The Long Way

Small white stand
For peach crops
Seems to plead,

Please don’t stop.
Real ripe worlds
Need to wait.

No one stops.
Dark gold fruit
Glows in shade.

Why Should You Have Felt That Way?

Last night’s dream was boring starlight,
A heavy net woven of woods
Hanging down from the dark to catch

Dream krill in the forests’ baleen.
You woke up neither sad nor glad
To know that the details would go.

Watching the bald blue now between
Chores you’ve accomplished and meetings
You’ve yet to begin, you wonder

What was boring about those stars?
The correct answer is nothing,
You surmise. Carved at the joints, dreams

Turn out to bind hybrid domains—
First, all things going on in dreams,
Events and faces in strange scenes,

And second, the dream emotions,
Which seem bound to all those events,
As if generated by them

But actually unrelated.
You feel dream emotions surging—
Joy, love, terror, boredom, worry—

While watching regurgitated
Bits of memory cross the screen—
But the emotions are their own.

It’s why nothing feels so vivid
Once you try to retell the dream.
What you dreamed was inadequate

Spur to how you felt about it.
Now, why? Why those two tracks for dreams?
You stare at the bare blue, trying

To see the stars behind the day,
To recapture fuzzy boredom,
But somehow boredom has escaped.

Can You Tell How a Hawk Waits Stealthily?

The drawing of the heronry

Is ink intertwined and spooky.

In Armitage’s Poetry

Of Birds, the heron, notably,

Vouches for Hamlet’s sanity.

Old French heronçeau was subtly

Corrupted to hernshaw, duly

Thence to handsaw, and you can see

Now why Hamlet said, sensibly,

He’d notice hawks in heronries,

Places where hawks ought not to be.

You squint at the sketched, inky trees,

Whose twigs can seem like beaks and knees.

Are herons what heronries breed?

Then Anes

Things link how they want to in the woods—

You think as you think and not as you should.

The most dangerous suspicion is that

Someone who’s not like you doesn’t like you

Since they’re not like you, and maybe they don’t,

But that’s just the first step to the excuse

That you don’t need to like people like them.

Tomfoolery. Bumpy soup. Bullet-proof.

Someone touts the term, nonce. You look it up.

You’d thought of something nonce as a one-off

And it was, although also varying

Value. Every thought that you bump into

In the woods is nonce and then forgotten,

Even the thought that the way to get through

The woods must begin with an incident

(Something happens, and you write about it)

Or a phrase (you like a wording, and you

Write about it—bullet-proof bumpy soup).

You could sort a great many poems in bins

That way—triggered by phrase or incident?

What they’ve got in common is that they won’t

Happen / if you ain’t paying attention.

Road Tar Smell

Threads deep past
Through just now—
Life makes sense,

Sense by sense.
As a child,
You loved smells

That burned well.
Wood, gas, tar.
You’re part fire.

After Salter on Frost

First by means of sound,

No, rather, rhythm—

And within the head,

Not out in the air—

Poems first win us when

We’re still small children.

It’s almost tactile,

A kind of bumping

Over the train tracks,

But pleasurable,

Soft whackety-whack,

Keeps us coming back

For more physical

Encounters with lines

Of words we don’t know

As terms with meanings,

As reference points,

As explanations,

And don’t need to know—

Back when we could feel

The separation

Between poetry

And making meaning,

Between language felt

And language used for

Communication.

It was ok then

To have no idea

What the verses meant,

But brain barks backward,

Becoming carved

Away by living,

Steadily losing

The ability

To love the rhythms

That cloak their meanings.

Alright, what this means

May be important.

Parse first, but recall,

However bitter,

Poetry remains

Language carrying

Echoes still playing

Around, foolishly,

Within. To entrance

The old, backwards brain,

To keep it on track,

Maintain attention,

Even grief’s haunted

With ghostly rhythms,

Even protests chant,

Even massive prose

Buries unmarked grace

In wisdom’s garden.

Piled Flake Dunes

Packed light terms,
Dense as stones,
Cliffs worn crushed

Up by quakes,
Down by love
From the grave—

Here’s your edge,
No more room—
Sands. Clouds. Noon.

Sailed Newsprint

Adhesive
Scraps rode waves,
Like labels

Glued to show
Kayakers
What went wrong.

Someone dropped
A paper—
Now that’s all

The news faced
Here until
It sinks in.

Life’s No Bourse, You Tragic Simpleton

Dive into any absorbing,
Thoughtful sort of activity,
And you’ll notice a tipping point

Where your absorption starts feeling,
In a niggling way at the edge
Of your awareness, like a waste

Of invested energy when
You could be investing elsewhere.
Then, for that and for no other

Reason, you start to lose the joy,
The pleasant, flow-state contentment
In continuing those actions.

This is a deep form of sadness,
Obsession over investments.

Parable of Her Most Fortunate Soul

The phone rode along
On the roof of the car

Where she’d set it before
Getting back in.

They called it and called it,
When she said she’d lost it,

And everyone could hear
The buzzing announcing

It was near, but no one
Could locate the phone—

Not anywhere in the car,
Not anywhere in the seats,

Not among the piles
Of coats and detritus—

Until one of them asked
Could it be on the roof?

And everyone was amazed
That the phone had survived

Driving all around town,
Unattached, in the dark.

Poem in Three Waves

Storms on ponds

Won’t touch down.

No one asks.

Young pond poems

Steal their spots,

Waves all ears.

Don’t leave yet,

One poem moans.

Waves shed tears.

Back to Dying as Living Again

Many times, in local settings
Of mostly elderly people
(Now more and more common to find),

You catch yourself glancing around
Considering the various
Stages of dying on display—

The minor (thin, white hair, soft guts)—
The on-the-way (limps and walkers)—
The circling-the-drain while trembling.

A lot of living being done
Through the processes of decay.
You consider a world begun

For everyone at middle age,
No infancy, youth, or childhood,
No growing, no reproductive prime—

A planet with one odd species
That steps out, maybe from seed cones,
Already salt-and-pepper haired.

How would everyone’s stages feel
On such a compressed timetable?
Likely much the same, the same.

The Lives of Towns of Human Lives

Peruse the news not for the news

But to absorb the many towns

News covers, and their differences.

Some people, just a few hundred,

Live in Jarratt, Virginia—small,

Scruffy community in green,

Nondescript, second-growth woodland

Housing the town’s main employer,

A deli meat plant that appears

Like a low, boxy fungal sprawl

Of pale buildings and parking lots

In a field scraped out of the woods,

Where a scandal has erupted

About contaminated meat.

Meanwhile millions of people live

In about the same acreage

In the legendary city of Cairo,

Where it’s so unbearably hot

These days it only comes alive

At night, when the streets overflow

With people—there’s just not enough

Fuel to avoid daily blackouts

And despite the crowds out at night,

A deep gloom pools under the lights,

And in interviews locals say

Things like, Everybody is dead

On the inside. They’ve surrendered;

They’re down. Egypt is a graveyard.

Maracaibo, Venezuela,

Rose on an abundance of oil,

But there people aren’t just depressed.

Recent hard times have been so hard,

A quarter of the city left.

Neighborhoods of abandoned homes

Could each pocket the citizens

Of all of Jarratt, Virginia,

With houses to spare—but no jobs.

Nobody seems to be fleeing,

Or so down they’re dead, in Görlitz,

Saxony, abutting Poland,

With an advanced economy,

Diversified enterprises,

A good fifty-five thousands folks,

A power plant beside the lake.

But the coal industry’s near death.

Nativist sentiment’s rising,

Along with right-wing politics—

Think of the border, the places

Hemorrhaging people elsewhere,

People so different from Germans

Who are being allowed in here!

Our way of life must be preserved!

That’s not the worry in Pokrovsk,

Ukraine,

Dead in the path of the surging

Russian war machine. One more place

People are more than despairing,

They’re fleeing, and not gradually.

Trains are filling up every seat

With the town’s old inhabitants

Suddenly themselves refugees.

A sampling. That’s all. A sampling,

Unrepresentative, of towns

Around the world where humans live

That happen to be in the news

For their recent ways of being

Diversely unfortunate. Years

Will haul this metal-cored pebble

A few more times around its star,

Just a few will do, and these towns

Will no longer be in the news—

Well, none except maybe Cairo.

Cairo’s an historical beast

So large and ancient it can make

It’s own fuel for newsworthiness.

But there are so many places,

Each with its own sets of stories,

Where humans have pockmarked the Earth,

And you know they’re all connected

If you squint a bit, but they feel

Like so many wandering worlds,

Untethered, lost in their stories.

