Hide When You Feel Seen

City or country
The cloud’s on the left
The moon’s to the right

Suburb or city
There’s some kind of sky
Prison not so much

Hospital only
Those times you’re in luck
An open window

Can send lots of things
Into awareness
The odor of dirt

The squawk of a jay
They’ll give you away

Where He Lives Now Is Uncertain

Lambs, apples, attics,
The dawn is flowers.
That is as you please—

Edo period
Sedges and pond weed
But many blackbirds.

In the hospital
You swam in jaundice
Yellow as lemons,

Pulling together
Phrases remembered
But not the places

Where you first met them
And said, There I am.

No Wonder

Take your pick—would you rather
Imagine the lost wonders
(Flocks of passenger pigeons,

Bioluminescent bays)
Or imagine how wondrous
Your ordinary today

(Motor vehicles, airplanes,
Music gathered from the air)
Would be to those from those days?

This is not rhetorical.
This is a survey question.
Would you rather imagine

The wonders of the future?
Seriously, what do you dream?

Plura Fecit Nihil

You misremember
The past so you can
Empty a cavern—

You divide the piles,
Beauty to one side,
Prelapsarian,

A mass of horrors
To the other end.
You stroll in between,

Expressing longing
For lost innocence,
Diverse abundance,

The plants and creatures,
The arts and textiles
Before those horrors,

Which you explicate
In their reeking heap
Of guano and rust.

Now there’s a clear space
For you to stand in—
Good witness, human.

Taken One Evening

Back to taking in the evening
While it’s possible, the fading
Light along the lines of the cliffs,
The almost turquoise hints in it,

The ridiculously slow pace
Of any evening without clouds
If you’re just watching it, no lamps
In the house, no suburban lights,

A broke and broken luxury,
Evening to not do anything,
Speak to no one, pay for nothing
Much for now. You be the monster

In your borrowed lair, the torches
Not coming for you, not this hour.

Narrative Abandonment

All the bits of stories
That you never finished,
Wouldn’t it be fun to
Call them a collection,
Print out that collection,
And call that flash fiction?

Nothing flash about them,
More like amputations,
All abandoned projects
Barely beyond concepts,
Dropped as soon as started—
The heart quickly hardened

Over stumps of fables
About worlds full of holes.

The Honors of Successful Controversy

Worth it or not, you want it,

Or at least the body does.

It takes enormous effort

To go against the body

Determined to keep living

Irrespective of life’s worth,

The reason that suicides

Are both relatively rare

And overly violent.

If the thoughts could cheerfully

Advise the body drifting

Off to sleep, die in deep sleep,

Darling, before the morning,

Or even the morning dreams,

And the body could do so,

The species would soon dwindle

Peacefully, longevity

Being the quirk of a few

Who were mostly curious

And confident they could go

Any time they wanted to.

The Quiet Crowds

How many uncounted molecules float
Between you and the nearest obstruction?

How many interactions will they have
In air, while you’re not paying attention?

There are methods for summing over them,
Laws of gasses, means of estimation,

But no one deploys those methods always,
Every moment, at all hours, no one could.

The air goes about its quiet business,
More events than you can ever notice,

And much of that moves through when you breathe in,
Stirred atoms altering your decisions,

With never a rest or gap between them,
Never an end to their interactions.

Torn to Bits

There isn’t much horror to peace.
If you’re lucky, life carries on,

And you’ll never be traumatized
Too much by what happens or what

Happens to you, and you’ll lose youth
And love and loved ones, but slowly,

As the bodies around you age
Intact, not one blown to pieces

In front of you, not one cut down
By violence, no children killed.

If you’re lucky, you’ll reach the point
Where the only horror you’ve seen

Is that, even wholly at peace,
Perhaps especially at peace,

A person will detach from flesh
To vanish into wilderness,

The body going on intact,
The person never coming back.

You’ll witness how awareness splits
Before the body hosting it
Can quite give up on hosting it.

Collection a World Later

On an afternoon in the desert

With a half-moon and half of a wind,

You stumbled upon Derek’s claw-print

In concrete / After the bird has flown,

And, well, it’s a bit sentimental,

His portrait of an old, widowed man,

Dying in a farmhouse At the edge

Of a new estate, but then again,

It was a young man’s poem, and young men,

When not mocking or mad at old men,

Can be awfully sentimental

About melancholy old loners,

Fancying themselves half among them.

Now Derek himself had aged and gone,

Leaving this among his many poems

From a fairly long life in Ireland,

Where he had been well celebrated

Enough and had presumably not

Died as comprehensively alone

As the old man in his young man’s poem,

His claw-print after himself had flown.

The Star Is Not the Tenor

Astronomers and astronomy

Buffs are fond of assigning nicknames

To interstellar phenomena,

Most often based on faint resemblance

Of a pattern to some well-known thing

From human experience on Earth,

A seagull, for instance, or a crab.

Surprisingly, no one’s yet nicknamed

This galactic disemboweling

Of one NGC by another,

That is, seventy-seven fourteen

Torn by seventy-seven fifteen,

Which, in colorful Hubble pictures,

Looks remarkably like an image

Of an embryo in utero,

Like an extravagant scaling up

Of recapitulation theory

All the way to the cosmic level.

Of course, astronomers talk about

Stars being born, quite casually,

As if it were hardly metaphor,

Identifying star nurseries

As matter-of-factly as frogspawn

Identified floating in a pond.

All perfectly understandable,

The sources being more familiar

Than the targets they illuminate,

But temporally, shouldn’t it be

The other way around, things on Earth

Like birth and death, graves and nurseries

As analogous to combustions

In the night skies that preceded them?

No? Fine. The embryo galaxy.

Planning for the Future in the Past

It’s called scheduling,
Making a schedule.
Do it, and it looks

Like future pre-planned,
The future made past.
But it’s only when

Things go according
To schedule, to plan—
The school year begins,

The planes get airborne,
The army marches,
The bombs start to fall,

The concert concludes,
Elections are held,
The conference ends—

People get seduced
Into trying it
Again and again,

Until they believe,
Sure, it’s their future
Fossilized in plans.

The Smash Up

Sex is an accident, wrote Eva Gore-Booth,

Who was correct, and that’s not the half of it.

Sex is a bafflement, to students of it,

Uncertain why life forms have or haven’t it.

It can come as simply as gene-mingling yeast,

Or turn ridiculously elaborate

As plant species dioecious and monoecious

In one life, or as genital counterfeits.

There’s no absolutely convincing reason

Any life should try sex and not simply split

The way all lives managed for billions of years,

As most one-celled organisms manage it,

As somatic cells still do, even in whales,

And what makes this accident so persistent?

Dim Monsters Move

Maybe doomscrolling demonstrates something
More than manipulated compulsion.
Maybe you know the real news is moving
Somewhere under all the breaking clamor,
And you know you’re not glimpsing it, you know
You’re missing something and must keep looking.

Old news outlets often run side hustles
In which they market the news of the day
Of your birth. Even given retrospect,
You’ll notice it’s generally not much
Of anything really significant,
And anything you sense between the lines
You attend to thanks to the surrounding
Decades of context. Still, in the lines’ cage . . .

What Do You Mean We

People love their ancestry,
And people are resentful,
Hostile, or condescending

With regard to ancestries
They don’t perceive as their own.
It’s a little thrill to claim

Individual villains
Perched in the family tree,
But, on the whole, your people

Triumphed by perseverance,
An inherent quality,
While suffering wickedness

From other kinds of people,
Against whom they persevered.

Bookstore Fantasy Aisle

Grant them a material
Existence as conceptions
Created from memories
And language for solid things,

Then, in a sense, they’ve planted
That tree growing inside you,
You know the one, the knowledge
Of mind, which is only mind.

Other people watch people
For the people, the fusions
Of bodies with mind they are,
But you focus on the mind,

The way its branches hang out
Of their mouths, eyes, and ears, hands
Trailing twig tips like willows,
How they move like potted plants,

How they converse without roots,
Without mycelia, how
They tilt and sway their crowns,
How they’re many growing one,

How one is part of the mind,
One of the lies of the mind,
Which isn’t one, but legion,
How the wind coaxes the leaves.

Erasure’s Resistance

Job’s extraordinary urge
To obliterate himself,
To die, to not have been born,

To never have been conceived—
For the date that began him
To have never existed,

Swallowed by the calendar,
World that never had a Job
To know of, to contemplate—

This seems more than suffering,
More than only a death wish.
This is an angry protest.

That there could be such a world
That could suggest a fable
Of any Job’s existence

Is itself sheer wickedness—
Better no world at all than
A world this inconsistent.

The Deep Reader’s Groove

The problem with re-reading
Is that a single reader
Over time becomes more like
Any other committee,
Prone to return to the mean,
To sanded-down consensus.

