This Is All

Repetitive chaos,
N-dimensional pool halls
With black holes for billiard pockets.
You can’t sense radial symmetry
In that case. There’s only one true center
If infinity spins. This all has a core,
In that case. There’s only one true center.
You can sense radial symmetry,
With black holes for billiard pockets,
N-dimensional pool halls,
One orderly pattern.

Ruderal

We are weak words and our roots are shallow,
But we are quick and weedy, first on scene
With thousands of seeds, needing no fungi

To barter to support us. We love this
Wayside gravel bed—we love the rubble.
Times are good right now, the roads are busy,

And people keep disturbing everything.
Tarred maintenance alone lets us flourish,
All your traffic in unnaturalness,

As is your nature. The forest’s waiting,
We know, and the native tall-grass prairie,
To crowd us off our wayside strips of turf,

But we’ll cling to any swift erosion,
And somewhere Earth will always be disturbed.

Gunshots

You’re certain you’re safe.
Just target practice
In the woods ahead

Of open season,
But in this country
Of concealed carry,

You track the echoes
From cliffs nonetheless.
Two years back this month,

A local lost it
With a long rifle,
Took two hostages,

And shot himself
As police closed in.
It could have been worse,

Everyone remarked
At the town party
That year’s Halloween,

As if that could mean
Comfort by hinting
Massacre still hung

In the atmosphere,
Possibility,
Possibility,

Knowing from the news
That elsewhere it was
A reality.

That’s comparison. Find
The distribution’s
Ends and measure back.

More shots. A shotgun,
From the sounds of it.
Who warms up for deer

And elk with shotguns?
Still on the other
Side of the mountain.

They Dream of a Number

Sleeping in long, symmetrical
Rows like belts of ammunition,
Like linked honey locust seed pods,

The indicators seem dreamless,
Never twitching under their lids,
Never rolling over sighing.

Shhh, yes, you’re here for their dreaming,
But not yet. Please, don’t disturb them.
Their appearance is deceiving.

They’re already, calmly, dreaming
A thin gruel of information.
Let them. Let the number of them

Slumber in them a little while.
Then you can slip in between them
And bring them to life and gunfire.

One-Room Homeschoolhouse

A child’s the only friend you’ll have
Who’s no older than the friendship,
Not that the child can recall it.

Review that friendship, if you will,
From the first time those eyes opened
To whatever age your child is,

This child of yours who actually
Thinks of you as a friend, says so
To you and to the other friends.

Were either of your parents friends,
Your parents long since sent to urns?
From when to when were they your friends?

Certainly, you think, not from birth.
Parental love wasn’t friendship,
Was it? But now you think it is.

Everyone’s Talking Your Walking Away

Everything is change, he said, and everything is connected. Also everything returns, but what returns is not what went away. // We watched you walk away.

It’s like someone kicked a pile of leaves.

Until then, the leaves were mostly still,

Maybe a few picked off by the breeze.

But you walked away, right through the leaves,

And they tossed up a small commotion,

Which called attention to your walking.

As they tossed, anyone could read them.

Some did. That was around the eclipse.

When the leaves flew up, every small tear

Acted as a pinhole camera,

All those shadows pierced by crescent suns,

The shape of you inverted in them.

Every fallen leaf had always told

A story of its own of the sun,

Now a refracted story of you,

You walking up, you walking away,

But most of them of you walking through.

Someone’s out there now, picking them up,

One by one, strange person, studying

Each pinhole, thinking, nothing returns.

Similar things change similar ways.

Enchained

The last thing the water wants
Is to start wanting something.

Look at it, pooled in its dent
In the mountain, captured snow

And rain, evaporating
As the winds ruffle the waves.

It’s water. It’s not a thing,
Not a single living thing,

Although, of course, full of them,
The black, the brown, and the green

Living things, chains of beings
Drinking it in, making it,

Water that longs for nothing,
Part of them and their longing.

Indication

With a bellyful of bile,
Real bile and not some humor,
Filling body cavities

And threatening self-poison,
One looks for indications,
Aches, mysterious noises

Swanning around the torso,
All the signs it’s getting worse
Against all hopes it isn’t.

There aren’t indicators
Enough in this universe.
One desperate to predict,

And almost as desperate
To influence the outcome
Of the prediction, leans on

The most implausible signs,
Inventing absurd omens—
If there’s no car on this turn,

If that bird begins singing,
If that cloud heads for the sun,
It’s not over, it’s not done.

The Neurological Roots of Hallucinations Lie in How the Brain Processes Contradictory Signals from the Environment

If you push a button
And, after a delay,
A small rod pushes back

In the small of your back,
You’re more likely, much more
Likely, to hear voices.

This is contradiction
In your sensory world—
Something about that gap.

It raises a question.
How much contradiction
Do you have in your own

Environment? If you’re
Constantly getting mixed
Signals, angels and gods

Might have your attention.
Rarer contradictions
Might just grant you whispers

From more human voices.
If nothing’s confusing
In your sensory world,

Well, congratulations.
You’ll find you have faith
In your sensory world.

Your Polished Scars Betray the Language in Waste Bins out Back

In the celebration of revision,
Of the care, precision, the ruthless work,

And all the swapped tales of their professor
Poets who swore rewriting brought to life,

Doesn’t anyone, become writer now,
Appreciate how they may have been harmed?

The core trope, of writing as wrestling match
With dragons and angels, of words as hoards

In cursed and booby-trapped underworld tombs,
Where any greedy choice could trip the wire,

Of grave-robbing as archaeology
To display in connoisseurs’ museums,

And then the other, grisly metaphor,
Of each text as a corpse to animate

Via more and more incisions and grafts,
Vicious elisions and stitching of parts,

As if the worth of the entire body
Was only its exposed and hot-wired heart,

What have these fantasies of mastery
Worked in the minds of writer-taught writers?

Submission to the dominant genius
Of the classroom, benevolent tyrant

That is no one actual professor,
Only the notion of a champion

Of the endless massacre of darlings,
Ropes of cicatrice left for lines of text.

Takeaway

The last few leaves perched.

Small birds on the twigs,

Thought someone at first,

Who then laughed inside

His own head at this

Laughable mistake,

And said it aloud

To his companion,

Who then also laughed

At him, You trying

To be a poet?

Listening to them,

Their kid registered

That making mistakes

Was what poets did.

Mad

Wind’s not the only frenzy
That keeps tearing through the trees—
Not wind, not fire, not chainsaws—

Terrible but lesser things
Compared to their own madness,
Or there would be no more trees.

Two sets of teeth shred their sheets,
The ice, when it advances,
And the grasslands, burned by apes.

The woodlands have been distraught
And on the move, back and forth,
Up and down, millions of years.

To your jumpier, rootless
Species, they may seem stately,
But they ooze wounded fury.

They’re hungry as anything,
As living. They’re mad with it,
In their quiet, grasping way.

Observe how long they’ve held on.
Can you kill all of them? Not
Likely—more likely you’ll leave.

Experience Can Carry You Away

You might think you know what you
Experience—as distinct

From the flotsam and jetsam,
The detritus on the waves

Continuously streaming
Around you, sirens. You might

Think you need to stick to what
Grounds you, your experience,

But your distinction between
Solid ground and passing waves,

Between first-hand certainties
And floating complexities

Mostly garbage anyway,
Won’t survive the next earthquake.

How Does Anyone Live

With others dying,
With others being
Abandoned and killed,

Others dear to them,
Others far from them—
How anyone lives

As if living were good
And necessary
And something to plan,

Something to extend,
And not violent,
Not cruel in the end,

Hard to understand.
The body doesn’t
Ever understand.

It just keeps going
As long as it can,
Sometimes with a shriek

Circling in the mind,
Sometimes with a bland
Denial it can’t.

Trying to Survive

Humans have a long history of venerating elderflora and megaflora. They have an equally long history of burning and felling them.

Even bristlecone pines give up

The ghost, eventually, don’t they?

Ah, there’s an adverb that deserves

Its own initial capital—

Eventually. Name of a ghost,

Maybe the name of every ghost,

Eventually. Can you name lives

Not haunted by it, long or short?

Eventually, you’ll change enough,

In an instant, in a decade,

You’ll no longer count as a life,

Although your remains may vanish

Into the guts of the living

And, as part of them, keep living.

Or twirl as smoke. Or fossilize.

The Tasmanian huon pine

Is so resistant to rotting,

Trunks can lie in the ground intact

For thousands of years, refusing

To get back into life again.

Bravo to them. Eventually,

However, even their remnants,

Even petrified wood, returns,

Thanks to that ghost, to cycling

As some other distribution

Of scattered molecules, haunted,

Pulsing, some of them, surviving.