Twenty Five Feet

The depth of the Great Salt Lake
Is a lesson for us all.
That greatness is a puddle,

While a fingernail of lake
In British Columbia,
Slicing three hundred meters

Deep between mountains, and not
Impressive on any map,
Could drown Chicago’s skyline.

What’s the lesson, exactly?
Pause, while the lecturer paws
Through available options—

Things are never what they seem?
Still waters run deep? Big things
Come in small packages? No,

Certainly it’s none of those.
The lecturer glances up.
Trust me, there’s a lesson there.

It’s something about being
Misled and/or misleading.
The big one holds less water

Than the small, and there’s meaning
Somewhere in that paradox.
Shallow can mean many things.

So can deep. But that’s not it.
Try this: the unexpected,
For whatever reason, makes

You pay attention, makes you
Feel that you missed some meaning,
Makes you sure there is meaning,

There must be meaning. So you
Produce your choice of meaning—
Life’s not like that. It’s like this.

The lecturer nods sagely,
Underlining the wisdom.
The Great Salt Lake of Utah

Is just twenty-five feet deep.
It means the world’s surprising,
And wisdom evaporates.

No Bells, No Cathedral

Hummingbirds, lizards, finches,
Coyotes, quail, and mule deer
Are common in these canyons—

Nothing so haunting as bells
Ringing over the peaked roofs
Humans built to spook ourselves.

We echo forms of the world
And then notice how those forms
Remind of us of our echoes.

Don’t those bird songs sound like bells?
Those cliffs look like cathedrals.
We craft our imitations

For poppets in the forest,
Then sense ourselves in the woods,
And feel haunted, as we should.

The Stream

Clouds laced up the pointed cliffs
Like white laces through high tops.
It was the end of summer,

The start of a long weekend.
A nearby, once-rural town
Was celebrating peaches,

Once an important harvest,
Now a nostalgic party
Involving vendors and booths

In the city park, plus games,
And, yes, some competitions
Involving the quality

Of peaches and peach cobblers,
Pies, preserves, ice cream, and such.
In the canyons under cliffs,

Tourists from around the globe
Focused on their adventures—
Hiking, cycling, scenic flights,

And pictures of each other
Having all those adventures
To celebrate being here

As you have celebrated
Being there and there or there.
The clouds all dissipated

After flaring up briefly
In the late afternoon light.
What were you celebrating?

What were you most focused on?
The many changes of pace
In the way everything changed

Each instant of the weekend,
The ordinary weekend,
Ordinary holiday—

The speeds of the vehicles,
The milling of the locals
At the peach fair, the surging

Of the internationals
Boarding at the shuttle stops,
The clouds winding, unwinding

Around the steep, crumbling cliffs
That defied you to define
Beauty in inhuman ways

Not even to do with life—
Just stone compressed, lifted, blown
Grain by grain into the stream.

Simplified Rococo Hypocrisy on a Picnic

Whenever the pace
Of the incoming
Slackens, memory

Springs into action.
Haven’t you noticed
How most thoughts amount

To entertainment
For the troubled self?
Even dread’s a show

Seizing attention
With macabre puppets,
Since horror’s better

Than boredom to mind.
Poor mind. The dullest
Moments are down deep

More richly detailed
Than memory’s props,
Garish collages,

And reused costumes.
That’s all of future,
All of fantasy,

And yet you turn back
To start rummaging
Memory’s attic

For more mummery
Of what might happen
The very instant

Your attention flags,
Bored with the moment,
With the nuances

Of, for instance,
A drive down the road
You drive every day.

You defend yourself—
Hey! Of course! It’s dull!
The same every day!

And I’ve got so much
I should think about,
So much on my plate,

And won’t it be good
To get everything
Done, and can’t you see

Me living the life
I should be living,
And what if I don’t

Get these ducks lined up,
And that set up done?
All done would be great.

Alright. No lectures
Then—you’ve had enough
Ambitious people

Haranguing others
About how to live
In the blissful now.

It’s not that the now
Is so damned blissful.
It’s just that it’s strange

That the world’s details
Bore you if they don’t
End up as threadbare

Bits of old costumes
The mind wears to play
The set narratives,

The three or four tales
It can’t help but stage.
No one dares to say

Imagination
Is a poorer place
To spend your hours in

Than the dullest, most
Quotidian hour
You ran away from.

You might want to try
To see if you can
Remain nonhuman

Enough not to need
To hide in tired thoughts,
When you could be free.

A Good Soak

You have about an hour
Of direct sun left you.
You park yourself in it,

The way you’d position
Yourself in a shower,
To get the best of it,

Ignoring dinner-time
Hunger and setting down
Screens full of books and news.

The world will carry on
Or maybe it will end.
In the meantime you’ll watch shades

Forecast the Earth’s shadow
And haunt sun-warmed meadow.

Unlike Unnatural Words

Scrutinizing some writing

Someone published in Paris,

Roughly three decades ago,

You realize you are struggling

To analogize language,

To say what language is like.

Why you’re bothering with this,

Who knows? Nothing’s to be solved.

Who cares what language is like?

Three times you’ve started drafting

A poem in response to it.

Three times you’ve spun out in sand.

It’s not there’s nothing to say.

There’s too much depth to soft sand.

Sometimes the means have no end.

Identity Post-Politics

There’s no use in railing

Against identity

As a measure of worth,

Privilege, suffering,

Entitlement, honor—

Even Jesus is just

Part of Identity

Among devout Christians

Preaching through latter days—

My faith in Jesus is,

One missionary tries

Explaining, a huge part

Of my identity.

Identity constructs

Identity these days,

An acknowledgement now

Spanning political

Spectra—identity

Is something that is made,

Not eternally fixed,

Not even for warriors

In the cultural clash

Over who is what sex.

Everyone must define

Whatever position

They mean to champion.

The missionary’s faith

Seems very real, and yet,

It’s also just a piece,

A huge part but a part,

Of an identity

That, like any other,

Is labeled, part by part.

A Laggard Companion

I brought my teacher Camembert

Because she said she didn’t know

What it was, said a high-schooler

To her best friend in the lot

Adjacent the bakery

Where kids hung out after school.

What kind of teacher’s never

Heard of Camembert cheese? the friend

Replied. How sheltered is she?

You mean, like, how ignorant?

The girls laughed delightedly.

The ignorance of adults

Peaks just before one joins them,

When one still has some distance,

A last shred of perspective.

The spare adult listening

Just wanted to know one thing—

What classes did this teacher

Give instruction in? Adults

Don’t care all that much about

Ignorance, but adults hunt

Down vulnerability,

Usually by specialty.

What’s your specialty’s status?

And what’s your status within

Your established soecialty?

Ignorance of cheese is fine

For engineers. Janitors

Don’t have much status to keep.

But high school teachers waver

Between the ranks, on the brink

Of pity, on the margin

Of respectability.

Adults are slow. The gossip

Had moved with the laughing teens

Back into the bakery.

Daunting

You can rehearse all the good
Things on your vicinity,
Itemize what makes you glad,

Or should, about the bright day.
But gladness goes beyond counts
And anyone, any day,

Can draw up lists in combat
Of the reasons to be glad
And the reasons to be sad.

The direction selected
Says either already glad
Or already sad. The mind

Casts about for evidence
That will affirm what it feels.
Evidence is always there.

The chemistry that goes on,
That orchestrates all of this
Has no care for your affairs,

Is an evolved reaction
To other combinations
Of the ancient molecules

That generate behavior.
Chemistry tames chemistry—
Tames—the same root as daunting—

To vanquish, to fill with dread,
To domesticate, to tame.
All you need to go feral,

To be ferally content,
Glad, satisfied, enlightened,
Is for awareness to hold

The reins of your chemistry,
So that you aren’t forced to think,
Can never be forced to think

Of anything too daunting.
Hasn’t it occurred to you
That all your meditation,

Prayer, dances, opiates, booze
Have been weapons in one war,
For awareness to refuse

To be tamed to being good,
By brain’s social chemistry
Evolved to remain subdued?

Both sides deploy the weapons.
Mostly the taming side win.
But when they’re stolen, unearned,

Gladness, peace, contentment
Are always small victories
For you against things to do.

A Hot Air Balloon

How many years until everyone
Alive as these lines are typed is gone?
And how many years going backward
Would you need to reach the point at which
No one right now alive was yet born?

The second one is easier, more
Amenable to an estimate—
Even if the soul designated
As oldest at the moment is not,
They’re unlikely to be that far off.