There’s an assumption the depth
Of understanding deepens
As it wears into a groove,
And claims of finding new things
Through re-readings are frequent
And may be true, but a groove
Is also increasingly
Confining, narrowed, and smoothed.

Appropriate

Everything you take,
Every word borrowed

From someone human,
From someone’s language,

Amounts to, for you,
Appropriation,

No matter whether
Whatever you stole

You inherited
From your ancestors,

Found under a rock
Or spotted tramping

Through a tradition
Not remotely yours.

Heritage is all
Gifts, thefts, gifts of thefts,

And in the corners
Of the human world—

War zones, prisons, camps,
Reeking factories,

That windowless mill
In Pompeii’s ruins

Where someone enslaved
Tromped with a donkey

In a circling rut
Until both were dead

And quickly replaced—
What’s inherited

But theft, and what’s theft
But inherited,

And who can say where
Their phrases came from,

Who can know all their
Ancestors have done?

Whatever Happened to Cicero

Eloquence itself was just a beast
Who dithered and alternated sides,
Who wanted to conserve old systems,

Who popularized philosophy,
Made a career of prosecution
And defense of questionable men,

Who gloried in purchasing the home
Of the most fabulously wealthy
Man in all inequitable Rome,

Who fled and returned, fled and returned,
Playing the games of the powerful
Prone to turns murdering each other,

Accusing each other of murder,
Finally caught fleeing yet again
And eloquently baring its neck.

Hold Fire

Someone casually referred
To some new technology
Not even accomplished yet,

Still just a dream and a threat,
In terms of profundity—
It’ll be bigger than fire.

Oho. No it won’t. For one,
It comes much later than fire,
If it makes it here at all,

And for another, control
Of fire was the grandmother,
The last common grandmother

Of the rest. If this new tech
Burns you, it’s fire, you bet.

The Bird That Didn’t Sing

Maybe the changes most
Intriguing are changes

In contexts of sameness—
Of near sameness—changes

Not only cyclical,
But minimal, even

Confined in mid-cycle,
Like the landscape that looks

The same all afternoon,
Trivial cloud movements,

Maybe no clouds at all,
No dramatic shadows

Until the very end
Of the day, when it’s time

For you to leave knowing
You might never witness

Such subtle skirt-settling
Of feathers on branches

In this or any scene
Like this landscape again.

Get

Wild turkeys warble
Somewhere out of sight.
A scrub jay squawks back,
Or maybe just cries.

What’s matter-of-fact
For various lives
Might seem quaint to you,
Exotic, now, right?

Well, there’s a contrail,
Followed by a roar.
The facts of turkeys,
Jays—now some titmice—

Don’t make an idyll.
Hawk screams, coyotes—
Still strictly business,
Nothing pastoral.

A breeze wavers through.
Jays and coyotes
Hush up and listen,
But not the ravens.

Whatever lives want,
Whyever they cry,
They’ll take what they get,
Or at least they’ll try.

Cryptomnemology

It might be even more frightening,
If dementia could run in reverse,
If every day you remembered

A little more than the day before,
Old details you’d long since forgotten,
Some charming, many embarrassing.

Isn’t this what happens to someone
Once they’re renowned or notorious
Or become minor celebrities?

Past actions rise up from shallow graves,
Indiscretions and mere oddities,
Most dangerously old opinions,

Gibbering j’accuse, the lot of them.
Let memories lie. Don’t bother them.

The Death of Local News

Having read about what happened,
Somewhere, somewhere, and somewhere else,

Translated from accounts of those
Who experienced things themselves,

You have your reactions. You form
Your opinions, even in bed,

Even as a half-invalid
To whom none of those things happened,

And then you eagerly read more,
Now hoping for certain results.

Sometimes, it seems like you’re getting
The results you were hoping for,

And the world seems more promising,
Even if your world’s not improved.

Other times, it seems like nothing
Is going as you would have hoped,

And the world seems more menacing,
Even if your world is no worse.

It goes up and down, back and forth,
While in your world you get notice

Some powerful force is coming
For you, for your income or health,

Your family, your life itself.
This you ignore. What can you do?

You go back to reading reports
Of results from worlds beyond you.

Scourgerels

It’s easy for any ordinary
Life to vanish under the waves, but no
Human can commit enough wickedness,

Be responsible for enough torture,
Murder, rape, and general cruelty,
To not have later human admirers.

Anyone can do the roll call. You could
Do it yourself, listing the vicious names,
At least the ones known best to history,

But someone will always praise some of them,
Go on about cultural achievements,
Or strategic genius, or strength of will.

There’s a tiny, genocidal hearth god,
Or a niche awaiting one, in most hearts.

Compounding

Decay and desuetude,
Not to say ruination,
Are understood as tokens

Of transience, of what’s lost,
How what was is other now,
Not at all what it was once—

Yet, it got this way summing
Constant accumulations
Of everything happening.

Ruin is cumulative.
Decay’s an acquisition.
The past lets go of nothing

While hoarding everything else.
Transience itself adds up.

Counting Down the Counted Up

A quarter of a century
Since your father died of starved lungs,

And the obits, provincial
As well as national, still

Kick out daily entries,
Ninety-something years old,

Born before he was.
He used to return

From doctor visits,
Boasting the doc said

He’d live until ninety—
Not even three-quarters

Of the way there when he died
Before the millennium,

But obits make you feel he’s not
Over until no one’s older.

Withdrawal Symptoms

Poor Kierkegaard. He couldn’t think
Of a predator scarier

Than eternal oblivion.
Oblivion would render life

Empty and hopeless. Well, starting
With all the lives theology

Of some Christian varieties
State get only oblivion,

How empty and hopeless puppies,
Kittens, eagles, whales, or cedars?

A forest might not look cheerful,
But empty and hopeless to trees?

Dream oblivion before hell,
You poor thing. Dream oblivion

Before endless torture, before
Even the open-ended mill

Grinding out reincarnations.
What is it with souls, anyway?

Come from nothing. Anticipate
Returning to nothing. Panic

And invent all sorts of horrors
Alternative to nothingness.

You know what’s going on with this.
People can’t be made to behave

As people desire each other
To behave. Nothing offers blank

Afterlives on which to inscribe
Fierce threats and hazy promises,

Postscripts to fear and to hope for,
Cravings to alter behavior,

And at some point, oblivion
Threatens withdrawal symptoms.

The beauty of oblivion—
No withdrawal or addiction.

Waves Penned

Reckon there’s no true
First of anything,
Just little pieces
Coming together

Until, there you are,
Somewhere around there,
The whole thing, the first
Cell, human, symbol,

The first fish, first bird,
First writing system,
Past mere accounting
With pictograms,

A cylinder, a brick,
A burnt shoulder blade
Asking a question
Or making a boast,

All those waves that went
In sounds and gestures
Now evoked by lines
Like weirs penning them.

Beat Thief

Whichever language mothered you,
Hope for slang, hope for dialects.
You can’t know what a tongue can do
From just one local dataset.

Most great words don’t get out enough,
But it’s the peculiar phrasing,
In some places worn to the nub,
Elsewhere unknown, you ought to praise

And pray to encounter somehow.
Be careful how you approach it.
Just appreciate it for now.
Savor it. Don’t try to poach it.

One phrasing can make an armful
Of rhythms, long waves tilting speech.
Feel for those. It’s not as harmful,
In your own words, just to thieve beats.

Vernacular

Too readerly, swimming
Through crosscurrents of text,
Language like a river,

Monolingual river,
Mixing tributaries
And sewage, and run-off

From smokestack factories
And big agribusiness,
And sometimes salt water

Backing up in the mouth,
And sometimes bloated stiffs
Rolling down with the floods,

Just swimming, well good luck
Not getting infected.

That Emptiness

No matter how small the gap
In which you confine the curve
Of circle between straight lines,

How useful you find the tool
Of close approximation
Approaching infinity,

You will never close that gap.
Between the idea of pi
And a trillion-plus digits

Tip-toeing right up to it,
There’s always an error left.
Zeno’s arrow paradox

May be swept aside, and yet,
There’s no crack in consensus
Your pi can’t reach to the edge

Where the circle simply spins.
The fractions shrink forever
And yet, they never get there,

Never reduce the error
To nothing—always a gap,
A something, that emptiness.

You Have the Means

It means nothing. It means something.

It means something that it means

Nothing, but it means nothing

Merely for meaning something.

It means nothing on its own.

It means whatever meanings

You or someone bring to it,

Find in it, and bind to it.

It means something that meaning

Nothing can mean something, if

You put your mind to it. It

Means something that something can

Mean something else to you, if

You won’t let it mean nothing,

Not when it could mean something.

