Misdirection Poem

Someone opened a window
And hauled up blinds that had stayed
Always down for months and years.

The character of the day
Didn’t change in the slightest.
The character of the room

Was transformed into something
That had never existed,
Another room, another

Kind of room. And yes, this room
Was real, before and after.
A real person raised real blinds.

But it was a parable, as well—
The first, more shadowy room,
Metaphor for the unknown,

Second, open-windowed room,
Metaphor for the unknown.
Seems redundant, but it’s not.

The unknown had nothing much
To do with obfuscation,
Nor the known to do with light.

The unknown came with the day
As the day explored each room,
And the unknown never changed.

The Art of Itemizing

Lists are to literary
Culture as bacteria
Are to, well, everything else.

You can scrub your documents
And finish every to-do,
But before long lists will grow.

Search through the earliest lit—
Few poems, a great many lists.
Before you get Gilgamesh,

You get a long list of kings,
Gilgamesh one among them,
No poem yet, just an item.

Offspring of segmentation,
All rhythm’s variation.

Service Bear

A comma-lacking headline

Pings around the Internet,

Bandied by algorithms,

Feral, free of proofreading—

Bear dead after attacking

Hospitalizing man—no

Comma between attacking

And hospitalizing man.

So, after the third viewing

Of the exact same headline

On scattered aggregators,

You might think the bear attacked

An odd comic-book villain,

A one-issue B-lister,

The Hospitalizing Man!

Superman’s in hospital,

Thanks to him; whole cities are

Admitted. He’s like a plague.

He’s Hospitalizing Man.

But now a bear’s attacked him,

And it’s beyond him to send

Wildlife straight to ICU.

Man and bear both meet grim ends.

You grin an ironic grin,

Given it’s too late for you,

Already in hospital.

But maybe, if you get out,

This time you won’t have to go

Back in, thanks to the bear who

Chewed Hospitalizing Man.

Afternoon Ramble after an Invalid’s Nap

People are dying all over the place,
At every moment and in every way,
While you pursue your inexorable,

Slow approach to the same destination,
Fascinated with it, as if it were
Singular, significant, important,

When you know it’s not, particularly.
Your daughter has gone to the library
To restock her carousel of novels

In which people die all over the place
But, being fictions, can sometimes can return
To fictional life. You are staying home,

Leaving the books alone for once, dozing
And dreaming of bar charts, color-coded,
Swaying slightly, like city tower blocks

In a moderate quake, the darker stripes
Representing time spent on quiet things,
Brighter bands for hard work and adventures,

The top, muddy, purple-brown band standing
For time spent dying—a fine line for some,
A thick cross-section of core for others.

You wake with a start in afternoon light,
A spill of brilliance across the dark floors.
The bar charts all scatter. While you were out

Many people must have died, many more
Were born. This is the true tree of knowledge--
Quarreling recipes bear the same fruit.

That You Aren’t

Something should be going on right now
That you should be observing. But no.
You search around the most recent past,

Which passes for the present, the world
Within reach or at least within reach
Of the senses as the brain interprets,

And you hunt through books you have to hand,
Recent issues of journals, hoping
For something substantive to sink in.

You skim through several conflagrations
Burning online like high-steppe brush fires,
Fast, fierce, brief and scrubby. Nothing much

Going on such that you feel you should
Be observing. You’ve grown squinty-eyed
On approach to the bright light of death,

And, heavens, how you appreciate
Having been granted the long, sure, swoon,
Much as you always craved the lightning.

But there is a strange obligation
Seems to come with this sort of dying—
A something you should be observing.

The Dozy Lyric

It’s gotten into the habit
Of unscrolling straight from waking,
From whatever you were reading,
Words before you know you’re asleep.

Often it just extends a poem,
Your own or someone else’s, styled
In your head in the same manner
As original, waking text.

When you do startle back to life,
You realize the dream version
Was more vivid, had more action,
Maybe some pulpy elements,

A monster, even, in the words.
You wish could keep such monsters,
But dreamed poems remind you of fish—
The most boast-worthy get away.

