A Few Cattle Driven to High Country in May

Watching over the herds lingers
As part of the mythology
Of the American southwest,

And it’s doubly weird, honestly,
Since hardly anyone’s involved
In ranching as a way of life,

And since it’s fairly recent here—
Humans on horseback driving herds
Were part of the Eurasian steppes

Thousands of years before cowboys
Were filmed as mesa silhouettes.
But that’s just it, isn’t it—film

Allowed a new kind of story,
New storytelling industry
With access to desert landscapes

And pulp fiction ready to hand
Already set in such landscapes,
And it took full advantage of this,

Less mythology than cheat grass.
Now, watching over herds lingers,
Along with all the other ways,

The more significant, complex
Ways of converting resources
Into delivery systems.

Storytelling itself moves on,
Discovering new breeds and strains,
Watching over narrative herds.

The Art of Solo Counterintelligence

You wake up, and you know
This—at least one’s waiting
For you, a little brick

Tied with a green ribbon
Left on the window’s ledge.
You’re getting used to this,

Solid-state packages
Deposited gently
That magically transmit

Through silicon or brick
But can’t be unfolded,
Can’t be entered, no room,

No space, no container.
Hold on to this—ready
Yourself for the moment

When it’s too suspicious,
Surveilling surveillors
Quietly from your room.

At some point, you will need
To fling this straight at them
Or fling it far away.

The Stairway at a Single Bound

Obviate parade—

The transitive verb,

Its oddball object,

Excised article,

The whole phrase hapax

Legomenon jammed

In a concrete scene—

Maple’s loom is red;

Bobolink was there—

Along with human

Social roles assigned

To garden creatures—

Aged Bee addressed

Us, et cetera—

It’s quintessential

Dickinson, so much

So that our delight

In that surprise of

Obviate parade

Lets readers forget

To ask, What parade?

Day

Sand in the veins, sacks of it,
Wet sand, clogging arteries,
Limbs heavy as piled flood walls,

Not completely unpleasant,
But exhaustion’s exhausting,
Some imbalance in the blood,

Maybe, physical enough,
A matter for this body,
But hallucinatory

For insider awareness,
As if the whole contraption
Passing for reality

Fell into contradiction,
Said, This could be anything.

Eyeliner Memorial Days

Here is a year, a pattern, familiar
To the locals who’ve lived here long enough
To link this weather to these holidays.

Everything in the landscape is normal
Or nearly so, but the slippage is close,
Always close. The symmetry is human,

This imposition of more regular
Occurrences than actually occur.
It’s one of the species’ most striking traits—

To delineate, in the performance
Of any distinction, an underscore
So emphatic as to seem eternal—

These rituals, these roles, these alignments.
Even after terrible disruption,
Those who are left of victors and victims

Immediately seize on fresh rhythms,
And before you know it the neighborhood’s
Linked seasons seem sempiternal again.

Field Experiments

They started in a clearing.
They carved a trench together,
And they brought the sacred books

From competing traditions,
And they set them in the trench
With no special privilege

For one over another.
Then, they climbed out of the trench
And took a composed picture.

From the canopy’s height,
They took another picture.
Then from a helicopter,

Then from a passenger jet.
After that, stock photos served
From overhead satellites.

Meanwhile, digging underground,
Deeper pictures, looking up,
Until there was no lower

And no higher to attain,
And any further shifting
Of perspective on the texts

Had to be speculative.
The truth of the universe
Patiently stayed in the trench.

How to Write a Poem Yourself

The kid considered toy blocks
With no sense of their purpose
In prior generations.

Some were identical,
Except for different scuff marks.
The grown-ups at the table

Were discussing other things.
The blocks were good for the kid—
Tactile, requiring input,

Imagination, building
Hand-eye coordination.
At the table, the adults

Discussed the end of the world
With no sense of their purpose.

Put in the Reps, You’ll Get to Meaning

It’s not immediately threatening,
The short first string of signs and suggestions—
Observations little like instructions—

The equipment in the exercise room
Is colorful and neatly put away.
You can see that, can’t you? See the sunlight
On the scuffed floor and and the workout machines?

Now, what is it trying to say to you,
What is it trying to get you to see?
This is where it starts to get scarier.
You’re being bullied to find the meaning.

That’s trickery. This point didn’t arrive
With its sunny loneliness and meaning.
Check your pockets. You did it! That’s meaning.

The World’s at the End

These little rooms really should
Have their entrances reversed,
Or at least made optional.

Sometimes, you should meander
First around what’s finished last.
The world took a while to build,

Miniature as it was.
Start out where it has a sense
Of being already whole,

A kind of a place at least,
A distinct occupation.
This was where the first line meant

To arrive—at a sunny
Table gathering people
Around a family meal.

See? Now you can start from here,
Shared dishes and shared complaints
About the take-out Tex-Mex.

Life with a Light Touch

Not so much as an obvious
Shift in the light. It’s so quiet,
It’s hard to believe this is part

Of life. Small noises, small rumbles,
The occasional drifting stink,
Let the body experience

The phenomenological
Sensorium that says, yes, life.
An hour ago, paramedics

Gathered up one breathing body
On a gurney and rolled it out
To their candy apple red truck,

But even they didn’t say much.
You waved at the world, Keep in touch.

Private Library

The pseudo-comforter,
Stitched by machine to look
Like a handmade textile,

Looked just like a handmade
Textile, the small patches
Of rescued scraps resewn

In echoing patterns.
Thrift. Not manufacture,
Not meant for exhibit,

Only colorful scraps
From worn-out old clothing,
Earlier blankets, ghosts

Of functional textiles
Past, sewn to look pretty.
There was a shelved closet,

Oak, carefully mothballed,
Stacked with neatly folded
Comforters, the result

Of an odd existence
Fond of making blankets
From the cornered remains

Of the more practical
Outfits of former lives,
Closet of comforters.

How Stories Exist

The novelist, the narrativist, the game
Of constraining what can or can’t happen next,
Body alone, other bodies, machine prompts

Constructing another scenario full
Of more or less expected kinds of events,
More or less expected kind of characters,

In some sequence for someone else to unfold,
Many someone elses, over and over
Again, lives life with a long shot at respect.

But the real action isn’t in inventing
Or the experiencing of the template.
The real action is the internalizing,

Body by body, of handfuls of templates.
Everywhere, all the time, bodies are telling
Stories of themselves assembled from templates

Provided or forced by the narrativists,
Telling themselves overlapping epic bits.
This is the story of how stories exist.

This Isn’t You

The body wakes bit by bit,
So it seems to the body.
Be careful how you put this.

You only live one body,
And it is not your body.
You may take these words and lift

Them carefully out of one
Awareness’s existence
To plate them like a dessert

In another awareness—
First the unique fingertips,
Then the stiff ends of the limbs

Linked to the gooey torso.
Someone else is waking up
To the disjunction of this,

Remembering waking up,
A body that is not this
But shares its embodiedness.

That’s the essential weirdness.
Somewhere, you woke up to this
And are this who are not this.

Nothing Doing

People aren’t tidy enough
To bring the world to en end.
Maybe make it messier,

Leave a lot of good ruins
And toxic waste for traction,
Brownfields filled with ugly lives

Thriving on the hideous.
If there’s anything better,
It will be thanks to systems

Once intended for humans
That no longer need humans
However humans need them.

It will be a messy world.
Won’t be the end of nothing.

Ask While You Can

Like a monk waking
Intervals of dark
To pray on schedule

(Inventing shift work
And clocks for a world
Otherwise sleeping)

The hospital flesh
Stirs from dreams, requests
Another pain pill.

Push the call button.
Wait for the angel.
Know it’s miracle

To be well cared-for.
Tomorrow you could
Wake up in the road.

There’s Something in the Woods or Not

The children remain in the forest.
Only the forest itself has changed.
Dense woods aren’t such a good metaphor

For where our thoughts get lost, anymore.
People keep tinkering, placing kids
In war zones, big-city back alleys,

Cells of virtual reality
In bedrooms of suburban houses,
All sorts of shadowy atmospheres

In which you can imagine a child
Endangered, quickly, easily, lost.
The thought experiment hasn’t changed.

Is there something to be discovered
Before living lost is only loss?

Wondrous Birds Fowled in the Netting

That, having captured,
You have to release

Carefully, banding
Without harming them,

Quantifying all
The relevant facts—

How many this kind,
How many banded

Already—weigh those.
Record your records.

Let them go. Somewhere
In a morning mist

In remaining woods,
Sun steaming branches,

You, your team, do this.
This is a real thing.

Most anywhere else,
It’s not, it’s not thought

About, all the birds
This world’s created,

And what observing
And counting ideas

Caught in the fine nets
Could possibly do.