Let’s round up a bit to 120
And predict things won’t change much, as well.
In 1904, no one alive
Now was already born, and no one
Here now will still draw breath

By the time 2144
Is announced, assuming years still count.
Of course there’s nothing about that stretch
On which you could safely bet. What did
1786 know of this?

Miracle Hunger

People die for miracles,
Die questing for miracles,
Somewhere in the human world

Every hour of every day.
The simplest explanation
Seems to be relentless hope

That solutions can be found
When the one hoping believes
That solutions can’t be found—

So, sometimes, when one is found,
An actual solution
After all, people insist

That it was a miracle.
Continuing to find none,
However, doesn’t stop hope,

And hope is exploitable,
And people exploit people.
People die for miracles

From people who exploit them.
Still, that’s somehow not enough.
Solutions may not be sought,

And still the hunger remains
To witness a miracle.
And who knows why it remains,

Why supernatural tales
Are loved by level-headed
People—why Taoists accept

Emptiness in the Way, yet
Constantly play at magic.
What is it the hunger’s for?

Say gravity could switch off
Locally, killing no one—
That would be a miracle.

Would people be happy then,
Live contented, so much fun?
This hunger is for something

That could make life miserable.
Think of just how terrible
Life might be with miracles.

One Person Playing a Silent Scene

That’s a handsome bit of melancholy,
He said, Although it does risk self-pity.

He waited to see what she’d say to that,
In the peculiar suspense invented

By phone-texted conversation. Dot-dot.
While he waited, he wondered what he’d meant

When he had incorporated handsome.
Handsome how? Fine? Elegant? Masculine?

How could a melancholy emotion
Suggest any of those connotations?

He knew he had a tendency to link
Oddball adjective-noun combinations.

She didn’t answer him, but he began
To understand he’d meant he’d imagined

Some handsome and melancholy person
Expressing that opinion she’d sent him

And then had unconsciously elided
The person from the imaginary

Situation in which the person said
Such a handsome, melancholy thing,

Leaving behind a floating emotion
That seemed to risk being self-pitying.

That, too, was his thing—removing persons
From spoken settings, leaving only terms.

He thought of Stevens—Life is an affair
Of people, not things, but for me it’s been

The reverse, and that has been the problem.
He gave his phone a last glance at the screen.

Over the Blue Aegean

You’ve been so many places
You can’t say you’ve ever been.
You tremble over the blue

Aegean near the ghost town
Created by cruelty,
And you lust for its beauty,

Its overgrown masonry,
To spill from inside your mind
Out over surrounding life.

After the revolutions,
Genocidal replacements,
And grief, it comes down to this—

Once all locked rooms are roofless,
Ghost thoughts can enter what’s left.

Why Haven’t Cave Cats Evolved?

If you’re in the right frame
Of mind for world-building,
Then adding blind cave cats

To your cavern planet
Might be a good idea.
One good idea, at least.

You’d have to have a lot
Of species that made sense
In those ecosystems

You imagined for them,
Deep in conversation
With stalactite tunnels,

Hunting the blind cave mice.
And then—since you’re human,
Narrating for humans—

You’d need mysterious,
Troglophilic persons
Haunting the caves themselves,

Beautiful, slender-limbed,
And elvish, near-sighted,
Nearly ageless as olms,

Maybe hunting with help
From those predatory,
Magical, blind cave cats.

Can you sense the darkness,
The intimate absence
Of illumination

Lacking changing weather,
Yet? Now a visitor
Sets in motion the chain

Of events that upend
This quiet, settled world,
Propelling your hero

Onto the harsh surface,
Into the terrible light,
Where aliens from Earth—

No—portal travelers
From your world and your time,
Have arrived, having found

A link between the worlds,
One tunnel in a maze
Of networked threads binding

All the worlds together.
The cavern world’s woven
With diamonds and metals,

Which humans find, meaning
Your hero’s sweet people
Are doomed without the help

Of that first visitor,
And the fact that what ties
All the worlds together

Is one vast tapestry
Of squeezes, belly crawls,
Windows, speleogens,

And boneyards that only
Blind cave cats can traverse.
Hero and visitor,

Turned lovers, assemble
A blind cave cat army. . . .
Now you have a story.

Homo ligare

Cuneiform tablets confirm,
Prayers left at temples confirm,
It’s been true for a long time—
Debt is scarier than death.
There is no bottom to it,
No end to ostracism.
Death is often punishment

For debts, which proves their ranking.
Pay back your debts, you can live.
Die, and debtors will still come
To visit your family—
And not only for money.
Debt is the depth of being
Human, is obligation.

Dreams Are Feints and Misdirections

For yourself, iIt dawns on you,
You suffer far more conflict
In dreams than in waking life,

Far more. But are dreams the source
Or the storage? Once again,
The question no one’s answered

To others’ satisfaction
Is, What exactly’s the point
Of all this activity

In the resting body’s brain?
The intensity of dreams,
Even more than their nonsense,

Doesn’t fit explanations
Of health or prophecy well,
Although such explanations

Are plentiful, each of them
With its ardent champions.
You sleep. You survive more dreams,

None of which are true killers.
You wake, rattled, to a day
That will be, for most of you,

Much calmer than your dreaming,
And yet it’s one day, dull day,
That’s going to have to kill you.

Porcelain Dishes

What foolish things might you do
If you could keep on doing
Dumb things indefinitely?

Clattering porcelain dishes
Annoy you making breakfast.
What if you replaced them all

With wooden bowls, something dumb
Like that? What if you spent years,
Or aimed to, replacing all

Non-native plants in the yard?
That would be dumb. Warm winds blow
Through the window screen, and you,

You think of free afternoons
Stretching to infinity
In which to think of dumb things

To take forever to do.
Then it hits you—only one
Such afternoon, like this one,

Can bloom an infinity
Of nothing much, mostly dumb.
Watch how this dust spins in sun.

Every Poem’s Unsolicited Except for the One You Can't Find

Spent part of an afternoon alone
While crowds were consuming the world,
And all you consumed were short poems—-

Old ones, canonical, minor,
New ones, intimate, from war zones—
Trying to sate that same hunger

That has always pushed you to poems,
Throwing them back by the fistful,
As if reading were a taste test,

And you’d lined them up like samples,
Amuse-bouches you filched yourself
From the trays in the kitchen fridge.

You’re racing to get to the one
That stops you, makes you swear softly
To yourself in satisfaction,

This is it, this is just the thing
That a poem should be, that I’d want
A poem to be, that I envy.

You’ve eaten yourself sick this way,
And here’s the thing. Ask any chef—
It’s hard to do with a mouthful

What almost no one manages
To do with a multi-course meal—
To not so much sate as transform

The hunger into awareness
Of an experience never
Previously known and forever

To be sought again, a shudder
In the way the world can be sensed.

What You Never Wrote in Terms of What You Did

The sun is in the window.
The sun’s all over the floor.
You could be doing nothing.

You could be finishing chores.
The worst thing is to be torn.
The sin of accomplishment

Taunts even the fulfilled life.
Have you done all you needed
To feel you needn’t do more?

Yes, and yet here you are, cloaked
In contentment’s own daylight,
Soaked in the pleasure of sun,

And quiet, and nothing much
Needed until tomorrow,
Still thinking, should you do this

Or better you should do that?
That letter you want to write
(More truly, to have written),

The parts of tomorrow’s tasks
You could maybe get done now.
A ground squirrel, its cheeks stuffed,

Waddles up to the glass door
While crossing over the porch
And eyes its own reflection.

Everything’s more important
Than this moment, than writing
About this, than reading this,

And then, there it is. The bliss.
You’re getting to the bottom
Of being while you’re dying

Happily in your rocker,
Bathed in sunlight and watching
That squirrel determined to live.

You’re the Last Frost

She said her father said

To her on his death bed

And then laughed, We were all

Just horse thieves anyway.

One of her listeners

Enjoyed the anecdote

But was fascinated

By the unintended

Pun in, You’re the last Frost.

Something ominous stirred

In that phrase. While the thin

Edge of changing climates

Pressed various places,

Surely some place would soon

See its last snow, its last

Blizzard, the last hard freeze,

The last frost for the years,

Maybe millenniums,

To come. Finality

Rustled its trailing skirts

On the floor of the mind.

End of a line or end

Of a global era,

It’s not the end itself

That haunts the empty house,

But the thought that the end

Will never be undone.

The anecdotes moved on.

Other stories were told.

Each was anything but

The final one, although

What couldn’t be undone

Somehow left one undone.

