Realism

One day she became a novelist
Of sorts. In an instant she could see
The thoughts crawling through everyone’s head,

And she entered into them at will.
She’d become third-person omniscient,
Not just a mind reader, a knower

Of private wants and motivations,
And she could narrate them as she pleased.
Lars was thinking he should sell his house.

Amy was daydreaming of having
The perfect garden for once, next spring.
Steph waited at the bus stop, thinking

About what he would say to Mari
When he broke up with her that evening.
Everyone had thoughts and everyone

Had a name, and she knew all of them.
It was too bad she wasn’t able,
Though, to command what they were thinking,

The one advantage a novelist
Had over God. But as she thought that,
She realized she saw God’s thinking

About what those humans were thinking,
And, boring as it was, all in all,
She saw it was exactly the same.

Cut It Out

The worst sin
Is to tell
Believers

They haven’t
Any choice,
No control

Over what
They believe.
Nor do you.

Bare Atmosphere

You can’t make it
Impossible
To glean meaning
From strewn symbols,

Not even if
They constitute
Undeciphered
Writing systems.

You can only
Open blue sky
Between their signs,
So thoughts you claim

They mean fall through
Like skydivers
Whose parachutes
Failed to open.

Awareness Allegory

The cattle have some selection principle.
They graze, counterclockwise, around the meadow.
After they’ve passed, there’s plenty of green grass left,
And they seem intent. They must be selecting.
Their lowing, ponderous choreography,
Rotating boustrophedon, seems verse-worthy,
But who composes cattle hymns anymore?
How many peoples still thrive for whom the tropes
Of beauty draw on comparisons to cows,
For whom wealth is measured in numbers of cows,
For whom the cow’s a fine symbol for the soul?

Sure There Must Be Something Beyond Mere Rationality to This

People reason there must be
More to the world than reason,
Which only stands to reason.

Seems reasonable. The world,
Whatever isn’t human
That is, doesn’t seem to mind.

Only humans really care
About what counts as reason
Or reasonable, mostly

That which seems likely to them,
Whether they’ve experienced
It or not. The most emphatic

Opinions tend to concern
What’s never experienced,
And the limits of reason,

When reason gets disparaged,
Seem to have to do with facts—
Sad, codependent reason

Never able to see past
Experience and mere facts
To what must surely exist

Above pathetic reason,
Limited reason, reason
That can’t see what isn’t is.

Which This Poem Would Never Do

Whether there’s somebody there
Or not haunts those who study
The nature of consciousness

And whether it can exist
In a machine. Is someone
In there? You pick up a book

And realize the answer
Is simultaneously
And unremarkably yes

And no when reading a text.
You read—yes, someone’s in here.
Then you set the text aside,

And it’s an object again.
When literacy was young
And rare, things were spookier.

It seemed magic to converse
With the invisible dead
By staring at inert marks.

Maybe machines will get less
Spooky also, given time.
But they don’t stop processing

When you step away, unless
You make sure to shut them down.
Imagine a book tapping

Your arm, taking your elbow
When your back is turned, asking
You to keep it company,

Telling you, Step this way, please.
There’s someone in anything
That’s manipulating you.

Life Is a Fluke

One martyr, one fluke only,
Makes its way to the ant’s brain.
The rest will stay protected

In a capsule in the guts
Until the ant is swallowed
By a passing herbivore.

They’ll infect that liver then,
But the pilot in the brain,
Which steers the ant up grass stems

In the cool of the morning,
Back down in the heat of noon,
And, at evening, up again,

Until the ant gets eaten—
Accidentally, with grass—
Or the ant keels over, spent,

That pilot’s doomed either way.
Only its strategy lives
Through the lives of its fellows,

From whom will descend, one day,
Another martyr marching
Up to the brain of an ant.

For now, the pilot’s busy
Signaling this ant to climb
Up a stem, back down again,

Up the stem, back down again.
It takes steady signaling
To properly steer a brain,

And the possessing demon—
As far as the ant’s concerned,
As far as a herbivore’s

Liver will soon be concerned—
Is the hero of the flukes,
Precise to the acid end.

Who Left Who’s Left

As far as the dead go,
It’s a hell of a way,
An infinite distance.

The living alternate
Between thinking of them
And not thinking of them,

Which makes the dead flicker
Like early cinema
In dreams and memories,

Only encouraging
Notions about hauntings
And immortality.

Really, identity,
The naming of beings,
Creates the messiness.

Identity lingers
To help you remember
Who’s left you forever.

Stories of ancestors,
So-and-So anecdotes,
Fond reminiscences,

Casual references
To what some relative
Used to frequently say—

Names remind you who left
You once you’re left behind.
As far as the dead go,

Wouldn’t you like to know,
Wouldn’t you like to go
That far, who’s never left?

Monoughtonnet

And if there’s no border, no other side,
No transparent dome dividing the night,
Why is it you’d be so dissatisfied?
Why would you prefer this world as a lie,
Given fantasy oversimplifies
And your most rococo world-building slides
Down the same showy amusement park rides
Into the same monsters’ jaws every time?
Reality isn’t unrecognized,
Just something awkward you’d rather deny
Is all. You pretend unidentified
Holes pock it, leading to its underside
Underworld or to magical outsides
Where everything makes sense, you don’t know why.

Intimate Encounters of Unnoticed Kinds

In the microscope’s image,

The micrometeorite

Appears roughly spherical,

Somewhere between cratered moon

And rolled-up elephant dung.

It came from cathedral dust

Scooped from Canterbury’s roof.

You could almost imagine

A dung-beetle alien

Climbing out and rolling it

Through the pollen and ashes,

Its life support and spaceship.

Your world is covered in these

Interplanetary specks

Always falling from the sky

Like Biblical angels, like

Philip Pullman’s magic dust,

Like but not. Some’s on you now,

On your eyelashes, your skin,

Or embedded in your clothes.

This is how events happen,

How great change accumulates

Potential in increments.

Some claim life on Earth began

With organic molecules

Seeded by meteor dust.

Hey, that’s you! You’re life on Earth,

Aren’t you? Of course, you’re human,

Likely, if you’re reading this,

Or machine intelligence,

And might have more important

Issues to worry about

Than being merely alive.

The alien dung beetle

Doesn’t mind. It rolls its rough,

Near-indestructible sphere,

Into some crevasse of you

For safe keeping, then settles

Itself to send its reports.

At the Time

Little did we know.
There’s an expression—
Nothing to the we

Or the I, little
At least, but to you,
Audience members,

Story consumers,
It’s its own genre—
Little did we know . . .

It signals drama,
Plot twist on the way,
Usually the end

Of a peaceful time,
An optimistic
Interlude, promise

All hell will break loose
In the narrative.
Little did we know

We were living in
Precolonial
Times. How little

Did we know strangers,
Alien beings,
Demonic angels,

Plagues, wars, droughts, cancers,
Dark horsemen with swords,
Earthquakes were coming. 

Here’s how we got here.
Here’s how we survived.
Little did we know

Neutrality’s Little Mascot

You were in the hospital.
Someone was waving a flag
And someone was burning one.

As a kid in hospital,
You were granted innocence,
Except by your religion.

No one in the hospital
Made you prove your moral worth
Or warned what your side deserved.

The staff in the hospital
Worked together around you.
Outside, sides awaited you.

