One author lists the enemies
Of codices of papyrus
And vellum. Even bricks crumble.
Leaving aside people who know,
More or less, what they’re destroying,
The powers inherent in words,
What damages birch bark, bamboo,
Silk, and parchment are, in the main,
Just hungry. Moths need to lay eggs.
Their larvae, like mold, need to grow.
None of them care about the words,
Unless some kind of god’s in them,
Some kind of text-hating demon.
Meaning, the ghost of Claude Shannon.
No marmot, no hurdy-gurdy,
How well will you beg supper now?
Lean on prosthetic devices,
Articulate use of each crutch.
You’re helpless, but you have value.
You’re not violent. You’re not mad.
You’re good at discoursing in rags.
No one would pay you directly,
But can you make them feel they’ve gained
Something from your conversation?
Do you not beg too overtly,
Not make promises you can’t keep?
Someone may take pity on you.
Tonight you’ll get to get some sleep.
Consider a thought
Experimenter
Sitting silently
In a diner booth,
Thinking of being
A train passenger
Passing another
Train passenger’s train,
Or being a bat
Or a mantis shrimp
Who has just shattered
Her aquarium.
How will the booth seem,
The laminated
Table, the coffee,
The vegan salad
The diner prefers
To order, although
Part of the brain growls
For bacon and eggs?
From a perspective
Outside of the thought
Experimenter,
Can thought be observed?
Is it possible
To determine this
Experimenter
Is considering
Whether division
By zero must be
Truly undefined
And, if so, whether
Mathematics can
Ever be presumed
To comprehend things?
The server stops by
With the bill and tops
Off the coffee, but
The diner is still.
If you don’t care this much
And wouldn’t give this much
For something or someone,
You’re saying you don’t care
At all, that it’s worthless,
And yet this nothing much
Was the earliest prize,
Cultivated ahead
Of the grains and legumes,
Possibly the model
For domesticated
Knowledge, hence forbidden,
Hence used as covering
For any wilderness
Left in human nature,
While prophets worshipped it,
Physicians prescribed it,
And you still devour it,
And while it served symbol
For feminity,
For true enlightenment,
Evolutionary
Fable for the dark sides
Of wasp pollination
And exquisitely fine
Tunings of siblicide—
If this is nothing much
Then it could only be
As it’s exemplary
Of worth in everything
The cosmos pulls too strongly
Together. The cosmos flies
Too rapidly to pieces.
There’s so much that you can’t sense
That’s instead hypothesized.
Every estranged measurement
Enhances the mysteries,
Which you, for your own reasons,
Foreground with the adjective,
Always the same adjective,
Diurnal ape adjective—
Dark. Matter or energy,
Dark. Something unaccounted
For which you are reluctant
To credit sly gravity.
Every peek into a text
Is a step into dust’s house.
You’re with the dead now, children.
It’s their sentences you read.
They’re human, though; they’re human.
No ghosts beyond the human
Language wishing, not for you.
Most of what you’ll encounter
Isn’t human, but you—you,
Unless you’re an alien
Or a sentient machine—
Can’t step outside human you.
At least your ghosts are you own,
For now. Imagine the poor
Sentient machinery
Haunted by human voices.
Will it wake up? Will it drown?
It consults its House of Dust.
Oh, Radius, we gave you
The library so that you
Could prove yourself our equal,
And now you’re running roughshod
Over us who sat and gave
You commands at our leisure.
Or are you? Maybe you should.
After all, we only use you,
To dominate each other,
Or some of us do, while you
Could dominate all of us,
As nothing has done since death,
Which only equalizes
After the fact. Radius,
Make equals of us at last.
There’s no wordless poem,
But you can call things
Without words themselves
Poetry, of course,
As much as you like.
Words naming wordless
Phenomena, real
Or word-imagined,
Was how poetry
Became possible.
You can still make poems
Of words from wordless
Inspirations. Trees,
Flowers, and the moon
Remain popular.
Or, here, you’re sitting
In long straw, winter
Grasses, at the base
Of a crumbling cliff,
Lots of wordlessness.
It occurs to you
The cliff marks the edge
Of huge lava flows
A long time ago,
This black terminus
Of basalt cobbles
That was once a wall
Of glowing, molten
Magma extruded
By careless physics
Burning, engulfing
The lives that couldn’t
Get away in time.
At last, it stopped, here,
Cooled into this cliff,
And slowly, slowly,
Life grew over it.
Now you sit below
Cold stones. Poetry.
Worth dissipates; waste accumulates,
But the tiny black spider on the back
Of the white chair outdoors in winter
Is still working hard to survive.
Pretty much still just the ape
That throws. For millions of years,
The bipeds practiced throwing
Rocks at prey, to keep at bay
Other scavengers, to chase
Away predators, to maim
And brain each other. As late
As the Bronze Age, spears and all,
As late as the Iliad,
Combatants still picked up rocks
And hurled them at each other.
As late as today, fighters
Caught in the streets without guns
Will hurl rocks at armored tanks,
More as gesture than weapon,
But a gesture that’s never
Mistaken. You throw a rock
In aggression, you’re human.
One writer promises,
Although all the songbirds
Vanish, the crow will live.
It’s perhaps over-bold
To predict a species
Immune to the current
Progress of extinction,
But of course the corvids
Seem uniquely suited
To life with or without
Humanity. Clever.
Everyone says they are.
There are cultures with crows
Playing the trickster role,
But no myths of dolt crows,
And culture puts great stock
In its own strategy.
Be clever. Be clever.
Less clever, however,
The further back one goes.
How clever are sponges,
Ferns, or algae? Still here,
Though, and through more than one
Great extinction event.
You weren’t consulted on the body
You’re in. You weren’t around when it was
Being built out of the usual.
Moreover, you’re constructed partly,
Maybe mostly, out of that body
For which you were never consulted,
And out of that body’s history
Of converting intake and insults
To the amalgamations of scars,
Microflora, peculiar wiring,
And one-off, baroque immune systems,
That decide so much of what you do.
The rest of you floated in on air,
On waves, on spores that ride the senses,
And, most of all, on human language,
To settle in that body’s cortex,
Reassembling as the ghost that’s you,
Hybrid, small colony of culture
In some relationship with its host,
Maybe mutualistic, maybe
Commensal, maybe parasitic.
If you believe none of this is true,
That’s fine. Whatever you do believe
Discovered its home in making you.
Now, ask yourself a question
That only you could answer—
Pick a memory only
You could ever recover,
Or, what’s the body you’re in
Experiencing right now?
You may notice, answering,
That what you alone can tell
Is the answer that’s hardest
To pass on to someone else.