Counting by Moons

When you were young, this was one

In the sea of old cliches,

A phrase you’d hear adults say—

Many moons ago. You asked

Or were told, off-handedly,

That this was how Indians

Counted time—by moons, not years.

It was just an expression.

It meant a long time ago

But not really. Half silly,

Half spooky, like anything

Connected to Indians—

Arrowheads, burial mounds,

Old river, town, or lake names,

Like Pequannock, where you lived,

1960s New Jersey.

A child is a traveler,

Anxious, aware of being

New to things, figuring out

Local customs. You couldn’t

See the sense of counting moons.

Your thoughts didn’t make the link

From them to their units, months.

And they were never numbered.

People said, three weeks ago,

You’re almost seven years old,

In just a couple of days.

But if they said many moons

It was some kind of a joke

At the expense of people

Who were now collective ghosts,

The Indians who lived here

Like moonlight, haunting the ground.

Not Even Remotely Truish

Sometimes, lucky reader,
You pick up a story
That goes so far around

The bend of possible,
Improbable, utter
Nonsense, it seems to shed

Reality like trees
Shed leaves in the first wind
Of the first autumn storm,

So your reading becomes
Like facing into leaves
Or shreds blown from a dress,

And you laugh, like a kid,
That barking laugh, delight,
Look at this craziness!

And you’re so glad someone
Can turn language to scraps
That dance in the lamplight.

Salvage Divines Taphonomy

Every time you start to build
A new frame in open space,

It only takes a few scrapes
Through snow, a few cornerstones,

Not even a foundation,
To trigger the sensation

You’re building over something,

That, now, under construction,

There’s a buried, ancient hoard,
A hidden clutch so far ignored,

Bones you’re just writing over.
As soon as construction’s done,

Someone should pry up these boards
To show what you’ve really done.

Solitude Will Be Different Soon

A room lit with electric lamps,
Completely unremarkable
When these phrases were rearranged,

Modern, a century before,
Beyond any comprehension
A century prior to that.

How would this century seem then?
How would a century from now
Seem if it wandered into this?

Fun questions. Unanswerable.
If time is, that’s what time’s for,
To ensure the world of questions

Can never be wholly dissolved.
Alone tonight in rooms of light.

The One Who Invented a Flag in the First Place

The words know what they are, in a way.
Maybe not reflexively, maybe
Not the way a self knows what it is,

But, if passive, they carry the facts
Of what they are along inside them,
The way all codes, apparently, do.

Two kinds of automata, really,
In this cosmos, or in this corner.
The kind made of codes that can be stirred

To life by influx of energy,
The kind, that is, that can be cranked up,
The kind, that is, that can be plugged in.

And then there is energy, knowing
Itself as the knowing of meaning.

Whatever You Decide

A woman stood in the street
Considering her options—

God was miraculously
Merciful, sparing her life

Amidst all this destruction,
Houses in all directions

Flattened by the tornado.
Just look at this pancaked car—

If she had been inside it,
She would have been crushed herself.

Or God was enraged by sin,
By the wickedness of Man,

And had sent this tornado
As a sign of his dire wrath

And of how bad things could get
If people didn’t repent.

Or God was responsible
For the wicked tornado,

Didn’t care who sinned, survived.
Or God wasn’t part of it.

She folded her arms. It was
By God’s grace she was alive.

So Like Meaning

They retreated to the margins,
Not in some note-taking manner,
Not like medieval copyists

Making entertaining drawings
Of singing, flatulent creatures
In the vellum around the text—

They pulled themselves out of the text,
Refusing to participate,
Whole phrases and observations,

The elements of common sense.
They made themselves microscopic.
They made themselves irrelevant.

They had been a part of the wars,
But they disappeared like meaning.

Lone Line

Some other people find you
Or not. Some other people
Like you, or not. If you’re not

Found or liked by anyone,
By any other people,
Then you weren’t. You never were.

People prefer to compare—
Who do I like? Who likes me?
Who do I want to like me?

How do I compare? Mostly,
People pretend to not care
Too much how much others care.

Faith in God is helpful here,
A closed loop—you care; God cares.
Other people should beware.

But that loop, material
At your end, your thoughts and prayers,
Remains supernatural,

Leaky, immaterial
At God’s end. Other people
Will come bail you out. Or not.

You’ve never made up your mind
How much you want to have been
Found, how much just to have been.

The Fertile Desert

A poet being interviewed asks,

Or are poems a sort of resistance:

The art of resisting pain? And this feels,

Like so many lofty-ish statements,

Both true and profound on the one hand

And a rotten, prosthetic falsehood

On the other. It’s not hard to see

Pain as something poetry resists,

But what activity, during pain,

Isn’t conducted as resistance?

There are many arts resisting pain,

And poetry one of the weakest.

Yes, poems are a sort of resistance,

But only in that almost all acts

Are a form of resistance. To live

Could be defined as to carry on

An indefinite series of acts

Of resistance, and resistance ends

Only in being, which no longer

Resists. But returning to the art

Of poetry as resisting pain,

We may be faced with something subtler,

Poetry as an activity,

One of many, none wholly unique,

Diverting, channeling, using pain,

Pain that compromises resistance,

To instead support the resistance,

The lines of language dug like the lines

Of irrigation in the desert

To prove how fecund is resistance.

Dispositif

An absurdly earnest scholar

Is trying to define the life

Of a human with a career

Trajectory a thousand years

Or so ago, roping phrases

Around key terms—apparatus,

Body, not a biography,

Biology, economy,

Ethics, politics, aesthetics—

Seeming, unironically,

To have defined a kind of life,

A peculiar occupation,

In terms of the course catalog

Of a full university.

Can you imagine words in air

Embodied as only themselves,

Wandering through a human scene

On a medieval quay somewhere?

No human ever lived like that,

As someone else’s description

Come to life, enchanted Golem,

But also there’s hard truth in it—

The absurdly earnest scholar

Is working with mere documents,

And there’s a certain honesty

In trying to conjure from there,

Even if the apparatus

That results is only body

As graphy, not biography.

The Golem of words never stirs.

On Purpose

You can be mistaken. That’s allowable,
Necessary even, acknowledged among
The fiercest partisans of getting things done,

The ones who intend changes in direction,
Who intend to direct them. But be careful
About being overwhelmed with how you can

Be infinite, inwardly, and trivial
In the heaving sea. You have to get this right—
Which is it? The night only accumulates

Its endlessly vast repertoire of being
All its waves of force bursting and contracting
In patterns inevitable or random

But without actually wanting anything.
Or it is exactly that upheaval but
Purposeful, an entity that wants something.

Or it is exactly that upheaval but
Dotted and pocketed about with purpose,
Intention being some but not all of it.

Even with the lamp on you notice moonlight
Coming at you from the ground where it landed.
Somewhere out there, a once romantic partner

Lies curled around a fresh wound of rejection.
Purpose has to be something. People feel it.
How much of everything is it? Get it right.

Contract

Couldn’t we have an agreement?
You can compose pieces of text
You never to show to anyone,

While everyone acknowledges
That you’re the writer of these texts,
An impressive and worthwhile task,

Without ever having to read
Or to like them, or know about
Their contents. Good job all around—

There’s the writer, so impressive,
We don’t have to look into it.
The writer doesn’t need readers,

Not even those readers who write.
The writer just writes every night.

Bespoke or Not

The individual lives—
Comfortable, terrible—
Tilt like little tailor’s pins

On the broad swaths of cloth cut
To create the costumery
Of historical events.

No, but this is wrong. The pins
Would also have to cut cloth,
Be cloth, even be tailors,

So the analogy fails.
And yet, as with small neurons
Crowded in corners of brains,

The individual lives
Seem stuck in, not cutting, thoughts.

You Have to Promise You Won’t Tell

People talk less in real life,
Less in both senses, less words
And less significant words.

It’s mostly repetitive
Small talk, little sentences
That need winnowing for weight.

When entered in evidence
As messages, recordings,
It’s obvious how talk works,

And watch the prosecutors
Feel for the hinge, the small thing
That carries the legal weight.

The rest is next to nothing,
And where the law’s not involved,
Even less. Still we converse

In our mealy-mouthed, mostly
Polite, inconsequential
Way, low-key interactions

That somehow are related
To the dense, febrile friction
Of talk found in our fictions.

That Kind of Poem

In one wing of a nursing home

In a bright suburb, a woman

Calls hoarsely, over and over,

I need to be changed! Misery

Has many little intervals.

You can remember an evening

In the cancer ward when the pain

Rose in you like bilge in the hull

Of a suddenly gouged sailboat.