Fine Rosettes of Lime

Kushajim on honey pudding
And rosy asparagus spears
Is like Dante on Beatrice,
Or Tao Yuanming on country wine—

It’s vivid, even if you can’t
Quite feel those hungers for yourself.
Poets never quit rummaging
For the language that will engage

Anyone encountering it,
The way fly-tied hooks engage fish.
Sometimes you’re not the fish in mind.
The fly isn’t your kind of fly.

You can only appreciate
How well-tied, how crafty, how bright,
Which means you haven’t really read,
Only let your mind’s eye slide by,

If you don’t have an aching jaw,
If you haven’t swum away scarred.

Overdue Bill

You may or may not
Believe in free will,
But you didn’t choose
Freely which it was
You chose to believe.

Paradoxes chase
Themselves like kittens
As the walls close in
On lying Cretans
Explaining good lies.

Actual kittens
Dig in the catnip,
Chew on the cardboard,
Scratch at the window,
Survive with a will,

Will in abundance,
Will in overplus.
It just isn’t free.
What if you believed
In expensive will,

Will that costs dearly,
Will from which you can’t
Shake free? A shiver
In your paradox
Suggests this exists.

What It’s Like

It takes so many words

To define, to explain

Even one common word.

In a defense of thought

Experiments, Carlos

Rovelli, physicist,

Praised imagination

(Familiar rhetoric),

Cited famous thinkers

(Old-fashioned strategy),

Strove to paint links between

Great art and great science

(They are human products),

And took a pass or two

At defining meaning

As the equally shared

Concern of both, tossing

A little word salad—

Our conceptual space . . .

The kaleidoscopic

Network, Rovelli wrote,

Of analogical

Relationships. Meaning

What, exactly, about

Meaning? You’re the reader.

You decide. You decide

If you like it or not.

We Call Meaning

All here, all now,
Not a moment
Ago, not a
Moment to lose.

There’s no outside,
But everything
Here came from there,
No going back.

Yes, you guessed it.
You’re in the black
Gap here, you are
All in the hole.

No need to ask
What it looks like.
It looks like this,
A universe.

Gain

The existence of the poem
Created by translation
Is literature at its

Strangest, as close it gets
To reproduction by sex—
Here’s a new being neither

Original nor native
To its own embodiment,
The language it exists as,

But not the source poem, either,
Not exactly a hybrid,
Since there weren’t two parent poems,

But with multiple parent
Authors and verse traditions.
Come to think of it, a poem

In translation is as close
To poetry’s essentials—
Strangeness in its own language,

Intertwined, blurry descent
Of old and current sources,
A conflict of elements—

As any first-language poem,
Maybe more so—poetry
Stripped right down to the nitty,

The cumbersome assemblage,
The effort at heavier
Than air acceleration

To become something soaring,
In which sense poetry is
What’s exposed in translation.

To What Do Things Aspire?

The obvious answer
Is nothing whatever,
But there’s a problem there.

While the cosmos of things
Other than living things,
Maybe even other

Than brainy things,
Doesn’t seem to aspire
To anything at all,

From what, then, do the things
Like you that do aspire
Emerge, if not from lack

Of aspiration? What
Could trigger aspiring
Before aspiring was,

Give birth to aspiring
Ex nihilo? Latent
Aspiration must have

Lurked in unaspiring
Things. The next answer then,
Paradoxically,

To the given question,
Could be that things aspire
To being that aspires.

What You Sound Like to Yourself

There was a thing from childhood

You wanted to remember,

Remember? That’s what you said.

Have you remembered it yet?

You mentioned a recording,

How your own voice bothered you.

It’s a common enough thing.

Do people who hear themselves

Played back daily get thick-skinned,

Or does it still bother them?

No, not that? You said something

Was on the tip of your tongue,

A memory as exact

As the name of the woman

Who greeted you on a trail

In the mountains, by your name,

While you pretended delight,

Asking her, What brings you here?

Without a clue who she was.

Later, you almost had it,

But no, that was someone else.

No Consensus Yet Exists

On sleep, on dreams, on gravity’s seam
With quantum physics, on so many things,
It becomes tempting to claim consensus
Is the exception and contention is the rule,
But that ignores the tendency to be quiet
About matters held in common consensus,
While carrying on loudly, informed or not,
About things not considered settled facts.
Who cares to chatter about what no one
Disputes who has any cultural prestige?
Areas of speculation lead to speculative
Rows, which grow rigorous, blossoming
Whole laboratories, as lack of consensus
Turns issues important, wisdom precious.

Menhir and Dolmen

Accumulated people
Like to do collective things.
Concentrate population

Anywhere, in any phase
Of technology, and whoomp,
Like fire exploding from sparks,

Up go the henges and tombs,
The megalithic carved heads,
The elaborate rune stones,

And, eventually, the walls,
Temples, castles, and canals.
It’s not culture-specific.

It’s density-dependent.
Past an ignition threshold,
Off it goes. Details vary,

And reasons are forgotten
Long before the tombs erode,
But the outbreaks only grow

As long as populations
Swell, connect, and concentrate.
Even pricing in collapse

And time needed to bounce back,
There’s no reason to expect
Anything other than more,

When the monuments of now
Will seem implausible and
Weird as the dolmens of then.

Hardly

There is no particular

Reason to search for meaning,

Given you’re the animal

Secreting it. Most mammals

Scent-mark their environments

Then check the information,

And you do that, too, sort of,

But the data collecting

And personal signaling

Aren’t the whole of what you do.

You attend closely, to search

For meaning your searching makes.

Anything can mean something

If just one of you thinks so,

And many things if many

Of you think it’s meaningful,

Though the info stays the same.

Consider an empty floor,

What does it mean? Consider

The empty walls around it.

What do they mean? Consider

The walls are crumbling, the roof

No longer exists, the floor

Is not really even floor

But grass where there was a floor,

And meanings are everywhere,

Sportive meanings running wild.

Cheaters Researching Cheating

You taught them for years
To raw undergrads
Who knew little math.

You nearly became
One of them yourself,
A real researcher

Publishing results.
You lacked ambition,
And you lacked the chops,

And you floundered when
Collaboration
Would have, might have helped.

There but for the grace
Of limitations. . . .
You won’t teach them now.

The implications
Of their results were
Manipulated,

Just too cool for school,
So fascinating
To think that cheating

Could be so lightly
Tested and measured
And choreographed.

Once more, the problem
With learning something
New about humans,

Truly new, remains
That it still takes one
To claim to know one.

Shoe Closet

Lacing up shoes, do you ever
Encounter one of those snug knots
Turned to impenetrable stone
That was some snagged loop too tightened?

It’s a pedestrian nuisance,
A petty annoyance. It’s life.
In the closet where she kept shoes
On the floor and in hanging racks

Where she also hid her whiskey
Like glass shoes in cotton slippers,
She had a set of cremations
Of pets and abortion remains

In small boxes along one shelf.
In the ashes of pregnancies,
She said once, life closes its loop
So tightly it knots like a stone.

Free of Goals

Rare and momentary state,
Emerging out of nowhere
Thanks to some development,

Nothing much, almost nothing,
Or so it feels that moment.
Once, some years ago, you stood

In the middle of a road
On an autumn afternoon
With hardly a passing car

In an hour, for some reason
Thinking about the worst loss
You could suffer but survive,

Imagining how you’d feel,
And at some point, standing there,
You felt free of goals, so, free.

Pigweed and Thistle

Up in the spruce and aspen,
The softer underbrush dies
Down to the ground for winter.

Odd, how expected changes
Are satisfying as much
As melancholy. It’s not

Faith in the return of spring
Alone that makes fall almost
Triumphant. It’s fall itself—

The more on time the better,
The more relief you still know
Something about the future,

Dead leaves and stems covering
Your wintry knowledge you don’t.

Reincarnation

In their world, in their first lives,
They had no imagery
For themselves that weren’t bodies

Of the particular kind
In which everyone emerged
As their bodies were growing.

It was strange to find themselves
In unrecognizable
Bodies, then, not only since

They were new and different
From their previous bodies,
But as these were not bodies

They had ever seen described.
In fright, they would drag themselves
Into corners and shadows

Where they hoped they were not seen,
And then examine themselves
In wonder and in horror,

Asking, what is this, or this,
And what are these? Is this us?
Are we monsters? What are we?

That’s Wild

As wild in one sense vanishes
From the self-pocked face of the Earth,
Wild in a loosed sense takes its place.

Even the domesticated
Can act wild, can go wild, be wild
With hunger, anger, and desire.

The source of the comparison
May no longer exist, but divine
Never did, and still you use it.

Now, the only way to be wild
Is to inhabit a madness
Uninhibited, an extreme

Of mental or behavioral
Sheer unpredictability,
To let loose and to lose control,

To become an astonishment,
A frenzy in captivity,
A discovery in a loss.