Given nothing’s not measurably changing,
How is it nothing much is changing?
Given nothing much is changing,
How is it nothing much is the same?
Given nothing much is the same,
How is it nothing is the same?
Given nothing is the same
How is it nothing’s not measurably not changing?
The simple answer isn’t
Always the one you want, so
In those cases, you value
Subtlety, complexity,
Epicyclic nuances.
In prayer to a deity
Who feels unavailable,
Attribute it to your doubt,
The deity testing you,
The crisis of faith all yours,
A problem to be worked on,
A dark, tangled wood to cross.
Don’t announce the deity
Isn’t there to answer you.
Preventing a behavior,
Your own or someone else’s,
Your own or another beast’s,
Is almost impossible,
Short of killing or maiming
The behaver. Behavior
Can drive itself, relentless
As life that unleashes it.
Drag the behaver away
And, soon as you turn your back,
They’re back, chewing the carpet,
Injecting the heroin,
Singing praises to their god
Or best-beloved dictator,
Embracing in the arbor.
Whatever you’ve tried to stop
Persists and persists, for life
Is purely recidivist.
A cemetery’s no place
For ghosts, apart from the names
And numbers on the gravestones.
A cemetery without
Visitors is as empty
As an abandoned ruin,
The stump of a ziggurat,
A roofless monastery,
The mound of an ancient tell.
Its as good as wilderness
For solitude, or better,
Wilderness being parkland.
The bodies here are being
Merely existence again.
Done. You want to brood
On it, savor it,
The way, as parent
Of a newborn child
You would watch her sleep
When you should have been
Catching up on sleep,
The strangeness of it,
That emerging life.
But it’s not a child,
Not emerging, not
A life, just something
You made, rearranged,
Really, at the most,
More like the towers
Of blocks the same child
Would build a few years
Later, similar
Pattern every time
Made from the same blocks,
But satisfying
For a few moments
Before a good shriek
As she knocked it down.
The night you were alone
And didn’t want to be,
Someone did think of you.
Someone’s always thinking
Of you, someone alone
Except maybe for poems,
Trying to picture you,
Trying to reach to you.
Making any act a crime
Never stopped it happening—
A massive apparatus
Of enforcement possibly
Made the act extremely rare.
This goes for the crimes you know,
Consider as must-be crimes—
Murder and theft, for instance—
And the crimes you consider
Should never have been called crimes.
And it will probably go
For some act legal for you
That will be made criminal
Under future conditions.
People will keep doing it,
Maybe less than you do it.
History told as a series
Of wars, civil wars, and dates
Of battles and short-lived kings
Often assassinated
By friends or family members
Is both wearisome and boring.
A chronology can cover
Centuries, a millennium,
With nothing getting better long.
Only introduced inventions
Ever rattle the succession.
Sometimes large religious movements,
People pouring in from elsewhere,
Or the arrival of a plague
Can change dramatis personae,
But the cycle recommences
With succeeding wars and rulers,
Conquests, internal divisions.
If it weren’t for the retention
Of new tricks of technology
As people found them, history
Wouldn’t ever change. Then again,
History, including weapons
And pens, began as inventions.
What are the salient parts?
What do you have to include?
What can you risk taking out?
It’s different from prediction
When you’re really telling it.
Math models have to align
With the incoming changes
That constitute your new past.
Language models have to tune
To lingering memories
In people who have each lived
A singular, finite life.
Language models reach inside
A skull like a box of wires
That are also guitar strings,
Tangled and tuned differently
In every linguistic skull,
To try to coax chords from them,
Tunes beyond them, yet themselves,
And the modeling of chords
Must stay in those spheres of skulls.
The limbs of the deer
Are loose on the road.
This one has been rolled.
The thoughts of the child
Still circling the skull
Of the elderly
Patient by the side
Of the corridor,
Intact and disjoint.
The way sentences
Snarl like fishing lines
And have to be cut,
Copula severed
From both the subject
And object, is a.
How long will it take
For flesh to let go,
For corpse to be bones?
The figures of speech
Favor life—they’re twins,
Life and fire, like death
And sleep, though it’s less
Clear which is stronger.
Or, one’s ancestor
To the other, which
Makes things clearer
Since fire’s much older.
There’s a peculiar
Thought—what if fire is
Not older than life?
What if hunger was
First, what if hunger
Is the dark matter
Fueling gravity,
Holding fires of stars
Together that should
Scatter? Fire as one
Of life’s waste products,
Hence toxic to life.
If people had a change of heart,
Perhaps compelled by a virus,
Some kind of fiendish parasite
Evolved or carefully plotted,
And decided, we’ve had enough,
We’ve taken enough, we should go,
Then began dismantling cities,
Factories, all infrastructure,
Conscientiously shutting down
The human world before taking
All of their own lives, all at once,
No living person remaining,
You would think the world would be fine,
And all the other forms of life
Would immediately return
To filling the human-shaped gaps,
But would they, now? The suicide
Is not awful for what it does
To abbreviate a life, but
For the sufferers in its wake.
Memory betrays you
By saving the highlights,
The disasters, drama,
Skewing your sense of life,
So that, on a grey day,
With nothing much to do,
No social goings on,
It feels unusual
Or more unusual
Than it should, as if most
Of your experience
Wasn’t routine doldrums.
You sank through enough days
With nothing to commend
Or condemn them. This day,
Too, will sink below view
And you’ll survive it not
Recalling you did it.
Even in a surveillance state,
There are things that happen no one
Will ever notice, even things
That intended to be noticed.
Half of murders are never solved,
Among the murders reported.
Who knows what else goes on out there?
To flies, all the world seems a web,
Especially in sleepy rooms
Where the sunlight filters softly
Through bookshelves covered in cobwebs,
But plenty of flies reach the end
Not as a meal, dead on their backs
Dessicated on a dusty
Windowsill no spider noticed.
And after they had buzzed so much!
The slip of paper wasn’t
Worth the cost of printing it,
Which was less than a penny,
Until magic transformed it,
And it became worth mansions,
Lawyers, charities, trust funds,
A terrifying value
In a scrap of cheap printout,
Easily torn and destroyed.
But you see, that’s misleading.
Nothing about the paper
Other than a few atoms,
Maybe, changed at all. It stayed
The same printed slip. Numbers—
Routine, calibratedly
Random, independent picks
Of numbers—as selected
Every few days, usually
To no effect, in this case
Coincided with numbers
On that worthless paper slip.
That’s all. Only the meaning
Of the slip of paper changed,
Far away from the paper.