The Pledge

A pink blossom handed over
For safe-keeping while it wilted,

Handed by offspring to parent,
Who made a show of saving it

As a way of acknowledging
That the offspring loved the parent—

A gesture that’s been enacted
In many forms and with many

And various sorts of objects
Playing the part of affection—

What was its enduring value?
Many would say sentimental,

But it’s somehow vaster than that.
I would rescue you, if I could.

Incomparable

Has anyone tried
To search for the first
Point used to anchor

The comparisons
Essential for you
To explore your worlds?

The first point, the first,
To which anything
And everything else

Was analogous,
Was comparable,
Could be contrasted

In spreading webbing—
Was there such a thing?
Or were there many?

In the beginning
Was no description
And then something was

Like something other
And already known,
The light, the first day.

The Menga Dolmen

No written language. Rest there,
Then circle back to musing
On all the giant structures

Stone-Age humans assembled
At far-flung sites around the world—
Dolmens, henges, and temples,

Heaps with varying functions,
Varying shapes and meanings,
At varying altitudes.

Doesn’t it make you wonder
A little why anyone
Bothered to begin writing?

It wasn’t necessary
To organize anything.
It wasn’t necessary

For civilization or
To simply survive.
Some early writing contexts

Were much less awe-inspiring
Than the mounds and weapon hoards
Of non-literate neighbors.

You know the answer. Writing
Had ulterior motives.
Writing blossomed for itself.

Against Role Models

She brought him something she adored.
She wanted him to adore it.
At a glance, he knew he couldn’t.

He tried not to comment on it.
He tried to steer her to her own
Capacity to create worlds.

Limitations don’t limit us,
Not like appreciation does.
We get held back by what we love.

Could we be freer if we chose
To admire nothing no one did?
It’s unlikely the choice is ours.

Our admirations confine us.
We’re limited by what we love.

Kindness and Generosity

When death within a year or less

Approaches to near certainty

And becomes common knowledge, watch

For all the surprising kindness

That can blossom out of people,

Their startling generosity.

What possesses humanity

That pettiness can get a rest

For someone so undeserving?

Admit that at a minimum—

You are not, nor were you ever,

Deserving of the kindnesses

Shown to you once the news got out

That you were caught in a vortex

That could not be escaped without

Medicines not invented yet.

First, everyone’s in that vortex—

People love to remind themselves

No one gets out of life alive.

It’s just that you’re spinning fast now.

Second, when were you generous

And kind to the extent people

Are now being kind to you? Once,

On impulse, maybe twice? Perhaps,

If that. No one would mistake you,

No one should mistake you (you!)

For a paragon of goodness,

And until recently you were

Confident no one ever had.

And yet here people are, helping

To extraordinary degrees.

If you were planning a tombstone

(You aren’t), an honest epitaph

Would read, Here lies old-and-so,

Of whom nothing much comes to mind,

To whom people were truly kind.

Poetics of the Bifungite

You become increasingly
Interested in the gone parts
Of your ordinary life

You witness fast becoming
Collections of trace fossils—
The living that shaped them lost,

Lost without fossils themselves,
So only their tracks remain.
All preserved writing’s like that—

Whatever invertebrate
Soul wriggled itself through the clay,
That lived part left no substance,

At least not here. Here are trails
And hollows of those gone thoughts
That pressed up against language,

And although the written words
Are valuable and useful
And easily repurposed

As tools for the fresh thoughts found
Living in them and through them,
Opportunists, as thoughts are,

They’re never those first, lost thoughts.
Yes. Yes, that’s hard to accept.
Don’t you read for the ideas?

Isn’t most of what you know
Of people, of who they were,
Derived from their trace fossils?

It feels so. You know the gone
Parts were once alive, were parts
Of your life, of other lives.

But thoughts are too brief, too soft
To preserve themselves. Thoughts left
These tracks while thoughts lost themselves.

Do Cells Suffer When They Die?

Bizarre small sounds coming from
Your own stomach woke you up
In the middle of the night,

Just before the storms began.
At first you thought it was a mouse
Caught in a mousetrap in your bed,

Squeaking piteously in pain.
Then you realized there was no trap
Set anywhere, much less your bed.

Lightning flickered on your eyelids,
And you opened them. Your stomach
Was whimpering—not liquid sounds,

Not bubbling with gasses—crying
In a tiny voice to itself.
As you woke to this awareness,

You kept listening, and you asked
If these noises you’d never heard
From your insides in six decades

Should be considered surprising.
The cancer’s not in your stomach,
Yet, not that you know of, and yet

It’s around the vicinity,
Swashbuckling across the torso.
Maybe those were the dying cries

Of captured, burning settlements
Of citizen cells surrendered
To the marauding berserkers.

More lightning and the rain began.
Nothing much more ordinary
Than a late-summer thunderstorm

In the southwest’s monsoon season—
Nothing much more ordinary
Than an aging man with cancer.

The sad, shrill cries of the stomach
Sank to the back of consciousness
Like the news of people dying

Horrendously in other parts
Of the terribly human world.
Rain beat the window, and you slept.

The Night Cycle

It bears down out of the stars,
A shadow machine driven
By the absence of engine,

A well-oiled system of gears
That spin smoothly, silently,
A nonsensical techne.

It’s hunting down Ptolemy
To tangle him in its wheels.
Telescopes can see the spokes

In exposures too short-lived
To collapse in the spinning.
Sooner or later, someone

Will shake loose from that spinning,
To become night’s rim and hoop.

Elegy to the Spanish Republic

The poetry he liked the most

Was the poetry of titles

Picked by artists and musicians

For paintings and compositions,

Songs, sculptures, etudes, what-have-you,

For any art mostly wordless

Or entirely wordless, except

For the effort to title it.

The beauty of such poetry

Is that, whatever’s been titled

Has no responsibility

To hew close to connotations

Suggested by that single phrase

Or word or line—you can listen

For the sea surging in La Mer,

But it’s not necessary, and

When Liszt names a piano piece

Years of Pilgrimage, you can’t be

Disappointed by the absence

Of any stories or haunting

Descriptions of far-off places.

Paintings, too, may have lyrical

Names orthogonal to the art.

He collected these, secretly,

And shared them with no one, hoarding

The sense of freedom they gave him,

That it could be permissible

To invoke a vague atmosphere,

Which any further poetry

Could only dissipate, then split.

Find and Uncover, Then Gather in Place

If you really wish to bring
In as much as possible
Of your world as you find it,

Then maybe don’t determine
In advance what you should be
Finding. Your experience

May be low on characters,
On adventures of its own.
Of course, feel liberated

By fiction, by any art,
To invent worlds for yourself,
But those aren’t as you found them.

What are you encountering?
It could well be stunningly
Rich in text and tedium.

You could be someone who’s lost
In an endless wilderness
Of fragmentary voices

And angelic abstractions.
Yes, as much as possible
Of the dumpster where you live

Might not appeal to others.
Can you dare to not appeal
To those whose admiration

Might be the only reason
What you found by diligence
Might be preserved beyond you?

Do your best to save your work
And plan its preservation.
But it won’t be up to you

Whether preservation works.
Leave us your experience
Of the world as you found it,

Even if it lacks appeal,
Character, faith, enchantment.
You’ve left a world, a new world—

Let others do what they will
With what you found, when and if
Anyone ever finds it.

From the Book of Obsolescence

The career of paid mourner,
That is, funeral cryer,
Has a longer tradition
In China than in the West
Where it’s never now practiced.
Nonetheless, the western name
For such a professional
Is etymologically
Quite a piece of packaging—

The root word, meros, was share,
Part, lot, as in, one’s fair share,
One’s portion, one’s allotment.
Adjacent to that, moros,
One’s share in the sense of fate,
One’s lot in life. Typical
Figurative extension,
From human social contracts
To the way the cosmos works—

Gods and saints like prayers and praise
And insist on gratitude,
Since humans of high standing
Like and insist on those things.
Apportioning resources
Is what societies do,
So surely somewhere someone
Doles out resources to you
From the cosmic warehouse, too.

By classical Greek we have Moira
As name of one of the fates.
Meanwhile, from their word for speech
And discourse, logos, the Greeks
Coined the all-purpose suffix,
-Logy, useful everywhere
For the study or knowledge
Of whatever’s so suffixed.
Technically, moirology

Ought to mean the field of fate.
Somehow, however, it popped
In the nineteenth century
As formal nomenclature
For a funeral cryer.
Doesn’t the term remind you
Of one of those packages
Containing what you ordered
In some strange set of boxes?

What a service that would be,
What a person that would be
To hire for your funeral—
A scientist of your fate,
Personal moirologist,
Explaining your cosmic share,
The dimensions of your lot,
And then rending their garments
Over you, loudly weeping.