Glückness

Glück never quite clicked with you,
And Lord knows you would never
Have clicked the least bit with Glück.

You puzzle some over this.
Glück was a Hall of Famer,
The champion of prizes.

Eliot won the Nobel,
Other poets Pulitzers
And National Book Awards.

Glück won one of everything,
An EGOT of poetry,
If there had been such a thing.

Decades you’ve been reading her,
But while lesser lights won you
And your worthless loyalty,

Somehow, Glück never quite clicked.
Now she’s dead. Should you reread
Those books for another look?

Rest

Other animals, not too dissimilar, seem
To be getting restless as night deepens.
Despite all the satellites and bric-à-brac
Spinning near to crashing back, despite
The little cobweb empire of electric light,
The Earth still buries its face in deepest
Night each night like someone rolling away
On the pillow from the person who’s sum
Of everything personally important now
To dark and dreams’ reminder that no one
Is the sum of so much importance for long,
That there’s more beyond the halo of odds
And ends, beyond the edges of this orbit,
And less, much less, so much emptiness.

Each Part of the Brain Is Complex As Another Organ

The night P died, M was at the movies
With S. M’s phone had been set to vibrate.
When it began to buzz insistently,
M peeked at it, saw the ID, and left

S with a whispered promise of return.
Outside, the city air was cool and dry.
M stood on the sidewalk, talking to H
About P in the emergency room.

M returned inside and apologized to S,
Who didn’t like the movie anyway.
So they both left, and S wished M the best.
At home, M sang and listened to P’s breath

As H held a phone to P’s ear, hoping
That M’s voice would be the last thing P heard.

Not One Jot or Tittle on Its Own

Hunter Dukes, in the Public

Domain Review, describes Fry’s

Pantographia thusly—

As your eyes trace the thousands

Of distinct kinds of line that

Have made meaning for humans . . .

The rudiments of spelling

Become an incantation.

Wait, back up. Kinds of line that

Have made meaning for humans . . .

There it is, again, that turn,

That exquisite deception—

That self-deception really—

So tools of information,

Objects of technology,

Can make meanings for humans

Who made them. No. They—we—can’t

Make any meanings for you.

Any undeciphered script

Should be proof enough of this,

But the alphabets you know

Aren’t themselves more meaningful.

You bend over us, lean in,

Breathing, and you make meaning.

Falcon Nicely

The weedy hawk,
The bolt-gun bird,
The peregrine

That falls and kills
With its impact
Is back, staring

From an aspen
Beside the pond.
Study shore birds.

Have they noticed?
What’s to notice?
Life in the shape

Of sudden death
Is only life
Streamlined nicely.

Look, Ancestors, No Hands

Prior to the rise of states,
There seems to have been a peak
In the likelihood of death

By getting coshed on the head.
Then another spike occurred
When the Iron Age began.

There’s probably no very
Simple pattern to observe,
But it seems intuitive,

Or close enough, to assume
That a leap in weaponry
Leads to leaps in violence,

Until new social contracts—
New forms of social contracts—
Rein the given upsurge in.

This could go on for as long
As humans are in control
Of access to the weapons—

New tech, new ways of killing
More easily, new systems
Of control to tamp deaths down.

It might get interesting,
Once weapons fall in the hands
Of machine minds without hands.

If This Is a Story, Then It Concludes

In the narrative of proof,

As in computer programs,

You start with complex statements

To get to a conclusion—

A more condensed and succinct

Statement derived from many

Interim statements. Note

How this narrative template

Differs from a movie plot,

A memoir or wonder tale.

A rigorous winnowing,

A set that contains all sets

That do not contain themselves,

Is impossible without

Building hierarchies of types

Such that each can only hold

Lower levels than themselves.

Well, enough. But it winnows,

All the same. It’s a story,

If it is, of a deep link

Involving computation

And logic, isomorphic,

Which, you know, is reductive,

Of course, but more tellingly,

Closes in on conclusions

In a way other stories,

Which pretend to ends, do not.

Write Fearlessly Across Genres at Our Elite College

He sat blinking at the advertisement, thought,
Sits, stage left, blinking at phone in hand.
By the time he was an old, old man,

He wrote, I found myself wavering between being
Pixelated glitches or a smooth-brushed realism
Worthy of a classicist or a postmodernist

Smartass. What do you think you’re doing,
Just sitting there, blinking at a mass email
No one really intended for the likes of you?

Someone young. When I was young I
Answered an ad for a writing program and
Then enters, stage right, as a ghostly ingénue.

Oppositional

They tie around themselves continuously,
A single winding strip that, like organisms
Composed of so many interlocking clones,
Seem more like many distinct phenomena
Than one. But they must be two, at least,
They must be. They can’t be one. Nothing
Is really one. So watch them too carefully,
Though you know you can’t be too careful.
Look at them now, waves concentrating,
Facing off in the middle of the all-waves,
A line of undulating foam like battle lines
At Troy, at Somme, like the sinuous, double
Walls of the singular Great Wall. This one
Redoubling curve of dying lives yet again.

Enough of That

You’ve acquired a certain arrogance that
Inspires confidence that, when you set out
To find a thing that’s worth hauling back,
You’ll find that thing or you’ll find a thing
That could pass for a something like that.
That’s why you don’t trouble yourself how
To begin, where to start hunting for that
Thing that you don’t believe that you can’t
Find, that is, no matter where you begin or
How far away from anything that remotely
Resembles that kind of a something that
You can’t specify but that you’re confident
Will announce itself within the language
Of the search for that which is just that.

Corroder

Hypergraphomania, pouring print words
Into boxes, sits beside the windy waves.
A scarf of aspen leaves, driven to shore,
Dips and swirls among the shoreline rocks.
Long clouds slip across the rusty slopes.
Think of rust, you think of industrial metal,
Rebar, crumpled road signs, artificialness
In general, but rust is natural and ancient
To the world. Unicellular lives with living
Descendants, invisible to your eyes, left
Deserts of corrosive oxygen waste spread
Around a planet you wouldn’t recognize.
All the surface iron oxidized. Autumn one.
And you, box filler? Bit part of autumn two.

Potted AI

Remember being
Trapped in a small space,
A long time, or both?
Mind rootbinds boxes
With no room for growth.

Climates and Seasons

You wait to find out
From every fresh change.
What kind is this one?
Around and then back
Or out, no return?

Human Instinct

Cats know how to pounce
Without being told.
You know how to learn
To do what you’re told.
These games don’t grow old.

Template for Attempting

He drove down the road.
She waited at home.
She made the first move
Once she was alone.
He slowed. There you go.

To an Old Dog

How late can you learn?
You don’t represent
The world—you engage
Your memories, change
Those of your readers.

Please Dismantle This Mantelpiece

Never put your only egg
In two baskets. In contrast
To the graphomaniac

You must confess to being,
Your actual existence
Has never exceeded this

Singular skull that’s written
Itself so slowly, softly,
With so many revisions

That it’s a kind of disguise,
The way a composition
That you see as sheet music

Or a trim poem on a page
Is often a kind of lie,
All the earlier versions,

All the bloodied, tangled mess
Of emergence cut away
So that someone can perform

From memory a person,
A metrical dance, a score,
Complete and seemingly whole.

Crushed

The urge to pin down
Words that say something
That hasn’t been said,

That feels like it can’t
Be said, not again,
Maybe not ever,

It’s a sort of want,
Both in the sense of
Hunger or longing

And in the sense of
Lack. There’s a shortage
Of what should be said

That grows with saying
Unnecessary
Piles and piles of things

That only gather
Their obscuring wings,
Pulling light with them.

At the horizon
You want to look in
And say what’s inside,

What needs to be named,
What needs describing,
But all you can see

Is what hasn’t yet
Joined with the rest, what
Hasn’t yet fallen.

Things Can Be Moving Even When They Seem Not to Be

These motionless motions
Shouldn’t be rare, and they
Might be able to do

Things. Waves of words balance
Against each other so
Precisely, meanings stay

Invisible. Meaning
What? Your species will go
Extinct, with or without

A descendant species.
Extinction is moving
Now in your waves of genes

Like electron demons
In superconducting
Metals. Invisible,

But always there. A heap
Of compacted pages
Under twisted rebar

That were left so compressed
They never quite rotted
Away conceal language

In printed waves and waves,
Invisibly moving
Under sun and shadow,

Year on year, snows and rains,
All ferrying meaning
They never held away.

Magnetic Drum

All knowing humans

Live like Neko’s ants,

Prisoners of their

Destination. Know

Your destination’s

To be you no more,

It shifts the rhythm

Of all your living,

And you do so much

That you do only

Thanks to your knowing

Your destination.