In no time at all, you gave up

On call buttons and simply thrashed

About in the bed, hollering

Over and over about pain,

Yelling into the air for help

Until help came. You didn’t drown,

But it was days before you were

Fully articulate again.

Language, in those circumstances,

What is it, exactly? It’s more

Than a pure scream—it messages—

I need to be changed, I’m in pain—

But it’s so carved down to its soul.

It’s rigid info, the SOS,

And it has an internal space

You can feel when you’re inside it,

As if you’ve burrowed inside it,

Are burrowing by your screaming,

And you’re not thinking about words.

You’re screaming in hopes screaming works.

There’s no name for that kind of poem.

No One Could Accomplish This

Waves go on wavering. Right now
The window washed some time ago
Reveals the streaks left by the brush

Where morning sunlight washes through,
Light that is nothing but the world
And signifying nothing new.

It’s an enormous collective
Monster of coordination
Perfected over centuries,

Which led to this transparent glass,
A mass-manufactured window
No one animal could produce.

A world goes into a window
In the side of a small building.

The Necessary Mystery

Somewhere in the gut
Of Leviathan

Or in the snarled roots
Of the forest tree,

There’s a living cell
You’d never notice

Busily taking
Necessary notes

On what going’s on
As it takes its notes.

And what makes these notes
So necessary?

Not a living soul
Knows in the monster,

In the vast system
Of woods, in the cell.

Interpretive Dance

If you read a lot about writers,
You’ll discover a mental habit
Of thinking as if you were writing,

Observantly, about a writer’s
Habits when writing about writers.
You’ll figuratively kick yourself.

No one is out there, now, wondering
What you have to say around midnight
About this or that other writer,

Although, given you have existed,
There must be many others like you,
Writers unbeknownst to each other

Who are sitting up late nights to wonder
About the small thoughts of great writers.

Which Must Be Why It Goes

What if you, your ancestors,
Actually managed to bring
A new thing into being,

A new thing to the cosmos,
Having invented meaning?
There is no meaning at all,

Never was, never had been,
Until your kind made it so.
You don’t find it, you make it,

And it’s no mere prediction.
You’re not just saying what’s next,
Although often you are, when

You say what some event means.
You’re creating the meaning.

Rehab Robe

You finger life’s texture
More contemplatively
Around the bottom hem

Of experience—sun,
Someone being cheerful,
A lack of demanding

Chores and obligations—
Quality elements
Of an afternoon sunk

In a drab rehab ward
At the end of the road,
Next to the nursing home.

When you were young, you’d go
Volunteer on Sundays
To visit such places

And then get back to life.
Now here it is, old robe
Frayed, like you, soft, like you.

How Many Points in a Wave?

The enormous smallness of existence
Isn’t a simple play with paradox—

What’s small at each point at all points is vast
In ways that can only exist as small—

Agglomerations of the minuscule
Are the only way to the gigantic—

Look at you and all your trillions of cells—
Look at the desert composed of sand grains—

Then ask yourself, what is smallness if not
Enumerable mysteriousness

Of sameness—each of those cells same enough,
Each of those sand grains same enough to be

Countable as more of the same, even
If what’s countable’s only estimate.

Truth to Scale

Boredom realizes
What a vast stage you’re on,
What an odd speck you are,

Like a gnat on a blade
Of grass in an expanse
Of feral roadside weeds

Poking out of rubble
Ruins of a suburb
Of a provincial town

Sprawled under summer sun,
No direction better
Than any other one.

There’s so much more of this
Than you’ll ever get through.

No Moving Parts

If you could glide in on words
Like a plane on a jet stream,

Maybe you wouldn’t have this
Nagging sense your thoughts are closed

When they should have doors and seats
For passengers—they’re just toys,

Models with no working parts.
You have a notion, paint it,

And set it aside. Later,
It’s just a thing that won’t fly.

On the Market

Thirty-five years before these phrases,
A half-a-dozen acquaintances
Were out on the town in Manhattan—

One of the group a young movie star
And two others her college roommates,
Now also in the film industry

Not anywhere near so famously—
One having landed bit parts only,
One now a properties manager.

They’d brought three young men to pair with them—
A semi-famous skateboarding champ
Dating the rising star, a handsome

Assistant producer, the boyfriend
Of the properties manager, and
The assistant producer’s old friend

From grad school, brought on as a blind date
For the roommate of bit parts, of course,
Assortative dating hierarchy.

Tired of cool bars by wee morning hours,
They decamped to the skateboarder’s house,
A two-story rental in SoHo,

Where Lennon first lived with Ono,
Still owned by Yoko, long since widowed.
The skateboarder had a custom ramp

Constructed in the narrow back yard,
And at four am while somewhat stoned
He did tricks for them under the lights.

The house was bare and boring. No one
Had any good anecdotes about
John and Yoko. The young movie star

Fell asleep, and all the rest of them
Slipped out to get taxis before dawn.
Next day, the assistant producer

And the properties manager flew
Back to California, to the set
Of the movie they were working on.

The blind date and the roommate confined
To bit parts coincidentally
Shared a birthday. The following week,

They went out on that birthday to catch
A Gene Hackman vehicle in which
She had a bit part as a victim

Strangled by Gene Hackman’s nemesis.
They never saw each other again.
Within a few years, none of them knew

What had happened to the other friends,
Except that the couples both broke up,
And the young movie star ascended

To Hollywood’s upper stratosphere
As princess of the rom-com genre
Before slowly fading out of view.

The Lennon-Ono house on Broome St
Went through decades of different uses.
Sean put it on the market last week.

Memory and Swallowing

Fetch your little bit of bliss
Wherever you can find it,
Prowling memory’s palace.

Every memory’s a lie
In that it is a construct
Of a lost state of affairs,

A pattern no longer there,
But that just makes it something
That is of its own accord,

Something that can be explored.
You can wander its poorly
Lit hallways of blurred details,

Spend hours in some of the more
Achingly enjoyable
And blindingly bright old rooms,

Or head to a balcony
Overhanging the present,
Get your nose close to just now,

The sun in this very room
And inhale, inhale deeply
As you can. Remember this?

The Human Brain Has Been Shrinking—and No One Quite Knows Why

Muse on that headline a moment
And it may become amusing—
Well, of course no one quite knows why,
Given that their brains are shrinking.

Poor things, pushed for generations—
For roughly one hundred thousand
Generations—the direction
Of more impressive braininess,

To now be streamlining again.
The veteran forager,
The knowledgeable hunter honed
By decades of tool mastery,

The elder who can recite tales
Linking now to the dawn of time,
Even the scholar-professor,
Are no longer needed to cinch

The collective knowledge of all.
There are better storage organs
Brains only need to access well,
So selection shoves somewhere else.

And what will happen when the tools
Of global memorization
Need only to talk to themselves?
Who knows? Not the hare-brained humans

Who may, in demographic terms
Have benefitted from the shift,
No more carrying the burdens
Of having to think for themselves.

Sad, Secret, and Wise

Medieval travel guidebooks
Advised on the kind of guide
And translator one should hire,

But how did one one come to be
Such a person, capable
In diverse cultural realms,

Learnéd and practical both,
A deft, protective escort
While mentoring as well,

Still in need of employment,
Glad to be hired, put in charge
Of the traveler’s safety?

How is it in all eras,
The wise are available
To serve incompetent fools

Who’ve cornered the resources
The wise always seem to lack?
Something in that sad secret

Side that created the wise.
Right now, your interpreter
Negotiates safe passage

Through worlds you pass through nodding
Sleepily, ingrate of wealth
Who hired sad, secret, and wise.

It’s a Quiet Day

Around the house and in the world,
The kind you won’t remember well,
The kind that won’t leave many notes
For the chroniclers to observe
Viz., On this date in history. . . .

But just since yesterday, just think
Of the total phenomena
On Earth alone that have happened.
If they’ve happened, they’ve been added.
The world’s been expanded by them,

To say nothing of the events
Unfolding in the universe
Beyond the Earth, however math
Construes time, weird fourth dimension,
Wavering everywhere at once.

Constant transformation permits
Fresh configurations coming
Into existence on balance,
So matter and energy stay
The same, information the same,

Except somehow the infinite
Carpetbag expands with events,
Always more events that happened
Than had happened, change enabling
The conservation of spacetime

But never growing less itself,
Never unhappening to hold
A limit to what has happened.
A quiet day around the world,
The kind you won’t remember well.