Danez Pulls the Trigger

Sometimes familiar phrases,

Applied in surprise contexts,

Can make those contexts explode.

Feel your mental furnishings

Suddenly slide to starboard,

For instance, when Danez Smith

Refers to a perfect perm,

The shade of the master’s face,

And means Michelle and Barack.

This isn’t just irony.

This is how expectations

Can build force like tectonics—

Were it Nancy and Ronnie,

Even Hillary and Bill,

How typical—the hairstyles

Of the tightly wound spouses

Of our plantation’s rulers,

Colonial, alien—

But the depth charge in the poem

Comes from Michelle’s perfection

And Barack’s firm mastery.

You could say it’s in service

To irony—My president was Black

Who exercised gross powers

Of war and hegemony

While we danced in happiness—

And, in this case, that’s for sure,

But it has other uses.

There is no expectation

About what kind of context

A word or phrase belongs in

That doesn’t store potential

Energy. Polysemy

Is infinite at the start,

And binding terms to contexts

Begins their definition

By constraining possible

Meanings—notice constraining

But not eliminating.

Every word’s under pressure

From conventional uses.

That pressure has energy.

That energy can be used.

What We Gained in the Fire

This is not whatever’s left.

This is a new world itself.

It may be less lovable—

It’s certainly scarred by loss.

But the scars didn’t exist

Before the fire. Now they do.

Ask anyone the era

That was the best,

And they’re likely to select

Something humans remember,

Somewhat altered by culture,

But prior to disaster—

Prior to which disaster

Doesn’t really much matter,

Just antediluvian,

In any case. Then it went

On its way, the world, until

It ripened into something

As antediluvian

As was before. This valley

That inhabitants now mourn

Was already burnt to stumps

Near the end of the boom years

Of mining, a century

And a couple of decades

Ago—old photos look grim,

Grimmer than this new patchwork

Of thickly forested green

Cut by swathes of blackish brown.

That first fire burned it all down.

Local school kids will be forced

To learn about the damage

Done by both historic fires,

Assuming there are school kids

Attending future classes

In the valley created

By that history, their worlds

Contingent on disasters

That made their worlds possible.

For a While They Were So Dominant, and Then They Just Burned Out

Hush in the assonance of dusk,

Herbert concluded. When I am

Gone what will you do? / Who will write

And draw for you? asked Silverstein.

The experts on eurypterids

Puzzle sea scorpion fossils,

Wondering how they could have been

So successful then quietly

Extinct—possibly the record

Is incomplete, or possibly

The gigantism enabling

Their long, globe-girdling migrations

Also doomed them. Other humans

Spend less time studying the world

And more time talking back to it,

As if it ever talked to them.

They apostrophize like crazy,

Addressing unresponsiveness

As a way of finding comfort,

As a way of making displays

To try to impress each other.

This may be part of their success,

To bravely address the cosmos,

This trait that may also doom them.

So You Said It Again

Sunset lit the clouds above the cliff
But the dog playing fetch and the cats
In the cactus, sniffing for rodents,

Didn’t notice this. Meanwhile, you missed
Whatever it was about the world
Around you that you missed, which strained thought

So much that you kept repeating it,
That the world was rich with what you missed,
Getting no closer to noticing

Whatever it really was you missed.
A subtle shift in the direction
Of history, hidden in the wars

That were so obvious? An omen
Of something even more dire than wars?
Some reason to be an optimist?

The dog had returned to its owner.
The cats had given up their hunting.
You knew there was something that you’d missed.

Signs of Life

Some mornings it all feels faked
Or a clerical mistake.

You can’t really be dying.
You’re not consumed by cancer.

Ok, you haven’t been well
For a while, for quite a while.

But here you are, a month past
The latest diagnosis,

The tea leaves that landed you
Back home for palliative care,

And you seem no worse than then,
Possibly better even,

And today you spent outside,
Or partly outside at least,

In a world full of omens
And stray animal totems—

The mouse that the cat dragged in,
That escaped into the works

Of kitchen appliances,
The gopher snake that slithered

Over your neighbor’s bare toes
While he pushed you in your chair

Around his thriving garden,
The fox that ran through the yard,

The mule doe browsing the roof
Of another neighbor’s shed—

See? It’s the middle of life,
Life’s usual oddities,

And here you are, taking notes
On it all, since you’re alive,

An omen unto yourself—
How dare you claim you’re dying?

This Is Not an Accomplishment

The business of living can be
Such a terrible distraction
From the satisfactions of life—

Not only the obligations
But the plans, coordinations,
Things busy getting said and done.

They have their own satisfactions,
Of course—the heavy medicine,
Lulling drug of accomplishment.

Oh, when you’ve finished the whole list!
Oh, how much you’ve crossed off today!
You actually did something good.

A breeze snatches you out of your
Rumination, but don’t be fooled.
It’s never rumination’s fault.

It’s the seduction of doing
And of having accomplished. . . what?
Have you noticed the air feels good?

How to Get into a Poem

So many times you’ve stared at the words,
Which are mostly ordinary words
In mostly ordinary syntax
In your widely spoken mother tongue,

And those printed and/or glowing words
Stared back at you, which is to say,
Sat silently on the screen or page
While your brain tried to feel for a dance,

Some shiver of choreography,
Some suggestion of inspiration,
Amounting to an invitation
Into the gathering density

Of their dark, deciduous ideas.
Tonight, the letters look like black twigs,
Like crosshatched ink, like dripping black
Brush somehow growing through midwinter,

The blackness overwriting the snow.
It will be all darkness soon, no one’s
Mother tongue. The words will say nothing,
And you’ll finally be in the poem.

Human Sadness and Spiritual Peace

A new friend, made since

Your death warranty

Was gravely pronounced,

Marvels at the strange

Mixture of human

Sadness, spiritual

Peace she’s just witnessed

At a funeral

For another friend,

And you ponder this.

Your thoughts reshuffle

Nouns and adjectives,

As they always do

When you turn around

A phrase in your head,

As if it could be

A karakuri,

And you have to solve

How to unlock it.

Outside, thunder throws

Around the canyon

And winds flatten scrub.

Your thumbnail settles

On spiritual

As the first trick word

To split the puzzle.

You pry it gently.

How is spiritual

Parallel human?

Human is sadness.

Spiritual is peace.

Mixed, apparently,

They remain distinct,

Although that feels strange.

And how is it not

Human, precisely,

To be spiritual?

The word sits oddly

In the polished frame

But it won’t wiggle

Loose—maybe it’s not

The right spot to start.

Who Did This?

The relentless fantasy
Of decision renders acts
Difficult to understand

As anything other than choices,
From the color on the brush,
To the meal in the oven,

From where to spend small money,
To what to do with the day.
Surely even the sages

Who meditated on this
And stepped away from effort,
Even the saints who gave up

Decisions to God in prayer,
Remained haunted by choices—
Not so much the choices made

As those dancing in the brain.
You decide to bake a quiche
Prepared for you by a friend,

Who is kind and generous,
A good cook with a pantry
Well-stocked with the right supplies.

What role will your oven play
In the great unraveling
Of your civilization,

In the events of the life
Of this living, spinning rock?
Every small act comprises

Millions of tinier swerves,
Including your decisions,
Always clouding your vision

Like midges on a footpath.
How will you make it to lunch
When none of your steps are yours?

Soggy Flowers in a Broken Glass

Can you embrace good fortune
Without liability
For whatever suffering

Your luck carved implicitly?
Sometimes you look at a day,
Scrutinize an afternoon,

Green and gold under the blue,
And suddenly feel compelled
To come up with an excuse

For being within that day.
Someone suffers for that sun
As for any form of wealth.

Black Leather Jacket in August

The child left for school looking
Stylish, although the effect
Was secured in no small part

By a cool black leather coat
Discovered in a thrift store—
Perfect for a crisp fall day,

But maybe not so ideal
For a late summer heat wave.
Impatience is hard to fight.

Consequences are demons
That arrive in every size,
However trivial, and

Every time she leaves the house,
You consider prediction.

And Then Next

If you saw a wet scrap
Of paper with a grey
Boot-print stomped onto it

Lying in the gutter,
You wouldn’t pick it up—
It’s not likely you would.

Why should you? What could you
Reasonably expect
Would be on that paper?

Take it from the other
Perspective, the story
That begins with the rare

And extraordinary
Information built in—
The scrap was a ticket

To a big lottery.
That ticket just happened
To carry the numbers

That won. People walked by
That lost scrap of paper
As it turned into shreds,

And no one picked it up.
Has that ever happened?
How much could it matter—

As an allegory,
A cautionary tale,
A pointless irony—

If it did? The story
Feels somewhat pathetic
As soon as perspective

Is fixed and specific.
You happened to walk past
A wet scrap of grey paper,

But you didn’t obsess
Over if it had text.
You lived through what went next.