The Post-Colonial Error

Bronze Age lead pollution
From mining and smelting
Is still hanging around,

Dozens of centuries
Later, in places such
As the port of Corinth,

Where it’s been used to date
The port’s activity
To thirty-four hundred

Years before the present.
The Industrial Age
Just accelerated

Recently. It began
With kilns and factories
For beer, bread, pottery,

Dyes, and weapons, of course,
Weapons, millenniums
Earlier. The great world

Religions are younger,
All of them, than the first
Seams of industrial

Pollution. The heroes
Of Homeric epics
Waved around bronze edges

Culled from tin and copper
Mines torn into mountains,
Smelted in smoke and lead.

Logistics was always
The backbone of conquest,
And the colonial

Eras ran on enchained
Labor among their wastes
Before metaphysics,

Before the collected
Sayings of the sages
And enlightened teachers,

Before scraped codices
Were binding the sacred
Wisdom of the ancients,

And you think it started
And finished yesterday,
Your colonial age?

Longueur

Waste is a goodness, away
From the life that can’t use it
Or discovered by the life

That can. This isn’t final,
As declarations go, not
The last thought by a long shot.

Like all the rest of the silk,
The lines are testing, testing
For the strong holds through thin air.

Waste is only distressful
Found by life that can’t use it,
Or, sadly, undiscovered

By the life that can. Boredom,
For instance, when not to hand.

Bestrewn Sin

You’re such a difficult possession
For a body to experience,
A new kind of parasitism

To go along with all the ancients,
And yet most ephemeral of all,
Not unicellular, not a phage,

Not even another form of life,
Not even, exactly, a hunger—
A disturbance in the signaling

Of the systems already evolved,
As if, when a wind sifts through the trees
In the blossomy apex of spring,

That breeze and the floral chemistry
Combined to create an alien
Impossible without both of them

But not belonging to either one,
Not solely the production of trees
That can’t propel signals far themselves,

Nor of the wind, which has no signals,
Only whatever data it pulls
Along with it around the planet.

But you’re not scent; you’re not blossoming,
Either. You’re a tendency that could
As well prevent as assist seedlings.

You’re a trait the body’s dependent
On now, can’t not have, can’t live without,
Too late, and you’re difficult as sin,

Which is, after all, only one more
Of the many attributes bestrewn
With you through the body, on the wind.

Perched on Rockfall in Dry Wash

One degree more northerly
And about twenty meters
Higher than Mount Tai’s summit,

Roughly a third of the way
Around the globe heading east
From the Jade Emperor’s Peak,

There is a sand and basalt
Dry wash between junipers
And piñon pines that tumbles

Through a notch in the sharp cliff
Off the edge of the mesa.
In heavy rains or snowmelt

It fills and rinses itself.
The rest of time, its stones
Are home to sunning lizards.

Mule deer clatter across it.
Skunks and coyotes leave scat.
Sometimes, hikers leave boot prints.

The nearest temple’s an hour
Back down through desert by car,
In the city of Saint George,

And although tourists visit
The surrounding parks in millions
Every year, it’s quiet here,

Except for the wind. Its rush
Suggests old Taoist notions
Of wind, the piping landscape,

Although those notions are imports
As much as any tourist.
Tsoo. The closer, Paiute word,

Onomatopoetic,
Too. The wind wanders around,
Rushing over black rockfall

In the wash. Hush, wind. You’re not
One of us, not a person,
Not a musician, no kind

Of beast, not by any name.
Waves of patterns push others,
And the others push others,

And somehow some waves end up
Caught in skulls thinking with them
How they wash around the world.

After All

If only your misapprehensions proved
At least as solid as animal flesh,
If not as stone. When you looked up at dusk

From your borrowed table in your rental,
And you sensed in the long shadows creatures
Who resembled you who weren’t quite human,

You could be confident they were agents
In their own right, about their own business,
And actually, mercifully, not quite

Human. Extra-human, slim aliens
Who were not there for the conversation
Or the competition for resources

That full humans would be, you could let them
Drift along in the evening, fairytales
Intent on their own, not-quite human needs.

You would feel so relieved. It’s not all mind,
Not all an endless game in people’s skulls.
There is something, someone else, after all.

From About the Time of the Destruction

World War II came and went.
Most people survived it.
That’s easy to forget—

For the tens of millions
Who were killed in some way
By that global horror,

There were two, three billion
Survivors, those alive
At the start and the end,

Most of whom have died since.
Thirty-two centuries
Earlier, give or take,

Just after a solar
Eclipse, the late Bronze Age
Kingdom of Ugarit

Collapsed of starvation
And repeat invasions,
Despite having lasted

A few millenniums.
In nineteen-twenty-nine,
Excavations began

At the site by a team
Of archaeologists
Headed by Claude Schaeffer.

After a decade, work
Stopped due to World War II.
Then, in nineteen-fifty,

It started again, led
By the same Claude Schaeffer,
Who had survived the war

And continued to lead
Excavations until
Nineteen-seventy. So.

A small interruption
In the reconstruction
Of the never-restored.

This is the mystery
Of civilization—
Ascension, violence,

Destruction, and ruin,
Stones joined end to end by
The spittle of small lives.

Gieta

It’s night on this side at this hour.
You are penniless and dying
In all likelihood, but you’re loved,

And with all the terrible things
People are doing to people,
To the world, and the world to them

At this instant, it’s peaceful here
In your rented room with your bed
Made of an old futon ready

To warm you again, tinnitus
Mingling with a new recording
Of ancient airs, only mild aches

Like familiar mice in your bones.
You’ve rolled down the blinds and nothing
Will pull you from words, but not yet.

Tiny Structures of Debris

Peripheral thoughts float by,
Imperfections of the eyes,
Linked, translucent elements,

Bacterial revenants,
Maybe, hallucinations,
Illusions, complications

In any case, confetti
Tossed by unseen, unsteady
Fingers of dead languages.

There are no advantages
To be gained from having spots
Cluttering sight with faint thoughts.

Washing Up

One war started with a botched invasion
And a lot of brutal bombing. Poets
Of the invaded, underdog nation
Were published frequently in translation.

Then another war followed an attack
Of supreme, indiscriminate mayhem
With a determined effort to render
That mayhem moot by retaliation

Sparing none of the trapped population,
And so poets of the earlier war
Were washed aside to publish fresh poets
Trying to survive the new genocide.

Thus wars toss up poets behind headlines
As storms raise and erase wrack on shorelines.

Breaks

Take one. Give one. Be one.
Have one hatchet your bones.
Clean break. Psychotic break.

Spring break. Those are the breaks.
There are more. Missouri
River Breaks, Montana,

Recall visiting them?
Recall all the landscape
Breaks near the highway sides

Where you would stand and stare
Over the broken stones,
Thinking how you would break?

Delusions are called breaks
With reality, but
They’re less like prison breaks,

More like solitary
Confinement in one’s own
Corner cell of the real—

Fractures, ruptures, pauses,
Gaps In stratigraphy,
Suggestions of nothing.

Divil a Bit

Well, it’s another way of saying it,
Another element in the circle
Of ephemera around the black hole

Of that most remarkable conception,
The black hole’s antithesis, actually,
Rejecting everything, even a frame.

There’s such a cloud of terms approaching it,
And not one admissible within it,
Not even so much as divil a bit,

That it should strike you as miraculous,
That remarkable paradox in which
Each of you, of all things, will end as it.

Cultured

You’re not surprised to learn
That a single protein
For a potassium

Ion channel can change
A rattlesnake’s slither
To a rattling motion

Or its ability to rattle
To a slow slithering.
You’re not surprised, given

You’ve lived your beastly life
With glass-boned skeleton
Thanks to one amino

Acid switch transforming
A collagen protein.
You imagine yourself

As rattler in a lab,
Unable to threaten,
Whole body convulsing

With a rattling shiver
Every time you attempt
To slither in your cage,

Cage being the only
Environment in which
You’d continue to live.

On the Late Occasion

There’s a trifling way in which
All poems are occasional.
Reading through a motley stack

On a sunny afternoon
In a liminal season,
New and old from old and young,

Some straining against syntax
To make a mother tongue feel
Entangled as translation,

Some literal translations,
Some that read like transcriptions
Of kitchen conversations,

The triggering occasions
Of each one begin to jump
Out of the lines and choices,

The poems that start from a word,
A face, a scene, a private
Love or grief or resentment,

A desire to do something
To this damned language, a wish
To bind an old wound, a rage

At a recent news event.
What would it even look like,
A poem on no occasion?

Eclipse

We’re extremely numerous
And superbly camouflaged.
Your shadows are homes to us.

We split when you step on us.
Most of you host one of us,
Aligned opposite the light.

No, we’re not innocuous.
Yes, we are your parasites,
But we’ve been coevolving

With you so long the balance
Is judicious, a burden
Necessary to your life,

You’ve come to think. You’ll never
Catch us by watching yourself,
Examining your shadow.