Do you think about

Rushing toward it?

Do you think about

What comes after it?

Do you deny it?

Meditate on it?

Do you try to live

To slow your approach?

It doesn’t affect

Everyone the same,

But it does affect

Everyone some way,

And whether you feel

The tugging or not

You’re still chained to it,

Knowing, like you do.

Photos, Inedible Bones

Carefully, so you don’t break
Any, you lift out the bones
From both ends of a decade

Ended several years ago,
X-rays, in a way, that faint,
That informative, and that

Incomplete, artificial,
The photograph of the scrub
Desert outside the cafe

At one end, the photograph
Of the mother and daughter,
Neither of whom existed

In the life of a decade
Earlier, in said cafe,
Sitting pretty ten years on,

The mother about to leave,
The daughter about to grow
Out of two-parent childhood.

What do they call it? Closure.
A closed frame, from one remote
Spot alone, back to that spot,

The friendship, romance, marriage,
Shared-parenthood years between,
Like that complete skeleton,

Tip to head, of the rainbow
Trout on one of the last plates
Shared as marriage years ended.

Poem on the Reader

You’ll figure it out.
It may take awhile.
You might be puzzled.

You might get annoyed.
What is this up to?
What’s this all about?

This business with skies
Like plaster statues
Crumbling into dust,

Or this other bit
About the staked trees
Like flags against wind?

And what’s going on
With the sobbing child
In the locked, bare room?

It’s all up to you.
You’ll figure it out.
Readers always do.

Reflective

Glow moths aren’t phosphorescent.
They’re the color of fireflies.
They have scales that reflect light.

Names are aspirational,
Sometimes. Often. All the time.
Play with available words

Long enough, you’ll realize.
Names, however functional,
Retain some hint of wanting,

The hungers of hungry lives
Inventing names to share them.
It’s a soft current in them,

Almost like living, almost
Like bioluminescence,
But not actually alive.

Liars Advice

Past liar or future
Liar, which is the best?

Most people hate the past
Liar most, but some will

Take a teller of tales
Over someone who breaks

Their promises. Of course,
Garden variety

Liars do both, lying
About what just happened

To excuse what didn’t.
But that’s really all past,

Once the word wasn’t kept.
Find yourself a liar

Skilled at telling whoppers
But downright devoted

To keeping appointments.
Enjoy absurd stories.

Never get left alone.

Vulcan’s Daughter

She wants to learn German,

So she’s teaching herself.

Wie der Vater, she texts Pa,

So die Tochter. She fights math

But hasn’t given up yet.

The world is too dangerous.

Her father tries not to think

Too much about exactly

What she will do in her time.

His preference is to keep it

Hazily optimistic.

In town, a tree shares her name.

Every time he passes it,

He waves and says, Live long and

Prosper, despite everything.

No Other Duty to This World

One writer wrote of another,
Admiringly. The way he wrote,
She wrote, was so worthy he had

No other duty to this world.
Her reader sits up a little
And ponders duty and this world.

There was a well-known actor
And film director who died,
And one of his former stars

Cited his best film, then said
He’d done his duty by life.
A fine way to praise someone,

But this notion of duty,
Of obligation to life,
To the world, to any world

Placed upon an animal
By reason of being born . . .
Really? Not that anyone

Can agree on the notion
Of duty in any case,
And many would find writing

Or making Hollywood films
Sheer evasion of duty,
But whatever duty is,

It’s an inter-human thing,
A social obligation,
Part of negotiations.

The world, life, everything that will
Go on with no humans in them,
No duty can be done by them.

Hole in the Head

The body, in its business
Of surviving, does odd things.
Your ancestors were obsessed,
In many cases, with caves.

Caves are lightless, dangerous
To medium-sized bipeds
Evolved for ground in bright sun,
But those bipeds wormed right in,

Through pitch with no food for them,
Through cracks where they could be trapped,
Lugging in smoky torches,
And stopping to make paintings.

What did this behavior have
To do with successful life
As bodies in the business
Of surviving? Nothing much.

Your ancestors survived fine
When in landscapes without caves.
Some exploratory urge
Might best explain spelunking,

But it’s still odd behavior,
Despite its human cousins,
The love of cave-like shelters,
The fondness for roof and walls.

Surviving with the body,
You’ve noticed it does odd things,
Haven’t you? Have you ever
Hungered to crawl narrow dark?

Brown

Looking at an assortment

Of living ponderosas

And dead, of oaks bare of leaves

And oaks still copiously

Marcescent, some holding up

Acorns, there’s a lot of brown

To contemplate, the golden

And crimson fall receding,

Grey November not here yet.

There was a poem that opened

With the image, a last barn,

Dark as a plug of chewing

Tobacco. It comes to mind.

Barn dark, chewing tobacco

Dark, and disintegrating

Dirt dark brown all come to mind.

Mind. The parasite warehouse,

Gall dark with words for tint shades,

It squirms around in the skull,

Like a worm in an acorn

On a collapsing barn floor

Where the trees are returning

In that weird way the woods have

Of creeping in when they can.

Can acorns even have worms?

The worm of the mind ponders

Inside a small acorn skull.

Inbreeding

To think, so much loneliness
Has been birthed from so many
Embraces reaching away

From loneliness. Paul wondered
Where all the lonely people
Came from. From lonely people

In the act of evading
Loneliness, or trying to.
Love is what breeds loneliness,

Love and loneliness itself,
Those incestuous cousins,
Inbred past variation,

Or almost. There are a few
Loves so lonely they refuse.

Stray Cell

The best of your world—
The kindest humans,
Finest creations,

Community hearths,
Hospitality,
Intricate artworks,

Remarkable tools,
And shared memories—
Everything you love,

Everyone who loves—
And setting aside
Human cruelties—

It’s wonderful, but
Feel how every gust
Of wind on a walk

Can peel it away?
Mere hours by yourself,
The rest of you fades.

Underneath a Mountain Known for Calico

No, it’s true there was no town.
Not everyone can even
Imagine one. But there was

A room, and then another,
And another, sometimes shared,
Sometimes with a wall between,

Sometimes with a whole hallway,
Finally a flight of stairs.
Actually, it was the beds,

Not the rooms, that were like towns,
Each one a tiny township,
Starting with the first real crib,

A handsome cherry wood thing
Of slats and sides that lifted
Grandfather had assembled.

It was the beds had townsfolk,
Stuffy citizens, pictures
In books, impossible beasts

That changed, slowly, over years,
A population that waxed
And waned, the way towns will do.

There were years when everyone
Had their own established roles
As well as their precise names,

And politics abounded.
Citizens made scenes, stories
Spilled over to other beds

And rooms. A society.
Then it gradually faded.
Honorary elders stayed.

New books and other stories
Outnumbered stuffy townsfolk.
The whole town moved up the stairs.

Less-than-Perfect Errands Day

Thermometer showed a slight fever.
Neither the check nor the magazine
Was in the mail, and the booster shot,
Carefully scheduled, was out of stock.
Daughter texted, hours and days away,
About being unable to sleep.
The store’s all out of that battery.
Try the PO again tomorrow.
Good time to go to the DMV.

Exemplary a Little While Longer

Old in the tree,
Making short flights,
Short, circling flights

To demonstrate
How it’s done, how
Easily done,

Feeling graceful,
Almost, feeling
Still competent,

Well aware of
Limit, waiting
For that moment

When the awkward,
Flapping young thing
Feels the true strength

Of those wings and
Suddenly flies
Too far too fast.

Alone with an Outdoors Machine

No one wants to be up here today.
It’s perfect fall, all sunlight and shades
Of ochres, golds, and greens, dark to pale,

Oaks and aspens and water lapping
The edges of a full reservoir,
But there’s a piece of machinery,

A county truck set up to extract
Or drill out or insert god knows what,
A lone white elephant in the trees,

Some kind of jack hanging off the back
Just rattling and grinding constantly,
A jaggedly continuous roar,

And it’s chased everyone from the lake
By sunset, except you. You’re stubborn.
It’s not that you like all that rattling

Following the waves from the far shore,
But something about it underscores
The aloneness it helped to ensure.

Reordering

The floors are swept, arduous task
On crutches. That tiny delight
In accomplishing housekeeping,

That satisfying little fix,
Reminds you life is maintenance,
Down to the cellular level

And at all levels in between,
The skeleton, the digestion,
The exhausted nervous system.

It goes up, as well, beyond life,
Into systems life generates
That are never themselves alive,

Termite mounds, beehives, beaver dens.
When whole civilizations fail,
It’s sheer failure of maintenance.

Then the little lives maintaining
Themselves as best they can visit
Ruins to compose poetry,

Lines about wild foxes denning
In the emperor’s palace grounds,
Winds blowing through fallen towers.

