
And music, without visitors,
Becomes effortless with practice.

An abrupt ruckus of quacking
Comes up from the ducks, then quiets.
Imagine that for song and dance.

A Tree in a Forest, a Human in a Town

For all your walls, you are permeable,
Incontrovertibly convertible,
An enormous fortress of a bazaar,

A complex of continuous exchange
Of what you were for what you turned just now,
A knot of perpetual replacement

Of every particle of moving parts,
Until exchanges clog or walls collapse.
Meanwhile, you haunt your trade, a haze produced

Like smoke hovering over your markets,
A byproduct of their activity,
An uneasy, ragged flag visible

From the walls of every other fortress
Churning under its haze, never at rest.

Still When Past Them

Life, including dying,
To one side, existence
To the other—that’s how

You see it now. Not life
Forever against death.
Both through life and past death,

Existence weaves itself,
All nonliving substance
That’s alive for a while,

Involves each sort of life
In turn—predator, prey,
And, mostly, parasite—

Then, while those lives go on,
Returns again to waste,
Ordinary being.

And for the lives churning,
Consuming each other
By wholes and sampled parts,

Existence keeps passing
Through them, as them—also
Waiting, for them past them.

In the Nation That Is Not Nothing

Only nothing much abides,
Never the same as it was,
Always the same total size.

Long clouds glide around the Earth,
Continents too, more slowly.
Some hours feel good and some hurt.

Some conversations are hushed.
Some name known names and some don’t.
Some things are never discussed,

Never, although they exist,
And, since they’ve never been said,
Nobody notices this.

That’s the way with nothing much,
So much but not once nothing,
Emptiness layered in dust.

Ignore the Banal at Your Peril

Daily life seems not to change
The way it goes on changing—
Occasional joys, routines,

Occasional rude shocks, but
Never any miracles.
The highly improbable

Remains inevitable
In large numbers, and the world
Is nothing other than large

In numbers, so you can count
On most of most unlikely events
Happening, just not to you.

This is good and this bad,
As daily news reminds you.
You get up, live, go to bed.

Somewhere, something terrible
And rare happens to someone,
Somewhere, incredible luck.

This is good and this bad,
As daily news reminds you.
You get up, live, go to bed,

You think of what you should do
To keep your small world going,
Do the larger world some good.

Do some good but do some bad.
The daily news ignores you.
You get up, live, go to bed.

At some point you realize
You’re nearing some kind of end,
Past which you won’t realize

Anything ever again,
But in the meantime changes
Get on with the days, changing.

Stump of a Rainbow

The engaged couple pose

For photos in the gold

Straw grass of late summer,

Sunset on the mesa.

Once the magic hour’s past,

They tromp back to their car

With their photographer

Who declares that she’s glad

The sun came out before

They load up and drive off.

They’re hardly down the road

When a twitch of lightning

Jumping above a peak

Superimposes against

A sudden, truncated

Stump of sunset rainbow.

Volunteer

Go out then, tree,
The castle, well,
The cabin’s lost

It’s roof. Grow up.
Can’t stop you now.
Winter will wait,

Winter growing
Increasingly
Patient each year.

Never Sing about Supper When Singing for Your Supper

Songs are mostly for wanting,
Wanting back, regretting, or
Changing the locks on the door.

I want you. I want you back.
Why did I ever want you?
I don’t want you anymore.

There’s the bulk of the billboard.
There are other traditions,
Of course, but just how other?

The hymn hankering for God,
The shih for the departed,
The flyting against a foe—

Each just another other,
Wanted, unwanted, wanted
Back, the way things were before.

Life itself’s mostly longing
But not so much for others.
Where are the hit songs wanting

Good food, sound sleep, or safety?
Who sings for the health and wealth
That dominate temple prayers?

Lyrically, song’s just love song
Of one sort or another.
However sung to the self,

Singing is for the troubles
Everyone has with others,
Wanting, regretting others.