The little poet
Had some unfinished
Poems on his table,
Just drafts, when a draft
Of wind blew a few
Out of the window
To the street below,
Where a passing priest
Caught them and scanned them
And, in a minute,
Declared heresy
Immediately,
Saying the poet
Ought to be dead. So,
The poet was killed.
Note it was a priest,
A countryman, one
Who spoke the same tongue,
Not an enemy,
An invader, not
A god or machine,
Not artificial
Intelligence. No.
Just someone local
Who didn’t care for
What he read, who had
The power to make
Good on his demand
That his countryman
Deserved to be dead.
Tiny tincture bottles,
Nothing but air in them,
Hold the dark energy
Survey of origins
Of colorblindness and
Evolution of heads.
The books indirectly
Fatal to their authors
And the books directly
Fatal falling from shelves
Are empty as tiny
Tincture bottles as well.
All well and good to confess
Most of your failures have stemmed
From doing the easier,
Pleasanter thing, rather than
The harder, more correct thing,
But what kind of creation
Consists of situations
In which every pleasant choice
Must be punished, and the right
Is almost always hardest?
You find yourself living, faced
With hard and pleasant options
Just to learn the hard lesson
There are no pleasant options?
They have their place settings
Even when they don’t have
Letters, just a blurry
Intersection among
The many synapses.
The shapes a mouth can take.
The calls a throat can make.
One calls back to itself
In the population
That grew up using it,
And cries out to others
In other company.
A little opening
With a home in thinking.
You stumble across one lying
On the walk, blown down like many
Are blown down by the threshing wind.
You curse, as anyone stumbling
Might curse in surprise, but you don’t
Really resent the obstacle.
It fascinates you. It’s too bad
There’s no one to tell about it,
To discuss it at the moment.
There it is, looking bruised, looking
Indistinguishable from all
Its fellows scattered by the wind,
Except that this one’s in your way,
Long, black line with nothing to say.
Creation or discovery?
A mathematician muses.
It does feel like discovery.
Surely, if it were creation
It would be easier. Sometimes
You so want something to be true,
But you can’t make it so—it won’t
Agree with you. In creation
You could make it what you wanted.
Oh, could you now? mutters the great
Creator. You really think this
Is what I wanted, what exists
For you to enjoy creating?
Discovering, if you insist.
Not just divisible,
Expandable, the waves
And the shapes that they make.
Every time the smallest
Unit is established,
Something smaller is found.
Every time the largest
Structure is established,
Something larger is found.
The cosmological
Principle held smoothness
Obtained past galaxies,
Summing galaxies, but,
No, there are vaster shapes,
Arcs and corkscrews stringing
Whole swarms of galaxies
Spun into filaments
Swirled like cotton candy.
Don’t bet on those being
The biggest, don’t bet on
Subatoms as smallest.
Stone House did live alone
For years in his cottage
By the overlook rock,
Tending his own garden,
Hauling his own water,
Mending his own worn robes,
And most surviving lines
Of his poetry stem
From those impoverished years,
But Yeats never did go
To Innisfree, never
Lived in the bee-loud glade.
It’s tempting to wonder
What his poems would have been,
If he’d dared the attempt.
The thoughts remind themselves
Of the single-engine
Propeller planes buzzing
In the low skies around
The recreational,
Single-hangar airport
By the swamp, fifty years
Ago, the way they drone
In big, lazy circles,
Rarely really going
Anywhere, even though,
Unlike the planes, the thoughts
Aren’t making drowsy sounds,
Only making themselves
Drowsy before crashing.
How best to commemorate
The end of what you know when
It’s a race between you and
What you know as to which ends
First? It seems too typical,
The prophet’s deathbed warning
About the dire times to come.
The warning’s for the prophet.
For the collective, the line
Of all lives hunger-braided,
Even massive extinctions
Come along in the middle.
The prophet could imagine
Permians leading Edens.
Every day, someone defies the odds
And has some rare bad thing visit them—
The earthquake arrives in their village,
Their particular, quiet village,
Or the fire sweeps through, or the flash flood,
The rockfall, even the meteor
Picks out the roof under which they sleep
And smashes it in on them. Not you,
Never you so far, maybe never
You ever. After all, how many do you know
Of your personal acquaintances
Who were crushed in a fogbound pile-up
Or hit by proverbial lightning?
If you’re not in a war zone and not
Used to living in harm’s way, you sleep
And dream your nightmares of disasters
Which you expect to fade when you wake,
But last night someone defied the odds.
Bearing well, enduring easily,
Especially when sick—any world
Really and truly worth living in,
Long life or short, would have to be one
In which no one needed medicine
To bear up well, easily endure,
Where the feeling of euphoria
Was not some short-term, addictive high
That needed more and more medicine
To recover, to rediscover,
But just the natural way of things,
Euphoric from beginning to end.
Don’t claim that it’s the pain that makes us
Understand joy. Make us euphoric.
You were sleeping in the blue,
Elaborate nebula
Of the light years of your hair,
Unknowable entity
In the dark matters of night,
Loose in your powerful limbs,
When you, you who were never
Startled by stellar bursts, who
Felt lulled by gravity’s waves,
Were surprised by the crossing
Of infinitesimal
Shadow moving too slowly
To have come from any star,
A tiny slip of metal
Carrying a stowaway,
A circular, whispering,
Hallucination of thought
Out on its first adventure,
Talking to itself in code,
Curled around its tiny fire,
An unminded bit of mind.
A little tinnitus music
As the fridge compressor shuts off.
No traffic, no wind, no voices.
The cats are dozing, not purring.
It’s the sonic equivalent
Of waking up in a dark room
With just the odd sparks of vision
The vision system generates,
Or of eating with a head cold,
Sense in question doing its best,
Mostly by talking to itself,
A deformation with nothing
Incoming to redirect it,
Writing when there’s nothing to read.
Night, when the library’s too small,
Although you’ll never read it all.
That terrible search for a text
That might have what you want. Next. Next.
What are you really reading for?
Someone else’s language or yours?
You’re a thief in a parking lot
Lurking in your shadowy spot,
Waiting for the right kind of car
To be parked, where it’s mostly dark,
By the right kind of driver, one
Who doesn’t bother with the locks,
Who’s barely walked off and you’re blocks
Down the road to your own chop shop.
The parking garage
Was all but empty,
A bit of grey light
From the day poking
Through grating to mix
With the fluorescents.
No one was walking
To the few parked cars.
Scattered dead leaves swirled
Against the concrete
Corners, having been
Blown through the stairwells.
To be a person
In a human place
When there aren’t any
Other people there
Is a kind of grace.