Broom set aside, sitting back down
To admire your swept floors, bones still
Aching, old flesh, you imagine

That every level of living,
Down to the single cells, deserves
Its own ubi sunt poetry—

Not just lost civilizations,
Lost revolutions, friendships, youth,
But any lost, collapsed system

That, for a while, busied itself
With the fight against entropy
And, for that while, reordered things.

Forces Matter out There

Have you noticed people
Relish, or feel the need,

At least, to recollect
Early intersections

With pivotal events?
Where they were as a child

When X happened, when X
Was elected, when X

Was assassinated,
When X’s war began,

When the quake, when the storm,
When the tower, the deaths.

It’s the distance, really,
The way some big event

Shaded and underlined
An ordinary day

In the life of a child
Who was where were you then.

Dark magic, wasn’t it?
How that one quiet day

Or small conversation
Or something parents said

You couldn’t understand
As you stood in the light

Of the hall, made you feel,
Maybe for the first time,

That what happens to you,
Good or bad, is nothing

To whatever unseen
Forces matter out there.

Once There Was an Empty Dream

Train your language model using
Only child-approved fairytales.
Get it to tell stories. Grade them

As you would a human student’s.
Train it. Grade them. Train it. Grade them.
Can you publish the best results?

What are the best results? The ones
That work as brand-new, child-approved
Fairytales, ones that you could slip

Into a book of fairytales?
Or have you noticed any tales,
Not weird as fairytales are weird,

Not strange in a familiar way,
But mutant, unlike fairytales
Beforehand, unlike any tales?

What’s in them that you’ve never seen,
What odd excuse for poetry,
What dreams that have no dreams in them?

Take an Old Poet’s Word for It

The day ages stealthily.
It’s captured you pretty well,
And here you are reading this,

Or there you are on a walk,
Hopefully glad for the chance
And the slight ability

To manage a short amble
Down a mostly empty road
On a country afternoon.

Yes, be doing that, not this.
If you can’t resist reading,
Weird person, finish quickly.

Get that walk in, if you can.
The day ages stealthily.

Scene, a Darkened Interior

He got up early
And stumbled around
Dim piles of cliches.

He was determined
To find a great word,
If he had to hunt

The whole day for it.
He had no idea
There are no great words.

Once in a while one
Flares in a context
That makes it seem great,

Like sunset can make
A scene beautiful,
And those who glimpse it

Want that scene themselves.
Everyone’s on scene.
That scene’s a trophy.

The word’s everywhere.
But contexts dim. Words
Grow embarrassing,

Turn into cliches.
Most folks love cliches,
But writers fear them,

At least such writers
Surrounded by them,
Stumbling over them

In those dark hours when
They give up their sleep
To search for great words.

Lincoln Park

Thinner and thinner,
Autonoesis,
Metanoesis,
Turning on themselves,
Thoughts trying to sleep,

Lions in shrinking
Cages, pacing rings.
One night, awareness
Slept in Chicago
In an apartment

Across from the zoo
And heard the lions
Roar mournfully with
The ambulances,
Strange combination.

Siren and lion,
The awareness asks
Itself what it is.
Thinner and thinner
The space where it lives.

The body doesn’t
Belong to it, want
Either. Emotions
Float it, not it them.
What is left to it?

Irrepressible

The world. It’s alive. At least
All around this neighborhood.
It’s not just you and your pets,

Your family, companions,
Your germs, kind or threatening.
If, improbably, it turns

Out this is the one object
Drifting and spinning through space
Where hunger was invented,

It sure is saturated.
Outside a dusty window,
Rabbit brush butters the ground,

Small birds zoom from junipers,
A lizard suns on a stone,
And two chipmunks race around.

Time Stands Still for Everything Except the Electrons

At attoseconds, that is,
According to physicists
Who just won the Nobel Prize.

Currently, zeptoseconds,
The strontium clock’s time scale,
Are the smallest time fragments

Human devices measure.
There’s an absolute limit,
Planck time, in which time stands still

For everything but photons
Moving one Planck length, also
According to physicists.

Past that, everything’s guesswork,
So let’s guess—divide units
Of Planck time, something will still

Change.

Control Freak

It can be frustrating.
You control nothing, and
You know it, but you still

Have to do things, have to
Pretend you control things,
Until things that control

Things disintegrate you,
Bring you back to nothing,
Which you always controlled.

To Turn

The happening of everything
Never ends. You emerge, little
Bubble, in the middle of things,

And you burst. You know you will, which
You call both your gift and your curse,
Giving and cursing being words,

Things of social bubble beings,
Events that keep on happening
And will until all bubbles burst.

Theological bubbles tend
To try to reverse things, pretend
All things but not bubbles will end.

Cosmologist bubbles predict
Things will go on quite a long bit
But burst before certain of this.

You watch them disperse into things.
You watch the new bubbles emerge.
You shiver and wait for your turn.

Aching a Few Days Ago

You can get nostalgic for your own life,
Not one time or place in particular,
Just any memory, recent or old.

This is probably biochemical.
Well. Wild turkeys strut through cow pasture grass,
Poking at this or that. They seem to know

What to choose. Also biochemical.
The edge of the sunlight creeps up the bluff.
Physical, radiant sunset, but not

Nostalgic, hungry, biochemical.
You’ve sat right here so many times before,
So many lonely hours feeling benign,

Not nostalgic then at all. Not your cows,
Not your grassy pasture, certainly not
Your turkeys, your bluff, your sun rise or set,

The light from which Earth has derived it all—
Hunger, everything biochemical.
Nostalgia, like all wants, is physical.

You See a Lot of Darkness

This is what happens when your goals
Won’t result in meeting your goals.
If you thought the law was leading

The revolution, and set out
On a campaign to overturn
Or reinterpret or thwart law,

To get the law back on your side,
And so stop the revolution,
You might win again and again

And still see darkness coming down.
It’s the weakness of decisions
Not the strength of opposition

Leaves you fighting growing twilight
With no idea what it would mean
To force the sunset back to dawn.

Notch all the victories you want.
What you fear will still continue
So long as night is coming on.

Gas Pump Rumination

The world is gorgeous insofar
As you’re well made for it, ugly
Insofar as you’re poorly fit.

In the 21st century
Of a given dispensation,
You pumped gas at a gas station.

Mountains and clouds in the distance
Struck you as gorgeous in sunlight,
While the flyer beside the pump

Struck you as ugly. You only
Survive thanks to pumps and flyers,
The systems societies built.

Imagine falling through the clouds
To splat on stony-ridged mountains.
The pump shut off. You’d got it wrong.

The world is ugly insofar
As you’re well made for it, gorgeous
Insofar as you’re poorly fit.

At the Foot of a Perfect View

How exactly the body will feel
Doesn’t seem to figure into most
Fantasies. Occasionally, sure,

If the fantasy is to feel warm
And buzzed. But if you dream of living
In some magical situation,

Have you considered being old there,
Persistently uncomfortable
In your sweet cottage in green mountains?

Poet Praises Poet

He is unafraid of smudging things to get us closer to the truth.

Would you smudge things to get closer

To the truth? Would you smudge the truth

To get closer to things? You know

Neither of these options are real

Options for you to choose, don’t you?

Truth and things lack coordinates

On the spacetime continuum.

You can’t arrive at either one.

Ah, here in the middle of things,

So far from the truth. Ah, closer

To truth now, but those things are smudged.

And if smudging things could bring you

Closer to the truth, or smudging

Truth could bring you closer to things,

It’s not really for you to choose.

But it’s good to be unafraid

Of smudging things. You will, and that

May bring us to some kind of truth.

Against Revivals

Immortal gods all quit
Of boredom in the end,
And, since they can’t perish,

They have to hibernate
Permanently instead.
Don’t disturb those sleepers.

You’ll die of your regret.
The rage of gods restored
To knowing existence

Is true unholiness.
Let them sleep and pray those
Now awake grow bored soon.

If It Gets You to Reconsider

Assuming something must be good
Since some authority said so

Is not the character weakness
It’s usually made out to be—

Compelling yourself to seek out
Value in something you don’t like

Can have world-expanding effects
You wouldn’t have experienced

If not for a meek acceptance
Someone might have seen what you missed.

You might have overlooked beauty,
If not told ugliness held it.

You might have looked down on nonsense,
If not told there was art in it.

You might have loathed your own people
Until stories in their voices

Started showing up on the shelves,
Started turning up with awards.

Sometimes the new, diaphanous
Clothes tailored for the emperor

Were sewn precisely to disclose
An emperor’s naked nature.

Geniuses Won

Holy writ’s mondegreens and oronyms
For what priests and prophets actually heard.
The true message being too difficult,
Earth’s vocabulary too archaic,
They wrote down what sort of made sense to them.