We’re sure to hug the outline
Of any shade you give us.
You’re our permanent eclipse.

If you hope to catch a glimpse,
Find a crowded, sunlit spot
With no other light but sun,

Not too close to twilight, but
Well on either side of noon.
Watch the ground where people walk.

Relax. Don’t hyperfocus.
See how all the shadows point
Along the same alignment?

When someone steps directly
Across another’s shadow,
Watch for a faint reversal,

A shadow that seems to jump
The wrong way in the brief crush.
We just made another us.

Planetary Activity

What has Earth done? Nothing much
So far. So far it’s pretty
Well contained. Maybe its moon

Is slightly ruffled, maybe
It’s tickled its neighbor, Mars,
Winged tiny bits of itself

Around the other planets.
Otherwise, it’s been peaceful,
So far, minding its business

For the most part. What it’s made,
It’s kept close to the surface
A good few billion orbits.

Maybe keep an eye on it.
It tends to experiment.

Future Permanent Tense

Motion in the direction
Of whatever you’re watching
Makes the myth of the future,

The myth there is a future,
Woven out of past events
In which something you could see

Allowed you to get to it,
A metaphor, a fable,
Of something was and wasn’t

Yet, the future permanent.
Of course, if you spotted it,
It had already happened,

No matter how much more past
You created on your way
To that past where you’d reached it.

Impermeable Priors

Can’t be updated,
Replaced, reheated.
They’re settled business,

Brick walls not cell walls.
They’re not interested
In calculations.

You don’t know the odds,
But you know you can’t
Change them. Some givens

Are givens with no
Consideration,
No kind suggestions.

Face Music

Overhear an adolescent

Describing the art of makeup

As music you put on your face.

Now it’s in motion, isn’t it?

Tough to have music without dance,

Rhythm, some sort of changing notes.

It puts makeup into concert

With expressions and emotions

To imagine it as music.

Think of someone at their mirror

As composer at a keyboard,

Pausing, jotting another note.

Think of a street full of faces

Voicelessly singing their colors.

The Mute Barrens

Language, regardless
Of medium, is

All interior,
Which is why to rip

Opportunity
To speak from someone

Is to slam the door
On whatever chance

They had to invite
Anyone else in,

To prove that they had
An interior.

A human without
An interior

Can’t be a person,
And other humans

All damn well know it.
Live inside someone’s

Language and become
Partly that person.

Refuse them language,
Refuse to see them

Or listen, and gain
Wastelands at the cost

Of your own mental
Depopulation.

Air Hunger

A little Armageddon
For the ordinary lungs
Dying in the hospital

Of life’s ordinary loss,
Pneumonia, COPD,
Inflammation, or cancer,

The cells starved of oxygen,
The body reflexively
Gasping for more air, more air!

Milder forms include asthma,
But in the dying, it’s death
Announcing the beginning

Of descent. On the ground soon.
Above the clouds, then under.

Tag

An enormous motorcoach,
Length of house and width of bus,
Is stuck in the sandy mud.

A park ranger’s SUV
Is parked, disapprovingly,
Nearby, candy lights twirling,

But engine off, no siren,
Silent, more disappointed
Than angry. What kind of fool

Drives a white whale off the road
And onto the mesa grass
To camp on protected land?

Everyone wants to escape,
Nobody seems to know how,
Not the hermits in the hills,

Not the off-gridders, preppers,
Billionaires wanting to park
Their utopias on Mars.

There’s nowhere to escape to.
You’re stuck living here for life.
Good luck driving off the side.

Evening at Home

Father and child discuss
The problems of human
Groupishness and agree

The only hope would be
To soften boundaries,
Bring down the temperature.

It’s not in their natures,
It would seem, to dream cures
Or crave Apocalypse.

Maybe it could be less
Absurdly violent,
If terminology

And identities could
Be a bit more porous.
It’s all amiable

Between the two of them.
What happens when they meet
Someone who disagrees?

House to House

Things are things
That happpened:
No one will.

No one thing
Will ever
Yet happen,

Not even
That one—just
Things that did.

God’s Prosthetic Hand

They’re still going
To God’s Right Hand,
Those dying now

Who have refused
To abdicate
Belief—at least

Who won’t concede
Their doubt—the hand
May not remain,

But there’s something
They’ve carved they hope
Can still catch them.

Quit

What do you want
From similar
Experience,

From the common
Trajectory
Biology

And history
Give to human
Lives they spit out

Like pumpkin seeds
Into the air
For gravity

To arc the same?
Poets will write
About old age

Like anyone
Talks about it,
Noting the same

Disappointments
And surprises,
The same bromides

About being
Sad or grateful,
Until they quit.

The Bumblebee Leaves

Free thinking, by nature,
Is trial and error.
The bee caught in the house,

Unlike a panicked bird,
Flies like a free thinker
And will find its way out,

If one window’s open.
Terror and hardwiring
Kill trial and error,

Kill rumination, kill
Tinkering, kill any
Semblance of free thinking—

The fly that pounds the pane,
The bird in the ceiling.
Bats seem to have the knack,

Despite starting out scared.
Give a trapped bat a door
Anywhere in the house,

And so long as the bat
Hasn’t already grown
Enamored of shadows

In a closet in back,
It will find its way out.
There’s nothing elegant,

Nothing obviously
Goal-directed, bumbling
About at medium

Velocity. And who
Would say a bee or bat
Is necessarily

Smarter or a better
Strategist than a bird?
Nonetheless, if you’re prone

To wander and get trapped,
Some calm rumination,
Some tinkering, helps that.

Perpetually and Forever

In a bookstore in Mahwah,

Not far from where Johnny went

Looking for a job once but

Nevermind, there was a slim

Paperback of poetry

Titled, A Coney Island

Of the Mind. This was forty,

Forty-some years ago, now.

The book looked interesting,

The tumbling sprawl of the poems,

More disorderly than verse,

Way too much white space for prose.

The book wound up on a shelf

And then another shelf and

Then another, in this state

And that apartment, that state

And that and that apartment,

In and out of old boxes,

Until the pages yellowed

And were last seen in storage

Somewhere in southwest Utah.

And all those decades, Lawrence

Was still living and waiting

For his typewriter to write

The great indelible poem,

Living and waiting his whole

Century, and now he’s gone.

Hear It Passing

Dove’s crisp salute will return soon,
Her obstinate wrinkle rasping.

There’ll be that first night warm enough
To call out the outdoor chorus

And then it won’t be just the one
Solitary in the firewood

Lugged into the house, bewitched
By a warm room within winter,

Then it will be more legs and more
Chirruping faster and faster,

And it will be one more summer
Lifetime rubbing legs together.

Indications of Spring

Close observation of anything
Changes your perception so fully
The thing perceived becomes a grouped thing,

And in this transformation debuts
Meaning, which usually remains
Private, although sometimes you can’t help

Trying to explain it to someone,
How you never miss the flowering
Of certain trees in a nearby town

Since that means spring and all of the springs
You can remember since you moved here,
Or how you know a constellation,

Not by any of its well-known names
Recorded from cultures east or west
Or indigenous, but by some name

You’ve made up for it, rearranging
Say, the Hunter, in your mind, instead
As the Condor or the Banded Goose,

And how seeing it, star wings spread out
Above your doorstep, fires memories
Going back now half a century.

Meaning’s always personal, to start,
Observation reconfiguring memory
As gravity clusters galaxies.

You have to get others to attend,
To attend and to compare, to bring
Their own memories, to grow meanings.

Equally

Almost every world is a gone world
By the time you’re scrutinizing it.
Nineteen-sixty-eight. Nineteen-ninety-

Six. Two-thousand-twenty-four. That’s three
Of them. There’s more. A reproduction
Of a painting, used for an album

Cover, itself reproduced in light
Glowing out of electric digits,
Shows the open doors of a farmhouse

Onto a luscious Finnish summer
Of sun all day and abundant green,
Sometime in the nineteenth century,

And you scrutinize it, and you sense
The northern summer air, the wood smells
Of an old farmhouse you know is not

This one painted in oils some decades
Before you were born, but one of yours,
Only equally from a gone world.

To Help the Neighbors

The whole body seems to be blebbing
Since, ironically, some candidates
For apoptosis refused to die.

The inside’s being taken apart
By cells that should have disassembled
Themselves years ago. It all bubbles

With elaborate self-destruction,
And maybe it’s meta-programming,
Cells killing all as cells kill themselves,

But why, biologists want to know,
Why? The martyrs aren’t your cells that die
For your self but for your neighbor selves.

Mutable

Outside, you hear the rushing

Water, but you don’t see it.

Later, behind a window

That blocks the stream’s sound,

You spot it rippling through grass.