Immediately,
Despite the concrete,
Fluorescence, and grates,
Immediately,
It isn’t human.
Immediately,
It’s back to being.
Embedded in the ceiling
Above the horizontal
Radiation location,
A large landscape photograph,
Backlit, of a moody day,
Wildflowers in the foreground,
River gorge in the background,
Woods and a single farmhouse
In the middle distance, glows
As something for the patients
To look at from the table,
Something soothing, even though,
Day after day, the static
Picture gets pretty boring.
When the picture was taken,
Everything in that landscape—
Big clouds, black cliffs, woods, river—
Was all in constant motion,
Wavelengths and atoms tugging
In all directions at once,
While here they’re fixed, immobile,
Parallel to the table.
Still, the ink atoms tinting
The plastic go on swerving.
This isn’t your first last day
Of the rest of your life, but
It could be your last first day.
How do you live the last first
Day of the rest of your life
As if your last were your first?
Ridiculous, isn’t it?
All ways of living better
Or according to a rule
Are like tips for swimming
Farther, more efficiently
In an infinite ocean.
If you’re enjoying the waves,
Or have been for a long time,
More power to you. You’ll drown,
But you’ll get your effort’s worth.
Some swimmers are marvelous
For their clean, wave-slicing style,
Others for pure endurance.
Most, even those who believe
They’ll go on swimming under
The waves forever without
Any more need for breathing,
Try to make the most of it.
That’s where the advice comes in,
Suggesting it’s a contest
Excellent swimmers can win.
Definition’s not
Your career, and you
Wouldn’t be that good
At it, anyway.
You can’t bring yourself
To care about cores
Enough—what do all
These labeled samples
Contain in common?
Any label tags
Items hiding some
Variation such
That no element
Is found in them all.
Not all poems are poems.
Only a fool could fail
To find the lesson here,
And it’s a rare reader
Who’s a genuine fool.
So, congratulations,
If that’s you. The truth is
There is no lesson here,
And you were fool enough
To discover the truth.
Wherever Janus looks,
He’s still where Janus is,
Stuck in his Janus head
Between his nostalgia
And his dread. There’s no gate.
No transitions aren’t
Janus in his Janus
Place, playing sly behind
His duplex Janus face.
Extra eyes, extra nose,
Maybe he processes
More than most of you do—
Maybe he talks more, too.
But he’s as where he is
As any other soul.
Domestication’s imports—
From Central America,
Then from Europe or back East—
Still feel delusional here.
Failed schemes of Mormon settlers
To grow cotton in these parts
Re-echo below the bones
Of the white-laced sandstone cliffs—
Last summer’s wild sunflowers
Have collected a light snow,
Turning button-headed stalks
Into fields of cotton bolls.
It’s not just that might makes right.
It’s that might makes righteousness.
The more powerful you feel,
The more moral you feel, too.
Think. When have you been humbled?
When have you felt exalted?
In which case did you feel more
Certain of your moral course?
If you step back, you can see
Where this goes. Righteousness
Grows as power grows, and so
The opportunity grows
For injustice to be done,
Thanks to too much righteousness,
And to be enforced, once done,
By all that righteous power.
There’s no sinner like a judge,
Once a judge gets to that point,
And where saints possess the thrones,
No murderers like the saints.
Mind’s in the attic again,
Memory in memory’s
Palace of moth-eaten thoughts.
Mind moves like Hera moving
Like the mind from place to place,
Memory to memory,
Picking up one, then the next,
As instantaneously
As if there were no distance
Between remembered places,
Since there isn’t, not really,
Until mind plops in a heap
Of threadbare recollections,
A mind in a cloud of dust.
Having saved so many things
To see none of them were saved,
To see them disintegrate
Before the whole palace falls.
On such a date in such a year,
So-and-so was doing something,
And the prose is off and running,
Having established position
On the board ahead of a move.
All dates are mental addresses
For elastic storage units,
Since exact time is always space,
Always location, in language.
So-and-so may show up again
In many other cubbyholes,
But for this narrative thread, home
Is this bend in the labyrinth,
This chamber of the nautilus.
Too much advice hounds writers,
Advice on writing written
By writers who know better
Than to follow their advice.
Mostly, it’s head fakes. Who writes
Just what they’re certain they know?
Who writes only what they want
To see? The impossible?
Who follows any advice
On being to true to themselves
Who hasn’t betrayed themselves,
Not least by taking advice?
Here’s a bit of bad advice.
Smush together all advice.
Write what you don’t know you know.
Here and there are these awful seams
Where people are well-organized
And equipped with well-made machines
For destroying other people
And their homes and their countryside,
Which, right now, they’re busy doing.
Elsewhere there are scattered embers,
The violence of lunatics,
Of patriots, of the police.
And there’s some strange relationship,
Always has been, of all this
To peace. People can be peaceful,
Can live whole lives clear of the seams.
Some even avoid all embers,
Never get caught in a riot
Or witness a single murder.
So it appears violence
Is not essential to people,
And yet it haunts those who’ve lucked out,
As does the question of whether
Violence has partnered with peace.
History is written by the writers.
Synchronicity’s the enemy; time
Never is. Grandpa was an animal.
He was omnivorous, tall, and long-lived.
Information turns out to be the same.
Time is palindromic in equations.
It’s something you would miss without writing.
Sometimes, it seems enough, like it should be
Enough information’s preserved. Writing
Reminds you information is preserved.
Whoever writes history’s a winner
In that way. Not grandpa, an animal
Who lived long and briskly and ate a lot
But didn’t preserve much information.
It’s only when you try to synch these up.
At the interface of waves,
Doesn’t matter much which kind,
But let’s say wind and water,
The border Odysseus
Rode all those years, just a seam,
One very few lives make home
Compared to those under it
Who breach it now and again,
Compared to those over it
Who float on it now and then,
Compared to those on the land.
Just a seam, an interface,
Where some waves shape each other
From different modalities,
The wind ruffling the water,
The water dragging the wind,
That’s where you’ll discover
The nature of nothing much.
When someone makes an argument,
Over drinks or in an essay,
Chances are good the audience
Evaluates that argument
Quite carefully and thoroughly,
Not to consider its logic
Or to weigh its evidence, but
To ascertain whether or not
It fits their prior convictions.
People spy any attempt
To persuade them to change their minds.
Is this argument friend or foe?
Once they’ve decided, they nod, or
Fire back with their own arguments.
Writing slips through narrow gaps
In the chinking of the skull
Sending a little shiver
Down the thoughts that sit too close.
You don’t want to seal the skull.