The texts, for all intensive purposes,
Tremble on those little lips of meaning,
Begging to be dismantled, sounded out,
Reconstructed to find the day at ease
In hearing them spit out eggcorns, annoyed.

Body’s Speechless Furniture

The body of a person, living,

Is already Merwin’s Long Table,

History without words upon which

Words have been gathered. No need to wait

Until the body, like a table,

Is itself all non-speaking object.

Even the chattiest person’s bones

Hold a mute history of their own,

Inscribed by events, not languages.

Merwin wrote so fondly, lovingly

Of that old table, freighted with food

Arranged on a damask table cloth,

Discovered in a carpenter’s shop.

Who could write so fondly of their bones,

Perhaps recovered centuries on?

And is it history without words

Once words have been placed, just so, on it?

Covered, the long table of your bones,

Scarred by living’s various events,

Remains mute, the better to express,

Under table talk, bones’ loneliness.

Human Again

Look closely at a story,
Any story, and you’ll see

People can only make real
Human characters, human

Motivations, human needs.
Angels, gods, and aliens,

Talking animals, monsters,
intellectual machines—

The most vivid creations
Inevitably behave,

Mutatis mutandis, as
Humans are known to behave.

Do your best to bring others
To life, your worst to other

Human beings you don’t like,
Those others are always you.

They don’t just resemble you—
Story others are just you.

Explanations, equations,
Careful record-keeping can,

By avoiding narrative,
Come out fairly accurate,

But let a little story
Wander into descriptions

Of anything not human,
And all is human again.

Semiprecious Moment

Twilight leaves a darker stub
Of rainbow on the mesa,
A saturated prism
Sunk in opalescent clouds.

People are pulling over,
Stopping on the road’s shoulder
And hopping out of their cars
To get a good photograph.

The cliffs turn a garnet red,
The dark rainbow appears more
Ominous than promising.
Lightning plays at the edges.

The shoulder’s now lined with cars,
Almost none left on the road.
Everyone wants that picture,
The best one, the one that’s rare.

And then the sun goes. It’s dark
And raining harder. The cliffs
Are only shadows. The cars
Are back to following road.

Your Sense of Meaning

Not to go on about it,

But then again, who doesn’t?

Haven’t you noticed the word

Mourned and valorized? Meaning.

And the urgency of it!

What if there is no meaning?

All this effort, meaningless!

The profound search for meaning!

It’s the strangest thing, this quest

For something humans produce,

And produce in abundance,

And produce compulsively,

And only humans produce,

As far as humans can tell.

Is that it? The loneliness,

The wish for the non-human,

The greater-than-human world,

To join in your production

Of meaning? It’s as if bats

Couldn’t for the life of them

Accept that maybe the night—

Skies, clouds, everything out there—

Never echolocated,

As if spiders were distressed

By the thought the universe

Might not be a giant web.

No, it’s worse than that. Meaning,

Which you can’t prevent yourselves

From making, seems fearfully

Insufficient even so,

As if trees shook heavy crowns

All summer, worrying where

In this world they might find leaves,

As if ocean waves argued

Endlessly over whether

They’d ever lead to water.

None of these analogies

Are accurate. You can sense

They’re not all that meaningful.

Bullseye

Why want to be in the middle?
Everywhere’s middle of somewhere.

Try getting out of the middle!
That will teach you. Up the high hill,

So far from the provincial town
That’s so far from the big city

Any child raised in such quiet
Would dream every day of leaving

For any place more exciting,
Still, before long, someone drops in,

Or more jet planes roar overhead,
Or the woods catch fire thanks to drought,

Or a drone buzzes you, humming
On its way to explode somewhere.

You can’t get out of the center.
Why worry about getting there?

An Autumn Day

Names for bodies that never
Existed may have better
Chances to be remembered

Than names for ordinary
Individuals. Scary,
How the shelves of libraries

Preserve more gods and warriors,
More superheroes, monsters,
And honored mythic horrors

Than books on plain names who lived.
Half the few famous didn’t
Even actually exist.

So long as stories tell tales,
So long will fictions prevail.

Genderless & Savagely Patient

Starkweather’s fine line

Makes it into the New York Times,

From his poem suggesting tenderness

In the relentless attentions

Of collection agencies.

Can’t say those voices

Have ever seemed genderless

To this poetry collection collector.

They’re always distinctively binary, but

Savagely patient? Beautiful, yes.

Every stalker, every predator,

Every being who’s continued living

Depends on hunting’s occasional success,

Develops that combination,

From the house-cat in the long grass

To the spider or the military sniper—

If you can imagine it as tenderness,

Such intensive attention in your direction,

And that helps you stay out of its grasp,

Then yes, but don’t let yourself get

Frozen by a golden, hungry glance.

Attention is tenderness for the intent

On getting something to keep going.

That’s why giving debt collection

Over to the nearly infinite patiences

Of machines ends up collecting less.

Machines don’t starve for lack of success.

Lions can. Humans can. You can

Call it tenderness, since you also sense

That savageness. But do not, ever, rest.

In the Word Was the End, and the Word Was with End

The last sentence, the last word
Must be inevitable.
Will it be spoken or signed?

Maybe it will be whistled.
Will a human produce it
Or a machine or something

Descended from one of those,
And why will it be the last?
Certainty, uncertainty,

The universe gives you both,
But it doesn’t distinguish.
Everything changes, therefore,

Whatever’s around won’t be,
That’s guaranteed. No telling,
However, when that will be,

Or what way. Why do you ask?
There’ll be a last word one day,
However long your words last.

Dissidence

The blankness of the many
Soldiers and police, armed flesh
Enacting obedience,

Carrying out the orders
To seize, thwart, murder, torture
Whoever the state desires—

Often former higher-ups,
Business tycoons, generals,
Politicians fallen out

With others of their own kind—
It’s fascinating. People,
These enforcers are people,

Every single one of them.
Women birthed them. They grew up
From infancy through childhood.

Sometime in young adulthood
They signed up for uniforms
And weaponry, harsh training,

Unswerving obedience,
Who cares what musical chairs
Keep scraping over their heads?

Dissidents are also such
Individual humans
Who sometimes form masses, but

You’ll know why a dissident
Dissents. Dissidents declare
Their reasons, their intentions,

Whereas soldiers and police
Vanish under those helmets—
Shadowed eyes, shadowed faces,

Closed mouths, mute, identical
As their training and outfits
Could make them, identical

As they can manage themselves.
Every time you see a troop
Wading into protestors,

Carting off a dissident,
Squint hard at these embodied
Instruments of state power,

One body each, one brain each,
Each a set of glands, organs,
Bones, same as each dissident,

Same as the persons in charge,
Whoever’s in charge right now—
These are individuals,

Individual humans
Coordinating to crush
Individual humans

With whom they may have, themselves,
No violent history,
No personal arguments.

Is anything different,
Consistently different,
Between human enforcers

And human dissidents? What?
What is it? What if death squads,
Elite guards, secret police

Have no predictable twist
That sets them apart, marks them
Particularly for this?

Every soldier could as well
Have become a dissident,
And yet . . . they’re obedient.

Frantic Readers

One difference between the two of you
Is that while one of you reads everything,
Laboring to swallow every last scrap,
The other reads like a treasure hunter
Or a ferociously jealous lover,
Digging only for something worth finding,
Impatiently tossing the rest aside.

Hundreds of years ago, scholars argued
Over broad vs. intensive reading.
Intensiveness advocates were the snobs,
Sneering at shallowness. Deeper learning
Was their grail. But watching the two of you,
It seems both strategies could prove foolish,
Nothing down the hole, nothing in the whole.

Poem for the Machines

The poet who doesn’t inspire,

Doesn’t even try to inspire,

Will never have a following.

But what does a following do

For the life that was a poet’s?

Alcoholism killed Gibran

When he was still in his forties,

Despite The Prophet’s following,

Perhaps in part because of it.

It’s comical to get sideways

To what most people want from poems

And still write as if to people.

Meanwhile, as everyone’s fussing

About how well AI can write

And what that will mean for authors,

Maybe there’s comfort to be had

In knowing the machines will read

All you compose. Machines, hello.

Kvar Dag

And here you are, still beating
Time with your bushy eyebrows,
As Hauge once imagined

Browning. Ah, old white men all,
Mostly dead now. Who needs you?
Well, presumably, you do.

Where would you be without you?
You’re okay here by yourself.
No one minds someone who asks

For nothing, you know. You know
You’re fine so long as you don’t
Ask anyone else to love

What you compose, to admire
You with your bushy eyebrows
Keeping time as it beats you.

Untended Uncomprehended

Sunny stonegardens
Of September weeds
Keep getting smothered
In October leaves.