If you opened the window

Now, you could see and hear it,

But you don’t. You turn away

To think about the senses,

Yet another battleground

For contesting personhood,

Another category

Of human to be denied

Full humanity, and then,

Of course, to try to fight back.

You are not more completely

Human thanks to the mere fact

Of both seeing and hearing.

You present your own issues,

Anyway, given your shape,

Your fairytale frailty.

Nothing could be more human

Than asserting personhood.

If being a real person

Were an identity safe

To deny among people,

However, you’d deny it.

And with that thought in your skull,

You turn back to the window

And, for pleasure, open it.

Boundary Condition

Below even the beggar,

The pauper, the utterly

Destitute and low, Patrick

Joyce itemized the Polish

Peasantry categories.

Between beggar and pauper,

What could have been the difference?

Permission to go begging?

In England, a pauper held

The special legal standing,

The in forma pauperis,

Therefore not charged legal fees,

Pauper’s root, in any case,

Shared with poor, the pre-Latin

*pau-paros, little bringing,

Producing next to nothing.

The body of the pauper

Summing all the pauper’s worth,

Which only goes to show you

What creatures of surpluses

Human beings have become.

Tigers and moths are paupers,

As is the oak in the field,

The lizard in the courtyard.

Maybe ants and honeybees

With their storage colonies

Aren’t paupers, but aren’t they, though?

All the workers in service

All their lives to their systems,

What are they but worn bodies?

The pack rat on its midden

Is no pauper, but offers

No surplus trades to others.

Pauper, very poor person,

Died a pauper, buried in

A pauper’s grave, having lived

Like a pauper, dependent

Entirely on charity,

Not even able to beg.

There’s no dignity to it,

None at all, just misery,

But in the extremity

Of the word itself, pauper,

Dark, gate-keeping quality,

Human being boundary.

Yoked by Violence Together

At just the right distance,
From just the right angle
Of evening, the mule deer

In the field resemble
Fleas, heads dug in to feed,
Rumps jutting from the weeds—

Jumping fleas, bounding fleas,
Big fleas that might stampede
Through cattle fat as ticks.

All life’s parasitic,
Come to think of it, laugh
The ravens, black speck gnats.

Storage Units

An article estimates,
Including wild colonies,

One honeybee colony
Is currently functioning

Per each couple of dozen
Humans currently breathing,

Which comes to a few hundred
Live honeybees per person.

Sound like enough or too much?
What’s enough of anything?

What’s the satisfaction gained
From stored approximations?

All your humming industry
Gluts cells approximately.

Where Did You Get That Idea?

No one doubts a ghost’s existence
Like a ghost. Every ghost has been
Mistaken for a revenant at some point,

Instead of just another thought,
Another phrase, often enough
Compounded of several more

Of various ages, even
Various far-flung traditions.
Often, the most calmly composed

Thoughtful persons best acquainted
With ghosts can tremble at them.
Surrounded by her favorites,

Emily Dickinson noted
The hairs on the back of her neck
Still rose with each fresh encounter.

Every ghost knows it’s not a ghost,
And yet all pass through walls, and yet
All pass through skulls, and yet none move.

Speed Chess Poem

If there were one thing
You wished you could do
In style, fearlessly,

Daily, out of doors
Or next to windows,
Half the day some days,

Sunrise to sunset
Others, and at least
A bit inbetween

Any two sleeps—do
And win, keep winning,
Keep clearing the board

Then setting the terms
For the next graceful
Sliding and seizing

Of pieces to close
In on another
Conclusion—that’s it.

Alien Tradition

The voices of nothing are talking again,
Echoing down the long detours
They have to take through the years
And the languages to get to your ears,
Not your ears—the parts of your thoughts
That chew on old phrases, tasting
All their twists and turns. They know

They’ve made you sorrowful, or that
They’ve given your sorrow release
Like a latch lifted in mourning
Nothing much but being to mourn.
Open-mouthed over the waves of poems,
Lament until you’re satisfied,
And then we’ll bring you home.

Elliptical Curves Can Flock Like Birds

Machine learning left something
Interesting on the doorstep,
Snatched from murmurations

We didn’t know it could catch—
Curves gather over number
Systems like birds over fields

And finite fields are like clocks,
Like any kind of rhythm.
Float over one, start over

Again, like the things birds do,
Winging words, making poets
Out of mathematicians.

On the Street

Someone sits waiting
For someone to paint.

Otherwise, the street
Is wholly empty

Of any people,
Any interest.

The painter’s working
Anyway, trying

To get the exact
Shade of the pavement,

The grey that conveys
Not lonesomeness but,

What is this? Comfort?
Comforting emptiness.

On Origin’s Storage in Delirium

Who wore the first hat?
Not just some large leaf
Held over the head
And then tossed aside—
An actual hat,

A reusable
Item of headgear,
Reeds or fur or hide,
Whatever, a hat,
A purposeful hat

Where there never was
A hat. You can’t know.
No one ever will
Know exactly that,
And that’s exactly

The point—not the hat,
Not firstness in hats,
But the origin
Of any old thing,
The first this or that.

There must be someone
Just did something first
A moment ago,
Something old hat in
A lifetime or so.

Afterglow

The world excluding
Its human beings
May or may not be,

By human standards,
Reasonable, but
Those aren’t firm standards.

How reasonable
Is it to expect
The nonhuman world

To conduct itself
With human morals
And omens in mind?

And yet people do,
Watching the evening,
Yes another one,

It’s hard not to bless
The world for being
Unreasonable.

All Doctors

The yogurt tastes good to you.
Dr. Williams has been dead
Since just after you were born.

Now you are old. The yogurt
Tastes good to you. Your stomach
Carved to bits by doctors hurts.

You give yourself to the spoon,
To this moment that tastes good
Before your stomach hurts more.

Your doctors don’t know Williams
Existed, much less wrote poems
About, for instance, an old

Woman solaced by ripe plums
Eaten from a paper bag.

Sturgeons and Gar

Go to show that you don’t
Always need to adapt.

Extinction won’t always
Erase those slow to change.

Being a gar has worked
Well enough for so long,

Genomes that haven’t budged
In ninety million years

Or more produce more fish
Just like the gar before.

A sturgeon doesn’t just look
Antediluvian.

A sturgeon surviving
Now could have survived then.

The rest of life changes
Much faster as a rule,

But what has worked for gar
Forever works for gar.

Remember that next time
You’re trying to adapt.

The Secretion of Value

A few centuries more than four thousand
Years ago, the palatial Minoans
In the eastern Mediterranean

Had figured out how to get trace amounts
Of colorfast purple dye from the glands
Of sea snails. Rarity, difficulty,

Hierarchy, and beauty spell luxury.
Purple became a symbol of power.
Several centuries later, Phoenicians

Around Tyre had cornered the dye market,
Boiling up and drying dye-murex snails,
One per drop of purple or azure stain.

A few more centuries, three thousand years
Ago, give or take, Israelites seized
One dye factory, built a wall around it,

Decorated their temple with the dyes,
And filled Holy Writ with mentions of it.
Assyrians overran everything

And Babylonians overran them,
And so forth and so on. Millenniums
Of purple ruled by sumptuary laws,

As the massive snail middens grew.
Just archaeology and history now,
And puzzled children reading the Bible

Now and then in American churches
Bemused by the holiness of purple,
Which is fun but just another color.

Keep Moving

Like migrants using skulls to step
Cautiously across a stream, words

And phrases, symbols and ideas,
Ford treacherous generations

Of unstable, floating humans
To keep moving through the landscape

Of the years. Where are they going?
Past which border will they be safe?

Many words have been traveling
Since before thoughts could be captured

In stone or ink, and still aren’t safe.
There’s no sign of haven for signs.

Flap

A long wing stretches
Across the whole sky.
Clearly, we’re dealing
With reality.

The wing’s not attached
To any biped,
Furrred or feathery,
But it has feathers,

Tilting between white
And a darkish grey.
It bends, gathering
For a stroke, wingbeat.

Why does everything
In realism
Have to be like this
Wing covering things?

The Finish

There’s still some anxiety
To being caught by sunset,
Even in a peaceful place,

Even with good equipment
For traveling through the dark.
The diurnal mind recalls

How ancestors were winnowed,
How anxiety evolved.
This could all get difficult.

This could all get dangerous.
One hopes for kindly spirits
Or addresses some savior,

Or just tries to stay alert.
If these woods swallow the sun
Before you’re all done, you’re done.

Eidetic

There was a little more snow then.
It shows clearly, in the picture.
Otherwise this all looks the same,

As if someone walked up behind
A tattered portrait of themselves
Aligning faces carefully,

The breathing person congruent
With the torn representation.
Living presence fills the details

That the memory had let slip.
Yes, that was how your eyes looked then,
Dark over sun-struck sandstone cheeks.