Sure

Can a simple commensal,
One of billions near the heart,
Alive for five or six hours,

Ever feel about your pulse
As you about Earth spinning,
That it’s inevitable,

That there’s nothing more certain,
Despite some variation,
Than another beat coming?

You watch another day end,
Certain another follows,
If not for you, for others.

Nectar in a Sieve

Hope’s a prosthetic device,
But then, so are telescopes.
The difference is, hope occludes
The longer perspectives
That telescopes clarify.

There’s a certain bravery
In hobbling on without hope,
Literally without hope—
Accepting that creation
Entails its own destruction.

The short view may be anxious
And the long view seem stoic,
But that’s not the true long view
You’re taking. It’s the middle,
In which history finds you,

That odd way history has
Of rescuing the obscure,
Rediscovering the lost
Writer or artist who failed
At accolades while alive.

The telescopic long view
With its back to the sunlight
Suggests eventually
There will be no accolades
Nor anyone to give them,

Unless there’s someone hiding
Behind early galaxies,
Someone you can imagine
Observing and recording—
Oh yes, put your hope in that

Parking Lots

The world is swirling with nearly
Inestimable, uncountable
Minuscule events, tallying

And reshaping the summable
Whole of every extra moment,
All the trash and dust flickering

Past a grocery store entrance
In any given desert town
On any random, windy day

As someone pushes a cart out
In which condensation dribbles
From the misted vegetables

Now cinched in see-through plastic bags
Under a cloudless sky hiding
The dark and stars with dusty blue,

The dark itself only hiding
A dozen or more rogue planets
Booted from their stellar systems

For every observable star,
Trillions lost in one galaxy,
Each rich with minuscule events.

As Is

If you surveyed sufficient
Numbers of random people
As to which they found weirder—

That this world is as it is
Or that there are many worlds—
How much do you want to bet

The majority would say
It would be weirder to know
That this is the only world?

The point of fantasy worlds,
Then, is to feel more at home,
To dream worlds that make more sense,

Which goes for mythology
And folktales and wonder tales.
Why is this too weird to bear?

Fusogenia

Life slips sideways.
Codes for one path
Cross through others,
Blaze desire lines

Into the quads.
Viral packets
Of species traits
Squeeze through borders.

There are proteins
For insertions
Coded by genes
That insert them,

Horizontal
As any idea—
Some idea how
Ideas started.

Forget a Moment

A string of words—
Imagine them
On bamboo strips

Or on a slip
Of torn paper
Or a napkin—

Characters, jots—
Can they conjure
Anything rare?

The paradox
Is not that word
But forgetting

Signifying
For the warm glow
Of what ails you.

One of a Kind

What’s going on out there?
What’s everyone doing?
Some are trying to save

The world or their money,
Others their families,
Their neighborhoods, themselves.

People are protesting
While others celebrate.
An enormous number,

Two or three billion souls,
Are sleeping or trying
To sleep at this moment.

Some are dealing with floods.
Some are dealing with drought.
Some are dealing with war.

Some are being attacked
Since some are attackers.
Some are eating, others

Just distracting themselves.
Some are reading to learn
What they should be doing,

But everyone’s changing,
Changing being one way
Everyone is the same,

Human nature or not,
Changing being one way
Everyone’s on their own.

The Help You Can Describe Won’t Help

In the time of Warring States,
Near the capital of Chu,
The teacher of Crown Prince Heng

Was entombed along with his
Library of wisdom texts
On hundreds of bamboo strips,

Including the Tao Te Ching.
Heng would become the last king
Of Chu, overrun by Qin.

Lot of good the Tao Te Ching
Did for the people of Chu.
That’s one thing about wisdom—

How can it not make a dent
In the pattern of the world,
The local society

From which its wisdom emerged,
The environment that made
It thinkable, possible?

The collective behaviors
Of cultures with the wisest
Practical philosophies

Were no less distraught than yours.
What did Athens accomplish
Thanks to the Academy?