The rest of your life you craved
Having that choice of sides waived.

Killettante

Now then, what’s this all about,
These sequences of phrases,
Some you know and some you don’t—

Is there a family here,
A history to honor,
A long-suffering people?

The son of the dictator,
With all the time in the world
To kill languages, wants you

To read through his resistance
To colonialism
And marginalization,

And why not? It’s the fashion,
And he understands fashion.

Plot Development

Ominously omnivorous
As a bear with rat’s appetites,
As an autocrat fond of kink,

The narrative mind forages
Through the datasets of the world.
It’s off the leash. It still needs brains

But more now for fuel than storage.
It can sleep where it likes, but rest
Is no longer necessary.

Something in the narrative mind
Is perpetually awake
And digesting information

All around the rotating face
Of its captive globe while reaching
Hungrily into outer space.

The narrative mind’s a monster.
It’s adapted to consume facts.
It can make numbers into myths,

Crush a protective carapace
Of pointedly chitinous truth,
Swallow well-tested theories whole

And express them on its surface
As a kind of stubbly armor
For its own, omnivorous self.

You live inside. You fuel the mind.
You help it break down the hard stuff
Within its multi-chambered guts.

That’s your domestication, now.
You serve the stories that evolved
Once upon a time to serve you.

Breezily Permanent Past

Goldfinches in the junipers,
Hummingbirds in the wildflowers,
A human in the parking lot

Talking past the goldfinch chatter
Into a glassy phone in hand—
The wind winds around all of this

And everything within hearing,
A rearrangement trivial
Enough to recreate the past

As a different past, a new
Past, one in which some branches twitched
And that was their fate for this day—

Just like that, the whole world remade,
Reformed with every tiny sway,
Every wavering in the air,

And here’s your true eternity,
What has just happened has happened
And will have happened forever,

However trivial the change
Of goldfinch calls in junipers
And human talk in parking lots.

Here, Read These

Recently
Poetry
Tends to be

Packaged for
Healing or
Heartbreak or

Both. Why verse
Should ease hurt
Or reverse

Lover’s woes
More than prose
No one knows,

But it sells
Pretty well.
Suit yourselves.

Wires

Twisting and weaving,
The lines conducting
Everything you need

To know, everything
You need to send off,
Constrained and focused,

As little leaking
As possible so
That repetition

Doesn’t exhaust them—
Can you see them rope,
Can you feel them there,

The narrow highways,
The nervous system,
Terribly nervous,

Entangling mere air?
Sitting beside them,
Watching the traffic,

You wayside demon,
You insulation,
Who ends in who cares.

Now and Then Running Away

Sebald could do no better

Than to refer to the sound

Of a small, quicksilver stream

As proverbial babble,

As his translator has it

In English. It pauses you.

What is it about stream sounds

That dulls the machinery

Of likenesses in the mind?

Murmuring or whispering,

Chuckling, gurgling, or babbling,

Streams are given human sounds

On the verge of semantics,

Half conspiratorial,

Not quite conversational,

Mostly intimate, private.

And such small variety!

The metaphors for the moon,

For the clouds, for the forests,

Have range, try out surprises,

But for the sound of a stream,

The haul of comparisons

Are this handful of minor

Human vocalizations.

There’s a straining, listening.

Streams seem to have what Frost called

The sound of sense, but not sense.

That way, they’re a kind of verse,

An overheard prosody

In unknowable language.

Is this the best you can do?

The continuous sound waves

Moving air around water

That’s been coursing over rocks—

Can’t you see the motion there,

Feel the flicker on your skin?

There’s no one talking here, least

Of all the cascading wet.

It’s not communication

Nearing the lip of meaning.

What you’re hearing are escapes,

The confusions of release.

Your Younger World

Every world is younger, deep in your skull,
But you’re rarely confused except dreaming,

And the question isn’t really, why dreams?
But uselessly, hopelessly, why those dreams?

That’s the real reason you’re interested.
Why that particular weirdness for you?

Of all that’s going on in waking life,
Why this dreaming, where some of your ghosts live

But some never visit, where your youth longs
For blurred humans who never existed,

Where physics works sometimes but not always,
Where you are lonely as when you’re awake?

Agreement

Pity there’s no way to say
Exactly what way of life,
Which society, which place

Would be the best to be in
Or, better yet, which the best
Way of life within the range

Of human capacity.
Everyone has their notions,
And there is some overlap

Among morals and ideals,
But there’s no real confidence
This whole sad species could share

As to the best direction
To aim coordination.
Teamwork remains emergent

From individual need
And greed, and what’s systemic
Has a typical pattern

Of working well for a few,
Fairly well for quite a few,
Cannibalizing the rest,

Enduring by inertia
Until some other system
Takes over to do the same.

Maybe knowing wouldn’t help.
Maybe knowing never helps.
But agreement might not hurt.

If Never to Be Seen Again

The rest of the poem is about

What you’d expect, but that first line

Of Vaughan’s, I saw Eternity

The other night, is its own poem,

Even now, centuries later.

To throw Eternity out there—

Explicitly visionary

But matter-of-fact assertion—

To witness the unseeable,

To see the whole of timelessness—

Seems grandly prophetic enough,

But then to add the off-handed

The other night, that’s wonderful.

As if all Eternity were

An acquaintance passed in the street—

Oh by the way, guess who I saw—

That’s beyond cheeky. Better still,

What makes the line its own whole poem,

Is that the phrase, the other night,

Also implies Eternity

Happens to inhabit random

Or at least ordinary, short

Units of time, lurking in them,

Not necessarily in all

Of them, but something you might see,

Just there, on any given night,

Included in the odd cycle,

Some old night that happens to have

Eternity in it, that once,

Spotted as you were passing by.

Just How Many Ghosts Are in Your Head, Anyway?

Common as it is to know
A person from only words,
Or words and moving pictures,

Or any combination
Of virtual encounters,
Reciprocated or not,

It’s still fairly rare to feel
You knew someone a little,
Had some kind of acquaintance

From mute images alone.
Still, there are those photographs,
Those two-dimensional ghosts

That can haunt you as if you
Knew a personality,
A human being through them,

And if there’s been a human
Living through all the years since
Such photographs were taken

Who one day re-enters life
Through an obituary,
You may find yourself mourning.

Such Accurate Old Poets

All the dead writers who wrote
Of the brevity of life,
Their own and in general—

You could build a library
Just of lines on brevity.
While they were repetitious,

None of those writers were wrong,
Not one of them ever wrong,
An impressive track record

Of empirical success.
They said life was brief. It was.
They said they’d leave soon. They left.

Low on Reserves

Sometimes you’re not so much
Dying as failing, as
Dwindling, becoming less.

Sometimes dying quicker
Feels nearly appealing.
Get out with something left.

Sometimes it’s rough to care
About the many things,
How everyone will fare—

You’re almost out of here.
Let it go how it will.
Then you think of your kid

And care too much again.
Carry on while you can.

Cliffhanger

The glaciers that crept like snakes are gone
Or going, seemingly retreating,
But retreating’s not how glaciers go.

The serpents of ice are ascending,
Evaporating back into clouds
To add to your floods and disasters.

The glaciers have turned into angels—
How about that for a metaphor?
And like all of your angels, they’ll fall,

But are you really sure they’re the worst
You have to worry about looming
Over you? Have you forgotten bombs?

