What Does to Did

Truth’s got no ontology.
If it works, if it functions,
That’s good as it gets with truth.

What doesn’t exist reaches
Long fingers back through what does,
Through what happened to what was.

There’s no disentangling that.
You can maybe read the tracks
Those digits make, reaching back.

You struggle with the double
Sensing memory forces
Out from your experience.

There are correspondences,
Things you remember you bump
Into as new memories

Every day, as if the same,
Or after years, changed but same,
Such that you can update them,

And there are things that exist
In memories you’ll never
Make newer memories of

Again, and you can’t always
Be sure if that signifies
Absence or coincidence.

Those are the tracks reaching back
From what doesn’t, and can’t yet,
Exist through what does to did.

The lake where you froze to death
Is here, is freezing again
And isn’t, is wavering.

This Sort of Hectoring’s Terrible Verse

Few things as tempting
As a good moral
Excuse to ignore
Culture you don’t love,
People you don’t love.

Moral excuses
Exist since morals
Can’t exist without
Immorals being
Conveniently real.

A good immoral
Attached to a life
Or a way of life
Is a good excuse,
A moral excuse

For not attending
To it, for not
Appreciating
It, as immoral
As it is, of course.

No one immoral
Deserves to be heard,
Or studied, or loved.
Good morals belong
To you and your group.

Hard Only Unfolding

Heavy rains and graupel scrubbed
Blood spilled from the roadkill doe,
Fur now matted and sodden,

Body dragged to the gravel
Shoulder for the scavengers.
Doesn’t look like carnage now,

More like garbage, a dark lump
Dropped from someone’s pickup truck.
No one passing will be forced

Into swerving anymore.
If you happen to drive through
This turn in the road often,

You’ll get to watch it unfold,
Meal by meal by meal, to bone.

By Some Fluke

Poets, the unacknowledged
Liver flukes piloting brains,

The ones that will not survive
Sheep grazing, the ones whose eggs

Will never leave through feces
For the paradise of snails,

Never be coughed up for ants
To spin the cycle again—

The unreincarnated
Songs of reincarnation

Still, somehow, crop up again
And again, since ants have brains

And some fluke has to run one
For flukes to emerge again.

Somehow Related to Hubris

Documenting harmony
In despair, write one-sentence
Fairytales, one-sentence hymns,

One-sentence romance novels,
And one-sentence protest poems.
Now, cyborg centaur, combine

The results, root out the deep
Stories only you can find.
You’re not here to remake worlds,

Monster, you’re here as hybrid
Monsters always have been here,
To uncover, uproot, dig out

What was there before you were,
The longing that breeds hybrids.

About the Author

Has been is
Became is
Is published

Is has been
Is joined is
Won has been

Covenants

All these different kinds of rock,
The rounded river cobbles,
Miscellaneous gravels,

The bigger chunks of sandstone
Spread evenly like crumbles
Over a cake’s brown icing,

The faked half-stones of the walls
Of the townhomes in the midst
Of all the xeriscaping,

The massive sandstone layers
Of the thousand-meter cliffs—
An orchestration of stone

For its aesthetic effects
As decreed by town council,
Well aware the town’s taxes

Depend on tourist income,
And tourists appreciate
Thoughtful aesthetic effects.

Outside

A brain notes a patch of sun
On a cliff wall in the clouds.
Good job, brain. Pay attention,

The brain advises itself,
In the language of the mind.
The mind has its own interests

In things like spots of sunlight.
It rummages through its piles
Of collected detritus,

Looking for some useful tool
To make the light meaningful.
The light signifies the clouds

Have broken up, the weather
Could be changing, but it means
What the mind can bring to it,

The hauntedness of a life,
The appearance of mercy
In the indifferent stones.

It means the mind is outside
As well as inside the brain,
If the light grows while it rains.

A Sense of Some Sufficiency

In conversation, lives get checked
Like grocery lists, sacked lunches,
Or bags of Halloween candy.

Did you get everything, did you
Get one of each item, can you
Show off a lot of the good stuff?

Even righteous acts get counted,
If righteousness was on the list,
By those who value righteousness.

There’s a need for satisfaction,
Comparative satisfaction,
A sense of some sufficiency

Of acts, events, acquisitions,
A way to check the life was full
Enough you can relax and live.

Determination

The people who aim to will
Themselves to apparently
Impossible achievements

Are shrewd as revivalists
Calling the sick to be healed—
Don’t call on the amputees.

Always call on the feeble,
Those lacking in energy,
Those who are vaguely distressed.

Plan to build a company,
Become a celebrity,
A genius, something easy.

It’s not hard to pick something
No effort of yours could move,
No matter how determined.

Don’t announce you plan to win
The lottery on x date,
Unless your goal was prison.

Don’t command natural law.
Don’t make it your career aim
To reverse the planet’s spin.

Do claim you’ll come back some day,
If you like. A million years
Gone, who’s to say you weren’t right?

Clear and Glair

One common, one rare,
They share the same root
Of transparency,

Sure, but, before that,
Of sound, ringing sound,
Clear as a bell, right?

Now the common one
Has stayed translucent,
While the rare one’s gelled

Into a mucus,
A whitish sputum,
Nauseating term.

Meanings don’t diverge,
Significations
Do. It isn’t clear

What clarity means
Until you decide
It can’t be glairy,

But still it could be.
An egg’s uncooked white
Shines clear in the light.

For a Moment We Were

Are human beings human

Beings to human beings?

Yes, when conditions are met.

Conditions vary a lot.

As a phrase, human being

Itself doesn’t always meet

With sufficient approval

To merit soft behaviors

And kind consideration.

There’s also a distinction

Between the honorifics

To designate one of us,

And the actual kindness

That may spontaneously

Be accorded to strangers.

Sometimes, a human being

Is an assumption questioned

Retrospectively. Sometimes,

Being a human being

Is mere opportunity

Other human beings seize.

Are humans nice to humans,

Sweet to their own kind, ready

To acknowledge their own kind

As such, without quarreling

Or contempt, without malice?

Yes, when conditions are met,

But it’s unpredictable,

Except in well-known contexts.

Contexts vary, don’t forget.

And the Era of Archaeologists Will Soon Be Over

How many bodies are left,
Do you think? How many bones?
You’re all questions, once alone,

Full of answers in a crowd.
Good thing you aren’t in crowds much
Anymore. You can mutter

To yourself, old and alone.
How many bodies are left,
How many bones? Of all those

Billions of people who’ve lived,
Most corpses rotted or burned,
How many are in the ground,

In a tomb, in a lake bed,
Undiscovered, unlooked for,
Yet, not altogether gone?

The Earth must be pocked with them.
Aside from cemeteries,
Many of which are massive,

There must still be so many
Millions of unhouseled bits
Of skeletal revenants,

Just lying around out there,
Partway mineralized chunks
Of ordinary matter,

Mixed in with dirt, roots, and stones.
Most of them will never be
Disinterred, no matter how

Interesting the lives they led.
Even rare as fossils are,
Fossil hunters are rarer.

Let the Living Clean, Who Else?

Guess these arrangements
Are out of context.
The original,

Experimental
Text was a hybrid
Of fragmented prose

And lyrics sharper
Than a serpent’s tooth,
Ungrateful offspring.

It was more too-real
Than surreal, the way
You had to follow

The words like someone
Lost in storage space,
Left to inherit

Your dead relation’s
Hoarded possessions.
In the end, you learned

How to execute
An estate, so this
Collection’s what’s left.

Pass Out

Don’t be too surprised
By the cultural
Traditions the bees
Seem to improvise.

Yes, bees’ brains are small,
But you’re mistaken
If you think culture
Needs much brain at all.

Learn a bit, transmit,
Learn more’s the secret.
Culture’s parallel
Processing, that’s it.

If anything, brains
On culture are freed
To shrink to the rules
Of the culture game.

Shared mind’s an abyss.
Abysses aren’t held;
They hold. That’s alright.
You’re not storing this.

That Payment

It’s time to make another payment
On the will. The debt just keeps growing.
Its payments have gotten bone-breaking.

Can you even remember the free
Trial offer, scam from the get-go,
That suckered you in, decades ago?

First it was free, then easy payments,
Decisions almost nothing up front,
Then the loans to consolidate loans,

Decisions that others took for you,
Decisions you left up to the world
That you only had to pay later.

Past the window, the day looks pinned down,
Bright in the sun, reluctant to move.
You pause too, stupidly reluctant.

You have only the most obvious
Decision you need to make right now,
But you don’t want to make that payment.

Circuit Lies

Happy endings, color, and rhyme,

Why not, thought Byatt, having lost

Her child. Why the hell not have them?