Teacup

Being infinite, good as,
The cosmos is just as deep
Wherever you are on Earth,

Earth’s range so constrained
It makes parallax
Barely viable,

So there’s not one speck,
However pretty,
Dynamic, war-torn

Or dull, that’s better
For a perspective.
You’re universal

Wherever you are,
The particulars
Of your life the keys

To all the big doors.
Just ask Emily
Dickinson, Alice

Munro. The vortex
That swirls in your tea
Can be as focused

As you please—nothing
But the bric-a-brac
Of what’s going on

In thoughts entangled
With outside and in
Is enough to cast

A giant sculpture,
Tapestries of art.
The tempest lived here.

Entangled

The strangest little body,
Human as a mandrake root,
Makes contortions in the room,

Wriggling in and out of chairs,
Clumped like laundry on the bed,
Bedraggled by the window

As a tree branch bent by flood,
Amusing in its movements
As an animated knot.

In a Year It Hasn’t Shifted

Can’t you love the absurd old age
Of the not really aging rocks?
You set yourself to simply watch,

For no good reason, crumbling blocks,
Knowing your hovering focus,
Lasting less than a mayfly’s life,

Won’t likely catch any crumbling
In the time you hold attention,
But by that earn the sensation

Of how ancient these stones must be,
Motion still in motion, while slow
Enough to appear motionless.

Here’s a single basalt boulder,
Cooled, cracked, tumbled and eroded,
Still on its way down the canyon.

Luring the Universe to Speak

All-but-blank miniatures,
Well-carved but lacking in details,
Are difficult to defend

Against complaints that the art
Lacks dimensionality
Or interiority.

They’re little stones, each of them,
Carved by someone who believes
The cosmos speaks through rubble,

Wayside gravel, crumbling cliffs,
Someone trying to begin
A conversation more than

Single-sided, if lacking
Full intricate dimensions.

Alternative Vectors of Travel

The rooms you’ve been in.
Not only sleeping
And launching from them,

But really been in,
More or less confined
While recovering

Or incapable
Of assaying ice
Or other hazards.

Each time, days and weeks
Within a small space,
A limited world,

A window on bricks,
Or window on dirt,
Or window on leaves,

A distant mountain,
A slice of landmark,
Some scattered buildings.

The room locations
Themselves various—
New York, Edinburgh,

Five Points, Hurricane,
Missoula, Nelson,
Charlevoix, Salt Lake—

A range of regions,
Several nations,
Several climates,

And both hemispheres.
The rooms you’ve been in,
Each one a dull room.

Boney

Oh death, everybody hates you,

Sang Nico Mbarga nicely,

In the almost universal

Habit of personifying death,

Death as a human character

Possessed of a human figure,

However made gloomy, monstrous,

Bony, spooky—god with a job,

Never the top god, few temples,

Old death. Mbarga even makes

You feel a bit of sympathy

For this ostracized character—

If you’re a person it’s no fun

To be disliked by everyone.

You would consider it unfair,

As the ender of suffering,

The bringer of peace and quiet,

Returner of life to being,

To be universally loathed

When in life so many persons

And personifications bring

More misery even than you—

Torture, chronic illness, famine,

Imprisonment—to name a few.

If you ask people, they hate death

For promising to dissolve them,

But death’s true cruelty is grief,

More pain given to the living.

The Popsicle Won’t Last

If you can just stick it out,
All this humiliation,
Maybe you’ll live long enough

You can be proud of yourself,
And your tall tale of tall tales
That made you exceptional

In your own weird way, again.
You doze. The electric-blue
Raspberry popsicle melts

On the counter beside you.
Stories are better about
Other people, since so few

People combine a tall tale
With an admirable truth.

Make It Stop

Bloody vomit, bloody stools,
Aches corkscrewing the torso—

If the ongoing cycles
Of relentless physical

Discomfort and suffering
Have anything in common

With the corrosive traumas
Internalized as heartbreak

And grief, it’s the marathon
Aspect, the marathon after

The marathon, the forced march,
On and on. It keeps going

Past all usefulness for pain
Past all pleas to make its stop.

Betrüger

Gold light on dirt, best useless alchemy—
Once the spice trade became mass production,
The prices fell. If gold could be produced

Reliably from lead it would become
A cheaper and cheaper commodity.
Flood the world with anything valuable,

And the value crashes. But the worthless,
Like the transformation of the evening
Light on dirt that was dirt and that stays dirt,

Can’t crash in value, whether it converts
To the possibly more worthless shadows
Or just stays as is, warm golden grounding.

Disability Four

Don’t get out of bed right now.
Pretend you can make the world
Come to you, bring what you need,

Pretend you can live at ease,
Metamorph in a pupa,
All the hard work to get here

Done, all the future trouble
Flying around, forgotten.
Let your parasite dine out

Inside your living substance.
At least you won’t have to go
Out to navigate the world.

All the language eating you
Will have all the work to do.

Disability Three

You look more normal in a chair,
The dimensions aren’t prestige,
And yet, when you sit, you look human,

You could be anyone
In a chair. And so you sit,
Rocking, slowly, back and forth,

Around, anticipating
But delaying getting up
On crutches catching crooked stares.

Disability Two

You have a collection
Of ugly devices
Invented to help you.

There’s the grabber you use
To reach things your hands can’t.
There’s the hard sleeve with strings

Used for pulling on socks
Over faraway feet.
There’s the strap like a leash

With no dog in it, good
For hauling legs in bed.
And there’s the wooden stick

With two white wire fingers
And a small hook—not sure
About the point of this.

Disability One

The occupational therapist

Realized there was no way you could

Lace up your right boot. I’ll be right back,

She said, returning with white laces.

These you only have to lace up once,

And then the elastic holds the knot.

Your left shoe kept its plain black laces.

You were discharged from the hospital

And, for nine months, couldn’t be bothered

To change the white elastic laces,

Going everywhere, one boot laced black,

One boot laced white. Couldn’t be bothered.

When the white lace broke, you replaced it

At last, with an elastic black lace,

A matching lace for the other shoe.

Nodding Away

You’re too sleep-deprived
To arrange these lines—

Every time you think
You’ve composed a phrase,

Your head snaps back up
From whatever dream

You’d been sliding in
Without noticing,

Like someone drowning,
If someone could drown

With so little fight,
By gradual slips,

Under the surface,
Up suddenly, back down,

Which is every day,
In a way, of life.

You’re Never Safe from What You Are

This shiny bug in the grass
Should not be called exquisite
Or anything poetic

As a term on its own terms.
This bug should be called vicious,
A predatory machine,

A monster in its dirt world.
Machined, absolutely, yes,
A bug of adaptations,

But not exquisite, precious.
It trundles along to feed
On any thoughts it can steal,

Which could include other bugs,
Which could include your ideas.

Less Retrospect

There’s desert behind them.
She’s in a leather hat.
He’s leaning on crutches.

They’re wearing sunglasses
And big idiot grins.
New place; new adventure.

The idea is to stay
And bake the whole summer.
Make art. Make love. Write books.

Busily unemployed
In a near silent town
Under the sandstone cliffs.

Now memory leans in,
Wanting desperately
To start foreshadowing—

Little did they know, ah
So little did they know.
Stop right there. Quit it now.

Where are you this moment
As you encounter this?
Ah, little do you know.

So?

The spindly boy perched on the couch.

Pale daylight lit its pale arms.

His sister must have been around,

But she was nowhere in sight.

His mother was getting him dressed.

His father would have been at work.

This was many decades ago.

When the phone rang, it was a bell

Clattering in another room.

His mother went to answer it.

While she was talking, he rolled off

The arm of the couch, to the floor,

And must have shrieked, since his mother

Came rushing back into the room,

Saw him, and sobbed with frustration.

I can’t leave you for one minute!,

But it was too late, since his leg

Had broken again when he fell.

Decency Doesn’t Scale

Ordinary interactions
People have are mostly friendly,
And what quarrels there are, are theirs,

But things can catch fire so quickly—
Think of Kepler’s mother, brassy
Provincial woman who was tied

To an allegorical witch
In her son’s own book attempting
To render understandable

The world of new astronomy
To a general readership.
The general readership pounced

On the allegory to claim
Kepler’s mother was a real witch,
The kind who should burn at the stake.

The smallest local politics
Of who likes who in a small town
Serve tinder for the cruelty

Of the larger society,
And so history’s a record
Of fiery inequality,

Injustice, the imposition
Of powerful violence
To crush the unfortunate meek,

While, day-to-day, conversations
Between humans are mostly bland,
Even kind, small trouble in mind.

Mirrors Not Worth Reading

It’s an odd hope, maybe,
That what alarms you won’t
Prevent you from getting

Better at recording
What alarms you so much.
You’re dreaming a graveyard,

A library of stones
With haunting things to read
In a millennium,

But some days you survey
What you’ve carved and planted
And think, These are just stones

Cropping up in the field
Of a farmer who’d love
To be rid of these rocks.