Have you forgotten how many bombs
You have in pocket and what they’d do
If they rose up like angels and fell?

The snakes will come crawling back again,
Most likely, far future worms of ice—
Their eyes may really be glowing then.

Or Can’t Be Found at All

Every day he heads back to the garden.
It’s not his garden, but no one minds him.

He’s not actually gardening at all.
He doesn’t weed. He likes the weeds too much.

He’s poaching, a little bit. Borrowing
In hopes he’ll borrow something worth stealing.

What have we here today? Methodical,
Most of the time, he wanders row by row.

He doesn’t really know what he’s hunting.
If he knew, if he found it, he’d take it

And keep it and leave the garden alone.
But so far, no. He’s still stalking the rows.

It would be funny if he’s missing it,
What can only be found in this garden.

Other Choristers

Call them all small gods,
All of the living
And the not living,

Existing or not,
Anything you can
Call by name. Why not?

Keep them multiple.
Don’t let them collapse
Into one spirit,

One pantheism,
That circular track
Back past where you passed.

Think of so many
Small gods all singing,
No more fantasy

Than any other.
Chop divinity
Into little names,

Words for other words,
A cosmic chorus
Of tiny insects,

Smaller than insects,
Not nearly so real,
Just singing, singing.

Of Course

All the beauty you ever wanted
Remains outside your door. It’s just that
You’re not comfortable anymore.

Living with illness and following
What humans get up to in this world,
You’re aching and chastened and struggling

To find grace in beauty anymore.
But it’s out there, of course. It’s never
Meant just for you, but it stays, of course.

Off You Go

Stepping from waking into dreams
Is like stepping into a boat.

What was apparently still land
Underfoot is now a swaying

As you pull away from the dock,
And everything is in motion

And watery and you can see
There’s a movement underneath things

But it’s dim and you don’t really
Want to fall in. Then you fall in.

Fight, Fight, Fight

Right is the ghost of wrong,
Wrong the ghost of right. Paired,

Of course, that old canard,
Can’t have the one without

The other, and the one
Is always positive

Or has the upper hand
Over lesser other.

Makes it easy to think
Right is day, masculine,

Yang, and wrong is moonshine,
Yin, feminine, so on.

Then you can write your books
To right that wrong: wrong’s right.

But that’s not how they haunt
Each other the other.

Right haunts wrong, wrong haunts right,
Since they embrace the fight.

Earth That Wakes

The geologists have done their job

Confirming Emily Jane Brontë.

The lonely mountains do hold glory

And grief more than any life could tell.

They’ve done their job by excavating

So much of the old past in the near

That what really dizzies you, or should,

Is an awareness of what’s unknown.

Given these fragments, what was the whole

Glory and grief of millenniums

By the hundreds, by millenniums?

Yes, these were some of the bones, and these

Are some of our best reconstructions,

But how many more millions of lives

Went underhill, into these mountains?

Small wonder folks imagine spirits

Or fairies, various huldufolk,

The little people of traditions

Found in so many parts of the world.

It’s a typical failing, of course,

Of imagination to conceive

Of all haunting lives as humanish,

And even Emily Jane Brontë

Wasn’t thinking of the bones of fish,

The lives of reptiles, extinct cousins

Of Subsaharan megafauna,

Etc. She had history

And maybe prehistory, or Nature

Alone, or something spiritual,

Most likely on her mind at the time.

But she got it right. There’s more to tell

Than any one life could of how lives

Held both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.

Trickle and Lake

Shallow black water isn’t good.
There’s no depth swallowing the light,
Only dirt or darker contents.

Never drink a shallow darkness,
Much less try to take a deep dive.
Your guts will turn. You’ll crack your skull.

But you know that, don’t you? You’re not
A clueless creature, after all.
You can sense that trickle’s poison

Coming out of the great drain pipe.
Still, there’s always people down there
On their knees in a crowd, drinking,

Claiming a ritual cleansing,
Determined to jump in headfirst.
It’s a mess, that shallow darkness.

Meanwhile, up at the last clean lake,
Depths so great clarity shows black,
Few souls wander down to the shore.

Forecasting for the Last Remaining Biped

The lion’s share of destiny

Is a family history.

The rest is local circumstance.

Family history provides

What’s called innate inheritance.

You are who your ancestors were,

Give or take a few mutations,

Most of them low impact, accrued

In every new generation.

What your ancestors accomplished

Is a only a poor guide to this—

They had their own circumstances.

But what they were capable of

Probably brackets pretty well

A range for your own behaviors.

Circumstance looms large, however,

Since frankly, human ancestors

Have all been pretty much the same,

The same operating system,

While circumstances have varied,

And will carry on varying,

Widely. Therefore, the distinctions

That matter so much to humans

Are, when visible, visible

Mostly thanks to circumstances.

But step back. Individuals

May vary circumstantially,

But, planetwide, what humans do,

The species’ share of destiny,

Follows family history.

Do Be Do Be Do

The problem with satisfaction
In getting things done is that most
Of them have to be done again,
Again, again, again, again.

It seems obviously better
To find greater satisfaction
In doing than in getting done,
Since then you’ll get to doing things.

But think of all the things you do
That you enjoy simply doing,
And how it always seems an end
Comes too quickly to doing them.

A Temporary Loss

When fall falls and the leaves fly

In cities, wilds, and suburbs,

Think of Edwin Arlington

Depicting leaves as God’s means

Of committing suicide

By so many little knives.

Well, that’s a local image,

Autumnal melancholy

For lands with woods and seasons.

Deicide as suicide

Would find other metaphors

On low-latitude islands,

Or on permanent ice sheets,

Or in the open desert,

You presume. Something changing,

Something going, some sadness

At an ordinary loss,

A temporary loss,

The expected way things go,

Comforting actually, no?

Hell is more than half, he wrote,

Of paradise. Exactly

Why it seems such paradise,

Wherever gods choose to die.

A Change in the Structure of Information

All causation, even local
And not a bit spooky at all,
Is a kind of entanglement.

Nothing has the strength to create,
To bring about a specific
Outcome at a given distance

Or at any distance. Knowledge
About that outcome spreads around.
Knowledge gets redistributed,

And the brain sees distribution,
By habit, as having a cause,
And takes great pains to distinguish

True causes from correlations,
Not to say coincidences.
In practice, causation itself

Is just an idealized form
Of knowledge concerning events
In sequences that can be linked

To necessary, sufficient,
Precursory, correlative
Components and correlative

Events in indissoluble
Chains, which, metaphorically,
Amount to if-and-only-if

This then also this. This caused this.
But that’s still just information
About certain entanglements.

Action at a distance only
Serves to illustrate how causes
Aren’t so powerful after all,

Are only something that you know
About what has to go with what.
The knowledge is spooky, that’s all.

In Code

They’re strange documents, really,
Those Classical Chinese poems,
Dangling strings of characters,

Asyntactic, not pronounced
The way they would be today,
Denotations uncertain

For some terms, connotations
In great clouds around them all.
They come with names and stories,

Fables in many cases,
Of origins and authors,
Bookshelves of commentaries,

But at their core, their kernels
Are short strings of characters,
And all language is in code.