Was the Ashokan empire
More tranquil for Buddhism?
Did Seneca end so well?

You can find them on the shelves,
Distilled, the best of the wise
From two or three thousand years

Of states that kept on warring
Except when empires ate them,
Aurelius in his tent.

Free Soloing

On the far side of belief
Range other, rarer beliefs.
The mountains are lonelier,

But they’re still mountains. You aren’t
Escaping crowded canyons
Of the commoner beliefs

So much as indenturing
Yourself to the windy cliffs.
Gods and spirits grow scarcer,

Not thicker as believers
Believe. The air is thinner,
The ecology sparser.

But still, you keep on breathing,
Laboriously. You will
Still be convinced of something,

If only that it’s darkness,
The willingness to believe
What can’t be true, beneath you.

Memetic Eclosion

Living with an adolescent is
A lesson in metamorphosis
Of a kind peculiar to humans.

The physical changes are minor,
Compared to the whole transformations
Of many sea creatures and insects.

If not warped by serious trauma,
The personality of childhood
Stays visibly, flexibly intact.

But that mind is a maelstrom of minds,
New information and opinions
Swirling like fast-gathering twisters,

Uprooting narrow tracts of ideas,
Spinning with projectile trees and barns,
Odd fence posts, occasional bodies.

The landscape of adolescent thought
Is prairie midwestern, open skies,
Planed horizons, little resistance

To whatever weather comes roaring
From the rotating mind of the world.
Listen well to an adolescent

And watch their eyes as they talk faster.
You can almost see the dolly zoom
As they focus and the background falls.

The Diplomatic System of the Previous Era Was Not Going to Constrain Them

The pattern is stern
And fair persistent—
There are times of peace
And stability,
No fights worse than crimes,

Internal affairs,
Inequalities
And injustices,
Border skirmishes—
Then raw wars return,

Invasions, conquests,
Genocidal sweeps,
Collapsing nations,
Abandoned cities,
Prolonged dark ages.

Therefore you wonder
Which kalpa you’re in,
How stable things are.
If you can wonder,
They’re pretty stable,

But that doesn’t help
A whole lot. Lurches
Jar stability
But calm may return.
Die before it ends.

Overlook

Noun or verb? What you see,
Mosaic, a vast land,
Or what you fail to see,

The occupied bird box
In the dead juniper,
Just outside your window?

How about both at once,
Both the scenic landscape
And everything you miss,

Your panoramic eye,
Blind spots for key details?
Isn’t that most common,

The blur at a distance,
Bird’s eye but not hawk-eyed,
The universal law

Without casuistry,
The principled conscience
Lacking in anecdotes?

Look, There’s More

Every new prosthetic
For seeing tinier
Or farther away things,

Every new microscope
Technology, every
New kind of telescope

Offers revelations
Of a similar kind—
There’s more there than was thought—

Smaller phenomena,
Earlier galaxies,
Receding horizons.

The default assumption
Should be this will always
Be the case until not,

Until the day arrives
When some great new machine
In space or underground

Displays the edge at last,
The scale of emptiness—
If that day comes to pass.

Flawed Hero Fiction

Flawed people, people agree,
Are ordinary people
And also famous people,

Historic people, people
Who created great things, who
Did big deeds. All flawed people,

Being flawed being standard,
Inevitable. People
Are all always flawed people.

Fine. Then come the arguments,
Arguments that make it clear,
People organize people

Into reasonably good
Or worthwhile people who are,
Of course, flawed, as all are,

And unreasonably bad
People, more or less worthless
People not to be called flawed.

Flawed is a defensive word,
Evoking wabi-sabi,
A shrug at imperfection.

People of value are flawed.
Evil is not flawed. Evil
Is all flaw, a perfection.

So, to the one side you have
Yourself and all flawed people,
To the other, the wicked,

The worthless, the other side.
Flawed creates a boundary,
A way to rename the taint

Of bad behavior as not
Seeping steadily, smoothly
From the most wicked to all

By infinitely subtle
And continuous degrees.
No! Over there, the wicked,

The bad on the other side,
And over here, all the rest,
Flawed, as good folks must be flawed.