Between This That You Know and That Which You Expect, You Fix the Text

It’s not use; it’s not substance.
It’s more synchronicity.
It’s more coordination.

From the earliest life forms,
Time has been made of timing—
Enduring things co-occur,

So behaviors make the most
Of the rhythms embedded
In the surging waves of change—

You’re not running out of time
To get this done before night.
You're running out of timing.

Bacterium or human,
Timing gets the timing right.

Always Gaining, Lost Forever, the Same

Meanwhile, the whatever—
World, cosmos, universe,
Just keeps on piling up

Fresh phenomena, fresh
Events—forever more
Things have happened, never

Less. It pulls this trick off
Through the harsh alchemy
Of loss—was which isn’t.

The wasness stays, still was,
Can never undo it,
Keeps growing constantly,

But look closely at it,
And almost all of what
Was, what can never not

Have been, now, eerily
Also isn’t and can’t
Come back, this manifest

Riddled with permanent,
Expanding gaps. Riddle
Expanding cosmos that.

Myths of Being One of Many Beings

The addled brain shoves the thoughts
Like a push broom shoves the dust.
Little bits of fluff fly up.

Most often they drift away,
Back to the floor of the mind,
Subconscious again a while.

A few settle in your face—
Fragments of conversations
That never really happened,

Sometimes almost remembered
As more or less complete scenes,
Characters with narrative.

This is a new kind of myth,
Awareness like a complex
Of down-market apartments,

Doors and windows left ajar,
Voices, TVs, radios
Drifting along the stairwells,

You maybe in your kitchen,
Listening, but no—startled
Awake again, eyes alert

For a moment—what was that?
Whose lives were you making up,
Whose fictions were you soothing?

Life Outside of Truth or God

Math and faith have this in common—
There’s no questioning their conclusions
From outside their assumptions.

Meanwhile, the secular humanist,
Surviving outside of both traditions,
Or, at best, on their outskirts,

Marginal and feral as a fox
Patrolling the cosseted suburbs,
An Aesop’s Fable sort of creature,

Forced to settle for allegories,
Tropes, purely verbal morals, and prone
To trickster habits, gossips wickedly

About honest king leonine math, while
Self-soothing about faith’s sour grapes.

Welcome to LaVerkin

A woman walks down the street
Fanning her sweaty face—
In the suburban US,

They’re now a people apart,
The scattered pedestrians,
Mostly alone on sidewalks

Beside the rushing traffic
Of the normal denizens
In their private vehicles—

Most of what you see you fail
To notice well—the woman
With her piece-of-paper fan

That can’t much be helping her
Has fallen behind your car
And it’s up to memory,

Now, in memory’s surreal
Fashion, to preserve, to hold
Fast that juxtaposition

Between person and pavement.
You pour yourself another
Memory of days you lived

The same juxtaposition,
The times you walked suburban
Streets by yourself, no other

Pedestrians, expecting
A squad car any second—
The exhaustion, the aching,

The vulnerability—
Above all, the emptiness,
The emptiest possible

Emptiness, that of a scene
Designed for some busy kind
Of humanness turned waste land.

It was so satisfying,
At least when weather obliged,
To feel the human absence,

And so terrifying, worse
Than being lost in a crowd,
To be the only body

Without a shell in a world
Of sealed-up, tinted monsters
That could kill you if they cared.

All of this you’ve projected
On that sight of one woman
Walking while fanning her face,

The shame of observation
Being that it saves itself
In the shell of the observed.

Blue Jets, Red Sprites, Gigantic Jets

Reverse the better advice—
Start with something you don’t know,
Something that might startle you,

And keep folding and folding
Until you get to something
Bearing a strong resemblance

To what you already knew.
That’s the truth. Truth never gets
Closer to the bone than that,

Sharply written paper cuts
From some weird origami
You folded of the unknown.

Just a few decades ago,
You were a child and the world
Didn’t know from transient

Luminous events at night.
But they were happening, and
Nothing can unhappen them.

Know Your Audience

There’s something there
In your sleepy head,
You sleepy head,

And once again,
You let the sun
Reach through the trees,

Through the bronzed woods,
Through the forest—
Once again you

Are composing
While you’re dreaming,
Really dreaming,

Actual dreams,
So it’s a game
In which you try

To hold abstract
Lines together
While voices lost

To you for years,
Voices never
Heard through your ears

Are whispering
In the dry leaves
Of late summer—

What do you want?
One of them asks
You, who might be

The one asking
Long lost readers,
What do *you* want

To read? Can’t you
Feel from these lines
That you’re dreaming?

Now Picture What This Poem Means

When you ask someone to rev

Their weak imagination—

Or someone asks you the same—

What’s the actual request?

How many stories have held

Somewhere within them the phrase,

Imagine, if you will, or

One of its equivalents?

Often, the whole narrative

Amounts to such a request,

Where your attention’s the fuel

For your imagination.

Excavate your memory

To raise an original

Variation of the world

From the prompts mere words give you.

You won’t fail to be unique,

At least inside your small skull.

Those memories are all yours,

Even when they seem to be

Borrowed from someone else’s.

Fire up the workshop, the kiln,

The alchemist’s lab, the ring

Of the supercollider—

Nothing can be made from scratch,

But with enough memories

And fierce enough attention,

You can generate meanings

That didn’t exist before

In any philosophy.

Willing to Be Ignored

For that drunkish rush of the words
When the pipes are fully opened,
And the ropes of lines whip around
Like snapped cables scattering sparks,

Like the end of any one line
Could kill you if it could touch you,
Like Whitman was uncoiling it,
And Dickinson was wording it,

And something vastly more ancient
Than countable generations
Was generating its power
That sang—This is what verses were,

You gentle idiot, meaning
Way back, before chants praising kings
Or gods or potions like soma—
Before all the storytelling

About anthropomorphic night
And day mating to make the world,
Before anything but the shock
That the lungs could be made bellows,

And the upper appendages
Could semaphore with the singing,
And together the body’s parts
Could create something called meaning,

Although the meaning was the least
Of the poem back then—beginning
To make an appearance, fermenting
The origin of the lightning

That would one day drive whole systems
You might call civilizations,
But still just sprays of lethal sparks
Firing from the tips of your cries—

All you have to do is begin
Hemorrhaging what comes to mind
In the way of whatever form
Of language you’re comfortable in,

Then keep going until you can’t
Continue thrashing anymore.
The experience can be yours,
If you’re willing to be ignored.

Remaining Escaped Is the Reward

Warble all you like
About the journey,
The destination

Has to be the most
Essential aspect
Of any escape.

The destination,
If it’s good, endures.
You needn’t go back.

The destination
Determines whether
You can stay escaped.

Life’s Weeds Wedge Enduring Seeds

To occupy the baggy days,

As Laing did with her gardening,

You origami lines instead,

Pleating, creasing, and sharpening

The minimal information

Typical of the lyric form

The way one might fold a napkin

To make a pointed corner firm

Enough to pick out seedy bits

Stuck in the teeth after lunch.

Shouldn’t that be what writing’s for?

To repurpose a flimsy hunch

To dig out some kind of nuisance

That starts trivial but can mess

With your focus and happiness,

Your health and life, left unaddressed?

It rarely works. The ad-hoc tools

Of napkins, poems, or greenhouse peat

Disintegrate. Weed seeds wedge deep.

But, hey, you filled some time at least.

Kiteezi

You share a world,
Though you only
Know thanks to news

Of a landslide,
A rubbish slide
That killed people,

Many people,
In this landfill
In Kampala.

The photograph
Looks like the end
Of everything

As surely as
Any movie
About the end,

Any picture
From a war zone.
You share a world,

You and that dump
And the people
Who work through it,

Searching for things
They can pull out
And trade to live.

The efficient
Exploitation
Of human waste

At risk of quick
Or corrosive death
Is one among

The many traits
Shared in your world.
Take out your trash.

Haunted by the Weather

Obits are reminiscent
Of the immortal habit
Of tucking notes between stones

In salient ruined places—
Not only in sentiment,
In noting someone was here,

But as it’s astonishing
How many messages fit
Lifespans in such narrow cracks.