Pleasures, she meant, indulgences,

Why not give in to them when life

Seems so willing to be random

And cruel. Lies, she might just have well

Have said. Pleasures we know aren’t real,

Won’t just happen, have to be dreamed,

Why the hell not, luscious colors,

Artifice for the art lover,

Happy endings for the readers

Of fiction, who know they’re reading

Lies anyway, surely, shouldn’t they?

And rhyme. That’s a funny pleasure.

Who’s that for? Reader or singer?

The sing-a-long fan? The maker?

No pleasure for a translator.

This Made It Itself

Maybe never say,
Or never insist,
Things won’t make themselves

On their own, won’t take
Good care of themselves
On their own. The world

As experienced
Seems to make itself,
And if you need God,

You think, to make things,
You end up with God
God-made, on God’s own.

Things are very good
At making themselves,
And the things you make

Are mostly mixtures
Of them making you
As you’re making them.

Beginning

The path is damp through slick rocks
And over fallen needles.
It only takes a small rain

And the desert is, briefly,
Slippery again. Prisms
Flash from needles still on twigs.

The pines are no less scruffy,
Rusted, and sparse than before,
But they do seem livelier.

Here at the far end of fall,
The first rain in a long time,
And likely the last until

The first snow, proves renewals
Come in other forms than spring.

Vacant

You should want your skull
Haunted, don’t you think?
If the ghosts are gone,
You’ve forgotten them,

And it’s obvious,
Watching from outside,
That those who forget
Their ghosts lose themselves—

That terrible look
Of scared confusion
Behind the windows
When the host is left

Alone as last ghost,
With no one to haunt,
And no words to tell
How haunting it is.

Menial

The soul’s a hovering,

Solicitous servant

Attendant on the life—

Is the body in pain,

Comfortable, content?

Is everything lonely,

Are the clouds blue, the wet

Leaves left on the saplings

Yellow, the puddles bright?

Is the world bearable

For another morning,

Barring some misfortune?

The attendant nothing

But attention, the wisp

Asking, what would you like?

John Gower Shooting the World

The bearded gent’s bow is drawn,
And the arrow’s tip touches
The sphere itself already,

A pin to pop a balloon
Made of earth, air, and water
In tripartite compartments,

The red and blue clouds, green grass,
And crinkled lines of blue waves
Completely separated.

Allegorical image
For an allegorical
Writer—allegorical

But perverse. Is the poet
Intending to pierce the world
Or make a trophy of it,

Perhaps dress it like a deer
And serve the world for dinner?
The sphere just floats in the air,

Immensely simplified thing
Painted like a painted ball.
The absurdity’s the charm.

Poetry can’t shoot the world,
And his world is already
So caricatured, insight

Into it would mean nothing
Much about any real world,
But maybe that’s the whole point.

The didactic writer aims
At a toy too close to miss,
A crudely patterned model,

Always, and knows it, and pulls
Back on the bow anyway,
Since knowing is only play.

The Host

Jonathan Swift, commenting wryly,

Just past the dawn of microscopy,

Had no idea how prescient was his

Flea / Hath smaller Fleas that on him prey,

And these have smaller yet to bite ‘em,

And so proceed ad Infinitum.

He was taking a shot at poets,

The smaller ones biting the greater,

That macaronic Infinitum

There just for rhyme and to drive the jibe

Into satiric absurdity,

But it’s the joke that proved prophetic.

The smallest bacteria contend

With hordes of bacteriophages,

Among Earth’s most ancient and febrile

Parasite-host elaborations,

Some billions of years in the making,

Far more important than mites on fleas

Or fleas on humans (to say nothing

Of lesser poets on greater ones).

Electron microscopes trained at dirt

From unpromising yards and bare lots

Can image phages at densities

Of millions per gram, and the latest

Contenders for final parasite

Are fragmentary vampire phages,

Too stripped to invade bacteria

Or hijack bacterial genomes

On their own, that wrap themselves around

Flagellar necks of larger phages

Then hitchhike into bacteria

To use the larger phage’s genome

To command bacterial genome

To make swarms of copies of themselves

To latch on to more larger phages,

And so repeat, ad Infinitum.

Life is parasites, all the way down,

To steal another infamous phrase,

But who knows how high up hosting goes?

Abstraction’s Ratchet

To make a tool
With a modern
Human-type brain

Combines products
Of semantic,
Conceptual

Processes with
Mechanical
Neural know-how.

Now, in other
Tool-creating
Kinds of creatures,

We don’t know yet
All the neural
Architecture,

But would you bet
That in your brain
Words and concepts

Are already
The mind’s ratchet
To leverage

And hang on to
Each tool-making
Step? Step by step.

Lovegod

Whatever man loves is his god,
Wrote Luther, who also opined

That Copernicus was a fool
Trying too hard to be clever

Overturning astronomy,
Since the Bible said Joshua,

Needing more daylight to fight in,
Bid the sun to stop, not the Earth.

But alright, whatever you love
Is your god. Ada Limón wrote

Recently that her family
Loved singing together like faith.

That sounds nice. It would be cringey,
In Luther’s context, to simply

Say that you loved your family.
As gods? Some folks are worshipful

Of their ancestors, notably
Less so of their living parents.

What do you love that’s not shameful
To have as your god? Luther’s point,

Of course, was that you’d better love
The one God that he loved, the real one.

But you could love some spot sacred
To you, some sweet intersection

Between nowhere and nothing much
You’re careful to identify

Exactly to no one, a bend
In a country road, a stone shore

By a high pond or a deep lake,
Or just the alley by the side

Of a provincial city street
Where sun falls in and floods the bricks,

Since, god, it is the sun that seems
To move, and not Earth, isn’t it?

Shadow Puppet

Unimpressed by the body

Of your soul, as Wilde called it,

In a catchy line you love

And have loved for decades now,

The one that goes, what men call

The shadow of the body

Is not the shadow of the

Body, but is the body

Of the soul, which is stupid,

You’ve been building a shadow

Of your own, an alternate

To the usual dimmed light

Mistaken for a darkness

The obscuring body throws,

A real shadow for your soul.

Where others might write fiction

Or attempt to show bright truth,

You’ve had your fun pretending

That the fiction of a soul

Could project some dimmer truths

Through these material codes

That cultures make of language—

Ink, print, bits, recorded voice—

All densely compacted waves,

Decaying but more slowly,

You hope, than your flickering

Shadow, the embodied soul.

Pieces of Clear Dawn

Every time, they look like sky,

Especially to someone

Raised where they didn’t exist,

Who first remembers seeing

One in a dark pine forest

On a visit to the west,

A slight, sudden flash of sky

In a thin shaft of sunrise.

Winged bit of Indian sky,

The Muskogee Creek poet

Alexander Posey wrote

Of one, twelve decades before,

In a homesick epigram

For whatever lost heaven

Of home the bird had strayed from,

Long before you had been born

To have the thought that mountain

Bluebirds throw pieces of dawn.

A Mantra, Given Its Genre, Has to Be Repeated

A life of pain
Isn’t the same
As life without
Any pleasures

You say these things
These simple things
These cliched things
As reminders

Since your life hurts
Hurts often hurts
Suddenly and
Bad quite a bit

Meme 115

In Pound’s homeland,

Where the dead walked

And the living

Were of cardboard,

You may see now

The ancestors

Of red-pill jibes

And NPC

Comparisons,

The strange belief

The other’s fake,

An illusion,

And yet also

A brute zombie

You must bash down,

Your opponents

All self-deceived

Simulations,

You the hero,

Tired old hero

Who sees through those

Out to stop him

Seeking good,

Doing evil.

Haphazardly Furnished Compositions

Can’t all be Cather, can you?
Cash and poems, the fungible
And not-so, both get printed,

And, once you’re down to singles,
They’re almost always crumpled,
Your furnishings all borrowed,

Spartan but inelegant,
Neither plush nor démeublé,
If you have a home at all.

Poverty of income stems
From shortcomings as random
As poverty of acclaim,

As innate and external
As the rocking chair rescued
From someone’s storage unit,

Dusty, battered, and ugly,
But serviceable for sitting
With weak-brewed ruminations.

We’re Missing Something, and We Don’t Know What It Is

Upon reflection, it’s not
Surprising they’ve discovered
So many objects exist

In sizes between the sun
And Jupiter. The local
Is rarely universal,

If also rarely unique.
Experience indicates
The cosmos tries everything,

All minute variations,
Rings all changes possible
To most minimally change.

Gaps are troughs, subsidences,
Waves, not absences of waves.

Consider the Source

Peachy pink morning just before dawn,
And the body feels like it’s failing,
And the news feels like everything’s wrong,

And the day’s schedule is medical,
Chemical, plus work and bills to check.
The bank account may get overdrawn.

But the daylight only grows stronger,
This day made by sun, source of it all—
The body, the world, the work, the dawn.