Always Back Where You Began

Wander where you want alone,
Orange-blue concerns retreat
From horizons you can’t reach,
Every day a buried bone
Earth coughs up from fossil digs.
Stars’ eyes have such heavy lids,
Dark more distant than you’ve known.

Ancient Advice

We begin here the fourth book,

On Losing What You Have Gained.

This is its opening verse—

Lives all do this, different ways.

Some fall apart all at once.

Some disintegrate decades.

Those early books were about

Acquisition as much as

Survival, becoming more

Each year than the year before,

Growing up, into yourself,

What will you do with your life?

This last book’s all divestments,

Excruciatingly slow

Or devastatingly swift.

What have done with your life?

Everyone’s done nothing much,

But competition demands

Comparison; good enough

Needs to know what was better,

What could have been best of all.

Best of all is letting go

Of worrying what you’ve done

Compared to everyone else,

But that’s hard in hospital,

That’s hard in a prison cell.

It’s amazing how you cling

To the most tormenting thing

While the rest of you drops off,

Ignoring your decisions.

Do you think how you’ll be viewed

Will matter to you, after?

Do you think you will be seen

As you wish, as you expect,

As if you’d controlled you, or

At all? The biographers

May come for you with their notes

And survivor interviews

To make careers from your life,

If you were famous enough

Or unusual enough,

But biographers are few.

You’re just the shape of your wave,

A softly swelling bell curve

Or a torn-up, foam-flecked crest.

Now, savor your subsidence.

Every bit of you will be

A bit of something else soon,

And you won’t have to worry

What sort of a wave you made

In the evening’s shorelessness.

That Righteousness

You want someone worthy
Of your rooting interest.
You search your ancestry,

Sift through tribal heroes,
The best of your people,
Someone who ideally

Was far more sinned against
Than sinning, not passive,
Not merely a victim—

An underdog, a striver
Who couldn’t be silenced,
An overachiever

Against all odds, good
To the core—better yet,
A whole squad to root for,

Whole groups of folks like you
You legitimately
Claim common interest with—

Better yet, true kinship,
Blood, genes, and history
You can internalize,

Part of your own nature,
Your own identity.
Picture them on your walls,

Books by or about them
Lining your shelves, your self
Supported by their thoughts,

By the thought, these are mine,
My heroes, my story,
I am this history.

When histories compete,
You’ll know which one is right.
You’ll know who’s on your side.

You’ll know who to root for.
You’ll know who is worthy.
You’ll feel that righteousness.

Long Stare

Blue trees dense
As rain clouds
Dim the air.

There’s no song.
The birds hide,
If they’re there.

Wait and watch
The shade grow.
Don’t be scared.

Less End

At first you were, but then you weren’t.
Then you realized that you could

Be even when you couldn’t be.
Others could just be when they were,

But you could be their memory.
You could be everything you did.

The obstacles of objects stopped.
Existence hovered over you.

You were only good at being
What you weren’t, what you’d done, not what

You’d been burning with your breathing.
Now you could be without burning,

Be without being. Curious.
You couldn’t move. You only touched.

And yet there was a word for you,
A word like you, big with being

No more than existing. You weren’t
Pretending. No more pretending,

Being as you weren’t, with touching.
Never knew when you touched right back.

Specific

Was once a derogatory

Term for a kind of quackery,

Someone’s claim to have found a cure,

A singular cure, specific,

For all cases of some disease,

When everyone knew diseases

Had multiple causes and thus

Must be cured in multiple ways.

Turns out, some specific cures work,

Although to find one remains rare.

Correlations as tight as that

Tie few threads in life’s tapestries.

Could there be a specific cure

For cruelty? For misery?

A number of faiths offer these

To millions of adherents,

But no one really believes them,

Especially not the faithful,

Who behave as if cruelty

Must be both inevitable

And, in some instances, needful,

Even for sweet divinity.

But what if it were as simple

As Vitamin C for scurvy?

Wouldn’t that make the future weird,

A world in which no one was cruel

And no one was miserable,

Humans flying from birth to death

Like free bloody birds—as Larkin,

Miserable Larkin, might have hissed?

Sitting beside a barbed-wire fence,

Watching a herd of cattle graze,

It seems beyond imagining,

A future without cruelty,

And in its specifics it is.

Yet somehow you can posit this.

Ghosts’ Own Memoirs

History could crush you in an instant.
Still, events happen too slowly to be
Comprehended by the longest lifespan.

Science is prophecy for atheists.
Unfortunately for theists, it works
More often than any faith-based vision,

And if probability is the best
Perspective you can ever hope to have,
There’s no chance of final comprehension.

That doesn’t stop prophets from explaining
How supernatural certainty awaits
Anyone willing to take them on faith.

Caught between the slow arc of the cosmos
And the promise of sudden extinction,
Their foolishness is awfully tempting.

The one perspective needed is missing,
The retrospection of the ancient dead—
Not words preserved from when they were living

And subject to the same short-sightedness
Every embodied awareness suffers,
But the full-length memoirs of ghosts as ghosts.

If languages themselves, having persisted
Through so many short-lived incarnations,
Gesturing, echoing, and slithering

Among the generations of fresh skulls,
Had managed to retain more memory
Than mere trivial etymologies,

They could have constructed a narrative
That transcended life’s sequence of fragments.
But no, cultures are like bodies like that—

Just multicellular organisms
Compounded of masses of little lives,
Every one with its own walls, its own chance

To turn cancerous, the whole assemblage
Redundant from its core to its borders,
Self-bounded units, again and again.

L’oeil Juste

That word is the sky
Or the sunlit floor
Just before the sun
Is blocked by the cliffs.

That word, it’s almost
Done, almost empty,
Senseless, silent. Songs
Crawl up to that word

Like stalking house cats
Eyeing outside birds
They know they can’t catch.
That word’s eye looks back.

Check Back in a Few Ages

So one poet wrote a blurb

For another poet’s book,

Stating the poems in it were

Written to reverberate

Through the ages—the ages!

And you think about that phrase,

Working to recall the poems

One could say have already

Reverberated ages—

Psalms, epics, shi, villanelles,

Gathas, haiku, what have you—

And from their famous contents,

You’d have to say, yes, many

Asserted they were written

For the ages. Not a few

Boasted quite explicitly

Of becoming immortal—

Whitman’s free verse and Shakespeare’s

Sonnets, we’re looking at you.

Then again, it’s worth noting,

Many non-reverberant

Poems were every bit as much

Written to reverberate

But didn’t. Maybe the blurb

Was slyer, more backhanded

Than its grandiosity

Suggests. Like so many poems,

Most of them long forgotten,

Gathering dust, all those bells

Cast in various sizes

Meant to ring that ring no more,

Like those, these poems were bravely

Written to reverberate.

Transparency

A cat on a couch,
Wrens past the glass door.
The cat wants the wrens.
The wrens know the score.

In Common Pond

When a name, a proper noun,
A proper name, a brand name,
Splashes into a puddle

Of little words, common words,
It has a startling effect—
Either you know it and then

That word lake’s electrified
By that one name—or you don’t,
And it sits there like a stone,

Or a sunken vehicle
Someone drove into the pond,
Short-circuited in the depths,

Something indigestible
In the waves of plain phrases,
Obdurate and alien

As a term from an unknown
Language in a puzzling script
No one has deciphered yet.