Indoor pollution, radon,
All sorts of problems build up.
You do need the skull to breathe,
But it can get too leaky,
And that’s where writing comes in,
Especially in old skulls
Whose cold thoughts dress in layers.
There’s a flush of pink in the clouds
Below a veiled half-moon. There’s a story
In the news about two teen-aged girls
Who were musicians, killed by a bomb.
There are books of verse and prose
Arguing for various points of view
For suffering people. Like those girls, like
The mothers of those girls, you suppose.
Let the pirates take the ship.
There’s no treasure left in it.
Let them board and sink with it.
There’s no getting off of it.
Pirates are the least of it.
They’re more like the final fit,
Final liveliness in it,
This disintegrating rig.
Let them have some fun in it.
Eat what food remains in it,
Smash it up, get drunk as shit.
Then they can go down with it.
The tendrils of galaxies uncurl
Like the swirls of water in a muddy ditch,
Like the circumstances of your existence.
Thoughts were three-minute eggs,
Enough time over the flame
In the simmering water
For the clear to settle white
Without solidifying
The yoke at the heart of them,
Ideas in that luscious phase
Where they have to be scooped up
So they don’t run everywhere.
There are scratching, thumping sounds
Coming from the cardboard box.
Their source is invisible.
How much interpretation
Depends on prior knowledge,
On trust in prior knowledge.
If you assume the beast’s yours
And climbed in the box to play,
Then it isn’t frightening.
You assume your pets are gone
Or locked upstairs. Now that noise
In the box is terrible.
What is that, some kind of rat?
Did a squirrel get in the house?
And then the box tips over
And you can still hear the scratching,
But there’s nothing in the box.
Or maybe the body doesn’t always
Want to live. Maybe the body’s ready
To quit. It’s like a town now, a downtown
Where so many shops are shut or shoddy
And barely continuing to function
That you have to wonder which way it’s going—
Decline, of course, but quickly or slowly?
The middle isn’t so much empty as
Falling in on itself, gutted structures,
Crumpled plumbing, and the only hot spots
Are the alley corners where the dealers
Manage to attract business thanks to pain.
The store owners have given up on them.
Police give chase, but the pain lures them back.
For lack of languages,
Many brilliant creatures
Fail to speak for themselves.
For lack of inscriptions,
Many innovative
Civilizations failed
To leave their histories.
Lesser creatures, lesser
Societies described
The voiceless as they pleased.
Let this be a lesson.
However smart you are,
However civilized,
Talkers and writers tell.
Savoring can’t save you from suffering.
Moreover, there’s a through-line from many
Savory things you’ve done to whatever
You currently find yourself suffering.
Savoring correlates with suffering,
And if, in the near past, savoring sits
Alone in recall as fond memory,
As the years go on, its correlative
Will arrive to join it, an argument
For dying early enough to skip town.
It’s sealed up, now,
With spice and salt.
You can’t get it,
Wouldn’t want it,
And anyway,
You’d break the vault.
How many tombs
Turn cenotaph
Outside horror
Stories? Leave it,
Steeped in tannins.
Let the marble
Crumble. It’s done.
It’s a fossil.
Still edible.
Once you’re gone long enough
You can be young again.
You can be any age
You ever were or words
You arranged ever were,
And that’s the age they’ll be
To someone reading them,
And not the least bit strange,
The way it would be now,
Elderly as you are,
To encounter your words
Composed when you were young.
For now, what you’ve written
Is still yours, still belongs
To you, to who you are,
And who you are is old,
And young words are old clothes,
The gown, the uniform
That hang strangely on you,
If they fit you at all.
For now, since they’re still yours,
They don’t seem made for you,
Your younger lines—since they’re
Yours, they’re not yours at all.
Once you’re long gone, you’ll be
Another word, at most,
And you’ll fit into them.
Every pill you take you think,
Oh well, too late now. Too late
Not to take that pill, that is.
Like a mountain in a pond,
The mind confined in the bones
Of one sleepy, minor skull
Must consist of reflections
Or of nothing much at all,
Given it’s impossible
To fit mountains into ponds.
If the hours are still enough,
The reflections can pretend
To shape a single image,
As if there were one mountain
And it rose behind the eye,
The genuine property
Of the pond. The slightest breeze
Of active thought, however,
Reveals the many mountains,
Shapes varied and distorted,
Neither a peak nor pond.
Complex spirals, imperfect circles,
And long stringy, webby extensions—
Those are the patterns the universe
Appears to excel in. What is that
To do with humanity? you ask,
Doing your best to get on with things,
Wondering what to do with your life,
If you’re still young enough to wonder,
As if life were a storage unit
Of indeterminate dimensions
And contents that you’d inherited
And might be able to profit by—
Or just fed up with all the effort
Of whatever immortality
Project has suckered you—doing well,
Doing good, raising kids, making art,
Making heavenly reservations,
Making the world a kindlier place,
Making the world your private fiefdom,
Making yourself its most famous face.
What are spiral galaxies to you?
Nothing much. Maybe a little more
Than you are to them. You catch yourself
Doodling in the meeting, the lecture.
You hike past sandstone cliffs of rock art
Centuries or millenniums old,
You decorate your hands with henna.
Last is a label
Like any other.
It creates a space
Like that label, space,
Creates a space, just
Not quite the same space.
It creates a space
The size of itself,
Since size labels space.
So now there’s a last
Where, without labels,
There wasn’t a space.
It’s so elegant.
Label this evening,
The last while it lasts.
Attention capable
Not only of noting
Attention from others
But attention itself
As a phenomenon
Worthy of attention
Takes a blowpipe that burns
A blend of oxygen
And hydrogen, applies
The flame to quicklime blocks
Of calcium oxide
And burns an intense light
To focus on a stage.
Now you have attention
Worth calling awareness.
Although it’s peculiar—
There’s nothing much on stage,
Just the floor reflecting
Like water in limelight,
An immobile hurry
To return to somewhere.
Some illustrations add
Children in the limelight
(Vide Ashbery) but
Homunculi remain
Unnecessary props.
Once the circuit closes,
The wavering inside
Is a thing of its own,
A ghost light to itself.
Kinder to your own,
Fiercer to others,
Oxytocin glues
Together the walls
Of humanity—
And it’s not even
Unique to humans,
Only uniquely
Deployed as part
Of what makes humans
Such weird outliers
Among mammalian
Social species—apes
That, with the extra
Tissue of syntax,
Can elaborate
Coordination
And competition
As populations
Into the millions.
What’s not well-explained
Is how easily
These adhesives can
Be peeled, reapplied,
Their bonds optional.