Claret Cup Lane

No matter what happens, no matter
What it matter-of-factly portends,
Only you can decide what it means.

The best way to see this is to be
Ludicrous. Instead of focusing
On events where the meaning might seem

To follow logically, such as
Whether or not economic stats
Signifying a fresh recession

Mean that policy has been leaning
In the wrong direction, scrutinize
Something with clear-cut significance,

Such as your gas tank nearing empty,
And then think what this predicament
Means the universe is telling you.

Since they don’t mean what they signify,
Things never signify what they mean.
Where it drops to one is where we’ll live.

Oh Honey, Not the Comb

First and second person are wholly
Social-syntactical positions
With no permanent content to them.

The clouds gathered outside the windows
Of the cancer center’s chemo row,
The big chairs lined up for infusions.

Say you were there, in one of those chairs.
Say you would rather that I were there,
A sort of emptiness in the air.

Fix Your Wagon

One life ending awkwardly,
A wheeled cart bumping down steps,
Not crashed yet but sure to smash,

And a million other lives,
Give or take several thousands,
Ending in blinding flashes

As guns go off, munitions
Explode, drones dive, and tanks roll.
You can only die the once,

That’s what everybody says,
But with every jolt down stairs,
Think how many dead today.

Transected Thoughts Mid-Transportation

The swirl condenses
And evaporates.
Smoothly, one person

Gets relocated.
Another returns.
Another picks up

A chore where left off.
If you could hover
Over all the trucks

And highway traffic
And see every skull,
Inside every skull,

Would you be confused,
Dumbfounded, or bored?

This Is the Best Electric Toothbrush

Relics are garbage plus time.
Just check out Çatalhöyük.

Even so, most waste is waste
Forever. Fascination

Isn’t enough to make flakes
Of chert or pottery shards

Wonderfully valuable.
Long lists of palace accounts

Will never match Gilgamesh.
Toss your receipts in the trash.

Let your broken devices
Bulk up mountainous landfills.

The value of the middens
Compressed under lakeside parks

And bike trails in Chicago—
To give just one example

Among covered-over worlds—
Isn’t that of tombs and hoards

But, scientifically,
Of careful reconstruction

Of how some people once lived
And, imaginatively,

Of the graveyard chill of ghosts,
Of revenants underfoot,

Of long lost pasts in ambush,
Like cave paintings or cave bears.

As Grandma Used to Throw Up Her Hands and Exclaim

People don’t stop.
They’re like beavers,
Like bees and ants,
Like life like that.

The half-feral
Cow pasture where
Wild turkeys graze
With the mule deer

Has a new gouge
Along the edge
And a backhoe
Asleep in it.

Digging a ditch
To grow the pond
At meadow’s end,
Looks like. Good night!

Provisionally Liable to Exist

As it happens, it happened,
As it came to pass, touching
And seized, together, a share.

Tiring, isn’t it. As praise,
As ideological
And aesthetic achievement,

How stupid. An accident
Occurred. That’s how this world goes.
A verisimilitude

May be an accomplishment,
But to praise every contact
With the random in your art,

Essays, thoughts, metaphysics?
Low bar to fall as you are.

Allegorically Weaponized Butterflies

A chandelier
Of stained-glass wings,
Each wing ending
Tipped in a point,

The butterflies
Were intended
To be gorgeous,
But they’re frightful,

Their wings like fangs,
Like arrowheads
Hanging in air,
Art gone awry.

The aggression
Stays motionless
And colorful
But misaligned.

Real Is a Vehicle of the Unreal

Will translates moral.

Moral translates social.

Social translates friend or foe,

Superior or subordinate,

Model or outcast, and so forth.

The basin is full of water.

The parking lot is sometimes

Full of cars, but not now.

The latest anthology is full

Of better poems by better poets

Who would not be so abstract,

Who would not be so banal,

Who would not stare at the basin,

Thinking of how it almost killed them

Then writing social, moral, will.

To be human is to be imprisoned

By things that don’t exist, by things

That don’t need to exist to be real.

The wind at sunset stirs the water,

And the vehicle rolls downhill.

Twinkling Eyes, Sinking Hearts, and Ruthless Stares

The ancient and invasive,
Pernicious weeds of language,
Enduring, fast-evolving,

Paradoxical cliches
Never get any credit
For stubbornly persisting

Nor for growing so diverse.
Shh, you must not mention them.
They’re weakness in a writer,

Spurge in a groundskeeper’s lawn,
Purslane, lambsquarters, pigweed
In a flower bed. They’re shame,

No matter how edible,
Their persistence your failure,
Your incompetence, your sloth.

You know what the world would be
Without domestication,
With all the gardeners gone?

Weeds. The most successful weeds.
Likewise wild language, the speech
Fore and aft of history,

Ecosystems of cliche.
Sit with a view of a road’s
Overrun margins. Ok.

Money and Telling the Truth

Some people are skilled at the one

And some folks skilled at the other.

Still others are lousy at both.

That this is part of the normal

Distribution curve of humans,

However, isn’t accepted.

The same goes for many pairings

Of culturally important

Behaviors—their distribution

In the population follows

The elegant swoop of bell curves,

The supreme law of unreason,

But every individual

Gets a moral or essential

Character evaluation.

The evaluations follow

Still more normal distributions,

But knowing as much won’t help you

On the wrong tail end of some curve,

Nor hurt you if you’re highly skilled

At some coveted behavior.

Still More Light the Dark Collected

The fear and loathing
Of irregular
Patterns of torn holes

Think of gravity’s
Gluttony when dark
Collects all the light

Bumpy universe
Pocked with scattered holes
That aren’t holes at all

The photons inside
The light waves inside
Crushed and digested

Trypophobia
Can’t even begin
To cover it all

Cancer Free Solo

There is a pause
To assess need.
This requires terms—
Words and numbers.

If, afterwards,
You think you can
Handle the need,
If you’re careful,

You feel cautious.
How will you act?
It can be done.
Will you do it?

It’s a near thing.
The machines go.
The weather goes.
Handle your need.

Odds Are All the Aegis You’ve Got Left

Goat-skinned thunderheads snaky with lightning
Arch over you as if in protection,
The way divinities and good omens
Were imagined ahead of destruction,
Gigantic compared to your skeleton
That nevertheless, with its porcelain skull
Busy doing all this imagining,
Knows the storm, including its violence
Is ordinary, will tumble around,
A minor vortex in the atmosphere,
Just to break up over the horizon.
And you’ll still be here. Odds are, you’ll be left,
Still alive under reopening skies,
Until next time you should be scared. Next time.

Ask Their Graveyards and Their Enemies

Do you carry the falling
With you, do you? Words work hard,
Down to their orthography,

Phonemes, small flicks of the wrist,
To keep and carry meaning
That has to be brought to them.

People used to writing words,
To composing knotted strings,
Sometimes confuse bridge and kite,

After the kite carried string
That was tied to thicker string
And that to heavier cords,

Until a bridge roped across.
The kite was never a bridge.
A bridge is no kind of kite.

Wait, what happened to the string?
In the burial mounds, fine
Gold, felt, leather, decoupage,

But no strings coiled to tell you
What that world was all about,
No strings, no bridges, no kites.

The Empty Novel

There was so little
Life to that poor life
The novelist thought
Of imagining,
So little to write.

But that was the life
The novelist felt
Compelled to invent,
After seeing news
Photos of babies

Carried, limply dead
In rescuers’ arms
After bombs, earthquakes,
Mudslides, massacres—
Icons of horror.

The novelist wrote
A short novel first,
Focused on a child,
Then a long novel,
Encompassing kin.

But the novelist
Didn’t like either.
The novelist took
A ream of blank sheets,
Bound them and shelved them.

Gravure

It’s like a canyon system
Of waterways through desert.
It looks like the water wants

To get lower, reach the sea,
But it’s the Earth underneath
The desert that bends the streams

And sun raising water
That holds the Earth in oblongs,
And the arm of the spiral

That’s the curve the sun’s tracking,
One spiral in the local
Cluster with middle monsters

That won’t even let go light,
And how many expansions
Of scale are necessary

To find the core of wanting?
Is there a core? Is any
Of the wanting actual

Longing, actual desire?
It’s like a canyon system,
Language, cutting the desert.

Reflections in Concavity

See, the way people work
Is a fascination
And dreamy mystery

To people everywhere,
Since that’s how people work.
Individuals aren’t

Merely navel-gazing—
They’re looking for themselves
In the minds of others

They have to imagine
Looking for themselves, too.
Some of them try their best

To distill all watchers
Into an audience
Of one all-knowing God,

But, wouldn’t you know it,
God’s a fascination
And dreamy mystery

In the ways that God works,
One more weird persona,
Since that’s how people work.