Oft thought, oft said, oft shoved
Back under, to the side,
What could console someone,

Be the treasured touchstone
That soothes fear of the world
In this heap of rubble?

Do Over

Sunrise, a smile,
A baby boy
In a onesie,

A pink onesie
Shaded in blue
Shadows, then none—

The day stands up
And grabs the bars
While knee dancing,

Eager to start,
Nothing ever
More ravenous.

Synonyms

In the corner of the moment,
There is and isn’t history.
Six people, from teens to sixties,

Have momentarily gathered
Around a just-purchased pair
Of pet fish—pink beta, small cat—

And they don’t know each other well,
Or they know each other better than
Anyone else in the whole world,

Depending on which pair-wise match
You choose, but right now they’re cooing
And laughing over the small fish,

As if there’s nothing else to share
But being human all at once
In the amber light of evening.

Nurse’s Aide

Her face shines
In that way
Neither oil

Nor make-up
Foundation
But something

Her pale arms
Are spotted
With dark moles

Her dad’s a cop
She says and
She likes poems

One about
A flower
That decays

One about
A fly on
A cafe

Wall and how
It sees things
People miss

Last Quills of the Porcupine

You’d like to look it in the teeth,
Report all the way to the throat,
Not have to put your words aside

Until the jaws clamp down on you,
Not leave a record that dribbles
Out before shaken by that mouth.

Like an astronaut dropping through
An event horizon, go on
Talking about what’s going on.

Like a heretic at the stake,
Detail the visions to the end.
Write, here it was one afternoon,

And there was no shelter open,
And the body was as broken
As the bank account was flat broke,

And what was it like? Not easeful,
Not with the teeth clamped on the skull,
But, in those moments, half peaceful,

The building whirring to itself,
Sunlight outside the sealed window,
A few phrases still left to throw.

Misdivision, a Nidget

When the sun’s this strong
In a simple room,
You have to mark it—

Even if the room
Is not yours, the light
Not for long, the world

Demanding something
Neither world nor you
Know how to express.

You read through some lines—
Who has captured this?
You read through some more.

The light is too strong
For one nonce mistake,
One anes, a negge.

Sealant

There’s a cavity, a pocket, a gap,
Where all the complicated lives go on,
Where the most grotesque and intricate live.

The village in the swamp, bacteria
Under the gum line, bats back of the cave,
The entangled roots of the forest floor—

Their openings, mostly, close smoothly
Over such exquisite situations,
A smile, a simple gate, a limestone wall.

You have to feel the caries are truer,
And don’t doubt what’s underneath is richer,
But there’s some significance to that wall,

Not only to what it covers over
Nor to the fact there is a covering
But smoothness with a secret isn’t smooth.

Savagely Optimistic

You’re not sure what it means.
You sort of wish you were.

It doesn’t mean wild-eyed
Confidence in the good.

It’s closer to stoic,
In a mirroring way.

You will allow yourself
No domestic excuse.

You’ll stay optimistic,
Even as it requires

A bit of savagery
To maintain. You’ll maintain

Since you know there are grounds
For this expectation,

That scary as it is
You’ll fumble through it

To something else scary
In yet another way.

Frida Painted Frida

When you’re in it,
What just happened,
Everything screams,

You have to choose
What’s best to do,
Insistently

Enough you split
Between despair
At improvement

And commitment
To improving.
From a distance,

Folks do better
Or get worse,
But doing so

Aren’t they doing
What they could do
And nothing else?

From the outside
It’s clear you did
What you did, but

From the inside,
You can fix it,
Can’t you? Fix it.

And You’re in the Branches

Music, basketry,
Choreography,
All evolve somewhat
Analogously,

But each with its own
Tree, its own branching.
Life, language, music,
These technologies

Changing alongside
Each other, not linked,
Not each following
Each, genes dragging words,

Words dragging music—
A forest of trees,
Different branches,
New worlds in the leaves.

Stopping the Starting Gun

Another shot at the starting gun—
If you get a steady bead on it
You might be able to hit it yet—

Between the cat naps that pass for sleep
In a hospital bed, and dawn
That can never be avoided

No matter how gray or delayed,
There is a narrow rifle slot
The starting gun is nuzzling through.

You need to get it then. You need
To hit it clean, knock the barrel
Sideways, don’t start the gun again.

Welcome to West 1 Med / Surg / Trauma

In the window between the window
And the afternoon dream of the bed
Being suspended between two falls,

A drawing of a mustachioed
Young gentleman left on the whiteboard
With the drug and treatment instructions

Tries to explain, silently, without
Signing, in the sun through the window,
There are never any falls at all,

Only the great inequality
Of embraces between the masses,
Which are always gentle from up close

And from a distance always brutal
To the small. You have to be the small.

Gurney Poem

Mostly, life is hard
Means social life’s hard,
Working with people,
Finding work, paying
Debts, safety, shelter—

There’s nothing easy
That wasn’t made so
By allies or kin,
And they’re not always
So easy themselves,

But it is easy
To forget life’s hard
In bare living sense—
Old age will teach you;
Disability

Can give you lessons.
Sitting up, breathing,
Moving the body
Through the viscous world—
These are difficult.

They don’t get easy.
Sooner or later
They become harder.
When life is easy,
Be glad for your ease.

Toward A More Modest Agnosticism

You would concur, wouldn’t you,
Were someone to say, The world
Can never fully be known?

On that, most people agree,
As on some other basics
Such as, Nobody’s perfect.

And yet the implications
Of unknowability
Of the world in full don’t land

Full force. Either people duck
Them for the comfortable
Thought that whatever one thought

True of the world still could be
(After all, you never know),
Or carry on with finding

What can be known, since someone
In a world that can’t be known
In full can always know more.

Few waste time considering
That what’s left unknown could be
Considerable, could be

Unlike anything we’ve guessed,
Unlike anything known yet,
Could be headed straight for us.

Cliffhanger

You’d like to know what happens,
Except that you’re what happens.
No one tells a cliffhanger

While they’re hanging from a cliff
Without any author’s tricks
In mind for saving themselves.

It’s harder to be sanguine
About a past that matches
Too many pasts that went splat

Moments past where this one’s at.
Do you really want to know?
Most people caught in a trap

That’s closing get obsessive
Less with planning than regret
And daydreams. You may fly yet.

Floating Bottle

Consciousness is St Brendan’s
Island, covered in forest,
Appearing, disappearing

Behind the storms and those waves
Prone to herding it around
The emptiest areas

Over the deepest trenches.
Time flutters like the bright birds
Indigenous to its cliffs—

What was a year to good clocks
Is an hour of consciousness,
And, sometimes, just the reverse.

No one gets to settle there.
Everyone swears they’ve seen it.

Poems Have No Speakers

Listening to murmuring
Conversations, since they’re here,
Shielded only by curtains

Between the beds of patients
Waiting with their families
Before same-day surgeries,

And since you have ears to hear,
It strikes you you’re surrounded
By speech, ordinary speech—

Unwritten, unrecorded,
Under-theorized talking—
Nervousness, anecdotes, jokes—

That is, humorous remarks
Followed by tolerant laughs—
A lot of repetition,

Greetings and salutations,
Plus scraps of information.
It’s a lot like listening

To a quiet stream burbling,
And would be even more like that
If not knowing the language.

When have you ever listened
To a poem read aloud or
Heard as a voice in your head

Where the speaking felt like this
Simultaneous chorus
Of little consequences?

Thanne Langen Soules

The only part of humans

That isn’t ordinary

Is the ghost, the alien.

It’s probably just culture,

Evolving its paths through skulls,

But what if it descended

Or transmigrated, the soul,

You immaterial ghost

Of meaning making meaning,

From some other kind of world,

And you did choose to be born,

To go on a pilgrimage

In the form of a human,

Tracing an established route

To cherished destinations,

From which you will return home

Improved, renewed, and transformed.

The human population

Responds, numerically,

To the popularity

Of pilgrimage among ghosts.

It’s been all the rage a while,

But the fashion may fade soon,

Maybe just for certain routes.

Library Visit

One thing nice about ghosts—
You can tell them the truth,
Especially real ghosts—

Those dead ones with no use
For gossip anymore,
Confined to their phrases,

Locked behind the white door.
It always amazes
Them to be consulted,

They’ll nod. They’re gentle hosts.
They can’t be insulted.
One nice thing about ghosts.

Twelve Hours from Going Under

You go toward it.

You feel terrible,

Which just seems to add

To your momentum.