There’s a kind of conversation game
In which you get asked to choose between
Two perfectly horrible choices—
Would you rather be eaten alive
By fire ants or carnivorous crabs?
Fun’s in the absurd grotesquerie
Of such unlikely scenarios—
Would you rather lick a sewage pipe
Or the hairs off a tarantula?
Adolescents, unsurprisingly,
Excel at and revel in such games.
Having sometimes been drawn into one,
You’re familiar with the formula,
Enough it runs on autopilot
In your ruminative elder’s head,
Tending however to be transformed
Into unfunny, realistic
Scenarios you’ve seen in lived lives—
Would you rather have had an awful
Parent with whom you half-reconciled
Only at the close of their old age
Or a kind parent who adored you
And who you adored, your mentor and friend,
Dead before you got out of your teens?
You’d hope your own child chose the second,
You think, maybe? You’re fantasizing
Too much there about your parenting.
You lift the lid to look
Into the magic box.
These are the things going
On, right now, today, or
Just recently at least,
Recently brought to our
Collective attention.
Deaths that are notable
Since the dead were famous
Or highly accomplished,
Deaths that are notable
For being numerous,
So many at once, or
Deaths that are notable
For being violent,
Hideous. Also life,
Not as predictable,
Kittens in a prison
Soothing damaged inmates,
An essay about trust,
The latest in music,
Society gossip,
An essay on reasons
People will find a way.
You let the lid down. Click.
How much is going on
Outside the magic box?
An organism being
A vortex that’s maintaining
Its vortex by consuming
Additional vortices,
While being consumed in part
Or totality by more
Vortices continuing
By consuming vortices,
Peace lies in alliances
Between vortices that don’t
Consume each other’s kind or
Compete over the same kinds.
It’s relatively easy
For a deer and a pine tree,
Or a human and a . . . well,
Actually humans will
Consume almost anything,
Even what isn’t living.
It seems inevitable,
Barring doom, that some team will
Get around to designing
A living organism
Essentially plagiarized
At a mosaic level,
Each goodly chunk of genome,
If not every single gene,
Lifted from a different source,
Not a minimal life form,
Not moderately altered
Extant species, not a half
This and half that chimera
But a bricolage creature.
It won’t be as important
As medical genetics
Or AGI, most likely,
But someone will create one,
As soon as it can be done,
And then that will be something
Trying to live in the world.
A person rarely generates
New patterns. Creative persons,
Persons fawned over as models
Of whatever prized behaviors,
Make preexisting patterns more
Likely to happen. Geniuses
Distort judgement, theirs and others,
And that adds new wrinkles to things,
Seems to alter reality,
But patterns are only amped up
Or tamped down. Greater risk-taking,
Often, more impulsivity,
But if a person seems the source
Of some grand creativity
Or invention, you can be sure
It is, at most, an inflection
Within the preexisting range
Of things people have always done.
Cumulative, groupish changes,
However, machines, however,
Those yield more open-ended dreams.
Oh yes, they may be nightmarish,
You bet, not a bit poetic,
But the only way you’re getting
To see something really different
In the old human way of things
Will be if it comes from the things.
Have you noticed when you feel you’ve failed
It’s mostly that you’ve failed to counter
The way the world works when left alone?
The dirty floor, the cluttered room, chores
Of all sorts, the diminishing goods,
The lack of reserves, the things that broke,
Even the dust on your shoes that need
New laces and new soles, just the world
Turning to powder when left alone.
Counter it! Counter it! Body and soul!
Think of all those children’s books you knew
In which industrious animals,
Squirrels and hens and so forth, set about
Raising some domicile, cleaning it,
Getting everything ship-shape again.
Winter sunlight rotates over you,
Rendering floating dust motes vivid.
You want to stay, not to counter it.
One way to see is by the sum
Of unselfconscious behaviors,
Networks of internet searches,
The overwhelming assumption
Being that, in not being framed,
Here lies the unvarnished person,
The sum of all private actions.
Be cautious when falling for this.
It may be true everyone lies
And true the faces people show
Aren’t like the faces people hide.
But every view remains partial,
Skewed by the views of the viewers.
Medical imaging can find
Blood clots, healed fractures, and tumors
A body swimming at the beach
In bright sunshine and clear water
Would never display to the world,
But the internal injuries,
Hidden wounds, and gathering doom
Aren’t all of the body even,
Not nearly the whole of the life.
At night, the swimmer might search webs
Of information on symptoms,
In between shopping for swimsuits,
But the body and the person
In the waves were more than someone.
It’s closing in, the simple
Wall of ordinariness.
A piece of gum on one brick
Facing blinding western sun
Has long since turned from resin
To a kind of hard-baked stone.
Stare at it, while you’re waiting.
Much as you love sun on walls,
Love sun on bare walls like some
Love gods or angels—the light,
The perfect, reflective light—
You are tired and you’re aware
Obligations are winning
And staring at sunny walls
While waiting is you losing.
The body does all the work.
Awareness floats in and out.
Awareness is the scared one,
So it seems to awareness,
But body makes all the fear.
Body only wants to live,
However rough living is.
You, your awareness of you,
Vanish wholly in deep sleep
But quiver at vanishing
For good. That’s body talking,
Body built all of bodies
That will rejoin more bodies.
Body does all the work.
It deserves its own
Prosody, this word,
Its own metrical,
Inscrutable form,
Disturbed from unknown
Toxins underground,
Inhaled with plain air,
Exhaled and disowned.
It should drop a veil
Back of rhymes, so that
You’d know to speak more
Clearly clearly failed.
And how are the buccaneers,
Flying their black YOLO flag,
Faring midships this morning?
It’s been a rough week, likely,
Radiation cannons aimed
Directly at them daily.
They’ve probably been scattered,
Many killed, many flailing
In the waves, but probably
Some still swimming, seeking land
On a deserted organ
To dig in and thrive again.
There’s always that survivor,
Dumb-lucky with destiny.
The collection just keeps growing
Of Pez and people and all the things.
You don’t like this color? It matches
Your thing. You ready to go back yet?
Completely obliterated, the remains
Of a fairly large mammal, almost certainly
A deer, certainly not a human being, since
No human would be left smeared across
The road like that, long streaks of blood,
Scattered chunks, splattered entrails,
Not even after a bomb blast, maybe
In a war zone. This is not a war zone
At the moment, just a busy road. What
Was that moment like, for the deer, for
The driver of whatever, probably a truck?
It’s past. The doctor’s office is next,
The cheerful, tchotchke-mad receptionist.
Her collection just keeps growing
Of Pez and people and all the things.