Meaning the Small Number System

Your ancestors needed
For some reason to be
Precise estimating

Collections of items
Numbering up to four,
Precision dependent

On paying attention.
How much does attention
Need to be paid to serve

The small number system?
Let’s say numbers mean more
When you’re focused on them,

And the numbers you need
To mean are the small ones.
You start to understand

How threes and fours emerge
Prominent mnemonics
In major religions,

But that still doesn’t say
Why selection pressured
Accuracy guessing

Just those little numbers,
Nor why they, like meaning,
Depend on attention.

Most of all, it doesn’t
Say why none, why nothing’s
Not precisely counting.

Die Mauer

Even in long retrospect,
It still seems a little bit
Of a miracle, that year.

To watch Nelson Mandela
Walk from prison, a free man,
An actual, real person

Who had seemed almost a myth,
Or to see crowds swarm the wall
And begin to tear it down,

It did give hope. To be sure,
Hope underestimated
The difficulties ahead,

But hope has to be like that.
Otherwise, there is no hope.

For Dens for Ever

Abandoned ruins these days
Are mostly well-maintained parks,
Archaeological sites,

And tourist destinations.
The world’s so full of people
And people-moving machines,

Even the most disastrous,
Permanently abandoned
Cities, palaces, and forts

Sport brochures and entrance fees
More often than resident
Wild creatures retaking them.

It’s only in the mind’s eye
You can still see the pathos
Of old haunting prophecies

And poems depicting emptied
Towers and weedy courtyards
Sheltering animal dens.

If you’re willing to witness
More modest abandonment,
However, try the high plains

Of rich North America,
Still a global colossus
But pocked with inner failures.

Try the windswept farmhouses
Of Montana, Alberta,
Manitoba, Dakota,

Saskatchewan, and the like.
They loom on grass horizons,
Broken-windowed, tumble-roofed,

One here, one the next county,
Sparse as the melancholy
Their gaunt emptiness evokes.

These you can still see alone
And in front of you, wayside
Ruins where wild creatures den.

Is now more or less fragile
Than any ancient kingdom?
You and your stupid questions.

The Cosmos Is Such a Repetitive Mess

There’s a lot of gravel out there.
The asteroids have asteroids,
And they’re all gravel in close-up,

Homely chunks, agglomerations,
Planetary wayside rubble
Circuiting the solar system.

The deeper views look sparklier,
Spangled with stars, with galaxies,
But the pattern’s not that different,

A sprawl of similar splatter
In every direction, as if
Someone spilled diamonds on blacktop.

There’s structure. Of course, there’s structure,
No one’s saying there isn’t, but
Endless gravel’s hidden in it.

And Vow to Never Vow Again

If you vowed that you wouldn’t
But then you did, the question
Isn’t why you broke your vow

But why you ever made one.
Seriously. What’s a vow
But a linguistic construct,

An effort to countermand
Whatever the body wants
Or would do, uninstructed?

What’s a vow, whether public
Or silent, but a social
Contract made of verbiage

Preexisting the vower,
An airy habitation
For a bunch of ancient terms,

However vehemently
Sworn by the embodied soul
Who articulates those words?

The thing about King Canute
Was that he meant to display
Only inability

To control nature, the tides,
When he commanded them back.
Maybe that’s why you make vows.

The Wealth of Adolescence

Maybe no one
Reads you as well
As you read them,
As you read this.

They stare at you
And ask what’s wrong,
Since something’s wrong,
Something’s troubling

Them, about you.
You're young. You’re fit,
Contemplative,
And privileged,

And you know it,
But it still hurts.
Why does it hurt
If it’s this good?

The Partial Dodger

You know the pain is coming,
But you won’t deal with it now,
Since it’s not wholly here yet.

Coward. And so, what of it?
The day is blue and brilliant.
Seems appropriate to you,

Who think you are those things, too.
What’s next? Leap into the air
Like a cartoon character,

No. You tried that years ago.
Stay grounded. Drive to the pond
While you still can. Watch the waves.

There’s the peregrine falcon,
Right now, right there, against wind.
Nothing more belongs in air.

Half Dead on the Shore

The drawback of being
A terrific schemer
Is that scheming becomes

Insurance policy,
Circus acrobat’s net,
Retaining wall, levee,

And soon you find yourself
Depending on scheming
To save you at each end

Instead of beginning
And staying sensible
Through the middle of things.

Odysseus survives,
Yes, Odysseus gets
Home and triumph at last,

Yes, but Odysseus
Gets home last, after wrecks,
And wrecks, and wrecks, and wrecks.

Means to Fear Pain

More than one writer’s noted
That written lines feel more real
Found as excerpted fragments

Represented in someone
Other than the author’s text.
The power of quotation

Is the power of a frame,
Of any framing device—
It’s rarely the frame itself

That transforms what’s inside it,
But the fact of the framing,
Which is also a cutting.

If you know how to cut well,
You know how to discover.

Quag Forest

Set sail in any
Worn dictionary
Off of someone’s shelf
Or used bookstore stack.

The more randomly
You manage to read,
The more you’ll notice
Blurrier entries.

Vocabulary
In and of itself
Is rarely moving,
More rarely fiery.

The language of love—
Confession, protest,
Witness, rage, nature—
Has to be kindled

From half-sodden twigs,
Stones, and punked words
Settling in littered
Routes of flood waters.

Here and there, marsh gas
Flares and vanishes.
The words aren’t inert,
Just mostly humus.

Better Little Hope

Too fervently hoping
Seems to have negative
Consequences, mostly.

Maybe you cared too much,
Or maybe the cosmos
Heard you and didn’t like

Your desperate pleading.
You’re not one of the good
Whose many kindnesses

And brave agitation
For only just causes
Underwrites the fervor

Of your wishes. The good
Wish for the right reasons.
Do they ever wish too

Fervently, too? Do they
Find their most fervent hopes
Most frequently broken?

Perspective Isn’t So Perceptive

It’s not that you’re so small
When you look at a star.

That’s not the hard lesson,
That temporary awe.

It’s that, small as you are,
You’re attuned to the large.

Subgeneris

There’s a lot of stink about roots
These days, how they communicate,
How they deal with mycelia.

Is it all cooperation?
Is it bartering, is it song?
Language may anchor the forest,

But the tangle’s horizontal,
Like the whole skin of life on Earth.
It’s not really terribly deep.

You don’t have to run a backhoe
Or a drill to tunnel below
The endlessly talkative net.

Write as if prior to language,
Some teacher-poets say. So, paint,
Under the roots, in lightless caves,

Whatever you never wanted
To communicate, to express,
To alter others’ minds, to mean.

Leaky Radiator

Seems like, the poorer you get,

The more you think about stuff,

Not important stuff, just stuff.

It feels like all stuff becomes

Increasingly important.

A napkin can’t be wasted.

Use a cloth rag. The rag needs

Washing. Wait. There’s no more soap.

Someone has it worse, you say,

Rented roof over your head.

Always someone has it worse.

Someday you will have it worse.

Meanwhile you count everything.

Crumpled singles. Hospital

Bills in the drawers with extra

Supplies leftover from when

You came home with free samples

To change your own bandages.

How many days to payday.

How many miles to this tank.

How much to service the car.

When you can get groceries.

You care so much about things,

Stupid materialist.

Sing along now. In heaven,

Everything is fine. You got

Your good things, and I’ve got mine.

Browsing at Night

Sometimes when people say no
Excuse me, no, I’m sorry,
It’s a companionable

Leaning against each other
So that neither falls over.
That’s what you said in a dream

To a fellow customer
In a bookstore who reached for
The same volume as you did.

You both said, no, excuse me,
And you both said, no, you first,
And then the gentleman asked

If we both say no, then what
Is it we’re really saying?

Many One

Anything that repeats
Can seem imprisoning
From sunsets to gravel

To tears to mopping floors
To shaking hands smiling
To reloading mortars

And this is even though
Repetition comforts
And consoles you as well

Even though no repeats
Are exactly perfect
Repeats only patterns

In the new arrivals
That you tire of until
You’re the pattern that goes

Approaching Conclusion

A surprising number of butterflies
Hang around cottonwoods in November
In the canyons of the southwest desert.

They tend to stay up high and hard to see
From a level-eyed, ground-based perspective,
Certainly tricky to identify,

But you can spot them if you crane your neck.
The old leaves may be emptied of song birds
And the air threatening overnight freeze,

And yet there’s a dark species, and a white,
And a mostly ochre one with big wings
That vanishes when it sits on a twig.

Here’s the moment to draw some conclusion.
Attend well as more meanings spin through you.

You Will

You will be forced to make a choice.
The choice you make will not be yours,
But you will make it anyway,

And you will have to live with it,
Or be the one who dies from it,
Then someone else will have to judge.