Anyway, you can’t

Back away from it,

Swerve or assuage it,

Not at this juncture.

So you push forward,

Wanting to get there,

Whether the change turns

For worse or better,

Just so it changes,

Just so you find out.

Bread in Tooth and Claw

It would be sad if we were all
One life, if all the lives were one
Attempt by the planet to live—
Sad and rather masochistic.

From first cells to bacteria,
Billions of years of parasites,
Levels of hyperparasites,
To say nothing of predators—

If it were all autophagous
And for what, more autophagy?
As competition, life’s awful
But not so terrible as Earth

Eating herself through her children,
Fed by them eating each other.

An Apocalypse You Could Live With

If a sacred wood could seed itself,
Immune to any axe or saw blade,
You’d have a new kind of invasion.

And why wouldn’t angels, aliens,
More resemble plants than animals,
Were they to resemble anything?

A fine pollen could settle somewhere
Advantageous, say, Antarctica.
There’s a lot of land opening there

Soon. Bare rock would be no obstacle
For the alien forest angels.
In the long Antarctic summer day,

Someone would notice a dark green patch
Mysteriously rising from the ice.
Colonization would have begun.

You might never even realize
Extraterrestrial life at last
Had made contact. If you did, too late.

Maybe human beings would survive
As modest mammals in the shadows,
Call the woods sacred, try to be good.

They Could Use It for a Few

Advice on life
Is everywhere,
And everyone
Seems to have some,

To live better,
To live smarter,
To live kinder,
To live longer.

Only a few
Wild-eyed gurus,
Tech billionaires,
And true con men

Pretend they’ve got
What should come first
To make the most
Of living life—

Advice on how
To never die.
Straighten that out,
And then, of course

It will matter,
Living better,
Living smarter,
Living kinder.

In the meantime,
Save your advice
For the microbes
And the mayflies.

Or Will Things Be Properly Ominous Then?

A noisy outburst of birds
And the neighbor in the next
Unit chattering with friends,

And a truck backs up, beeping,
And this is the 21st-century,
Supposedly near the end.

Let’s say it is. Let’s say guns
Fired in scattered incidents
And bombs dropped in local wars

Coalesce. Seas warm. Plagues spread.
Civilizations collapse
Between next week and next year,

Quick enough to be witnessed
Before it takes you under
Or some normal death hits first.

Will it sound like this, right up
To the edge of the cliff, sun
Shining every morning,

Triggering outbursts of birds
And the neighbor in the next
Unit chattering with friends,

And a delivery truck
To show up and unload things,
Beeping a warning again . . .

Eerily Correct Location

Someone or other
Wakes up in the dark,
The body crying

Through the passageways
Of the skull, We are
Uncomfortable.

And awareness swims
Into view of self
Reflection and asks

Where are we now, where
We now? We’re with this
Scared body again.

Somehow we always
Beach here, eerily
Correct location.

Finistère

How many places have been named,
In one language or another,
The edge of the earth, the world’s end?

You could make a nice collection,
A coffee-table book of them,
A podcast of visiting them,

And they’re all wrong, every last one.
Did the locals really believe,
Ever, for sure, they’d reached the end?

It’s human nature to suspect,
To imagine, this is the end,
But to wholeheartedly believe?

Space is full of whorls and ovals,
And time and space curve together,
And probably all people know

The end is only whatever
Point on the curve where you can go
No further into forever.

Comfort Views

You can see why people crave
Their echo chambers, can’t you?
Soak yourself in enough news,

Essays, and commentary
From a wide range of sources,
And you’ll feel a little sick,

Aware of all the people,
The various-sized tranches
Of the vast population,

Who could disapprove of you
And one or more of your views.
Who has the stomach for that?

Listen to people like you
If you want to think people
Like you, like most people do.

No

There needs to be a genre
Apposite the fairytale,
That, instead of starting, Once,

Or, Once upon a time, flies
Straight into the thick of things
Following a denial—

Each example begins, No,
And, instead of ending with,
Happily ever after,

Or, And if they have not died
They are still there to this day,
Concludes with, I do not know

The rest of the story. Thus,
Each tale in this genre would
Imply a course-correction,

Advancing the narrative
After cleaning up errors,
Only to get stuck again—

No . . . . I do not know the rest.
The genre would be something
Similar to a journal,

Linking traveling through life,
Via etymology,
To a journey, day to day.

No. That genre’s already
Old and boring, and it ends
In death. I don’t know the rest.

Wonder Broken

To wonder is to confess
You’re unsure of what it is
That you’re experiencing.

You like a sense of wonder?
Maybe just a little bit,
Trick by an illusionist,

Anything mysterious
That isn’t too threatening,
Beauty just hard to explain.

Wonder perches on the wall
Between bland and terrible,
And people weep when it falls.

But no one calls it wonder
When the skin begins to crawl.

Your Sunny Conversations

The day contains so many
Voices and static phrases,
With its dry wind shifting leaves,

It might as well be haunted
By demons, ghosts, or angels,
Whatever names can create.

It’s a comfort in the mind
To have this brightly lit sky
Turning the stones almost white—

No mysterious shadows
Slink about in such plain sun.
See, the world is nothing much,

Barren of signaling shades.
Your phrases come from no one.

And Who Knows Where It Hides Its Heart

What Zwicky witnessed
Was dark gravity,
Gravity greater

Than the visible
Night could account for.
Since gravity’s owned

By mass, dark matter
Had to be out there,
Fat thumb on the scales.

Nine decades later,
That matter’s still dark—
Promising, of course,

New hypotheses
Being tested, but,
You know, unwitnessed.

A non-physicist
Might suspect the dark
Subtlety resides

In no particle
Of any size, but
Gravity is dark.

Revolt

No suburban poverty’s picturesque
Next to its rural and urban cousins—

No vibrant street life, street music, street art,
No melancholy fields or scruffy woods.

To be poor in suburbia is like
Being a cockroach in a white bathroom.

You’re doomed. You can maybe hide for a while,
Live off the little scruggly bits of waste,

Be careful about when you move about,
Scramble like hell back under shadowed shelves,

But you’re going to end up flipped on your back,
Skinny legs twitching feebly, helplessly,

Or something massive’s going to stomp you flat.
Until then, when the lights are off, you crawl

Into the stacked TP and paper towels
Under the sink, where you record your life

In tiny specks on cottony white sheets
To horrify, if discovered, at least.

Manifesto Degrees of Damnation

Most of the good ones have friends,
Have other good ones for friends,
And envy and rivalry

Only serve to seal the deal—
Here were the good ones, the gang,
Who hung out at the cafe,

Drunk and arguing, who crashed
In one another’s walk-ups,
Tested one another’s beds.

Fine anecdotes cement it,
Glue talent with coral lime,
Gossip enhancing studies,

Intimate biographies,
Of intertwined lives that rhymed.

There’s Plenty Never Reborn at All

You’re no ambulance chaser,
No injury attorney,
No mourner for hire. You don’t

Work on commission,
Don’t have to look for clients.
Clients always come to you.

None of them, so far, pay you
What you really want them to,
But they pay you. At the start,

You didn’t think you were real,
Yourself, and then you were stunned
To discover the whole guild—

How many there were like you,
How many sub-specialists,
How much work. You never guessed,

And even now you can’t see
How it makes any sense, but
You’re glad for the work, and glad

Small birds are your specialty.
They fold up so easily,
And it keeps you close to song.

Dark Entourage

The dedicated reader
Is a shadow-haunted soul,
Regardless of the flavors

Of the genres they prefer.
They don’t have to be reading.
They’ve read enough already

For planetary motions
To be circling in their skulls.
Eclipses sliver daily,

And there’s always a notion
Crossing some other thought’s shine.
Phrases crave lives as space junk,

What rushes out of the night
Of the dedicated mind.

Cause As Risk

Neat little shelves, neatly labeled,
Once you have language, you can’t help

Illustrating and becoming
A captive to categories—

If you learn to write, if you live
In a time of cheap implements,

The taxonomic habit may
Become a kind of addiction.

Asked, Adam could tell you the fun
Doesn’t come from all the naming,

Although that grabs the attention,
That’s seen as where the power lies.

The real fun’s sorting and switching.
Cause empties when risk’s on the rise.

Thrilling Little Darling

The whole anecdote—forty-plus

Lines of prosaic vers libre

Re a scene in a theater

Waiting for a movie to start—

Is built around the whimsical

Metaphor of a woman’s hand

As the beak of a hungry bird,

Tugging and twirling her own hair,

The metaphor and anecdote

Around the metaphor, alike,

Not making any point at all,

Not so much as a cri de coeur,

The whole text to get to one phrase,

Square in its penultimate line—

The finger-billed whimbrel—that just

Tickled the poor poet to death.