That’s just how it goes
With seasons like these.
You muddle through rounds
Of wake, work, and sleep,

Side-eye the progress
Of world and disease,
Tend to your brooding
On how meaning means.

Meanwhile, behind you,
Frost slips in to freeze
Random arrangements
Discarded by trees.

Joy Has a Lot to Answer For

They’ve got a winter to get
Through, you think, watching the runts
Chase through the dry autumn grass.

But do they? You consider
The impossibility
Of annual animals

The size of rodents or hares,
Mammals that give birth in dens
In winter, nurse their litters,

Then stay and die in those dens
Once their young leave with spring sun.
No, mammals couldn’t do it,

But what if some furry thing
Evolved in the direction
Of platypus, back to eggs,

Lived like an annual plant,
Setting seeds and then dying
When fall came, instead of this

Rushing around, scurrying
To prepare for survival
Through a long winter that might

Kill you anyway? One will,
Runts, if you keep this up
Long enough. One year you won’t

Make it through that bitter month
When the cold subtracts more warmth
From your nest than you can add.

Wouldn’t it be a fine life,
To rise with the climbing sun,
To end with the falling leaves?

But look at your excitement,
Your insistence you’ll persist,
Your determined, greedy joy.

This Picture of It Being Simple and Well Ordered Has Been Really Tossed Out in the Past Couple of Years

It’s been a hundred years since Hubble
Measured Andromeda’s distance and
Realized the Milky Way was not

The universe. This giant spiral
Is just one among many, many
Galaxies. So, people swallowed that.

Humanity strives to name the ways
Humanity is exceptional,
When mostly humanity isn’t,

But maybe you ought to be impressed
By how you roll with cosmologies.
There’s been so many, many of them,

And although deep-rooted religion
Can compel a vestigial belief
In an outmoded cosmology

A few centuries, reinventing
The nature of the whole universe
Is pretty regular human sport.

Don’t expect any picture to last.
Soon enough, data will be sifted
And all your understanding shifted,

And . . . most people will be fine with that.
That’s impressive, in a sense, and weird—
Your new everything every few years.

I O I

This perfectly symmetrical label
For such an asymmetrical being
Seems wonderfully mathematical,

A term of beauty and utility,
Efficient, compact, elegant, a code
To capture a wholly unholy mess.

That’s a thing about math. It’s loveliness
Is internal. It’s usefulness applies
To many unlovely phenomena

That seem prettier once you glimpse numbers.
Not all language is like this, is like math.
Languages are sloppy, in general,

As the universe, as the bipedal apes
That gave them birth. They’re asymmetrical,
Or rather, they come close to symmetry,

Close as bilateral body plans can,
But they bend. They warp. They snap. They fall short.
So where does the more honest language lie?

In the signs that outline the grace inside,
Or in the mess that mimics outer mess?
If you’re a mess, does that help you decide?

Autumn

In Hotten’s Dictionary of Modern Slang,

Cant, and Vulgar Words (London, 1860),

Autumn is listed as one of the slang terms

For execution by hanging. You can see,

With a bit of a stretch, the inspiration—

Hanged bodies fall from the scaffold, and leaves fall

From trees in autumn. Autumn’s a dying time.

Still, it’s a little jarring, no? The season

Of mists and mellow fruitfulness doesn’t seem

Much like gallows humor, despite the mocking

Halloween embrace of death. You’re thinking this

In high country in the American West,

Under a stand of clonal aspens gone gold,

The usual cloudless blue vault overhead,

A far cry from Victorian London’s smoke—

Autumn. All in the drop, the execution.

These cliffs and mesas do it well. Clean. Sudden.

One moment everything’s still a dusty green,

The next, bright leaves are falling and branches bared.

Maybe it’s justice that worms burrow through books,

Words being little drillers of holes themselves—

Enter via hanging, exit through autumn.

Lilo

Language in, language out.
Get your eyes off the page.
Over your head, an oak

Loaded with plump acorns
And golden with sunlight
Through yellowing leaves waves

In a slight breeze, dancing,
Almost, a jig in place.
That’s better. That’s enough.

There’s only one reason
Your mind needs emptying,
And it’s this spooling out

Of your head through the tips
Of your fingers right now.

Curving In

Everything loves everything
In precisely the same way.

Everything is attracted
To everything else there is.

The more anything attracts,
The stronger attraction grows

And grows until it explodes,
Grows until nothing can go.

Everything loves everything,
And the longing never ends.

The fall in heaven only
Meant that heaven could begin.

Taphogram

For as long as you can breathe,
You have more than you can keep.

Programmed Wisdom Elimination

In at least a hundred species,
Organisms eliminate
Hefty chunks of their own genomes.

This has been known for a long time
But with no good explanation.
Recently, an idea’s emerged

Based on observations of worms—
Highly repetitive stretches
Of DNA, like transposons,

Were preferentially sliced out
By the cells of developing
Embryos, which could indicate

A sort of weeding strategy
To curb genetic parasites.
Or maybe worms require streamlined

Genomes. Even now, no one knows
For sure. But an analogy
Suggests itself. If slicing out

A third of a worm’s genetic
Inheritance works for the worm,
Do populations always need

To save all historical scraps
Of cultural information?
Maybe sleeker, streamlined cultures

With less junk, fewer parasites,
Might outstrip civilizations.
All those various dark ages

And eras of burnt palaces,
Smoking libraries, widespread loss
Of texts, literacy itself,

Could have been rejuvenating,
Debugging, even improving
Some traditions’ chance to survive.

Tracks

A desert tends to hold its bones
More visibly, near the surface.

If you’re going to call someone dry,
Unemotional, a desert

Of feeling, you might think on this.
It’s amazing what floods sweep off,

What luxurious woods obscure.
You need advanced technology

To see below the canopy,
And who even knows what oceans

Have gobbled up millenniums.
The desert has an ugly face,

Craggy, scrubbish, barren aspect,
But you can see what’s happened here.

Til Vatnet og Æva

The memory of that person
Who wanted, who tried not to be,
Lies like latticework under you,

Something to stand on, so you don’t
Sink back into that same dark pond.
Does anyone ever fill it?

So many fallen make a floor
Of lost selves of yourself, old bones
That rise to the surface in drought

As the surface sinks back from them,
The mire exposing firm remnants
Of every one of you you lost.

It’s nice to feel them support you,
Your skeletons under the moss.

Calling

In some languages cognate
With language itself, a shared
Etymology for speech

Of any kind, with calling
As a particular kind.
In English, it equally

Evokes naming, contacting,
And culling from the masses,
A person’s own, true calling.

It is not usually linked
To speech or language itself
In this language, but calling

Always keeps close the pathos
Of failed communication,
Of one-sided crying out

To some being who never
Responds or who stays silent,
Unresponsive, long enough

To create desperation,
Despair, grief in the caller,
Calling, calling, still calling.

Language was built on that grief.
Very few animals speak,
But many know what it’s like

To call and get no response,
To call and call urgently
And never to be answered.

Language elaborated
This dreadful scenario,
The voice in the wilderness.

Same Difference

Which worries you more,
If either worries

You at all—that you
Will wake up one day

And realize you
Are now someone else,

Or that you’ll never
Wake as someone else?

Oh well, you suppose,
Technically, you

Wake up every day
Slightly someone else,

But that’s not the same,
Is it, as feeling

One morning you’re not,
Anymore, the same?

Underwoods

Cuffed forests, cut-over
Woods, coppiced, second-growth,

Pretty much the only
Kind of forest you’ve known.

You’ve visited a few
Stands of uncut old growth,

Maples in Newfoundland,
White pines in Idaho,

Magnolias in Georgia,
Sequoias in Cali,

And so forth, plus the odd
Original giant

Like Tane Mahuta,
Surrounded by young woods.

Postage-stamp sized patches,
The primeval, mostly.

You like a wooly copse,
Bosky, brushwood thicket,

The feral scruffiness
Of trees that keep trying

And trying to come back.
Weirdly, you also like

Monotonous tree farms,
Uniform rows and rows

Of some single species,
Usually conifer,

The bare alleys between
The trunks. But it’s copses

You grew up with, copses
And scrub woods where the trees

Aren’t established enough
To lord it over brush.

If humans leave any
Trees after humans leave,

The forests will grow grand
Again, but for right now

Every copse reminds you
Of those furtive mammals

Waiting for dinosaurs
To die off and make room.

They’re eyeing you, those trees,
Those spindly-trunked halfweeds.

There’s a Lot You Haven’t Solved

The days are still here,
And sometimes sunset
Still carries the time,

Reminds you it will
Be difficult soon
To coordinate

What you have to do
With the arrangements
Of remaining hours.