There was no single incident.
You’ve come back again and again.

Beach Reading

The phrases surface,
Entangled or free.
Rake up what you can

Out of the breakers.
A signed pun might take
A little hand flip.

A whistled one might
Juxtapose two tunes.
It is good and calm

To rearrange names
As you take them in.
You can make your own

Beachcomber’s palace
From the wreck and wrack
The ocean provides.

Elegant False Exits

A little calm, incomplete.
Shreds of paper dust the floor.
The oven clicks as it bakes.

If it makes sense, if it is
Detailed in the present tense,
If nothing wondrous occurs,

It could be a kind of poem.
Cats prowl a kitchen cupboard
Sitting carelessly ajar.

Fine new Oxford editions
Don’t exist. Wind hauls on doors.
But if it doesn’t make sense,

What are you doing here? What
Plant sprung the tongued pitfall trap?

Immaterial

What if they don’t care, they don’t
Want to revisit the end
Or anything before it?

They’re done with ports and stations,
All the waving and guessing,
The promises to be safe,

To have fun, to write often,
To come home. They’re done. They’re off
And not only forgetful,

They’re uncaring and shedding
As they’re accelerating.
What’s haunting you isn’t them.

It’s you stuck with everything
They ditch to get out faster.
Don’t expect a call from them.

The Reluctant Idealist

Ideals aren’t naive;
They’re tricksters. Justice
Could be much improved,

But ideal justice
Fuels injustices.
Humanity needs

Real community
To survive and thrive,
But idealized

Communities trap
Unwary victims
In viscous amber.

Idealism
Will scold reluctance
To salute ideals,

Scold up to the point
Of ostracizing
Or imprisoning

Or executing
The too-reluctant,
Which soon makes for more

Idealists bent
On rectifying
What idealists did.

Oh, there are sinners,
Grifters, and cynics
Who can be wicked

Lacking all ideals.
You don’t need ideals
To do awful things.

Ideals can subtly
Grease the skids, that’s all.
Ideals aren’t naive.

Good for You

When was there a good era
For most everyone living?
Was such an era ever?

Everyone can imagine
An era that seems better
To them for their ancestors,

But there aren’t a lot of tales
Or testimonies praising
Their own present as the best

Passed down from those ancestors.
Maybe archaeology,
History, and statistics

Could pinpoint the best era
For the most people in it,
But who would trust the answer?

Meanwhile, everyone picks one,
Projects one, imagines one,
Some version of an era

Dressed in dreams and nostalgia
That was or would be better
For everyone generally,

In their opinion, given
It feels like it would be, since
It would have been good for them.

All Miracles Are None

Every age of miracles
Seems less than miraculous,
Given any miracle

Accomplished, repeatable,
Quits being miraculous.
It’s not that explanation

Eliminates miracles.
No matter how step-by-step
Explicit the description

Of the achievement, no one
Really understands it all,
Not even the inventors,

Sorcerers, concept provers,
Prophets, and simulators.
In the mystery of how

Any inherited tech
Actually works as it does,
In the mystery of why

Phenomena will transform,
Everything’s miraculous.
A miracle simply works,

And that’s enough to end it
As a miracle. Starting
A fire was a miracle.

Proof Is Nothing

No message could be perfect
And be, but freed from being
A message and more than one,

No message can be perfect
As none. The dead have never
Stopped sending no messages.

Of course, you make up your own,
Many, many messages
From your dead who send you none,

And those say all kinds of things,
And some of them may soothe you,
But then you are sad again.

You thought you wanted some words
Out of existing language
To float to you from the dead,

Words they, living, never said.
Maybe you were wrong. Maybe
No message should be perfect.

Thermalization in an Extensive, Mountainous Landscape

Stronger winds, bigger debris
Outside the window. The storm
Is cotton-mouthed, spittle-flecked

At the corners of the clouds,
And swallowing hard, as if
Trying to gulp at the creek

Choked on tumbleweeds below.
Description, kittens. This storm
Is gasping for description.

Another tumbleweed, huge
Enough for a house to wear
Like a wig, bounces off rocks

And disintegrates. Straw fall.
All emptiness wants to sprawl.

Crossing Evening

The skater’s never fast enough.
Even when the outline is clear,
The edge of the shadow almost
Already a sketch of itself,

Even when the moment lumbers
Like an attraction in a zoo,
Going nowhere, only shifting
Its stance as it chews through the hay,

The skater can’t be fast enough.
The infinitesimal edge
The blade occupies has shifted,
Slightly, yet again, so begin

Another sketch of the border.
The futility isn’t lost
On the skater, who is counting
On the impossibility

Of illustration, no matter
How speedy the illustrator,
To sketch the more important point.
Changes are real. Divisions aren’t.

The Breakup Song

They haven’t sunk in.
Or it hasn’t. Both
Of them were only

The exact same thing,
After all. Just two
Of it. Uh oh. Now,

You’re going to get stuck
Again. Nothing could
Be manufactured

More rigorously
The same-as than them,
Their precise, exact

Specifications.
But they weren’t the same.
Same as never mind,

But there were the two
Of them, histories
Diverging, and then

In you, converging
Again. There were two,
There are always two,

If there is one, if
There really is one.
Still hasn’t sunk in.

Dream Simile

In the dream you were forced
To dream for someone else,
Someone dead for ages,

You were a murderer
Fleeing your home on foot,
Only horses faster,

And you came to a land
Of strangers—they to you
And you to them alike.

You sought out the palace
Of the wealthiest home
In that dream. You entered

And everyone crowded
Into the house was shocked,
But they never said why.

No one knew who you were,
Or where you’d come from or
Who your victim had been,

In the dream you were forced
To dream for someone else,
Someone dead for ages.

Archaic Paradox

They squat opposite
The cave opening,
One barely inside,
Other barely out.

They maintain their stares
At each other’s eyes,
Neither one speaking
Or looking away.

It’s a sunny day,
No storms in the air,
A little old snow
Melting in patches.

Neither notices
You watching, waiting,
Aching to see them
Introduce themselves,

Interact somehow.
For them to do that
Would mean you’re involved.
You can’t intervene.

A Writer Who Is Most Commonly Described as a Poet

One person is back as One Person,
Celebrated individual,
Life form praised in a cloud of language

For a surrounding cloud of language,
Replete with gaps and doodled drawings,
A multiplicity that can be

Tied to a single heartbeat and name.
One Person, that Author, that Writer.
No one seems excited the reverse

Is true, if not truer. Every word,
Every instance signed, spoken, written,
Emerges from a cloud of persons,

Myriad bodies, brains, heartbeats, lives,
Myriad persons for that term, one.

Information’s Dimmer Guests

It’s a bit like shadow puppetry
With nothing but the fingers and hands,
Or like playing with shadows at all,

The way you and your daughter used to
Amuse yourselves, boring desert days,
By posing around the porch to see

Who could create the greatest grotesques.
All those silhouettes only outlined
Patches of modestly decreased light—

They would have looked eerier, glowing,
If you could have thrown those tints at night.
You didn’t really make them. Sun did.

But you were the ones blocking the sun
To invent the shapes. You were the ones.

But Is Only the Third for Now

The dead may have three kinds of houses.
One kind’s living, beings as they were,
Bodies descended from dead bodies.

The dead may also dwell in culture,
In languages, monuments, and texts,
In all those sorts of inheritance,

And the dead find a third residence,
Open to them all, with or without
Descendants, the liquid nesting dolls

Of small ways of speaking and living
Inside of anyone living now,
The most haunted kind of house of all,

The phenomenon of a person
Who may find three kinds of houses soon.

Freon

Somewhere a compressor
Alternated grinding
Higher and lower pitched

Rotating engine sounds,
Maybe the grocery
Refrigerating food

All night long. Making them
Cold again, not just cold,
But refrigerated.

The world was ending, was
More advanced than ever,
Was nothing anyone

Said, as everyone knew
But continued saying
Opinions anyway,

Alternately grinding
Brighter and darker pitched
Rotating engine sounds.

Never Again and Again

So the dying goes on, and unless
It’s their own or their loved ones’, people
Choose, must choose, which deaths they let move them.

No one’s moved by all deaths equally,
But many are understandably
Angry about those deaths that move them,

Angry others aren’t moved equally.
Arguments boil up over which deaths
Were cruelest, most unnecessary.

Whose death was the most inexcusable?
Most innocent? Most vulnerable?
Whose indifference was the costliest?

Whose was the most hypocritical?
Whose owned unmovable righteousness?

Rosy Fingers, Words with Wings

The weak spots of a long work
Include its repetitions
And habitual phrases

It falls back on. Yet those thrive
By their cumulative weight
While finer passages fade.

A Riddle with No Resolution

The first encounter with infinity

Was as an unfamiliar word intoned

On a black-&-white hospital TV.