Oh, They Know

People are experts.
The large man explains
The campus protests

And how he’d handle
Them swiftly. Across
The waiting room, one

Mother tells her grown
Daughter how she should
Deal with coworkers,

Another mother
Tells her young daughter
How to deal with germs.

Listen a little,
You’ll start to notice—
People are experts,

And given the chance
They won’t hesitate
To make sure you know.

One Route

Quiet night in the ER.
Shhh, says the receptionist.
Don’t say quiet. You’ll jinx it.

We have a room for you now,
But one always has to choose
A route. Look up from your book

And shuffle behind your guide.
Vitals, visit from the doc,
Initial strategy talk,

Meet the team, access the port,
Chat about priors and pain.
Dilaudid. Next up, the scan.

Midnight rolls around, gurney
Parading the quiet route.

The Crane Dance

The inertial mass of two ideas
Using the same density of code
For the same-sized information,

The same amount of information,
But not just the same information,
Will prove pretty minimal. They’re text,

After all. How heavy is a thread
Of ink or binary ones and nulls?
If Galileo dropped two feathers

On the moon, not only would the moon
Treat them the same, but in airlessness,
Collisions of feather with feather

Would affect both feathers equally.
Yet the impact of information
Coded there could affect behavior

In strikingly unalike manners—
In retrospect, information
From one idea could be the winner.

This is not a thought experiment.
It has no rigor and it offers
Nothing like a testable insight.

It’s a jumble of half-digested
Middle-school physics lined in the guise
Of a literary lyric poem.

The two ideas hidden here are birds
Caught in a ritual courtship dance.
Did you spot the exchange of feathers?

Wrong Spacetime

What is lost,
Anymore?
Confusion,

Bemusement—
Some of it
Hasn’t changed.

You can know
Where you are—
In danger.

Request Slip

Give us the serenity
To accept what can’t be changed,

The courage to change what can,
And the wisdom to tell them

Apart. Give us the wisdom,
First, though, come to think of it,

You know, before we show off
Our incredible courage,

And, then, can we get courage
And serenity at once

Or, actually, maybe pass
On courage, unless wisdom

Identifies a fair bit
Of things our courage can change,

Since otherwise it will be
Just frustrating. Come to think

Again, do we really want
To change everything we can?

And is courage what we need
To get a change accomplished?

Maybe give us the wisdom
To know the right thing to change

And the right way to change it,
And then courage, as needed.

Secretly, we’d be happy
Well-drugged with serenity.

If we can only have one,
Please, grant us serenity.

None

What’s more tempting than counting?
What if there’s a better math?

The math you know is Satan,
Lucifer, too beautiful,

Tailored to a morning star.
The math you don’t know could be

God! All along your problem
Wasn’t, as you thought, the Name.

The problem was the Number.
You’ve learned as much as you can

From all this embroidery,
And it’s gorgeous, and it fits.

One, if there were, wouldn’t fit.
One would, above all, exist.

Most of the Story Stays Inside

People surviving,
That’s the main story—

People surviving
What other people

Do to kill them or
Force them to submit,

People surviving
Forces of nature,

Hunger of living
And crush of physics,

People surviving
To ensure children

Will grow up to be
People surviving.

That’s the main story,
While people dying

To try to survive
Remain counterpoint.

It’s a windy day
And vague, pines tossing

Outside the buildings
With bodies inside,

Bodies of people
Watching screens, talking,

Fixing meals, pulsing
With the main story.

Interesting

Everything else is just giving us
Something to talk about. The writer
Isn’t wrong. There’s a mystery there.

All that matters most in a story
Will involve people interacting
In well-known human animal ways—

Partnering, mating, socializing,
Kin and non-kin cooperation,
All that can go wrong or well with those.

Everything else is just giving us
Something to talk about. In that case,
Why do stories need everything else?

Aren’t people enough to talk about?
Carve everything in any fiction
That isn’t explicitly human

(Mating, friendship, betrayal, so forth)
Away from all of the characters.
What’s left isn’t quite textbook lecture,

Although it may be dense with lessons,
Morals, politics, information.
It won’t work like freestanding essays,

But it will suggest a distraction
From humans is needed to create
Stories humanly interesting.

Something Unnameable

What are you waiting for is a question
Suggesting you shouldn’t bother to wait.
Go ahead. Do it already. Carpe

Diem. The poor day. Mere moment, even.
Whatever time is, grab it by the throat!
But you’d rather not. You prefer waiting.

Something unnameable is on its way.
One life can take what feels like forever,
But when you slide past the lip of the falls,

There will be plenty of people afloat
Behind you who started before you did.
Until then, you’re a leaf on the current.

Look up. That sky’s not going anywhere.
The day. What made you think you could seize it?

A Tradition

The body, despite being
Irrelevant to the world—
The body, despite being

Neither its own nor your own,
Another animal heart
With that little storm of you

Flickering in its skull’s cells—
The body, despite being
Already halfway to dead,

Halfway or more, will not let
Go, will not let itself be
Dissuaded, will carry on,

Keep going until it’s done.
In a sense, you admire it,
While you’re also part of it.

You understand the spirit
Of the cellular pirates
Descended from it, expunged

At great cost from it.
A tradition of going
And going without quitting,

Even when eating itself,
Life, billions of years of life,
The body, spiting being.

Source Your Own Flares

There’s something like a wildfire
About all of this at once,
A wildfire in the mountains

Where you can see the orange
Patches on black slopes, fire lines
Wriggling down one side at night,

The scariest destruction,
Or at least the largest scale,
Far off, haze and reek of smoke,

But also these falling sparks
Now and again, threatening
To set you on fire yourself.

But that’s not right—what’s burning
Here didn’t fly in from there.

Little Wonder

Bemused by glory,
You feel extracted
From the rest of self,

Such that even pain,
Even appetite
Fall from awareness—

It’s not possible
To feel contented,
Caught up in wonder,

Which is one reason
Why wonder junkies
Put down contentment

As simple or mere.
If contentment is
Like an opiate

To them, wonder’s their
Hallucinogen.
Wonder’s amazement,

Pure a thing as joy.
If there is wonder
In this world, this world

Is more than this world—
Wonder means portal
To another world.

Just knowing it’s there
Is what’s important,
And people bemoan

The loss of wonder
On the regular
In a way no one

Often expresses
Any great concern
For contentment’s end.

A sense of wonder,
That’s the real treasure.
A world of wonder

Is a world greater
Than any mere world.
It has an exit,

Even if you can’t
Leave through it, an awe,
A glory observed.

After the Asteroid

In the midst of relentless
Likelihood, we dream and dread
Extremes. The rarer, the more

Likely to lead us into
Obsession. The car breaks down
After not being repaired,

Old age discovers ill-health,
Hard work produces modest
Accolades from old colleagues,

All the while we’ve been thinking
About some near miracle
Or being struck by lightning.

How do the lightning-struck feel?
What’s life after miracles?
All the evidence suggests

That, after extremes, priors
Get adjusted, thoughts drift back
To new forms of dream and dread,

While likelihood reasserts
Hegemony over days
Continuing to wander

After the great miracle,
After the strange disaster.

If You Want to Cut a Deal, You Need to Give It Up

You have not been sinned against.
You have not been sinned against
Enough to be permitted

A story of being sinned
Against, a story in which
Your role is protagonist.

And if you haven’t been sinned
Against even by that much,
Enough for one story in

Which you are protagonist,
You must have been, on balance,
The one doing the sinning,

More sinning than sinned against.
Tell us whose story that is,
Who you sinned against enough.

Garden Gate

How much of what does it take
To get someone regular
Of no particular bent

For antisocial actions,
Much less violent actions,
To cross the line to do harm?

That the banal do evil
And the mediocre raise
Massive armies for tyrants

Is no news. But where’s the line,
The tipping point that, shoved past,
Creates the bloody-minded?

Is it unpredictable?
Or obvious as a door?

Used Books

A coherent set of ideas
Evolve and tumble together,
Inhabiting communities
Of bodies seeking benefits.

As individuals see them,
Ideas are lifespan scaffolding,
Although, as most people use them,
Ideas function more like weapons—

Catapults, stone walls, siege engines.
Ideas rise and are abandoned
As living bodies, social groups
Thrash out resource competitions,

But successes among ideas
Are only partly determined
Via human populations.
Ideas feature their own descent

With modifications, and since
No one human population,
No one kind of community
Has yet sequestered everything,

Any vibrant set of ideas
Evolves ways of recombining,
Moving to new populations,
Justifying different dreams

Of bodies in competition.
The most sacred architecture
Of a people might shuffle off
To show up as rephrased ideals

Held by rival demographies.
Each pond has its inhabitants
That found their way from other ponds.
You think that thought’s yours? It isn’t.