Whole lives, like those notes and prayers,
Can be folded up and tucked
Into the leftover space

Created by erosion
Of the walls of what has been.
Imperious Caesar might

Have had a life substantive
Enough to block up a hole
And thus keep the wind away,

But most lives are too meager.
Whatever dates and stories
They squirrel into crumbling walls

Block nothing blowing through them
Into the once awesome rooms
Now haunted by the weather.

Good Health, Master Count, for Many Happy Years

A Byzantine bucket made of copper,
Buried in bits in an east British grave,
Engraved with North African hunting scenes
And the gift-giver’s inscription in Greek,
Likely made in an Antioch workshop
Fifteen-hundred years ago, give or take,
Only arriving in the British Isles
By way of trade a century later,

Is just one of the exotic items
Dug up at Sutton Hoo—the ship itself,
Jewels, silver, garnets from Sri Lanka--
Hoard of an Anglo-Saxon warrior king,
But who was the Master Count who received
The gift of a bucket in Byzantium
Wishing him health and happiness, who died
Sometime in dating's margin of error?

The Old Manse

The house of pain has got to belong
To God, if you’re someone who believes
The old saw, When God closes a door,

He opens a window. That’s for sure
The way things go in the house of pain.
Shut all the doors to all of the rooms

Known for housing aches, and sure enough
Someone’s left pain an open window
To climb through. Quiet the abdomen

Of cancer. Lock up the entryway
To the halls of the vertebrae. Still,
Pain crawls back in through a twisted knee.

There’s always a draft through cracked mullions,
Haloed, stained-glass faces among them.

A Nap in Forever

And again you say to yourself,
In a soft moment, This is it,
This is life, this sunny window,

This hour of quiet in the house,
The tree of bees and hummingbirds
Outside, nodding purple flowers,

And the quiet amazes you
When you let your mind rest in it—
How slow this planet is without

Communication troubling it,
Without local conversation,
The clouds drifting, coalescing

Moment by moment for billions
Of years—forever, more or less.

Becoming Unaccustomed to the Garden

A tatter to resist coup de foudre—
Who owns the paperwork to the villa
That waits in its ruins, barely a shell?

Not you, but you keep the tale company,
Lightning-struck lovers abandoned by wealth.
Lumpen flesh holds what words left to collect.

The black ghost cat prowls the empty table.
Blink and it disappears. Lovers were here.
Funny application of an old word,

Love, a cobweb of a thing you can’t name,
Via negativa until the gate,
And then two people stepping through flowers,

Which it appeases them to do. Good luck
Pulling together the theme of a world.

Experimental Game Theory Sonnet

When the leaders are advantaged,
A higher probability
Of aggression arises. War

Pursued by a democratic
Society fits this pattern.
Increasing the followers’ share

Of the collective decision
Results in decreased aggression,
Since the leadership benefits

More from the rewards of fighting,
While the followers benefit
More from a more extensive peace.

For a peaceful democracy,
Spread the responsibility.

The War Actually Began with a Revolution Where People Were Very Hopeful

The journalist wrote mournfully.
The dream of collective action,

Past mere vengeance or improvement,
Beyond the particular cause,

Is joy. Those who write about crowds
And study mass psychology

Have been noting this for decades—
Collectivity’s ecstasy.

Nothing’s more exhilarating
Than singing along with the crowd,

And since that raw exuberance
In rhythmic synchronicity

Has been with humans long before
There were enough humans for crowds—

Never alien to small groups
Euphorically circling a hearth—

The more recent, massive events
Must be seen as demography

Amplifying inheritance
To the point of hysteria,

Sweeping through large assemblages
Irrespective of common cause.

There, in the moment, in the mob,
Among the marching protesters,

Surging soldiers, briefly hopeful
Hordes of revolutionaries,

Something has found its voice that’s not
Anything to do with that cause.

But what is it? What’s been unleashed?
Poets and prophets can invoke

The terrible, angelic beast,
But even Yeats didn’t name it.

Wild in Every Way

First, completely independent
Of humans or any creatures,
Including the enslaving ants—

Second, veering out of control,
Very nearly out of control,
As a pattern of behavior—

Third, beyond fearless and feral
Into realms of the surprising,
Whatever makes the eyebrows raise—

Fourth, something truly unexpected,
Probably unpredictable
Or, at the least, unpredicted.

Step back and survey the wreckage.
What kind of wild is wilderness?

Nothing Must Mean Something by It

We needed the snow
That couldn’t be real,
The snow that started
As just a rumor,

Not in the forecast,
Or at least not tracked,
Sneaking up on us
Omen by omen,

The way no weather
Can sneak up these days—
Unreasonable,
Unpredictable.

There’s snow moving in.
The clouds are sinking.
The first flakes will fall
Before the fall ends,

But this will be no
Ordinary storm
Signaling the start
Of winter season—

This will violate
The laws of climate.
It will shift in tense—
Past, future, present.

We needed the snow
That had to persist,
That had no sure source,
That would continue.

Aren’t you ready yet?
Haven’t you stockpiled
Food, water, and books,
Fuel of every sort?

Strong gusts will move in.
Stray flakes will begin.
You’ll watch the snow pile
That won’t ever end.

Later, Past the Story

Psyche’s wings became her
Offspring, for who can stop
Dreaming of small pleasures?

From every shimmering
Scale like a floating lens,
Each stitch of tapestry

Culling its own palette,
Another butterfly,
Distinct, and another,

Until her wings were flown,
And she was left to float
On crimson and silver

Threading, left enchanted
By lingering vision,
The dozens fluttering

Around her, bearing her,
Hēdonē, Hēdonē,
Soul’s lids closing on thoughts

Where the butterflies touched
And kissed skin, the pleasures
That they were still, still there.

The Nature of Your World

Sample the current racing
Around whatever you are—
For what can it be tested?

Mostly words and images,
Plus quite a bit of music.
In the foreground, physical

Sensations; in the background,
Life forms, landscape, the weather.
All are available worlds;

None is inherently more
Important in the current.
You want to report, but what?

For some reason, a small scene
In an American poem
Blossoms uppermost in mind—

Not your memory, of course,
Except as reconstruction,
And doubly odd for being

In German, a child speaking
In German with a soldier,
An American soldier,

In the ruins at the end
Of World War II—Wo bist du?
Hier bin ich! Obviously,

A shy game of peekaboo.
Why would that line come to mind
When you’re seeking a sample

From your own experience
That could present some essence
Of the nature of your world?

Artificial but Intense

They float at the bottom
Of the gold, sunlit pool,
Rotating slowly,

Smiling peacefully,
The department store
Mannequins. They are,

Of course, passionless,
Void of emotions,
Hunger—or desire,

If these words say so.
But even these words
Allow for a glint,

A dot of white paint
In the corner of
Each Bakelite eye.

Malicious? Who knows?
Wise children think so.
Don’t swim through shallows.

Spite Is Also a Freestanding Word

The people who can be spiteful
Are usually disappointed.

Whether they’re justified or not,
Whether there’s as much unfairness

Toward them as they insist there is,
They’re terribly disappointed.

Not everyone who’s a victim
Of an authentic unfairness

Is disappointed, and many
Who are disappointed are not

At all spiteful, or are spiteful
Only briefly before finding

Their kind core personality—
Kind, silly, simply suffering,

But not spiteful. Still, the spiteful,
For whatever reason, are quite

Disappointed, and there’s something
About being disappointed,

That stirs the pot of spitefulness
Until the word snaps its anchor

And starts whipping like a loose wire
Throwing sparks around the dark waves

And you know this isn’t a poem
Nor even an essay on spite

But one of those odd instances
When a word that had been sleeping

Within its own capacity
For havoc slips free from the text.

Fun House

Three times you read the line
About the purple house—
Three times and fell asleep

Each time. The world shuddered,
But it never disturbed
The line you encountered

About that purple house,
That royal purple house.
All night long, the heavens

Shuddered for that purple
House, appearing closer
On every occasion.

You were the purple house
That never once shuddered.

Decoded

Value has its own rules,
The rules of value’s game.
The world is not a game,

Has patterns, never rules,
Except inside of games
Whose rules build their games.

Nothing’s more serious
For not being a game,
But not being a game

Means the world may behave
Many ways, may shudder,
But not disturb the game

Which exists as its rules,
Source of names and colors.

The Red Toothbrush

Here’s where definite
And indefinite
Have some leverage—

In determining
Narrative structure.
Stories about red

Domestic items
Have different flavors
Whether they waver

Indefinitely
Or call attention
To their uniqueness—

A red is one world,
The red’s another.

Smiling by Instruments

Some days, you have to say
Were good days since you failed
To compose anything

That would have made you feel
That you’d had a good day.
A day can’t be too good

If you want to keep it
Good for good. A full day
Leaves no room for the day

To store some thing you made,
And so it’s spent—good day,
No poem, not a good day.