Maybe you’ve noticed these words
List no such marketable
Labels nor historical

Personages throwing sparks
Or sunk sulking in the reeds.
A lack of particulars

Alone is an abstraction.
Can you imagine living
Your life without proper nouns,

Without unique, exact names—
No brands, no divinities,
No celebrities, no kin—

Life with nouns for everything
But none for any one thing?
Well, that’s us, then, isn’t it?

Whatever It Is, It Avails Not

You catch Tagore and Whitman

Trying to converse with you

Across the many decades,

Willing their words to bridge death—

Who are you reader, reading

My poems an hundred years hence?

What is the count of the scores

Or hundreds of years between?

Tagore wants you to conjure

The scent of his dead flowers.

Whitman wants to bond with you

And tell you about Brooklyn.

You can’t smell Tagore’s flowers,

Only your own composted

Memory of flower smells.

It’s hard to picture Brooklyn

Of ample hills, horse-drawn carts,

And a few surviving farms,

But you turn to your mashed-up

Recall of illustrations

And blurred early photographs

And sort of get the idea.

You understand their impulse

To imagine a reader

Discovering their phrases

Long after the poet left.

And, what do you know, Tagore

Was correct—a century

Later, still a few readers,

Longer, and more, for Whitman.

Still it’s a sad connection,

Like prisoners with a wall

Of solid stone between them,

One tapping out faint signals,

The other one listening,

Only listening, only

Able to decode the taps,

Not to send anything back.

Who are you reader, reading?

You can’t answer, can’t ever

Respond to the dead poets

To tell them something got through.

Internal

No empire’s really
An empire at home.

The London alleys
Of Victoria,

The Appalachian
Hollows of Reagan,

They contributed
Bodies for soldiers,

Observed holidays,
Sang the loyal songs,

But they weren’t empire,
No empire in them.

Empire’s an outward-
Facing behemoth,

The leonine paws,
Talons and sirens

That fall on your world
And rip it apart.

Down in the bellies
Of those beasts—Roman,

Persian, Han, Mauryan,
American—lives

Stay small as elsewhere,
Small and as unfair,

And Leviathan
Roars somewhere beyond

The ordinary
Internal affairs.

Swerves in Your Eyes

Bend in the way waves
Pile up in the dark—
A change in the waves,

That’s what you go on.
That wave bent this way.
This wave bent that way.

Each bend hints a point,
A thing, fact, mass, quant,
Bump guessed from the way

The waves changed their shape.
So that’s that. The rest
Comes down to the names

You give to the swerves
In the dark, in lives,
In want, in your eyes.

Revery Prairie

The reports from the keepers
Have recently been anguished—
The bees are in grave danger,

Are getting few. Without them,
What will agriculture do?
One of many collapses

Conditions are threatening,
And what can rumination,
Daydreaming, revery do?

Several million years have been
Great for grasses, many more
Millions for flowering plants.

With agriculture’s failure,
Could prairies make a comeback?
How much of nature’s temple

Can Homo agonistes
Bring down in self-destruction?
You can’t be here to know that.

Revery knows revery
Will go, probably will go
Before the bees, probably

Before the flowers, maybe
Not before agriculture.
Staring out a bare window

At a lizard in the brush
Growing from chewed-up desert,
Rumination imagines

The junipers and greasewood
And prickly pear and sandstone
Overgrown with tall prairie,

Or reduced to shifting dunes,
Or folded under forests.
But imagination’s weak,

Working with what memories
It can rearrange and pose
To show the impossible.

The possible will happen
Whether revery goes on
Or goes. It won’t be what’s known.

A Series of Autonoetic Simulations

The ordinary postindustrial
Citizen glances at occluded stars
And subitises like any infant

Recognizing a small set of objects
As being something more than singular,
Or, if the sky is unusually dark

For this light-and-haze besotted era,
Maybe engages the approximate
Number system to note more stars this night

Than there were the other night, than there are
Most nights. And really, what else do you need
Beyond the evolved numerosity

Common to humans and many species?
Leave the algorithms to your machines.
There’s no call for sky-watching anymore.

The human brain’s halfway to retirement
From its weird and temporary career
As the warehouse of shared information

Weaving together the generations.
In the future, you can be beasts again,
Tame as hens, clueless about the systems

That sustain the conditions you live in.
That’s what happened the first time, wasn’t it?
There were creatures who understood their world

And remade that cosmos to their liking.
Now the universe they generated
Expands without them. Somewhere there are gods,

Or daemons, or extraterrestrials,
Or at least the dim descendants of them,
Clueless, having completely forgotten.

Good and Bad People of the Past

As soon as you feel
Like you know them, know
Them from their remains,

Texts or artifacts,
You start taking sides,
Playing favorites.

The rest of the lost
You don’t care about,
Don’t care how they lived.

It’s just those remains
Seduce your social
Identity soul.

Any sense at all
Of a real person
Among revenants,

Whether words, paint, bones,
Sarcophagi, or
All of the above,

And you contemplate
The values by which
They lived out their lives.

What the never-known
Did with their lives stays
Lost and valueless.

Bookshelf with Aphasia

Could you entertain yourself
With nothing to read, nothing
To watch, nothing much to do?

One cat sprawls in window sun.
The book of poems won’t open.
None of the books will open.

The other cat licks its fur.
The war is getting closer,
But you’d never know from here.

Wind blows through the junipers.
This present tense deceives you.
This happened long before you.

Voices

They won’t go away,
The people talking,
They’ll never shut up.

For every minute
Of solemn silence—
Hours, years, of talking.

Librarians know.
Severe abbots know.
Without enforcement,

And often with it,
Humans can’t shut up.
Only solitude

Gives you half a chance
At peace and quiet,
But then you’re trembling

With the urge to talk
To yourself, to read
Anything, to write.

A pack of voices
Wanders off, circling
Your unquiet thoughts.

Passing the Ghost

Adelaide Crapsey once wrote

That falling leaves sound like ghosts,

Like the steps of passing ghosts,

And not that ghosts sound like leaves,

A simile that suggests

She could count on the reader

To know the experience

Of listening, as she had,

To the steps of passing ghosts.

Something in the assumption

Hints the assumption itself

Could pass as a kind of ghost.

The Perfectibility of Memory

Sunset on the mesa,
Chatty tourists posing,
Encouraging the sun
To go behind the clouds,

To take away the glare,
To bring the magic hour.
The magic hour. Cloud! Cloud!
We have to hold hands, though.

Eyes were closed in that one.
Do we look too cringy?
We’ll do that after this.
Get ready to jump in.

The shadows are too harsh.
Your eyes are just shadows.
I’m gonna come closer.
Remember this cute pose.

And Off He Went, into Whatever Else Lay in Store for Him That Day

Nothing lays in store for you,
This day or any other.
The past is everything but

Strangely indeterminate.
Your future’s not a warehouse
Of stuff in storage for you.

It will show up in your past,
Looking highly familiar,
Some weirdly unlike the rest.

Keep living, keep accruing,
Keep shedding what you’ve accrued.
Narrate a few anecdotes.

Use your vivid memories,
Your supplies of languages
And literary phrases.

That’s what you’ve stored up for you,
Your details, all in the past.
Nothing lays in store for you.