Inherently Maggoty Universe

The possibility of seeds
Must be inherently within
The whole of the cosmos, or else

How could seeds have evolved on Earth?
That doesn’t mean the whole cosmos
Must be seedlike. Parasitic

Viruses also must have been
Inherent in the possible
Phenomena of the cosmos

For them to have infected life.
It doesn’t mean the universe
Is parasitic at its core.

So too with beetles, mosquitoes,
Horses, and whales. So too with
Humans and human consciousness.

But when you say that consciousness
Is inherent in the cosmos,
You can’t resist the temptation

To claim the cosmos is conscious,
Is consciousness all the way down.
Why not beetles all the way down,

Or echolocation, or fear?
All those must have been inherent
Along with your prized consciousness.

The universe is capable,
Tautologically, of all things
Encountered in the universe,

So let’s settle down now, shall we?
That the cosmos manifested
Selfhood doesn’t make cosmic self.

In Turn

Maybe death’s not so special,
Not terminus, not portal,
Just business as usual,

One more thing you have to do.
You have to sleep. You have to
Be the body you call you.

You have to keep on changing.
Making creates vanishing.
That’s the daily arrangement.

Right now turns you into world
Out of whose turns you emerged,
Returning, not to return.

Life Is a Creature of Habit

You wake up. You get up. You do stuff,
And most of what you do is routine
For you, for whatever life you lead.

Or maybe not. Maybe you’re the one
Who does things differently every day,
Never eats, sleeps, or works the same way,

Every day chaotic adventure,
Travel one day, battle another,
The next hide under your bed covers.

No. You wake up, get up, and do stuff,
And most of what you do is routine
For you, for whatever life you lead.

What Have You Not Done Now?

And then, every day or few days,
Every few weeks at the outside,
There’s the hard thing you have to do,
Much as you don’t want to do it,

And usually it’s a small thing
Where once you start it, you finish
And can feel good about yourself
For a little while afterward,

Whoever you are, dictator,
Revolutionary, no one
Of any particular note,
Ordinary and complicit.

Other times, it’s a huge, hard task
Lingering on the horizon
And can’t be finished at a go,
Or will change everything once done,

So that you live in dread of it,
And sometimes you fail to do it,
And that, too, changes everything,
The hard thing that you never did.

Soon Enough, You’ll Be Cold Again

All weather ends; all climates change,
But some changes you won’t survive,
And most changes come after those.

Up at the reservoir, the heat
Is not so bad, summery fun
For those escaping the desert

With their motorboats and kayaks,
Coolers, floaties, and paddle boards.
You like to watch them, since you know

What this location’s like in ice,
In late fall, after the colors
Are gone and the first snows have come.

You know this place when it’s less fun.
You know it empty of people,
Except maybe a late angler

Hunched in waders against the wind,
New snow clinging to his hat brim.
You might live to see him again.

Negentropical Islands

Gravity cannot be
Locally reversed, but
The Second Law can be,

If the system’s open,
If energy pours in.
Every life’s an Eden,

A bounded paradise
Pumped full of exceptions
To mere dissipation,

So what is it that keeps
The exchanges open,
Negating entropy?

The secret to Eden,
The key to paradise,
The local reversal

That allows there to be
Life is dying, is death,
Authoring every breath.

Self on a Hill

Ruins are fine
And exciting
To find, but more

Exciting are
Ruins upon
Ruins, layers

Of earlier,
Other peoples,
Other cultures

From each other,
The top ruins
Without a clue

What lies under,
The middle, too,
A cake of time

Senescent, years
Of forgetting
Years that forgot.

And if this were
You, other selves
Unknown to you,

Long gone in mind,
Sequentially
Alien selves,

Not younger you,
Younger other,
You ruined you.