So this one, you could say,
By instruments, was good.

That Ship Is Canon

Life’s so busy in language,
Especially in writing—

But the life of just living,
The substance of most living,

Is less frantically peopled,
Even in noisy cities,

Than it seems to be in poems—
Less interactive, less snarled.

In ordinary moments
Of quotidian function,

People carom and scatter,
Bouncing off of each other—

People fall into daydreams,
And boring activities,

And stretches of nothing much
To do with one another.

But in texts, relationships
Take over, grow entangled,

Become engines of thinking
About being--what it is,

Or what it could be, should be—
Texts are lousy with people

Entwining most of the time.
Sometimes, the easiest way

To get away from it all,
Is to put away the book.

What Isn’t Turns Your Head More Sharply Than What Is

Pole-vaulting shadows
Catch the corner
Of your saccading

Panorama—wait!
Are those real shadows?
Nothing’s throwing them.

Well surely this is
Just one of the signs
Of your end’s approach.

Failure of vision,
Shadows, illusions
As the brain breaks down—

So long as you know,
Then they aren't scary.
Fine apparitions

Are entertaining
In their startling way.
Wilder and wilder,

Of course, but only
As emissaries.
Nothing’s throwing them.

Invasions Mature in Ruins

Finches, wrens, and flycatchers,
Roadrunners and quail—all pass
Your back doors’ double-paned glass,

So closely and so often
There’s no need for bird watching,
Not with those birds watching you.

And then there’s the mule deer who crop
The landlord’s perfunctory plants,
Remote landlord collecting rent

On these matchstick townhomes waiting
The next significant rockslide,
The next honest-to-god earthquake,

These townhouses anything but
Remote to the lean coyotes,
The fox that trots over the trail,

The butterflies, tarantulas,
Lizards snuggled into the rocks,
The low canyon winds that lean in

Hard against the awkward corners,
The atmosphere scratching itself
Against the intrusive structures

Of these buildings that don’t belong,
In which you love not belonging
Since intruding digs you in close

To the world that will overwhelm
You eventually, adopting
You, once ruined one of its own.

Luxury

On an evening when the desert
Sky kept just enough sunset clouds
And brought just enough canyon breeze

To lure you outside for the charm
Of the bright goldfish cumulus
And the touch of the cooling air,

The young neighbor couple came out
As well, for the first time in weeks,
To show you their new baby, Jack,

All of two weeks old and sleeping,
And offered to let you hold him,
Which you did, gratefully. He slept

Through the careful transfer. He slept
Steadily, nearly silently,
Breathing softly within your arms.

You watched his tiny, precise face
And felt the jolt of where you were
In your life, where he was in his,

Like an arc encircling you both,
As if a circuit had been closed,
No relation but the human.

Airglow

Damn but you want to find that forest
That you’ll never find your way out of,

That forest all the colors of night,
Of milky skyglow over cities,

Of the faint blue around the full moon,
Of the grey wool of gathering storms,

Of gasses’ self-illumination
As airglow, the crown of the forest.

You know it’s the very atmosphere
Of day, the atmosphere that belongs

To the planet and not to the night,
And yet it fools you, seeming open,

As if someone took away the screen
And left the window gaping in space—

It fools you until you see the lights
That tell you’re still in the forest,

The atmosphere of Earth, and you sigh
And smile. You’ll never find your way out.

Unreal Estate

The beauty of even a blurry
Finish line is that it underscores
Stray facts that existed before it—

You can’t visit most of the places
You fantasize about visiting,
You can’t live in most of the houses

You daydream about owning one day.
These were always true, but the blurry,
Inky black swiftly approaching you

Illustrates how increasingly true
Truth is becoming—not even one
Such home, and maybe no new places.

This staggers the dreaming mind, but then—
The urge to dream’s so strong—it goes on.

Partnered Undercurrents

When Audre Lorde wrote of Eros,

Our sense of self and the chaos

Of our strongest feelings, she summed

With poetry’s efficiency

And slippery polysemy

The fundamental arena

Of human being, not only

Erotic, but epistemic,

The heart of the situation—

The human sense of self, of soul,

Of self-reflective awareness,

Of being individual,

Which isn’t individual

In source at all, but from outside,

Borne on the pollen of language

And cultural inheritance,

Versus the human animal,

Host and sustainer of culture,

A more ancient inheritance,

Conveying our senses of self

In its waves as the deep ocean

Holds nocturnal phosphorescence—

No ocean, no phosphorescence,

Yet different wishes lurk in each.

The Ghost to His Daughter

Come to think of it, we’re both
Living in separate worlds.

Obviously, I’m alive—
How else could I be writing

These lines? And clearly you are
Alive—how else could you be

Absorbing any of this?
But the you absorbing this

Does not exist in my world,
And the me who’s writing this

Is nowhere alive in yours—
You in your world, I in mine—

Who knew that the multiverse
Was no more than linear time?

Reconciliation

The muzzled monster growled within
The set of bones containing him,

And then he stopped. Was it silence,
Then? No, not quite, not exactly—

A distant cousin, closing in.
It wasn’t so much he gave up

Or stopped because, well, what’s the point?
It felt like the time for growling,

Muzzled or unmuzzled, captive
Or free, was over, finished, done.

The monster reconciled with wait
To listen for quiet’s cousin.

Fair Condition

At the moment, the body
Feels like it’s at a perfect
Temperature, freshly bathed,

Neither too chilly nor hot,
Dressed in clean clothes, with a book
In the lap and a cliff view

Through large, sun-haloed windows—
Maybe a little hungry,
Slightly achy, no real pain,

Just waiting for the laundry
To finish its spin cycle,
Just watching the cat stalk flies—

So this is dying? Can’t be.
Don’t think about what’s waiting.

Skyglow

Dying hurts people.
Dying will hurt you.
Death doesn’t hurt, and

Death won’t hurt you—
To be more precise,
Being dead won’t hurt,

Or—more precisely
Still—nonbeing won’t,
Doesn’t, can’t hurt you,

Given it’s purely
You not being there,
No you to feel pain.

And all this, really,
This business of death
And your nonbeing

And what it portends
For you, the dying,
Is a distraction.

The vital issue,
The serious hurt
Belongs to those who

Are not dying now,
Who will have to live
With your nonbeing

In a world that lacks
You. Someone else’s
Nonbeing can hurt,

Can bring agony
So great it carries
Terminology,

Vocabulary
All its own, its own
Bleak nomenclature,

Beginning with grief.
To be sure, it’s true,
Some few are not mourned,

But most deaths leave holes
In remaining souls,
Where all the pain goes.

So, if you’re dying,
Listen while you can—
Your business isn’t

Your death or dying.
Your business is now
Anything you can

Do for the living
Who’ll be suffering
From your nonbeing,

Which will trouble them
And pile pain in them

Once you’re not there, once
Nothing troubles you.

Adela May Be Burning

Soon. At last report, the fire
Owns the rest of the mountain,
Starting just across the road,

And it will never be the same
Even if a green island,
Reversed cordon sanitaire,

Is saved. More and more,
The world is the quarantine,
And the pockets that are homes

In your hearts are confined
To keep the uninfected
By disaster, yet, inside.

Trepanning

According to a new hypothesis,
The origin of poetry can be
Pegged to the first use of trepanation.

Of course, earlier examples are found
Every few years, it seems like, so no one
Can be wholly confident of the date,

Nonetheless, the oldest examples yet
Do establish a ceiling for the start
Of versifying, which can’t be any

Later than perforated crania,
Since, according to this hypothesis,
Skulls are only drilled when necessary,

And it’s well-known people need poetry
Like they need another hole in the head.

Float Your Boat

Most annoyingly
And amusingly,
The architecture

Of your hospice dreams
Deliberately
Contradicts the walls

Of ordinary,
Waking existence—
If, within the dream,

There’s a large hallway
Leading from your left
Into the distance,

Receding stairwells
Of Piranesi
Ruination, then

When you turn your head
And open your eyes,
A shelf startles you,

Inches from your face.
And if there’s a stone
Rolled athwart your path

In one of your dreams,
Vertigo’s waiting
For you to wake perched

At the very edge
Of your too tall bed.
What’s the brain up to?

Is it translating
Via negatives
Like a camera

Had to, analog
Apertures needing
Reversals to close

In on the outer
World? Or are neurons
Weaving your basket

Of contradictions
For escape, the craft
Of the watertight

Coracle you’ll sail
When your real is gone,
When your dreams are done.