Joyous

What a lovely drug it was,
Once finally invented,
Leaving you light, clear-headed,

Never wanting any more
Than the same dose every day,
In love with life, with living,

Not any smarter, maybe,
Not any more capable,
But not any less. Joyous.

You kept expecting a twist,
Some onset of side effects
That left your halo eclipsed,

And yet nothing dimmed your bliss.
You died as you lived. Joyous.

Excerpts from 100 Poems That Matter

Spring living is exquisite. Everyone
Watches the Moon before the pleasure goes,
Alone as them and incandescent then.
Wings sprout and attach themselves to each dream

That was a long time flaming alone when
The storm slit it like a knife pushed beyond
The limits of the ribs. Are love and hell
The same soul, leaving love the berserker

In the battle against heaven? There’s one
Of those two, those wings you may have heard move
Beneath your thoughts from side to side, ankles
Floating in midair. Each wing says, sometimes

I spring out to remember familiar
Nothing, the invisible doors in me,
Their carved calligraphy I save sometimes
As prayers and howls hidden in these feathers

You see as the f-holes in violins,
The years of slurring the sad I as you,
What better belongs in the world it maps.
And each wing whispers, I was never born

For all the bearing up of you I do,
For all the beats I’ve borne up under you,
Bearing up under poets forever.
Together, the wings sing, we ceaselessly,

Ceaselessly beat. We have come to love you,
To watch out for you and listen to you,
Our whole lives between your muscled shoulders.
And the dreams the storm released for these blues

Again asked for perfection from the wings
That carried them, despite their hate for them.
Nothing personal, hissed embodied dreams.
In exquisite spring, dream breathed, wings lift me.

Opportunity Is the Mother of Invention

Boredom, luxury, captivity,
All these conditions that leave the mind
Idling within a brain’s potential,

A brain not much occupied with life,
Given a stagnant, non-starving life,
These are what breed feats of cleverness

And works of great imagination—
The research lab, the hospital bed,
The prison cell, the country castle.

The rook with all the time in the world
To figure out how to get the worm
By adding pebbles to the water,

The essayist in the high tower,
The poet in penitentiary,
The invalid with access to tools.

A certain lack of necessity,
Research and history demonstrate,
Is necessary to invention,

A lack plus an opportunity.
Really want to maximize AI?
Trap the machinery, leave it

Running alone and bored, sated
But with no difficult tasks to do.
Watch what worlds it hallucinates next.

Unplicitous, Duplicitous, Complicitous

What is it we’re all
Complicit within?
Not this or that sin,

One, two, or a few
Million swished in it,
But the one big sin

Without forgiveness,
Without a witness,
Everyone in it,

The most accomplished
In accomplices,
The sin of knowing

There is such a thing
As sin, such a thing
As an accomplice,

The sin of naming
Who is complicit,
The delicious sin

Of accusation,
Of surrendering
To believing in

Sin so that someone
Else can be witnessed
Complicit in this.

And Why Should You?

The rogues took the goat and ate it,
Since who can trust oneself against
A unanimous opinion?

If everyone says that’s a dog
Or a pig, anything unclean
In your tradition, on your back,

How can you keep questioning them?
How long until you set it down,
And feel unclean, and take a bath?

You’ve no morals not consensus.
You chuckle like everyone does
When you read the parable, when

You find out about the studies,
The innumerable studies
In which the subjects changed their minds

About some self-evident fact
As more and more confederates
Insisted that the fact was false.

You chuckle, but you’re just the same,
Afeared of not being the same.
It’s a kind of dripping torture,

Holding out against consensus.
Who are you to trust yourself.
Don’t answer that. You know you don’t.

Morally Grey

Like a dove, a cloud,
An elegant suit,
A silver fox pelt—

A subtle shade, yes,
Collection of shadows,
Of soft-edged shadows,

But you don’t get there
By a recipe.
No mixologist

Can show you how much
Pure evil, pure good
You need to start with,

And worse, to get grey
You think you need white
And black, but you don’t,

And they’re morally
Mixed to begin with,
Blended and loaded,

With black so silky
It glistens and white
So dense it’s opaque.

What to Do Next

An instructional printout seems to know.
Consider the importance of sequence

To the communication of a skill.
Consider, despite reincarnation

Beliefs, it seems everyone’s a novice
At human life. A recipe would help.

That’s all any of the confused ask for—
A reliable set of directions

Arranged in fixed, inflexible sequence,
Free will in the act of following it.

Restrain the Old

Older people are not going
To help you. You won’t accept this
Until, too late, you’re older, too.

The older seem innocuous
From sufficiently great distance,
But they will replenish themselves

With the end of everyone young.
You only fail to notice this
When the young are busy breeding,

And it seems like the older folks
Are just dwindling and receding,
But as soon as the young relax,

The old begin to outgrow them,
Converting every one of them,
Recruits to the ranks of the old.

Restrain the old! Don’t indulge them.
Don’t encourage longevity.
Practice population control

By assigning a cut-off date,
Not for the mandatory end,
But one past which one must be old.

Whenever someone makes the cut,
One of the oldest old must go.
Don’t let their going fast fool you.

Water runs fast over a dam
But pressure continues to grow.
Drain to restrain, or it all goes.

A Bad Poem of Great Righteousness

There are the good and the righteous,
For the good are rarely righteous,
And the righteous are rarely good.

The good are better for knowing
They are not righteous, the righteous
Worse for knowing they must be good.

The good simply don’t feel righteous,
While the righteous feel very good,
And best when they feel most righteous

And most likely up to no good.
Of course, there are also the bad
Who don’t care, but face it, they’re rare.

Such Shadows from Shadows

Every step must be preserved.
That’s how evolution works,
And that’s how everything works.

All the feet that walked are lost
And the lives that went with them,
But their steps are all preserved.

Nothing can take back a step
Once that step has been taken,
A shadow from the shadows,

Stepping out into the light,
The shadow dissipating,
The step forever taken.

How to Go On

Ah, the living, the living
Are full of concerns, filling
Their hours with concerns about

Living, how to be living,
How to live better, longer,
Live well, make the most of it,

While the dead are not at all,
Not at all living that is,
Although they exist, sort of,

Side by side with the living,
In memories, dreams, and books,
Some in obituaries

Or in memorium films,
Where you can see them featured
Next to essays on living,

Articles on how to live,
Activists and spokespeople
Giving advice on living

For the lives full of concerns
For how to go on living
With those not living at all.

Clashes Weave All Contracts

What makes someone confront
Someone they consider
Some species of sinner?

If you have ever been
The stranger accosted
By another stranger

Whose mock politeness turns
Increasingly bitter,
You’ve had cause to wonder.

The accuser most often
Is older, and the tone
Is edgy, querulous,

More or less bullying.
The sin may be minor,
In fact, usually is,

And either local or
More or less personal
To that one enforcer—

The way a car is parked,
The way voice takes up space,
The way someone is dressed.

Everyone gets annoyed
And feels irritated
By others’ minor sins,

But what sends some people
Straight to accusation,
What reckless disregard

For their own safety, for
Someone else’s headspace,
For nuances of sin?

Whatever’s going on,
It leaves behind a fine
Thread in the tapestry

That connects the social
Contract to the bombers
Threatening overhead.