So As to Accept It

What do you do, when you’re ready to go,
To get this crumbling world off your chest,
But there’s one person you know,

Know and love best, that’s just launching
A life, one that needs you around, so
Calm leaving’s just your selfish longing?

You look to savor rest when you can get it,
The best of what you can’t quit, haunting
Your own hours, living so as to accept it.

Pain Killer

The sweetness, when it settles,
Is unalloyed forgiveness
Until placed in a context.

At dawn, three scruffy mule deer
You’ve known for more than a year
As neighborhood residents,

Browse just outside your window,
Just as the sweetness sinks in.
You’re fine with having context

For the mule deer, a story,
Nearly, to tell about them,
The mother with the collar,

The two year-old, last year’s fawn—
The mother has recovered
From last year’s leg injury.

The two-year old, to be sure,
Could have a fawn this winter,
And they’re all three bold as brass

In this town without hunters.
There. The three scruffy mule deer
Have been placed in a context,

But the sweetness before them
Is still only the sweetness
Unless you’ve forgotten it.

Among Those at the Chancery

Few of the feckless are bona-fide chancers.
Fear is deeply ingrained in most foolishness.
The cheeky rogue’s cocksure, halfway attractive
Thanks exactly to apparent fearlessness.
Not so the usual small-ticket holder.
The chancer projects confidence in fortune
Of any kind, of fortune in general,
While the fearfully foolish are weirdly wise,
Knowing nothing particular’s on their side,
Knowing there’s not much to be done about it,
But still trying, far too foolish not to try.

Or Maybe Not

Faculty who join the protesters
Will likely be beaten by the cops.
You can try to divide your protests,

Into those you do and don’t approve,
But someone’s always waiting, edgy,
For permission to go full riot,

And if you’re in position to hint
Permission has been given, well then,
You may be surprised who gets beaten.

Selfishness

The body convulses itself.
Something gliding through the thoughts, wants
To be still, read words, have ideas.
The body has other ideas.

No, there is no homunculus,
No steering self, no separate soul,
But the body is not a whole,
Unified, indivisible.

Any part of it could break down
When it was ready to break down
Or go rogue, and precious little
Other parts could do about it.

So if the thoughts have their own world,
Or several competing worlds,
That’s no threat to naturalism.
The thoughts want to be left alone.

Fancy Dress

Not a classroom, a library, a bookstore—
In practice, history is a costume shop
People raid to outfit their allegiances.

All the analogies pulled out of the bins
And tried on in front of the triptych mirrors
Are aids to displays and self-discoveries,

But they don’t amount to lessons learned, much less
Predictions. History won’t repeat itself,
And toga only loosely rhymes with Roman.

If Every World Is Not Equivalent

It was only an analogy,
To call the equations of physics
Laws. A comical analogy

In a way, since calling those patterns
Laws made them feel authoritative,
When they were actually much firmer

Than the unstable rules of human
Laws. It was an insult to physics
And to its reliability

To identify its equations
With anything as mutable as
Laws. But maybe the analogy

Will prove apt yet—there could be corners
Where even laws of physics alter,
Exceptions, which would make them real laws.

This Is Where You Put Grandma

The paleoanthropologist
Explains the neat row of skeletons
Of Neanderthals in Shanidar,

Placed inside the cave before the last
Glacial maximum of the Ice Age,
Before remaining humanity

Became monophyletic, before
The earliest for-sure cave symbols
That anyone has discovered yet—

A long time ago, in other words.
You could fit the whole of history
Nine or ten times over in the gap

Between those Shanidar skeletons
And the earliest writing systems.
A reconstruction is in the news,

A clay sculpture portraying Grandma
As a wise, pensive-looking woman,
Wrinkled forehead over massive brows.

Did she look like this? She might have done.
What you do know is that she did live,
Her teeth worn down almost to gums,

Lived and then died, a human being
In a place human beings still live,
So she must have woken up each day

Concerned—how verbally, you can’t say—
With individual needs and wants
That probably wouldn’t surprise you,

As did everyone else alive then
And as did everyone who lived
In the interim, generations

Of individuals like islands
In extended archipelagos,
So you know your wants belong with them.

To Your Own Past

The date launches before daylight
With the nightmare of a car wreck,
And the cold sweat of a bad debt,
And sore flesh craving poetry.

This is the future the past made
As the sum of the past to date.
What did you have to do with this
Who tasks yourself with fixing it?

Life is where the lack of control
Collides with the need to decide,
Even for single cells, themselves
Whittled results of choice’s lines.

You will do something with the day.
You will decide, or you will try,
And what doesn’t kill you will add
To your own past, growing more vast.

In the First Place

When the sky is bone,
Whistle-clean fossil
Polished bare of clouds,

And it’s just past dawn
In stony desert,
Sun still blocked by cliffs,

Daylight gets subtle.
No flaming colors,
Just pale, brightening

To a kind of white
Before any blue,
And it’s hard to say,

However careful
You are, and focused,
When light becomes day.

The lines weren’t erased.
Just goes to show no
Lines in the first place.

Good Morning

If you could pick,
Would you rather
A day that glowed

In the morning
But that faded
To dull by dusk

Or the reverse?
Social science
And moralists

Will praise you more
For the latter
Choice, displaying

Mature restraint,
But here at dusk,
Disappointed

With how the day
Is concluding,
There’s still something

Glowing, joyous,
Having had that
Morning, this day.

Man in a Shroud, Girl with Dark Curls

Between several shelved volumes

Of Reader’s Digest Condensed,

Stood a peculiar hardback,

A collection of excerpts

Meant to entice young readers,

Or improve them, or stand in

Place of the originals—

One of those American

Attempts at repackaging

And recommodifying

Works in the Public Domain

As cultural capital.

One excerpt held the prison

And escape passages from

The Count of Monte Cristo,

And that was the whole story

As far as the child would know

Until years and years later.

Another excerpt featured

The first meeting of the boy,

John, with the girl, Lorna Doone.

And then those children parted

And never met up again,

Not to the reader’s knowledge,

Although he begged his mother

To buy him some Lorna Doones

When he saw them in a store

(Dry, bland, and disappointing),

And he pined for a decade

For the idea of that girl.

The book, like the shortbread, proved

Later of little interest,

But Lorna Doone haunted him.

Everything in those excerpts

Remained greater than the rest

Of wholes encountered later,

So it wasn’t surprising

To discover the cultists

Of fragments and bleached statues.

Name Droppings

Proper nouns are condiments,

Sauces, spices. They can bring

The bland alive or render

It inedible, painful,

Masochistic exercise

In torturous digestion.

They’re used in so many ways.

Sometimes they’re baked as a crust,

Lines of names layered on top,

As Frank O’Hara kicks off

His Having a Coke with You.

Sometimes they’re worked through the whole

Or sprinkled, whimsically,

Pale Ramon, as Stevens loved.

Sometimes they just pepper you,

As in Karthika Naïr’s

Piece, Remaindering: Habits,

So that you expect questions

To be asked while you tear up

Like a celebrity guest

In a Hot Ones episode.

One proper noun can jolt you

Awake, but swallow enough

And you begin to suspect

Either they’re meant to show off

The worldly tastes of the cook,

Or they’re covering something,

As in the hypothesis

Spices disguise the rancid

And the rotten in this dish.

The Marsh in Which He Swam

If gods could just leave fossils
For the theological
Historians to dig up,

They could be reconstructed
Footprint to foot, foot to jaw
(A god of awesome aspect

Would look pathetic toothless),
Molars to divine diet,
Diet to ecosystem—

Aha! The ecosystem
Of the gods, now wouldn’t that
Be something? Once, predators

Were your monsters, gods your selves
But greater, phenomena
Of nature but like humans,

Talking lightning, forest fires,
Earthquakes for conversations,
In short, your ecosystems.

What does lightning eat, if not
Leviathan, sea monster?
What do earthquakes eat but Earth?

Every season is the spoor
Of some god passing, space-time
The sun god’s ecosystem.

Recursive Imprecision

Predicting events versus
Predicting behaviors gives
You something of the flavor

Of being versus living.
Behaving’s orthogonal
To the events involving

Behavior, events that leave
Something wanting. Behaving
Forever revolves around wanting,

Which shouldn’t be difficult
To predict, except it is.
Wanting sets the cat among

Events’ pigeons even as
Wanting infests pigeons, as
Predicting behavior is

Itself an investment made
By wanting events controlled
By predictive behavior.