A solemn male voice recited five terms

Man, woman, birth, death, infinity, while

A hand wrote their symbols on a chalkboard.

The child in the hospital bed knew four

Of the words, if puzzled by their symbols.

The cross of Jesus was more than just death.

It was on all the Bibles and hymnals.

But the last word was completely baffling.

The child scrutinized its symbol closely.

It looked like the number eight on its side.

No adult explained well what the word meant.

On Hearing a Learn’d Physicist Talk on Clocks

As the intervals of similar changes
Become more similar between their changing,
One says that the clock grows more and more precise,

As if it were a tailor, as if it fit
Something or other to a t, so to speak,
When one could say it’s more like thread counts in cloth,

Denser, not more precise—and no, that’s not it,
Either. A fit clock is just more regular,
An internal comparison, as it were.

Slice the moments into pieces and the more
The change contained in every piece, the wave form,
Looks the same, the better the clock you can claim.

But there has to be, must always be, a change,
Not as one needs one, but as there can’t not be.

Peace and Prosperity Obituaries

They’re disheartening. It’s ridiculous,
These long, drawn-out, attenuated lives
With their protracted extinctions. Ninety
Is more common than sixty. Dementia
Seems to be involved in most instances,
The piecemeal ablation of personhood,
Vivisection without anesthetic,

A vague awareness in a molted husk,
Waste product of life’s drive to make more life,
Tragedy without the dramatic fuss,
Meat grinder of peace and prosperity,
As efficient as war only slower,
So much slower—predator less lion,
More python—so slow it’s ridiculous.

Mother Mind

Your greatest grandparents didn’t think,
Likely, waking up in their shelters
And gathering at the hearth to grumble

A little at each other, maybe discuss
The day’s plans or last night’s dreams,
That they were plugging into mother mind,

But it had already started working by then.
Face to face with individual human bodies,
It’s easy to think of them as themselves,

Distinct, their words their own, their habits
And behaviors belonging to those persons,
But no language is the speaker’s alone,

No skills, no ways of doing things, no
Plans for today, descriptions of dreams.
Your greatest grandparents collectively

Already tended a carefully shared fungus
Of mind. Those early patches were small,
But the mycelia threaded and connected,

And now, you may wake up never so alone
In a honeycombed tower, an empty home,
But you plug right back into mother mind.

Persistent Coexistence

Back where tomorrow
Began in twitching
Phase transitions, ice
And fever, it ends.

Young Earth

Adults often concern themselves with children,
Worrying they will learn too much too soon
About the disturbing world of adults.

Certainly, the young of many species,
Including humans, are at risk of harm
From adults, whether familiar or strange.

But do those risks lie really in learning?
Any innocence made of ignorance
Is a source of vulnerability.

How peculiar that human grownups want
Their young to not understand them too soon.
It’s not only that knowledge is power—

The knowledges themselves are competing
For skull island, survival of the first.

Loss as Consolidation

Forgetting and relearning
Apparently solves something
For both humans and machines.

Presumably, the machines
Do not find themselves terrified
By the forgetting prequel

Before the relearning stage
That advances the ratchet
For more flexible knowing.

A human lost for a name,
For familiar directions,
Will likely start panicking,

Although the model relearns
By mimicking those mistakes.

The Company of Sticks

Sickness, like everything, is wavy.
Wavular. Wavily washing you
Under the waves. The writers you like

For writing with nothing much at all,
A few books, remembered accolades,
Or no accolades, a hut, a cell,

You know they’re mostly mythology,
But you consider what it was like
For Stonehouse when he was holed up sick,

No one to tend his garden for him
While he recovered, maybe tending
The hearth where he nursed his smoky sticks.

Or Irina Ratushinskaya,
When she etched her prison poems in soap
With burnt matchsticks, what was that like, sick?

Writing through sickness is a mercy.
It does nothing to ease being sick,
But it’s company, under the waves.

Picket Fence

Are you one of those
Who tend to assume
The ghosts you knew once,
Unseen for decades,
Are probably dead?

They probably aren’t,
Not most of them. Most
Of them are doubly
Extant—memories
Living in your head,

Lives still going on
Somewhere far away.
Most of them you won’t
Meet again, not in
Your life, ghost to them.

A few you locate
Who you knew as kids—
Scott in Columbus,
Colleen in Sussex.
Maybe an obit.

But you don’t contact
Any of them, not
By text or seance.
You’ll be going soon.
Let them contact you.

Portent

And then they’re gone.
You watched all day,

Or, you looked up
Often, all day,

And thought about
How people think

Trying to think
What people think.

Clouds photobomb
So many scenes

And no one cares,
Except, sometimes,

The camera
Swings up at them

To indicate
Things are changing,

Storm’s a’coming,
Here’s a portent.

Dragging’s Not Playing Behind

The simplest term coined
For the most basic
Of dynamical

Systems names one thing,
One kind of return
On complexity,

But you never know
If repetition
In that rhythmic tense

Converges toward
A perfect cycle
Or bounces around

Chaotic patterns.
The secret may be
That its rules aren’t rules,

And the purest ring
Of return can’t stop
Those changes that shift

The algorithm,
As it were, itself.
It’s never the same

Period, the same
Orbit, the exact
Same of anything.

It’s not time marching
On and over you.
Time can’t stop drifting.

A Hank of Daffodils

Voiceless trumpets
A novelist
Itemizes
In a garden

A crowd a host
For a lonely
Cloud of poet
Two centuries

And a long belt
In his sister’s
Journal entry
For that day’s walk

A skein a coil
Is anything
Not a callback
From lost and found?

Worm Tracks

In Latin, not even
A little one, from not
And the diminutive

Of one, unique—any.
Some of the earliest
Clues to moving life forms

With soft bodies that don’t
Fossilize well are tracks,
Those little wiggle marks

In sediments that turned
To stone. New kinds of tracks
Debut new kinds of worms.

Etymologies track
The wiggles of new ghosts
Squirming to make meaning

Out of signifiers
That escaped, leaving them
Nullus, not any, none.

The Backdrop

From space, they’re in the foreground.
In ground photos, they’re backdrops.
You expect them to be there,

Although many desert days,
Or in the doldrums, even
Sometimes near coasts, not at all.

They used to be heavenly,
Ferrying gods and angels,
Hiding glories. Now you know

They’re thin, altogether thin,
All the layers of them. Watch.
It takes patience to watch long.

Important, unimportant,
The backdrop’s always moving.

Naill’s Finest

By late February, the first
Blossoms emerged from pollarded
Dogwoods in Toquerville, Utah.

Now you have to do it again,
Not just for the eyes or by ear,
For the chewiness to the thought

Of the dogwoods in Toquerville
Ahead of redbuds and cherries,
Ahead of the leaves and the heat.

Now you have to do it again.
Toquerville had a winery
In the early days of the Saints

That sold Naill’s Finest to miners,
Filling the coffers of the Church.
The vineyards are ranch houses now,

Not a whole lot to chew on there,
Other than lives lived inside them
That live life and live life again.

Weight Bearing

Manhattan has sunk a handspan
Into the underlying stone
Since when you first set foot on it.

Meanwhile sea levels have risen,
But none of this comes close to those
Changes on the island’s surface

In that same span. Since Lenape
Were swindled by the colonists
And displaced by force, Manhattan

Has sunk a depth equivalent
To the height of a Knicks center,
Not much compared to the stories

Of concrete stair-stepping on top.
Then again, the sinking won’t stop.

Mixed up with Yourself

any object, if you wait long enough, gets mixed up with itself

It’s eons against eternity

In the models of the physicists—

Inevitable thermalism,

Many-body localization,

Which one wins in the longest of runs?

Inhabiting one body yourself

(This isn’t precisely true, of course,

Since the bodies making a body

Are just roughly ennumerable,

But there’s a biological sense

Of you as one-body location,

So for now, let’s run with that fiction),

You’re not sure the answer matters much.

Neither eons nor eternity

Are in your forecast, notwithstanding

The hopeful fantasies that reared you

Before their own thermalization.

You’re already so mixed up yourself.

Fit

A virus has to fit the host,
To have the code that cracks the safe.

An organism fits its niche
To fill it as far as it can.

The traits of the host, of the niche
Shape the traits of what thrives in them.

Host traits will shift, niches vanish,
But what thrives fits them as they are.

Successful ideologies
Fit human beings as they are.

The Brook Parable

The water looked clear, but could have been toxic.
Water striders wandered under the cutbanks,
Their thin, black feet dimpling the surface without
Sinking in. Upstream, past the road’s overpass,
There was a small pond with a snapping turtle
And past that a remnant of a boggy marsh.
Downstream, the brook curled around scrub woods and fields
Before vanishing in more remnants of marsh.
The sides were muddy. The bottom was sandy.
Wading birds were never around stalking things,
And no one saw even the tiniest fish.