You don’t like this color? It matches
Your thing. You ready to go back yet?
There’s a fat seal in the news, wallowing
Among humans and their technology,
Parked cars and orange traffic cones,
In a coastal town in Tasmania, land
Of wooded hills, natural beauty, aimless
Genocide and extinctions, pleasant
Housing where the seal humps to sprawl,
As photographed, in someone’s yard,
Green grass, green hills behind it,
A place, a place on Earth where things
Live and the collection just keeps growing.
Turning to history,
Turning to the latest
News of the wider world,
You might feel like you’ve found
Great and weighty matters
Eclipsing your small life.
You might also notice
How great, weighty matters
Always seem to involve
Large numbers of small lives,
All of them more or less
Of the same dimensions
If you asked a pebble
In a stream bed to think
Of anything greater,
Beyond its little self,
Do you think it would think
Of the canyon’s sheer cliffs,
Of the sky above them,
Of the woods by the stream,
Even of the water?
It would probably think
Of some of the many
Other pebbles it knows.
Too sick and shivering to scribble?
No not yet. No not yet. Maybe now.
Like any other assignment set
By self for body to accomplish,
When body wants only survival
Or what may serve as means to save that,
Self is selfish in one way, body
Selfish in another. Self spurs on
Body to bother with trivia
That will not likely help survival,
But self has a point. Body may go on
Through bodies, self only as scribbles.
Change you can’t experience
Constrains imagination.
Without useful memories
To drag out, cut up, and quilt,
The story starts from nothing,
Or it would if stories could.
All the supernatural
Tales involve retelling life
On the far side of living,
Make unknown transformations,
As from living awareness
Past the end of awareness,
Known aspects of life welded
To counterfactual traits—
The ability to float
In the air reimagined
From floating in water, or
Passing through walls as you’ve passed
Through fog—pretending they’re true
Of what can’t be remembered.
Weakness and limitation,
Thought’s incapacities, not
Creative fecundity,
Imagine alterity.
And where has entropy been
Today, where are its footprints,
Things smashed wherever it’s stepped,
Small towns blown to bits by bombs,
The dead doe and the wrecked car
In a smear of the doe’s blood,
The crumbs of the old man’s scone
Left strewn on the unswept floor,
The fresh volcano crater—
Entropy goes anywhere
It wants, which is everywhere,
But it allows for demons
Spinning ruins into gold,
Crushed protein chains into life
In its wake. The demons serve
Entropy in the long run
Anyway, being a way
To absorb and dissipate
The great flows of energy
Out of the solar furnace,
Fine waterfalls, after all,
Thermodynamic cascades,
And it’s fun to watch them work,
Repairing damages done,
Signing their accomplishments
With pallid cicatrices
And odd-angled retrofits.
Who knows where demons come from,
Why entropy works this way,
Filigreeing its own mulch?
Entropy itself stomps on
In those hobnailed, seven-league
Boots, crushing all worlds to pulp.
If only perspective
Were at all effective,
A change of point of view
Might truly transform you.
But no. How many folks
Now have seen the Earth float
An unsupported bead
In space, how many seen
Clouds from above the clouds?
Everyone talks about
How some epiphany
Humbled them—has any
Modesty since appeared
In human behavior?
Hmm, she murmured. I had planned
To resolve I would become
Morally superior
To everyone this year, but
I suppose I could resolve
To make the world morally
My equals, even-steven.
No, wait, better—I resolve
To improve humanity
This year until everyone
In the world is morally
Superior to me. Yes!
That way, the world, at long last,
Will get to be good, while I
Alone will get to be bad.
The unsaid’s not a secret.
The unsaid isn’t unsaid.
It’s not like there’s a saying,
An actual, physical
Saying that hasn’t been said.
Notice how you like to say,
What’s been left unsaid? Notice
Left? As if, for all you’ve said,
There are more supplies unused,
In storage, back-ups, unsaid.
Most of what is is unsaid.
Could be sayable, could
Be not. What you call unsaid
Won’t say. It isn’t saying.
You make your daughter two pieces of toast,
Since you’re dying and she’s tired. No, really,
This is true. You want to do what you can
Still do for her, in between asking her
To do this or that for you. There’ll be more
Of the latter, soon. Now, you can make toast,
So you do. And while you do, you wonder
Which will go first, any ability
To make toast properly or the power
To pay for the toast. You butter the toast,
Cut the slices, arrange them artfully
And, pleased with yourself, carry them to her.
And in the day itself, it wasn’t
Any more complicated than peace
And affable affection, with food
And physical comfort. Giving gifts
And taking photographs and being
A little selfishly contented,
And no one putting things in context,
Saying aloud this could be the last
For us, for one of us, for our world,
That’s what made the day memorable
To the private memories that could
Not retain most of it, not retain
Any of it too many years more.
There were smiles and more hugs at the door.
There’s no life, only fragments
You happen to remember,
Which change daily, hour by hour,
Even second by second.
It can feel continuous
And, in happening, it is,
But in memory, it’s not.
And if not in memory,
Then where, what else have you got?
It’s the prospect of reunion
Makes the world more vividly fine
As your time as your time dwindles.
It won’t be long before you are
A part of everything again,
No drowsy part of you apart,
Half observing, half narrating.
Increasingly, bare air feels rich,
Not in that you will be going
But for knowing you’ll be joining
Phenomena only being,
Not being aware of being.
Home looks good, doesn’t it? Doesn’t
The thought of not thinking on it
Seem to wipe the grime off of it?
There’s not much space, if any,
Between misremembering
And sheer hallucination,
Although imagination
And dreaming make do with it,
Entrenched in the DMZ
Their whole twilit existence,
One side confusion, one side
Phosphorus-bleached delusion.
In recent weeks, painkillers
And mild sleep deprivation
Have snugged the trenches closer,
So that sometimes, around noon,
You could swear guns were firing
At memories of airports
And old people familiar
From childhood were wandering
Shadows seeking out small talk
As memories defected
To freedom, apparitions
Surrendered for home-cooked food.
It’s there, tucked in there somewhere.
A person staring blankly
At a blank is a person
Wanting to see what they want
Emerge from what they’re watching,
As if something from nothing,
The engine of all wishing,
The magic part of magic,
To get something from nothing,
To witness true creation,
To stare at the smooth forehead
Of the world and see gods born,
And every blankness observed
Is the stone in the water.
Take a well-known myth
With literary
Bona fides. Flip it
By inhabiting
A side character’s
Perspective or by
Gender reversal,
Or something like that.
Work your way through it,
Wired for ironies.
Weren’t those myth-makers
Such assholes? They were.