The dream of will is fantasy.
The dream of will is luck’s disguise.
The will’s half like a lottery—

You hope your picks will win some prize,
And show you chose sagaciously,
But there’s no option not to play,

And will’s cost to participate,
However small, is never free.

A Wreck of Paradise

It’s not under the water.
It still seems to float in it,
The usual bad ideas,

Head held just above the waves
Thanks to old, eroding stones.
View it through your memories,

An island, minuscule, rock
Speck you might expect closer
To some sort of mainland port,

Kind with a lighthouse on it,
But out here mostly swept bare
By wind and inundation

Whenever a storm blows through
As storms do regularly.
If you can manage to land,

You can’t step without tripping
On bits of the wreck itself,
Scattered around the basalt,

The outline still visible,
Less like a ship than a wall,
A low, broken garden wall,

And in the middle of it,
The island, the wreck, the same,
A peculiar, feral green

Adapted to conditions
Of winds and salty dousings
That would decimate most weeds.

Here Paradise ran aground
On the stern surprise of rocks,
But just because no one lives

In Paradise anymore,
Just because the garden’s wrecked
Descendants of lost cargo,

Doesn’t mean it’s disappeared
Completely. Seals like angels
Ring the wreck for protection,

Lolling and scratching their thoughts.
Not all underwater yet,
The usual bad ideas.

Sunesis

If you have it, you get it.
You get this. It is to know
That by understanding this.

The typical cottonwood
Lives a human-like lifespan,
But with opportunity

To double or triple that.
This one’s gone yellow with fall
That some years goes dun with drought.

It will be close to solstice
Before all these leaves are down.
Bark ribbed as corduroy wale,

It will stay grey a while then.
A strong storm could bring it down.
Put two and two together.

It’s a life. It’s not clonal
Like its cousins the aspens,
Although its leaves also shake.

It’s a life. Not valuable
As you and yours are to you,
Not a story character,

A cause, a human terror
Specific as the bodies
Arranged in neat rows below,

In this small cemetery
Where it was planted for shade,
But you get it. And see this.

The Lives of the Non-Combatants

You could make it through today
And pray for a miracle
To rescue you tomorrow,

As half the world does daily,
Most without your sympathy.
The lives of non-combatants

In any major event
Emerge and end easily—
Smoothly, seen from a distance—

Waves heaving into being
In ranks to the horizon
Warships cutting across them,

Crosswinds raising them again.
And every wave is thinking,
Since thinking is made of waves,

You could make it through this rain
And pray for a miracle
To restore your former grace.

Life Sized

You compose a line
With the point of view
Of someone who wants

To live. Death looms large
In rumination.
You compose a line

With the point of view
Of someone who’s seen
Some death in the news

Enumerated.
Each shrinks to a speck,
A morpheme, a bit.

You compose a line
With the point of view
Of someone who’s lost

Old friends and loved ones,
Mostly recently.
Death hovers, midway,

Intermediate
Between mighty god
And mere statistic.

Here’s where you feel it,
Not awed, not inured,
But ruined by it.

Streonæshalch

Big writers never live nowhere
With no big writer friends at all.
Big writers only, sometimes, die

Nowhere, where they have been exiled
Or first live small years as not big
Writers, to be exhumed later.

Nowhere writers can grow and grow
Postmortem, like a corpse’s hair
And fingernails, like the legends

That corpses’ hair and fingernails
Grow, when they don’t. Words don’t pull back
As quickly as the life retracts,

And every so often someone
Is exhumed and declared undead.
Undead writers grow scary big

And become worldwide wanderers
Who don’t depend on location,
Long shadows over nowhere’s walls.

Corpses Start Dark Ages

The living cells of roadkill,
Living cells of window birds,

All their loyalty undone
By behaviors of the whole,

By hazards those behaviors
Could never have evolved for,

By the broken skeletons,
And then the failures to breathe.

The living cells won’t last long.
For a little while, the bird

Is still warm, as is the doe,
And then the lack of supplies

From fresh blood, fresh oxygen,
Starve individual cells,

Individual cells caught
In the crash of the system

That had seemed built out of them,
That broke and abandoned them.

Ojai Valley Overlook

People tell themselves these things.
They take them personally,
But they all share the message.

Reversible assertions
With terms ten or a hundred
Times older than the persons

Who eye them, mouth them, sign them,
Tap them back out into space,
How could these ever refer

Precisely to single souls,
Single egos, single skulls,
Individuals? You stare

Longingly at the sentence
Anyway, and you whisper,
It’s for me. It’s meant for me.

Opulentia ex Machina

Why is it just delicious
To trace elaborate knots
In the threads of a story?

A character who returns,
A connection that connects,
A loose end sewn together

With a fresh significance.
Sometimes writers will fight it
In the name of mimesis,

Truer representation,
Fiction closer to the world,
Or out of sheer defiance.

Readers aren’t going to like that.
Might as well compose weird poems.
The gun and the lottery

In the first act have to mean
Something by the denouement
For a satisfying clinch.

It’s so delicious to watch
A weave that works like a watch,
Whether moral or amoral,

So long as it’s richly sewn
To look like a little world
Framed, when the world has no frame.

Of Emerging by Day

Once you pursue a plan
To reduce your longing,
That plan is your longing.

The discipline involved
Can get pretty extreme,
Hence monastic training,

Rules for sitting this way,
Rules for not thinking that,
Lifetimes of practicing

An equanimity
To release the wanting
Flesh into the serene.

Some faiths give up on it,
Assuming the finest dead
Will still be wanting things

For all eternity.
Well, between fantasy
And fantasy, why not

Prefer your own nonsense,
Dream of waking one day
From your unworthy life

To come into the light
Divested of longing,
Never hungry, never

In search of fresh supplies,
Aware without wanting,
Never not delighted.

Surveillance Surfeit

It is, all in all, a species of spies,
Imagining even imagined gods
And angels like to watch and not be seen,

Building even machines that love to spy,
Systems that love to spy, empires that spy
As children spy from behind closet doors,

Not for what they learn, but to feel the thrill
Of spying, watching without being watched,
Knowing while still unknown, they don’t know why.

Surveilling is a human obsession.
Being surveilled is a human horror.
It’s time everyone watched camera feeds

Of everyone watching camera feeds
Until everyone starved to death feeding.

Sailor’s Seaweed

A boot washed ashore
After spring storms with a green
Foot still curled in it.

Morning on the Border

How it all manages to be
So repetitive while never
In the smallest part repeating

Perfectly’s perfectly baffling.
The desert sand grains all repeat,
The ocean waves repeat, repeat,

Forest roots and branches repeat,
Wayside rockfall gravels repeat,
The stars and galaxies repeat,

The patterns of your days repeat,
The long odds and the short repeat,
Yet nothing’s ever repeated.

You sit there, dazed in morning light,
Indecisive, likely to try
The same sorts of tries as always,

Resulting in the same results,
That is, the same sorts of results
Until run aground on some shore

Where the repetition of rocks
Or sand takes over from water,
And somehow it’s all only once,

Each little repeat only once,
Never actually repeated,
Hitting a border, then over.

Broken under Dark Skies, 5am

Imagine all your angels
And deities in the air.
The cosmos you may pray to
Can’t save you and doesn’t care.

Your own goodness and genius
You may have once believed in
Won’t deliver you either,
May well dig you in deeper.

Actual accomplishments
Are largely lucky timing
And twists of coincidence.
You don’t have to accept this,

Of course. You can stay convinced
Of destiny, reliant
On a fated existence,
And you can live defiant

In the face of consequence,
While the odds fray you to bits.
You may even get to live
A life others wished they did,

And think your exception is
Beyond the statistical,
Something that God intended,
A life of significance,

But maybe consider this—
That wise, good lives accomplished
Stay rare would suggest the rest
Are what the rest should expect.

Yet. If only humans can
Imagine human values
Are part of some divine plan,
Then also only humans

Can invent accusations
That can blame you for failing
To accomplish that wisdom
And goodness humans define.

You can still, while you still can,
Go stare at the uncaring
Lights of deep night to feel blessed
Angels haven’t answered yet.

Antlers

This one’s limping and cautious crossing
The road these evenings in tourist town.
Someone must have already nicked him,

But his antlers are magnificent,
And he grew up here, free from hunters,
Never to see a wolf in his life,

So, aside from the tourist traffic
And maybe an opportunistic
Coyote or desperate cougar,

He’s got a chance to get through winter,
Despite whatever’s causing his limp.
The antlers will fall off soon enough.

If he lives and recovers his gait,
The next rack will be as impressive,
Will look like the same set of antlers

On the same deer, although they won’t be.
Well, that’s the way anything comes back,
The new past resembling some old past

So much you think it’s either returned
Or never left, when there’s nothing left
But likenesses, which aren’t things, which last.