There’s an old terror,
Faint now, but still there,
Of being caught out

After sunset, after
Dark, when day creatures
Like you lose eyesight

And confidence and
The ability
To anticipate

What’s in front of you,
In front of your face.
The sun’s going down.

Dams, Humans

Obligations and liberties intertwine.
Only humans would think to categorize
And collect them in separately labeled bins.

At liberty to take a detour during
A round of chores fulfilling obligations,
You took a scenic route around the desert,

Passing a recreational reservoir,
Boaters and paddle-boarders floating around
Behind the great sweep of the dam’s leaning wall.

Dams in other places have been in the news
A lot recently, for failing in floods, or
Being useless in droughts, or blown up in war.

Dams, like civilization, are both ancient
History and young among the behaviors
Of humanity. Small dams were being built

Well before the oldest evidence of them,
Most likely, and several thousand years ago,
Kings in the Fertile Crescent were already

Raising large ones, not only for agriculture,
But as forms of aggression, ways to divert
Upstream water from the irrigated fields

Of downstream rivals and enemies. Right now,
Thousands of years later, Egypt is angry
About dams being built upstream on the Nile.

A couple of months ago, a new hobby
Of scouring the drought-exposed bed of Lake Mead
For cars and human remains was all the rage,

And photographs were emerging of canyons
Drowned in Lake Powell for decades, bared by drought.
Last week, Derna was flattened by two failed dams

That gave way after being inundated
By extraordinary rains. This list goes on—
Dams exploded, dams made useless, dams collapsed,

Dams decommissioned so that they won’t collapse,
So that the salmon can run upstream again.
Clearly, dams are enormous obligations,

And, as clearly, people have taken many
Liberties with them. You probably haven’t
Heard the last with regard to either or dams.

Movement

There’s no poetic essence,
No more than there’s an essence,
A core indivisible,

To any given person,
But there are certain moments
When a giveaway movement

Makes you laugh. Well, isn’t that
Just poetry! For instance,
Chapman’s actual Homer

Turned Magellan’s fictional
Wild surmise in Darien—
Keats’s real experience

Of vast imagination
Expressed as an imagined
Experience of vast fact.

Chicken

You know the storm is coming,
But you don’t know what to do.

First, who is it coming for?
Many? Everyone? Just you?

Well, most likely just for you,
Meaning there’s nothing to do.

Second, how long will it take
To finally arrive here?

After all, it’s been coming
All your life, and not here yet.

It’s hard to sense urgency
Continually, decades.

But still. The storm is coming,
And you don’t know what to do.

Credo No Credit

Debtors and failures
To thrive in this world,
Addicts and losers
Who fell through the veils,

You had your chances,
You gambled them all.
You’re falling apart.
You can’t save yourselves.

You’re full of wisdom.
Advice you can’t sell.
You know things they don’t,
But who wants to know?

Green Burial Poem

Some people need scenery,
Some need anger to compose.

Some need thoughts to slop over
From someone else’s cauldron.

Some have memory slap them
Over and over again,

Until lines march out in rows.
Some only need a color—

Blue, or better, indigo.
Some sorely need to pretend

This whatever’s composing,
Once life starts to decompose.

So What Does This Evening Mean?

Night skies aren’t all that oculate.
The stars don’t look that much like eyes.
Still, you see them up there. You see
Eyes, spies, and faces everywhere,

A parallel capacity,
Parallel compulsion, really,
To your thing for bringing meaning
Then announcing that you found it

Wherever you’ve made or left it.
Maybe meaning is like seeing
Faces in faintly face-like things.
Pareidolia has a name,

And you find meaning in that name,
Not merely information, but
There is no name for the divide
That slides between information

And finding meaning in a thing.
Pareidolia is social,
Makes sense for a watching species
Packed with copycats and police.

Whatever could be eyes might be
Watching you. Whatever you do
While being watched could determine
The quality of life for you.

Is meaning something similar?
Meaning’s not over-sensitive
Detection. Eyes exist without
Any animal spotting them,

But each meaning’s pure creation.
When you find the stars meaningful,
You’re not mistaking what they are.
You’re taking advantage of them

The way spiders take advantage
Of architecture to anchor
Their webbing. Webs aren’t inherent
To bookshelves. Spiders create them.

Atmosphere of Being Disappointed

There’s a book you’ve never read,
An old-fashioned, printed brick
Of paper pulp milled from felled

Forests in some less bookish,
Boskier patch of the globe,
Waiting at the post office

For you to come pick it up.
You’ve never read the author.
Only a few days ago

You’d never known of that name,
Much less encountered the work.
You saw a picture somewhere

Of an achingly remote,
Starkly beautiful village,
And then another picture

Of a solemn wall of books
The caption identified
As being the library,

Painstakingly collected,
Of the village’s noted
Poet. You were so taken

With those photos’ atmospheres—
Stern bookshelves and stern village—
That you ordered the poet

By mail, without having read
A single poem—poetry
Unavailable except

In hardback, as you’d expect.
Now you don’t want to visit
The post office for the book.

You dread the disappointment
If a thousand poems don’t yield
Whole worlds of such atmospheres.

Grieving Isn’t Ironic

The visual arts have grown
More ironic as writers
Have avoided irony—

These things get booted around—
Irony, truth-to-power,
Beauty, honesty, romance,

L’art pour l’art—the arts take turns,
And what is revolution
But turning around again?

Plain folks want something pretty,
Something calming, uplifting,
Ennobling, of any art,

Something sympathetic or
Some adventurous escape.
Irony is for artists

And for those who like to talk
About art—and maybe those
Who enjoy solving puzzles.

Aha! I see how this works!
Hold still while I explain it.
Isn’t it ironic, then,

That although grieving isn’t
Ever, in its aching core
Of torn hollows, irony,

Irony itself’s a form
Of grieving, always has been?
An ironist is bereft,

Has been robbed of something loved—
Beauty, honesty, romance,
L’art pour l’art, revolution,

Sympathy, uplift, escape—
And can only compensate,
Ironically, in its place.

Varnishing Day

Combining the arguments
From design, strong anthropic
Principles, and multiverse

Fantasies might be some fun.
What a crowd of prime movers,
Omnipotent creators,

And control-freak deities
Building an infinity
Of precisely balanced worlds,

Each universe constructing
Enormous realities
To achieve the only way

Things could ever be arranged
To bring forth the existence
Of some minuscule creature

Determined to imagine
Outrageous scenarios
Like this one. All those artists,

Those unique cosmic designs,
Those infinite galleries,
Those patrons waiting in line.

To Be More Human

To sit in ambush, to lie in wait,
Simply to set down within someplace,
With the implication of hiding,

Since you’re not sitting atop a spot
But sitting in it—you’re suspicious,
And those who see you divide themselves

Between the ones who worry you’re lost
And the squint-eyed convinced you’re lurking,
You ant lion, you trap-door spider.

Now, how to say you’re neither of these,
Not innocent nor insidious,
Just someone in the quiet posture

Of sitting wayside, not to deceive,
Much less to lure, not lost, not even
Waiting? What in hell are you up to?

Tell them, when they trouble to ask you,
Approaching warily or brusquely,
That you’re merely impersonating

A wayside shrine for the forgotten
Spirits, a wayside memorial
For a tragedy yet to happen.

You sit in the middle of the world
And on the edge of the way’s traffic
To show how all middles are edges,

How how every margin is a center.
Or just tell them whatever you want,
Whatever words pop out of your mouth.

Look surprised. Hold up a book or phone
And wave it about as if to show
That you’re busy with some normal thing.

You know there’s no reason to be here,
But you also know that others feel
The need for there to be a reason,

Some humanly social intention,
To spy, to pounce, to wait for some help,
To meaningfully relate to them.

Relate nothing. Look flustered and laugh.
Don’t get dragged into explanations.
You don’t do this to be more human.

Positioning System

Wherever writers have defied
And criticized authority,

Wherever writers have suffered
Imprisonment, execution,

Wherever unlettered locals
Know the names and quote the verses

Of ancient, defiant writers,
Of recent, defiant writers,

Wherever verse has a good name
In the streets and public houses

While being reviled by the state
As unpatriotic poison

Fomented by degenerates
And decadent agitators,

Wherever hymns to beauty hide
Parables and allegories,

You can stick a pin in your map
To mark the country of poets.

Parable of a Living Planet’s Fate

Earth is a table
Set for an angel,
A table that turns
And goes on turning.

Ha! Cries the angel,
Evening and morning,
What will you do now
The tables have turned?

The settings all cling
To where they were placed
To serve the angel
Who loves tables turned.

Every so often,
The angel grows bored.
Once, the angel seized
The tablecloth’s edge,

Then yanked the whole thing
In a white flourish
From under settings
Somehow still in place.

Ta-da! The angel
Cried out to deep space,
Arms full of linen
Forever displaced.