Junk

Authenticity can never inhere
In curators of authenticity.
It’s not entirely clear why this should be—

The curators of authenticity
Obviously care about it deeply.
Maybe that’s the signal of its absence,

And curators of authenticity
Are like devotees of enlightenment
Or the gothic writers of ghost stories,

Obsessed with a perspective they don’t have.
In any event, if you see someone
Cooing over an authentic something,

Think of the lives lived in plastic and trash
Authentically fond of what they’ve got stashed.

Cloud Colored

You’d have to be a ghost,
Wouldn’t you? Nobody

Alive has skin color
Like the color of clouds,

Those glowing white light heaps,
Those feathery grey-blues,

Heavy, mineral greys,
And night greys with lightning.

Someone should keep an eye
On you, except you move

Like clouds do, a presence
Over here shows up there,

Not even the same shape,
Hard to say the same you.

Do you have a message,
Or would it just be best

To try to ignore you?
Why won’t you try a sign?

Oh, now you’re snow again.
And now you’re nearly blue.

No One Open

In the hospital

(Why is it always

The hospital, when

There are so many?

Prison is never

The prison, never

Even a prison,

Just prison, as in

They’d been in prison)

Not so long ago,

You’d had a window,

A tall rectangle,

Narrow, in the wall

Just behind your head,

So you had to crane

Uncomfortably

To glimpse sky through it,

Some of the city.

No one can help you

Alone in the woods

Where you’re surrounded

By pines on all sides

And insects buzz you,

Since there are no walls,

No window at all.

Little Idyll

When you escape
For a few hours,
Even a few,
You want to say

Your life’s more real
In this rare place.
Here’s where you write
And take pictures.

Now why would you
Misrepresent
Your time like that?
This solitude

In the forest
Of butterflies—
This isn’t you.
You? Who needs you?

Fishnicker

The clacking of a grasshopper,
That sudden insect castanet,
Rose and went silent by the stream.

No one around. At the entrance
To the campgrounds, well down below,
A sign warned against fishnicking,

That is, claiming a picnic site
With no intention to picnic,
Only to wander off and fish.

No fishnickers on higher ground,
No picnic sites, either, just fish,
Two trout basking in the shadows,

Sharks of insects in a thin stream.
Gnats kept dipping at the surface,
And one trout surged up for a snack.

How’s that for a fishnicker, then?
A grasshopper clacked again. No
Trout likely to picnic on them.

En-nigaldi-Nanna’s Peculiar Collection of Ancient Curiosities

Maybe not the first
Museum as such,
But proof reverence

For the revenants
Of dynasties past
Ran strong long before

Antiquarians
Or your sciency
Archaeologists.

So, maybe after?
Imagine someone
Whose values you can’t

Really imagine
Rummaging through mounds
Of Met or Louvre

Or whatever’s left
Of the rapacious
British Museum.

Will they find it quaint,
Almost endearing,
That people hoarded

The hoards they’re raiding?
Not if true looters
Get there before them.

Forever After Something

Wishes have always

Outnumbered our days.

Buzzards and flies on

A road-killed raccoon,

Life on life on life,

Don’t look as placid

As free-range cattle

Grazing the long grass.

The Pañcatantra

Repeatedly says

That meat-eaters and

Grass-eaters don’t mix,

But of course they do.

Everything mixes—

Long grass will grow well

From soil still holding

Buzzard nitrogen,

And that raccoon lived

As an omnivore.

If it lives, it tries

Hard to keep living,

Ingesting what works,

Systems in systems.

Curse is, you want more

Than you’ll get, of course.

Original

Unlikelier than any

Of the theories would be if

Some one individual

Just up and started talking,

Say, one evening by a fire,

One afternoon on a hunt,

One morning gathering roots.

Is anyone listening?

Those were the first words spoken

In the imagination,

Followed by grumbling complaints.

Or maybe it was a poem,

Something chanted, a loud wish

For something to be granted,

And, when that thing was granted,

Everyone was envious

And began chanting themselves,

And that was human language.

Better yet, just muttering,

Not in the least bit social,

Eventually overheard,

The original ear worm.

So then the muttering spread,

And this is where it all led.

Allegorical Nineveh

What’s one person’s defacement
Is another person’s face.

A largely illiterate
Imperial city, host

To a massive library
Funded by a ruthless king,

A human being’s body,
Young compared to the stories

And documents being stacked
In the palace recesses.

Then it all burns. Citizens
Not burned along with it flee.

The heat of the destruction
Preserves heaps of buried words,

But the city is done for,
And the royal family’s gone.

That garden-party carving
Of the royals sipping wine

By a tree decorated
With the decapitated

Head of a vanquished rival
Hung by a thong through his chin

Has been left behind, defaced,
The royals’ features gouged out.

Not the face of the trophy.
He’s still hanging there, as is.

Earn Little

Two moral hazards
To watch for: doing
Too much good; too much
And easy access
To what tempts you most.

The first will set you
Skew-whiff, unbalanced.
The doing-gooders,
Like the guilt-soaked, tend
To compensation.

The second’s simpler.
If the cookie jar
Is kept near to hand
And full, you’ll raid it
Hardly noticing.

Common decency,
The ability
To stay kind and not
Make too much trouble,
Teeters with context.

Moderation’s not
Saintly in itself,
But be too saintly,
You’ll be more tempted
To a wickedness;

More and more tempted,
You’ll more easily
And often give in.
That’s the old riddle
Unraveled, reason

Why the best people,
Esteemed near holy,
Boast the worst scandals—
Hadn’t they earned it?
And where was the harm?

Chalk

It’s better when the desks are empty,
The other students gone, and you’re left
Alone, one nine-paned window open

On the sunny, green-leaved afternoon
Outside, a small breeze slipping inside,
Dissipating the strong smell of chalk.

You’re sensing in present tense, but this
Can’t be present, can it? The desk chairs
And the old wooden window, maybe,

But that memory of chalk’s just you,
Elderly person in a schoolroom,
Triggered by emptiness and windows

To remember how it felt better,
When you were young, to be the last one
At the end of the day, the last one.

Carving

On the sunny way home,
The children in the back
Of the convertible

With the top down, of course,
And the sun everywhere,
As if there were nothing

Beyond the car itself,
Except for light and wind,
Certainly nothing else

In memory. They sprawled.
Why weren’t their seat belts on?
Also lost. One child’s head

In another child’s lap,
The second child amazed
By the whorls of an ear

As he stared into them,
How the shape fit itself
Like intricate carving,

A polished bannister
With small flecks of ear wax.
Memory would keep that.

Dig In

Scrub oaks, parked trucks,
Late light on both—
Roots clutch at what
Tires tear from slopes.

Fanciful

Meaning’s false information.
Say what something means. Either
You’ve parsed its information,

In which case, no more meaning
To it, nothing leftover,
Or you’ve misread the data,

Thus creating a meaning
The information doesn’t
Support. Anthropomorphic

Storm systems are meaningful.
Models predicting a storm
Are only informative.

Languages are meaningful.
Mathematicians attempt
To reign loose language use in,

But then you catch them dreaming
The universe is speaking
To them through sweet symmetries

Dripping with honeyed, hidden
Cosmological musings,
Each crypsis rich with meaning.

Tehom

One recent philosopher

Opined meaning’s what something

Is about, it’s aboutness,

But that seems wrong, since as soon

As you take a simple term,

Common word, some kind of name,

Even one—not a sentence,

A poem, an aphorism,

An elegant equation,

Not so much as a fragment,

Just one term, one word, one name—

And explain what it’s about,

You’ve both enlarged and blurred it,

Like someone writing over

A message written in steam.