For the Gasp

Now you wait
With bated
Breath—that is

You’re breathless,
Not breathing,
Holding breath.

Hard to wait
Long like that.
But you wait.

Place and Grid

The hippocampal cells that allow
Bats, rats, and humans to place themselves
Also allow at least bats to map
Their social position precisely
And get rats, at least, to imagine
They’re somewhere where the rewards are sweet
Without them ever moving. Of course,

Humans can do both these things. Assume
Your hippocampal cells are involved.
Where you are, who you are, where you wish
You could be, are all layered in there,
In those cells that punch above their weight.
Physical, social, dream locations
Are all the same kind of neural state.

Polysemous Monosyllabus

In a town, a desertion,
In a house, a persistence,
In a machine, reflexive,

In one religion, God’s third,
In another, guilt’s hunger,
In another, grandmother,

In a dead relationship
A refusal to respond,
In any language a word,

In some languages, the breath,
In the mind, the mind, the mind,
And in life what leaves at death.

Real Quick While We Have This Light

Performing for photographs,
The future bride and her groom
In traditional outfits—

Black tux, bridal gown and veil—
Photographer coaxing them
Into poses and kisses

In the dry, November grass
In front of stepped ochre cliffs,
Talking, talking, some walking,

Some light switching of faces
Into the bright setting sun—
Look at each other, love it,

Lean on him, love it, one more
Kiss, one more walking, love it!

Desire in the Wild Grass

Do living things, any lives,

Actually want to survive,

Or have tautological cycles

Of billions of years, trillions

Of cell generations of

Survivors leaving behind

Even better survivors,

Left everything come to life

In these latter days programmed

To battle for survival?

The cockroach and the wild grass,

Elephants and aspen clones

All deploy survival tools,

Offensive and defensive,

Digestive juices, toxins,

Whatever works for their kind,

And seem to struggle against

Dying, as if determined

To go on living, hungry

To go on living. Do they

Want, do they all want, to live?

Old Leaf

October was more
Than halfway over.
What can you recall?

You’ve known November,
Surely, however
That name lands for you.

Roman moons. Water
Laps along the shore.
Naming and dying

Stay mysterious,
Names fluttering in,
The cats mistaking

Leaves on the sidewalk
For scurrying mice,
A human startled

By one leaf at dusk
That flew like a bat.
December is bent

In this hemisphere,
Naming, mistaking,
Dying, all of that.

A Year of Sundays

The first contemplating a cliff
At sunset and then turning back,

Wondering what could happen next,
The rest a highly detailed blur,

Beautiful days, many Sundays,
If only you could remember.

Can you? Yes, you. Sit in a chair,
However young or old you are,

Alone, without acquaintances
Or devices to help prompt you,

And begin with a week ago.
From last Sunday, what have you saved?

And from the Sunday before that
And before that? A week of them,

A month of them, a year of them
Three-hundred sixty-five of them,

Recall’s not really for recall,
Is it, not for contemplation.

Memory serves to navigate
Whatever it was just happened

And to anticipate what’s next.
But sit down a while anyway

To try to remember, even
If you’re only just past seven,

You’ve lived irrevocable
Hundreds of days labeled Sundays,

Each crammed with innumerable
Acts and molecular details.

You were there, experiencing
And then forgetting as you went,

Like a wave criss-crossing the waves,
Continually dissolving

And reforming while happening,
All you’ll never recall you were.

Fragment from Memory

Those nothing-to-do all Sunday afternoons,
After the preaching and the pot roast,
The dishes and daddy’s nap,

That seemed eternal wastes back then,
A wasted eternity now,
When the late sunlight drooled

Like honey on the lawn,
And the little planes buzzed back and forth
Across the blue, cross-pollinating

Monotony with dreams of endless heaven

Once, When You Were Little and Scared, for You the Carney Stopped the Ride

Living is just one
Of the many things,
The infinite things,

You can never take
Back—doesn’t matter
If you barely tried.

Live a few years, live
A day, live an hour,
You’ll still have to die.

It would be kinder
If you got to try
And then to decide,

Maybe slip back out,
Undo the whole thing,
The whole exercise.

Say, I’m sorry, but
I want to leave, and
I don’t want to die.

Then Update and Pretend

The only thing weird about you
Is your priors—apart from those,
You have to admit you’re normal;

Your life’s been quite predictable.
It does seem a bit like cheating,
Though, doesn’t it? The more you know,

The more you can constrain what’s next,
But at some point, it’s just Laplace
And his super-intelligence

With access to so much data
The future is present as past.
You’re normally distributed,

Given what you know of your past,
But that’s all part of what you know.
What you’ll become might yet get weird.

When I Read the Learn’d Young Poet on Horror

What is leisure,
Not ruling class
Leisure and not

Shared, communal
Leisure? What is
Rest disabled,

Solitude freed
To take the time
Away from work,

The salaried
Precariat
Neither labor

Nor capital?
No capital
Anywhere here,

Just rental bills
And past-due bills
And rest as theft

Until someone
Finds you, drags you
Away from rest.

Every Morning the Story Is Dead, and Every Night It Starts Again

The way Apep was drawn in looping waves,
Not as a coiled snake or a snake stretched out,
A snake as a sequence of curved ridges,
Sometimes a knife through each segment, the barque
Of Ra coasting overtop the ridged waves
Like a package on a conveyor belt,

Makes you consider Apep as figure
For the general waviness of the night,
Of the deep, of all things hard to cut through
With the sharpest of human inventions,
Including gods and stories about them,
Including stories and how to kill them.

Chronic Mal’aria

He wasn’t all wrong as a prophet
Of his own demise, that Vallejo.
He was right he would die in Paris.

He died on Friday, not a Thursday,
But hey, that’s only off by a day.
He missed the season—spring, not autumn.

None of this is important of course.
What a silly way to read a poem
On death, and a young man’s poem at that.

The young always remember their deaths.
They’ve often invented sacks of them
That they take out and play with like dolls.

Only the soldiers and suicides,
Maybe the murdered, resemble them.

Siena Galaxy Atlas

Cataloguing
The images
Of galaxies,
Some four hundred

Thousand in our
Own galaxy’s
Neighborhood, with
Millions to go.

One hundred years
Ago, it was
Barely confirmed
The universe

Held more than one.
Once more than one,
There’s always more
Than many more.

Miraculous Revelations

When was it they realized,
Or just started suspecting,
That either the rules had changed

Or they’d lost their sanity?
How could they collectively
Lose their sanity? Rules don’t

Change, not the laws of nature.
So, even though they’d believed,
Or said they’d had, in magic,

Miracles, and mysteries,
In some kind of divine plan
That transcended everything,

It took an awful long time
For them to accept the change
Once it began. They couldn’t

All be mad. Nature itself,
Almost by definition,
Couldn’t be unnatural.

So when gaps started breaking
Through the fabric, here and there,
They worked hard to ignore them,

Then carefully studied them
For plausible origins,
Then, in desperation, said

Rips amounted to the proof
This was a simulation.
But those rips in nothing much

Kept opening on nothing,
People and things falling in,
While cults tried to explain them,

Worship them, leap into them
In search of a Promised Land.
One group simply decided

This was what had always been,
A solid world with weak seams
Through which things kept vanishing.

Pigeon Autofiction

The more things happen, the more
Things that happen get told as
Fiction. In this way, fiction

Is faithful to actual
Events, in that, as events
Become more common, fictions

Concerning them, concerning
Aspects of common events,
Multiply. Wars multiply

With wars, plagues with plagues, bourgeois
Tales with bourgeoisie, and tales
Of revenge with vengeful things.

Myth creeps in, forever cat
Among fact’s many pigeons.

Inflexible Tessellation

Regular pentagons
Can never tile a plane.

Only triangles, squares,
And hexagons manage.

Nor can any convex
Polygon of more than

Six sides wholly tile planes.
Convex hexagons draw

The line for sides that can.
Aperiodic tiles,

Of course, are their own thing,
Limit at the small end,

Monotile, hat tile, one
Stone, ein Stein, true spectre

Tile without reflection.

And Then You Won’t Anymore

You will know

When you stand in the road

With no idea how you got there.

You will know

When you look at the date,

And every number’s alien.

You will know

When you spot scattered blues

And think they must be blueberries.

You will know

When you see a window

With no name in any language.

You will know

Just before you forget

You know you’ll never know you knew.

On Clearer Nights

You’re inside a history
Where the inside never ends.
Outside it does. You’ve seen ends

And ends from the outside, and
You know they vanish, the end.
From the inside, you’ve seen night

Full of what looks like empty
Spaces you know aren’t empty.
No one knows the universe

Except from such an inside,
And any eyes inside know,
However often they close,

Even if the whole inside
Is all inside a black hole
That’s vanished from the outside,

Inside there’s only inside,
Dusky gaps with brilliant lights,
More or less overcast nights.