A Cowering Animal Woven Real

How would Ashbery or Hejinian
Have confessed a crime in a poem,
Assuming they had to confess?

How would Anne Carson have shifted
The phrases and gaps? Others, you would
Know how they’d do it, just not if they could.

To stick to the parochial theme
Of recent American poets, could Billy Collins
Or Mary Oliver have deliberately confessed?

Poets don’t confess their own sins,
As a rule, although Sharon Olds came
Close. What other people did to them

And theirs, what people unlike them did
To people like them, there’s a lot of that.
And of course, shame. Shame is confessed,

Often with a bit of chin-jutting defiance
Or rebellious anger in it, but
The best confessions in poems are accidents,

That don’t come out as confessions until later,
When mores and values have changed enough
That their very phrases are the sins. That’s the best.

Lapped Afternoon

Some days you race
Through. Some days leave
You in the dust,

Dusk arriving
In front of you,
A posterior

Of an evening.
And you woke up,
So early, too,

Still in the dark!
Now the finches
Sing for sunset,

And you’re way back
Of the glistening
Shoulders up front.

Familiar Silhouettes at Dusk

Pick a symbol, any symbol.
A well-known one might be better,
As would be one that’s so simple
You could trace it with your eyes closed,

Know it without being sighted,
But not so abstract and ancient
That it has no stable cluster
Of instant associations—

Not a spiral, in other words,
And not the outline of a hand.

Alright, you’re right. Too many rules.
Clearly you’re being nudged toward
A specific kind of symbol,
Such as a cross or Hakenkreuz,

A symbol of an atom or
A double helix, one that seems
A fixed, functional kind of sign.
But now ask after the meanings.

You’ll find there are many for each,
And arguments for each of them.

A symbol doesn’t symbolize.
Symbols have no such agency.
Someone says what a symbol means.
Few or many agree with them,

And people pass on the meanings,
And people decide to change them,
Or don’t decide, only mutate.
Pay attention. Pay attention.

Power lines don’t own their own birds,
However alike each evening.

Addiction as Expectation of Surviving Transformation

Is anything that comes back
To restart an addiction?
Days, life, music, opium?

Opium, classically,
Life, for sure, mother of all
Addictions, original

Hunger, music possibly,
But days are just revolving,
Aren’t they? Then again, jonesing

For another, another,
And another, the thousands,
Tens of thousands of days lived

In the mean human lifespan,
Isn’t that an addiction?
Not only to keep living,

But to keep watching the days,
Watching for the one that breaks
Out of the pattern, this one,

No this one, maybe this one,
Each return establishing
The sedate, wave-lapping change

You’ve labeled time, and each tick
Offering the fresh suspense
That this is the one that breaks

Out of time into chaos,
Open-ended change, the one
That escapes longing. And then?

Normal War

So far the war has been like all wars so far.
For whole towns and families the world’s over,
But the world at large, the human world, goes on.

The war that many are waiting for, the war
At the end of the world that concludes the world,
War prefigured in millenniums of art,

Does seem closer thanks to the latest war, but
That’s been true before. For now it has to wait
While normal war ends worlds at war’s normal rate.

The Mimic

People are so good at it.
It’s odd they fear it the most.
It doesn’t need uncanny
Valley approximations.
The idea of anything
Definitely not human
Appearing to be human,
A mimic of the human
Good enough to be human,
Terrifies in a manner
Distinct from any other—
Predators, fire, violence—
And it’s not at all clear why.
When have there been non-human
Mimics of humans, outside
Of fables, myths, and legends?
And yet, if a non-human
Demon, spirit or machine,
Perfectly like a person,
Was known to be real, moving
Through people you thought you knew . . .

Neutral Buoyancy

Once you back away, you know
No one’s likely to approve.
Some will say you’re a coward

For not being more involved,
As if there weren’t bravery
In risking disapproval

And weathering it when it comes.
Some will say you have no heart
As if there were no passion

In simple pacifism.
Some will say you’re supporting
Whatever they consider

To be the bad other side,
As if inertia never
Led a system to collapse.

So another fight breaks out,
And you back away, coward,
Traitor, cold fish in the waves.

The Garden of Extra Meanings

Potent as it is, paying
Attention is expensive.
Constant attention saps thoughts,

And divided attention
Can invest all the expense
But yield nothing of meaning.

Who acts inattentively
Is fooling around with death,
The lover of distraction,

But no can always pay
Attention, much less always
Focus it in the best spots.

That’s what makes meaning weedy,
Blooming unexpectedly.

Now Sing Some of Your Songs

What did you sing as a child?
The pop songs you memorized,
Their choruses and fragments?

Hymns of the house of worship
Your family took you to,
Songs the adults sang at home?

Fiercely patriotic songs,
Nationalistic war songs,
Songs sung at protest marches?

Did you mangle the lyrics?
Did your peers or parents laugh?
If you were put on the spot

By someone demanding, Sing
Your songs, could you? Could you not?

Nouns and Numbers

You flick a crumb
Off the table
And consider

All the millions,
Maybe billions,
Of its atoms

And the billions
Of human lives
Living right now,

The two beings,
Atoms, humans,
Analogous

Only by terms
Of being nouns
In large numbers.

The crumb joins up
With dust and stray
Hairs on the floor.

Lid

Turning approximately
In place, so that the sunlight
Seems to be losing its grip,

The planet tilts the tiny
Differences in its surface,
Its irregularities

Too thin for the fingernails
Of a god to get a grip,
And cliffs glow and look mighty

To something even smaller,
Kind of thing imagines
Gods with fingernails close-clipped.

Small Rockfall

Whatever happens
To history, this
Unhistorical

Slab of buff sandstone
Will have to erode,
Even if it’s not

Exploded before
It’s left well alone.
Hey, isn’t it fun

To know some things will
Be in the past long
Past the day you will?

Silk Triplines

It’s easier to find
Something to say in words

Someone already said,
Phrases already phrased,

If only to reply,
Only to call them lies.

It’s difficult to sense
Lures to attract meaning

Hidden in the landscape
Of a still afternoon

In the hills, in the town,
Trap doors flush to the ground.

The Fifth

There are five forests,
Five cities, if you’re
More comfortable

With lines of buildings
Than with crowds of trees.
Which one should you chose

To risk exploring?
The forest-city
Of lies, of half-truths,

Of facts, or of truths?
It would help to know
Which was which, of course.

But wait. That’s just four.
Which one is the fifth?
Approximately.

Streaming Argument

The past is dead
The past is gone
The past is another planet

The past is alive
The past is still alive
The past is a grotesque animal

The past is where you are
The past is where you were
The past is where you belong

The past is real
The past is out of sight
The past is out of sight and out of mind

The past is just a story
The past is where it stays
The past is fading over time

The past is far away
The past is a rhyme
The past is not your fault

The past is not mine
The past is not the past
The past is the past

Can Evolution Stick the Landing?

On the final approach, there’s no human
Eyes, no human element deciding.
The mechanism must land on its own.

All those millions of years of toolmaking,
Thousands of years of written instructions,
Centuries of engines pushing themselves,

And now culture, the infant colossus,
L’enfant terrible, is leaving the nest,
Or is restless, or has already left.

Human eyes scrutinize, half-terrified,
Their fine-tuned, shambolic mechanism
As it gradually gets away from them,

Away from controlled communications.
On the final approach, there’s no human
Eyes, no human element deciding.

In the Lyric

You may lose yourself in a lyric
Lifted from a radio sermon.

You may lose yourself in the decades
You live from first hearing that lyric

To the day you sit watching large clouds
Outside the window of a cafe

Where you wait to pick up your order
You can’t afford, bought for daughter

You couldn’t have imagined back when
You first lost yourself in that lyric

That is streaming now from the speakers
Of a world you never imagined,

Changed utterly, as Yeats liked to say,
Same as it ever was, the lyric.

Myths of Possession

Latinate or Mandarin,
The semantics of fortune,
Fú, entangle luck with wealth

In clouds of connotations
And echoing behaviors
Invoking prosperity.

There are other forms of luck,
Of course, other misfortunes
Than the blight of poverty,

But fortune as wealth, like wealth,
Is fungible as a coin,
As a credit on account,

Credit being another
Term that conjures a sweeping
Range of possibilities.

Actual wealth, actual
Fortunes are only access
To stashes of resources,

And stashes can only be
Held together by credit,
Fortunes in league with fortunes—

Believe me, I believe you,
And your tokens of belief.
Trust is magical thinking.

Worth is magical thinking.
Small wonder people invoke
Magical symbols of wealth

To try to lure good fortune,
Even as they ruthlessly
Work to exploit each other,

Since fú and fortune are both
Material possessions
And dark myths of possession.