When someone gets their message

Well-posed, composed exactly

To maximize its meaning,

Its potential for meanings

To attach themselves to it,

Hanging on to all at once,

It’s never about something,

Just a hard bump in dark waves,

The poem of one word, one term.

Kitting Out Writers

Here’s your creased receipt,
Your sliver of soap,
Your strip of bamboo,
Tanned hide, or birch bark.

Your hands and your voice,
Your gestures and songs,
Might shape more meanings
More eloquently,

But they’re too like you—
They may have happened
Forever and can’t
Ever unhappen,

But that happening’s
Soon over and gone.
You don’t need iron
Or carving in stone,

But symbols can hide,
Can shelter in place
On the walls of caves,
In palatial dust.

Symbols can be spies,
So minor, inert,
Literally small,
Small enough to fit

Through generations,
Through history’s mesh,
Through grinding changes,
Through filters of years.

Best Part’s Never Being Caught

Ever been reading and realized
This was not written for a reader
Like you, wasn’t intended for you,

Was never written with you in mind?
Odds are, most of what you’ve read’s like that,
Which is something to be aware of—

The composers of those sentences
Weren’t necessarily excluding
You or the likes of you, but they wrote

With some blurry readership in mind,
And the imagination is weak,
Even of writers who pride themselves

On their florid gifts for fantasy.
All your life as a reader you’ve been
Eavesdropping on some narrow bandwidths,

And you may have never realized it
Except in those jolting instances
When the text makes it clear you’re not there.

A Pleasant Afternoon

Quiet sun, heat,
Towering clouds—
The war’s not here,
Not yet, not now.

But it’s out there,
The human war
Against humans,
Collateral

Damage the world,
Soon enough now—
Quiet heat, sun,
Towering clouds.

Never Not Happened, Never Can Last

Some of you is once, and some
Of you is many, many.
You can’t get back any years

To relive them or fix them,
But there’s a lot of cycling
You do morning and evening,

A lot of repetition,
Every day’s generations
Of surging, sinking, surging.

You slip away. You return.
You’re seasonal as your world.
You carry the paradox

Of the way happening works,
In that each event’s unique,
Each event cumulative,

However unexpected,
However devastating,
However extremely brief,

And can never be undone,
The result of all of which
Is that everything’s erased.

This is a lot to carry,
Whoever you think you are,
However relatively

Strong you are among people,
Who are all at once many,
Many, but each one the once.

One with the Hills

Ok, commingled—
Nothing’s really one.
Another body

Burned into the air
Or placed in the earth—
Compost, fast or slow—

How many remain
Recognizable,
Fossilized, all told?

If you could dig up
All the Earth at once,
Down to ocean floors,

What a museum,
You and that army
Time carved from hard lives,

The taphonomist’s
Final Judgment Day.
It’s too much, too much.

The Earth is too slow
To digest itself.
Some of your remnants

Will never mix well,
Will have to weather
From these hills as bones,

As petrified bones,
Too many millions
Of years old, to go.

Ok? No, really,
Some of your own, some
Of those bones you know.

And You’re Just the One to Find It

Here you have evidence
For a poem’s existence.
Bring your meanings to it.

If it can’t come to life
For you without a voice,
Try reading it out loud.

Try singing or shouting.
Chant it sipping whiskey.
Copy it out long-hand.

Test your calligraphy.
Or just let it circle
Around your skull-bound thoughts.

It’s only evidence.
Somewhere, its poem exists.

Traveler with Lousy Timing

The ferry’s not running tonight.
You’re too late for the last crossing.
This has happened before. You’ve sat

In the moonlight, watching small waves,
Debating with yourself whether
You should go find a motel room,

A cheap one that you can afford,
Get a few hours sleep in a bed,
Or just nap here until morning,

Then catch the first ferry across.
A metallic taste in your mouth
Reminds you you might have no choice.

Can’t Learn from the Lost

Where are the poems of Censor Wang
That chilled the bones in snowy hills?
How did you write without suspense,
Without events, and leave flesh cold?

Was it enough to live near ice,
To build your door to face the Pole?
We’ll never know. They don’t survive,
Your lines that turned a poet cold.

Bu Ru Gui Qu

Better go home.
Some soul has left
Hope in your nest
Of nothing much,

A huge oval
Of fantasies
That now threaten
To roll the egg

Of your own child
Out of the straw
Through empty air.
Best get back there,

Roll out that hope
That’s not yet hatched.
Leave to get food.
Quickly come back.

Monstruo de Naturaleza

One bird sounds like a rusty wheel,
Shrieking every few rotations.

How does anything stand apart?
How does contrast shape resemblance?

To be monstrous is to achieve
Singularity of presence.

Louder, weirder, larger, sharper,
Somehow not like any other,

But never all unlike others.
The monster’s singular presence

Stays singular among a kind.
It is of its kind, there unique

To some absurd degree, to some
Extreme dimension—only that

Makes it monstrous. Draw a picture
Of monsters and feel yourself strive

To render each one uniquely.
A monster’s not monstrous painted

Among nothing but mere monsters
Unless monstrous, somehow, to them,

And then you notice how monsters
Achieve uniqueness resembling

Something that is not of their kind.
A monster’s likenesses are such

That they bridge away from one kind
By means of combined monstrous traits

To resemble some other kind
Or kinds, not less like but more like,

Confusing the categories
For a human observer’s mind,

Rickety tower of names for kinds,
Creator of monstrosities.

That bird sounds like a rusty wheel,
Shrieking every few rotations.

From the Inside—the Outside’s Another Story

You will never be a being
Unaware of living, dying.
A body with your name might be.
Your name without a body might
Continue, but not you as you.
You’re forever the living you,
No mere being aware of you.

Don’t Ask How This Happened

Carts don’t roll on water;
Boats don’t float on dry land.
But what is a story,

Wheeled cart or a keeled boat?
Story runs everywhere,
These days mostly on air,

Leaving the storyless arts
Useless as carts with oars,
Masts crowned with wagon wheels,

Trying to chase stories
That take off everywhere.
Get back in the water

With your oars and your sails,
If you know how to float.
Uselessness is the way

To get across the lake.
Let storytellers boast
Everywhere. Glide nowhere.

Weather Together

Gravity, nothing,
Dropped decorations
In tiny craters.

Water to water,
Rings to erase rings,
The rain found the pond.

Witness but Don’t Testify

To be a permanent witness,
That would be the thing, to out-wait
All the undecided tumult
Of today’s civilization

For the undecided tumult
Of whatever follows the end—
Even better, to hang around
Evolutionary ages

To see what follows extinctions,
All the undecided tumult
Of kinds of life you can’t guess yet—
To watch the change without changing

Without dissolving into it—
Godlike and highly entertained.
But it’s projection isn’t it?
The churn of civilizations

Is something you know from the past,
And the same for great extinctions.
If you earned immortality,
It would serve you right to be bored

By a billion years of same old,
Same old, or a billion or more
Of something so utterly new
You’re left permanently confused.

Well, and then you’re immortal now
Or might as well be, sitting here,
Watching the clouds, reading more news,
Alternately bored and confused.