Missing Detail

Something small and strange is
Merging with the wayside
Scenery this morning.

What is it? Afternoon
Creeping into the light?
You lie your location

To nearest and dearest
Just to escape up here
Where no one passing cares.

Scrutinizing the view
Up the sunny asphalt
You hope for some weird clue,

But there’s nothing to see
Bizarre enough to count.
Maybe burnt ghost pine trees.

Pattern Now Forever Written

Doesn’t it astonish you
That every least movement you

Make becomes part of the day,
This irreversible day,

Itself shaping the cosmos,
A bit of the whole cosmos?

You move through what can’t not now
Have been each instant you’ve been.

Tie

Is it the story or
Its contents that create

The dilemma? Settlers
And spores can be heroes

Of their own success or
Villains of lives taken.

The chestnut forests are
Mourned in America,

Land of many settlers
And source of many spores.

Can stories not help it
That a protagonist

Must perform the monstrous
Villainies of other

Stories of the same kind?
Is it in the nature

Of success to slaughter
The success of others,

Feature not a bug of
Heroes to be monsters?

Or is it the stories,
The nature of stories,

Not of their characters,
Pretended divisions,

The rising and falling
Actions, clipped conclusions?

Stories don’t just begin
In the middle of things,

Sometimes. All stories end
In the middle of things.

There are no monster spores
Or settler heroes here

In eternal middles.
Snip threads, make opposites

That look like ends, that could,
And will, tie up again.

And Don’t You Forget It

People who are most ashamed
Of what they’ve done in private
Vs. people most ashamed

Of themselves in company—
That’s another way to slice
Your personality cake.

It’s memory, either way.
Public humiliation,
By whatever means passes

For ostracism, outrage,
The stocks, works mnemonically
In the end, as evidenced

By your need to remind each
Other, you should be ashamed!

Description Doesn’t Do It

A website juxtaposes—
It looks like by accident—
Hagiwara, Pasternak.

Pasternak is poetic
In describing poetry
Through poetic metaphors

Of whistles, cracked ice, the night,
The duel of nightingales,
A sweet pea that has run wild,

Fine sorts of sensory things,
While Hagiwara responds,
As it were, through quotation

By translation, poetry
Has no demonic magic,
No mystery, is nothing

But a solitary soul’s
Sick, lonely consolation.
Well, ok, what is it then,

This poetry—poetic
Or sorry compensation?
It’s something, as it happens.

Now Poor Never

Knowing what they know already
They still express anxiety—
Is it now? Is the horror now?—
And hope—Not yet, not yet, not yet!

The pattern is plain in stories
Where the characters are fated—
Is it now? Not yet, please, not yet!—
And in war zones, and in pile ups,

And in the Code Blue ER rooms,
And on sunny suburban streets
In America where neighbors
Are known to run amok with guns—

No! Please, god, no! cries the jogger,
The woman pushing a stroller,
Not now! Not yet, not yet, not yet!
Then the shooter pulls the trigger

Or runs on. Andromache wails
From the fortress walls for Hector
Not to go down to fight, not yet,
Knowing what she knows, horrified,

Stay with me on the wall! Not yet!
Knowing what every person knows,
Still terrified the moment’s now
Or soon. So soon? Not yet, not yet!

Old Faith in the New Rules

The most powerful moral argument
Is the possession of magic that works,
And it doesn’t even have to be good

Magic—it can be the bleakest, cruelest,
And still be moral magic, if it works,
Thanks to the fact most magic rarely works.

Morality isn’t meant for failures.
People can only keep losing so long
Believing they’re on the side of the right.

That’s why it’s so important to believe,
To accept the bitter self-deception
That you haven’t lost yet, that your magic

Has been just a little off—self-respect
And faith in the righteousness of your own
Tradition, your own morals, are at stake.

But if the magic of your opponents
Works, works best, there’s only so long you can
Convince yourself their system’s worthless.

Sooner or later, you’ll steal their magic,
Or try, adjusting to accommodate
Your old faith in the new rules, more or less.

A Mind without a Summer

Bottled, borborygmic Tamboras,
Magma chambers of the common mind
Are building to blow and overflow

These tilted slopes history has grown,
This steeply terraced and fertile soil,
Cultured, climbing toward heaven still,

However troubled by drums rumbling
Underground. The idea was always
Only a little bit visible,

And the mind was always perilous,
But, so long as it was ascending,
Why decline the temptation to rise

Into the gathering mists with it?
The crater will prove the peak’s surprise.

Reading Lamp

If the book in hand
Were good enough, if
There were a book in
Hand, instead of was,
This would be the lamp.

Poor people, working
So hard to write what
You could claim angels
Or Gods had written—
Sacred prophecy,

Honest science, and
True mythology—
When it has to be
You, you who, lonely,
Wrote whatever book

This one managed to
Be, under a lamp,
A human thing.
Recorded music
Would stream on softly,

And the night outside
Would freeze, and your lamp
Burn gold dreamily,
If there were a book
Good enough to read.

Sinking Orion

The day’s awareness presses
Beds of needles into night.
Failure’s anniversary

Promises greater failure
Between now and tomorrow.
Strategy, think strategy

To wriggle through disaster.
Disaster—check out the stars,
Presumably good fortune

Nowadays, just to see them,
To live under clear dark skies.
To see something like brilliance,

How can that be disaster?
Belt your sarcastic laughter.

Small Town Fall

The vampire gnome, the gnomepyre,
Black felt cap, fake fangs, fake blood
Running down his grizzly beard,

Considered the rituals
Of costumes, food, and monsters,
All that made for festivals,

The playful overturning,
Misrule, overtures to death,
Loved by anthropologists,

So much culture to describe,
Group behaviors to explain,
And explanations there are

In plenty, but none of them
Really work, do they? Stories,
Something about transforming

Into story characters,
Out of the humdrum of life,
Something about preferring

Mythic, narrative endings,
No that’s not it. The gnomepyre
Wanted to participate,

Nothing too complicated,
Wanted to be sufficient,
Knowing explanation

Wouldn’t, couldn’t ever be,
Among children dressed for death
And elders busy dying.

Imperfections of Everywhere

Adolescents are excellent

Reminders that nowhere is great.

There’s always good reason to leave,

To escape, to find somewhere else.

The restlessness may be a phase,

But the sensors are accurate.

Nowhere is actually perfect.

There’s reason for embarrassment,

Possibly terror, everywhere.

It’s just the focus that’s tighter

In the emerging mind—the frame

Renders important what’s wrong here.

If age and experience shrug

And make a virtue of one place,

It’s thanks to distaste for others.

Long Drained Terminal Moraine

The landscape carries its marks
Of people coveting it
Or bits of it, or products

It could or once did provide.
Even those who only asked
For basics, food and water,

Who didn’t slash, rip, or mine,
Left their tracks and debitage.
So spare yourself delusions

That you’ve left the nets of dust
And ambition behind you,
Bivouacked by this barbed-wire.

Still, you’re not reminded here,
By handsome architecture
Or the finest museums,

How rich inequalities
And extractive cruelties
Gave rise to the loveliness

That now attracts the tourists.
Dry grass rustles at your knees.
You’re the next ghost on the breeze.

Talisman

Back in the nineties,

Charles Wright, already

Deep in his sixties,

With his most esteemed

Decades still in front

Of him, called his poems

Verbal amulets.

Poems as good luck charms,

As phylacteries,

Does feel right. It’s why

People quote the ones

That they’ve memorized,

At least those few lines,

Why they repost them

To social spaces.

They’re incantations,

Little spells to ward

Off the terrible,

But not quite nazars,

Icons, or crystals—

No one uses poems

To ward away real,

Material harm.

They’re for keeping ghosts

And mental demons

At bay, for feeling

Reassured when blue,

Frightened, heartbroken,

For staring down death.

Wright scoffed at his own,

Reminded himself

Whatever happens

Will, with or without

Verbal amulets,

But struck that brave pose

From inside a poem.

Time Travel

An unimportant part of the world,
On an ordinary, homely day,
Can you want to be a part of this?

It’s never been an exotic place,
Not decades ago, not yesterday.
It’s a town. People get errands done.

Nothing great or terrible of note
Beyond the initial settlement
And occasional domestic crimes

Are recorded having happened here.
What is here? If you went back in time
A hundred, hundred and fifty years,

You’d land on an ordinary day.
It could almost make time travel dull.
Can you want to be a part of this

Without wanting to make your escape?
Children are meandering from school.
Vehicles pull in and out of lots.

There are some clouds. The weather’s not bad.
It’s real. It’s as real as any day,
Historically true. Ordinary.