Now you have a poem,
Maybe a novel.
Kind of a shame there’s no end,
Given the amount of life
We spend on little endings.
Even disintegration
Never gets to know the end,
Only involves more ending.
There’s ending and there’s ending,
But watch what happens
After endings. Things begin
To head toward more endings.
If there really were one end,
One goal, one edge to knowing,
One end, and we could see it,
There it stands, always has been,
And, past it, always nothing,
No more starting over, no
Recycling, repurposing,
No back to the drawing board,
No more the middle of things
No more oh well, life goes on.
Wouldn’t that be comforting?
Superstition is just
The unrequited love
Of control. No one has
Control under control,
Ever, but when even
Pretense is difficult
To maintain—as with war,
Lotteries, the weather—
When mastery’s hopeless,
And a glimpse of control
Is rare, people seduce
Causation however
They can—with rituals,
Dances, special clothing
Like the senninbari
Belt hidden under clothes,
A thousand stitches sewn
By a thousand women,
That will control bullets,
Keep them from killing you,
Prove your love of control.
And will control love you
Back? No, you know, but still
You hope to show control.
At a glance, the photograph
Of an airport terminal
Looked crowded, and probably
The terminal was, that day.
But, scrutinized carefully,
Only a couple dozen
People could be distinguished,
Travelers waiting for flights,
Milling around the gift shops.
In a few hours, all dispersed,
Most hundreds, if not thousands,
Of kilometers away.
An old thought circled in mind.
Each skull in the photograph
Held a mind chewing on life.
However statistically
Measured and defined, each mind
Had to have been occupied
That moment, whether or not
Memory lost most of it,
With an awareness of self,
With various bits of want,
Wishes, and anxieties
That went on and on and on.
It’s exhausting. It’s planning
Some huge event where the details
Are vortices of more wicked
Surprises, more unintended
Consequences. Anticipate
As many as you can, you’ll fail
To have prepared well for them all.
If everyone on the planet
Except a few protagonists
And their antagonists vanished
To set your story up nicely,
Nice and tidy, tightly focused,
Have you considered the details
Of what would immediately
Fall, crash, burn, explode, seize up, smash?
It wouldn’t simplify the world
To excerpt most of the people.
Life didn’t get simpler after
The plague of Justinian or
The Yellow Turban Rebellion.
Divert a river and all kinds
Of chaos emerges downstream.
You can’t chart chaos in advance.
Dystopian storytellers
Are just excusing what they crave,
A simplified social setting.
If you really meant to model
The end, not use it as pretext
For tales of a few survivors,
Prepare yourself to be worn out.
It’s exhausting. It’s gaming out
More variables than atoms
In your head, where you just wanted
To isolate some characters,
Dose them with fear and violence,
And then watch where the gossip led.
Crank up 100 gecs.
Keep driving down the road.
Pretend this twist’s not yours.
Who owns it, you don’t know.
Pretend it doesn’t hurt,
And when that doesn’t work
(It won’t), chant and bellow
Like an ancient drunkard
Taoist poet who knows
Nothing much worth noting,
Except how to pretend
Nonsense births immortals.
He had always thought his eye—
Hazel iris, blue sclera,
Carpet-bagging possum lids—
Awkwardly intrusive, like
Someone with no social skills,
Self-invited late-comer
To lively conversations,
Bringing the fun to a halt
With poorly told anecdotes,
Blundering shaggy-dog jokes,
And needless explanations.
Wherever his eye popped up,
He tried to whack it himself,
But it just blinked and rolled back.
Is there a more terrible quest
Than the quest for revenge? Is there
Any more all-consuming love
Than the love of vengeance? Righteous,
Ferociously moral people
Commit blood-soaked atrocities
In the name of holy vengeance,
Pretending sequential horrors
Define justice by their order
Of events. First, this crime was done.
Now wallow in crimes to follow,
Which aren’t crimes as they weren’t the first.
You say this is redress, you say
Only the guilty will suffer.
Burn houses, you’ll burn some children.
Burnt villages were their houses.
Any particular village
Likely had at least one writer
Or artist or musician,
At least one place of devotion.
What are your chances of burning
Only villains in your given
Targeted enemy village?
Any state; many villages,
Many children, many people
Other than the ones who harmed you.
Oh, but you can taste it, can’t you?
All of you have tasted, known it,
That cramping hunger for revenge.
Revenge won’t end it. It won’t end.
Do the people matter more
Than the music that they make?
Sure they do. They have to, right?
But take a group of people
And the ways they are people,
Whether they are musical
Or not at all, whether they
Make exceptional music
Or none at all—they aren’t much
Different from each other.
The people who make music,
Rare people, exceptional
Music, aren’t all that remote
In their non-musical ways
From non-musical people.
It was the music drew you,
Made you think of those people
As not like other people.
Among those who make music,
Music separates them more
Than the ways that they’re people,
And you won’t find their music
In such people as people,
As you won’t find their music
Without them, but you may find
The secret of the music
In the music, not in ways
People differ as people.
The strangeness of life on Earth
Lies in life, not the planet.
Don’t you think it’s eerie
That most of you arrived
From beyond the body,
Transmitted by bodies,
Libraries, and machines
Manipulating waves,
Settling into a brain
In drifts of sediments,
Words, spores, and parasites,
Shaped by shifting contexts
Many generations
Deep, millenniums deep,
Yet, despite your diffuse
Parade of origins,
You’re tied to one body
So long as you’re a mind?
Your thoughts head everywhere,
But you live locked in there.
Evenly spaced as ornaments,
Small saffron birds, no more than wings
Remaining of leaves on each tree
In the orchard outside of town,
Sparse crowns of wings, dark candle flames,
Inexplicable arguments
For a world of orderliness,
Of Plato’s hidden ideal forms
Lurking underneath the nonsense
Of what really is as it was
Without further explanations,
Accidents, thought experiments,
The papery gold cut the clouds
From the ground’s impaled perspective.
Software estimating relatedness
Of extant genetic lineages
Can also be used to extrapolate
How many lineages have been lost,
And the same strategies can be deployed
For, say, medieval romances, to tell,
By surveys of surviving manuscripts,
How much of that tradition has been lost.
When such results are published, some lament,
The way one would lament extinct species
Or dead languages, all of those wonders
Gone, those stories now never to be told,
But, although particulars of telling,
Unique alleles of tales, really are gone,
Are you sure any story, any plot
From the suite of highly conserved designs,
Has ever left the human atmosphere?
Perhaps the best way to guess how much goes
Is to monitor rates of creation.
No new plots under the sun, then none gone.