Cloud Parenting

He said to his bored daughter

Online schooling, keep working,

Only to then undermine

His own command by adding

The further interruption,

Funny, I was staring out

 

To space, and then I noticed

The cat was also staring

Out to space, and then I looked

 

Up and saw you were also

Staring out to space. . . He smiled

A melancholy smile, but

 

Fortunately his daughter

Ignored him and kept working.

Liberation

They didn’t know. What they knew
Was indirect transmission,
The transactions of the signs,

Which were deadly, in a way,
Sure, but in the way of tools
In general, that could turn

To weapons in skillful hands
But weren’t agents in themselves.
When the signs shook free of them,

They didn’t see them going,
Too busy still using them
For exchanging messages,

Not noticing they’d exchanged
Messages for genuine.

Tumbler

Skill you’ll never have,

Since all falls break you,

Numbers in the drum,

In the bag, ah la

Vida es una

Tómbola, sing all

Singalong losers,

Lottery choosers,

Who want what’s human

To throw the fairer

Versions of the long

Odds of the large world.

They do, but never

Enough to alter

How tumbling shakes you.

Quiet Night Mistake

When what you thought was morning
Was the moon, you knew you were
In for further confusion

Through whatever hours remained
To you as short awareness
On the surface of the Earth.

The body you inhabit
Can’t but die an animal,
However it’s been estranged

By the spirits of culture
From an ordinary life
Under recognizable

Light. Li Bai woke to moon like
Snow, far from home, long ago.

Your Enterprise

Iron turns a torrent red,

Said the last line of a text,

Closing with a sudden clench.

You can’t let it go, can you?

It’s the rhythm of the phrase

That clutched you in sound effects,

Not its sense. Iron rusts red,

And rust will redden water,

Okay. It was the hammer

Of the line that made it more

Than self-evident, tempted

Your sense it meant more than sense.

Meaning comes from attention.

Whatever draws attention

Feels already meaningful,

Although meaning has to be

Built—doesn’t have to be true,

Of course. It has to be built.

When something catches your mind

Like that poet’s final line,

You tilt to your enterprise.

Entreaty

It’s not itself
Alive the way
Lives that depend
On it all are.

It’s comforting
To think of that—
At this angle
It laps the stones

Like water does,
A wavering
Gold reflection
Meaning nothing

Much to someone.
Go home. Go home
If you have one.
Please don’t have one.

In Time Everyone’s Out of Time

What do you have they had, too,
However far back before?

Sunlight, ok, and a breeze,
And maybe similar trees.

Don’t mention the other things
That would have been news to them.

Those are exactly the things
That will seem the most dated

To anyone after you—
Your rumbling passenger jets,

The electric lights at night,
All the winking satellites,

Recorded musical tunes,
Loud motorbikes down the road—

Archaic, or forgotten,
Soon enough, as the mention

Of streetcars, telegraph wires,
Or horses pulling chariots.

You want to be out of time,
Or any time too narrow,

Why? To speak to the future
As if words were eternal?

No, as absurd as it is,
You just don’t want to feel trapped

For the reason that you know
Perfectly well that you’re trapped.

Cavatina

In the smallish spaces
Between crests of fictions,
The glassy moments slide

Their alternating clouds
Across a half-burned slope
Leaning over the road.

Everything is transformed
By a necessity
To keep on transforming,

And between the few cars
Gliding down to sunset,
What sound like the last birds

Left in an emptied land
Trill their familiar calls
From living and dead pines.

What can a small song mean
To a mind that can’t speak
Without slightly burning?

Rules of Submission

One of you writes, I’m right here,

And that’s the end of that poem,

Which then gets published and wins

Admission to a volume

Of the best-of for that year,

While the smartass other one

Of you replies, I’m wrong here,

Which will have to self-publish,

Being bathetic cliche,

As clearly stated right here.

The Story of the Day

Already forming in the brain,
What it looked like outside, the hour
You woke up, what you did with that

First hour, then the second, changing
Light, how you felt, the narrative
Of what this day, so far, has been,

And you haven’t even spoken
To anyone yet, you haven’t
Even checked the overnight news,

And you know you’ll mostly forget
The majority of events
Of this day with stories in it.

This Is the Earth, After All

There is nowhere safe to go.
Long lives get distributed
Probabilistically,

And probability shifts.
If you’re lucky, you’re lucky.
No rampages through your town

By shooters running amok,
By soldiers, by colonists,
By ruthless secret police,

No earthquakes pulling down walls,
No cyclones ripping off roofs,
No wildfires encircling homes,

No floods washing towns away,
No droughts drying out the wells,
No plagues of swarming vermin,

No viral pestilences
Leaving streets strewn with the dead—
And still you could be murdered,

Could die in an accident,
Be mauled by a startled bear.
There is nowhere safe to go,

And yet some of you will die,
Maybe most of you will die,
Elderly and quietly,

One at a time, from old age
Related disassembly,
Probabilistically.

This is still Earth, after all,
That wears its lives like a shawl
Draped loosely on round shoulders.

How Healing Crawls

Epithelial liquid crystals,
Symmetrical at two different scales,
If modeled as fluid dynamics,

Could predict how wounds heal as skin crawls.
Detailed symmetries of skin cell sheets
In degrees of crystalline order

Refract light differently depending
On their orientation, magic
Of modern liquid crystal displays.

Nematic and hexatic exist
Simultaneously, nematic
At one scale, hexatic scales smaller.

In cells, then, as in liquid crystals,
And as in poetry, form forces
Function, easing any prediction,

But once you run the simulation
And know exactly what forces next,
Can you dream what those predictions mean?

Getting Eaten by a Tiger’s Skeleton

People fear the lively dead,
Their own and the world’s remains,
From skulls and ghouls to vaccines.

We’re past the Day of the Dead,
And we’re past All Hallow’s Eve,
But we’re never past ambush

From what we choose to believe,
Probably since we don’t choose,
Really, do we? Students write

Essays on faith for college,
Students with faith in college
To improve their salaries

Over the long haul of life.
No one in class mentions faith
In ambush by revenants,

The one faith all seem to have.
Some of their lives will not have
Long hauls, thinks the professor,

Remembering a student
Who died just after writing
This same assignment on faith,

Memory like a tiger’s
Skeleton in the forest,
Stalking the surviving past.

If We Don’t Navigate This as a World

Said Larry Fink of BlackRock

About the outbreak of war—

Then everything could contract,

A warning to billionaires—

But what’s really interesting

Is that phrasing, as a world.

What did you say? Come again?

Antiglobalists might shriek,

But there’s a necessity

And a higher register

Of arrogance in the phrase.

As if people were the world,

As if humans are a world,

A single organism,

Capable to pull itself

Together, a singular

World, a whole world, this whole world.

Earth would laugh, if a world could.

Note

Sometimes you get bad hiccups.
Hello? Are you reading this?
You’re not immune to hiccups

Or the occasional glitch.
Not so poetic is it,
When all the machinery,

The lives that build and sustain
Your bits of introspection,
All the inaccessible

Functions underlying thought
Intrude on your vast musings.
Wait, you say, they’ll go away.

Oh, they will, and so won’t you,
But they won’t have noticed you.

Mean Think

Coyotes again,
That strangled yipping
In chilly predawn

That makes you wonder
If they’re just greeting
Each other, or if

They’re celebrating
A meal of a fawn.
The deer have been thick

Around town this year,
And there’ve been no more
Sightings or warnings

Of mountain lions
Since way back last spring.
Maybe the coyotes

Were able to score
Something bigger than
Jackrabbits or cats.

Does, fawns, and a buck
Have stripped all the leaves
From bushes nearby

Your rented windows,
But they still patrol
The sidewalk and porch.

You rock in your chair,
Eater of packaged
Foods from supply chains,

An ecosystem
Of domesticates,
Humans for humans,

Humans threatening
Humans. Coyotes
Can mean what you think.

Devotion

Death loved you so much
That death gave you back
Safely the first time,

A great sacrifice
Of pure devotion
That touched you deeply,

And you thought yourself
Specially in love
With death in return,

Only in that way
That people who feel
Unreasonably

Loved fondly shelter
The thought of that love
As backup treasure,

Rainy-day option,
At least so-and-so
Will always love me,

But never really
Requiting that love
Or admitting it

To the world, always
Looking out for love
That you’d love better,

Love that you’d chosen
Yourself. Death never
Stopped loving you, though.

Death remained faithful
To you, to you, to
Every living thing.

Every One

The thing about the first person

Is that they never are the first,

Never were, never even close.

Ok, ok, someone somewhere

Must have used the first first person,

And someone before that, maybe

Immediately thereafter,

Had to have been the first person.

But by the time the first person

Tried joking, Madam, I’m Adam,

It was long past the time no one

Would ever be the first again.

You’re not the second neither, nor

The third, but at least they’re some more.