And anyway it will be back,
Bizarre, and you’ll lose it again,
Doze into it, lose it again.
The way to prevent loss is death.

Nomad

Your address / Remains unnecessary, for the rain / Will find you

Some people do

Manage to stay

Dry all their lives,

Fortune’s bell curve

A tent for them,

Nicely centered,

Never caught out

Near corner stakes

Under wet flaps

Where rain leaks in.

Peaked curves serve them.

But water pools,

And canvas sags.

Tents collapse, and

The little rain

Finds everyone.

Miracle Strange

You’ve gathered your collection
Of miniature voices
Arranged in tidy boxes,

All labeled and beribboned
And stacked up in your closet,
Ready to talk when opened.

And if no one opens them,
And none of them are chosen
As internal spokespersons

For minds come to adore them,
What then? May a volcano
Belch ashes to bury them!

May a mudslide crush your house
And make their closet a tomb!
May all your tiny voices

Wait quietly in the dark
However many ages,
Until the unimagined

And unimaginable
Audience discovers them
And finds the miracle strange.

The Eye of the Forest

What do you mean, go and gone,

Exactly? That’s up to you.

The literal sense seems wrong,

Though, after contemplation.

Wouldn’t stopping be closer?

Stopping and stopped, not go, gone.

But stopping implies presence,

Just an absence of motion,

And death won’t be that either.

Vanish, vanished. Here and not.

Pick your terminology,

Appropriately or not.

The forest will shift but go

On growing as something else

Transforming into itself,

But the opening it made

In itself will not be there,

The eye will close. Close and closed.

It’s Not Your Fault You Must Find Fault

The greatest goodness you can practice
Is to never seek someone to blame,
But no human can resist that lust,

And the first response, almost always,
Is, Yes, but some people are to blame.
And then the examples, in a rush,

Beginning with the most egregious,
History’s genocidal tyrants,
Psychopathic serial killers,

Traitors, swindlers, ruthlessly scheming,
Amoral amassers of fortunes,
The architects of surveillance states,

And so on and so forth, all the fat
Volumes weighing down the shelves of whole
Libraries of the notorious.

Open and shut. But what about cause?
Doesn’t it strike you that Genghis Khan
And Stalin retain their admirers?

Or that often your blame encompasses
Heterogeneous populations
Packaged under a single label?

The Nazis, the Commies, the racists,
The fundies, the atheists, the Jews?
Maybe you believe in causation,

Responsibility, and free will,
Since you need them to justify blame.
If no one’s truly responsible,

No one freely chose, then you’re denied
The cold comfort of blame. Underneath
The surface of much metaphysics

And many moral arguments lies
The desire to protect the access
To justifiable indulgence

In blame. The philosophy follows
The lust it allows. Even knowing
As much won’t help you, though. You’ll remain

A social creature evolved to use
Blame as a means to do well in groups.
The greatest goodness will elude you.

It Means

The bargain was never really the sin,
No matter whether the artificer
Tricks and wins or has to pay in the end.

For the audience, the artificer’s
Gross indulgence serves justification
For the punishment, plus thrills by proxy.

Just watching whichever version of Faust,
The wish-fulfillment becoming unhinged,
Followed by the full horror of the cost,

That’s as much of the morality play
As any moment of contract itself.
The bargain, the great metaphor, is one

Of those cultural knots twined to attract
As much meaning-making as possible.

Collaborators

This show lists thirteen writers
For each single episode.

It would be fun if things were
That linearly related—

More creators, better show.
Sadly, not all creators

Contribute equally.
Sadly? Not all creators

Can handle co-creation.
For them there are religions

Requiring only one god.
It's curious, however,

That with both gods and stories,
One, two, or three creators

Predominate at one end,
Then it jumps straight to dozens.
 

It’s true of scientific
Peer-reviewed research as well—

One, two, or three authors, then
An explosion, scores of them.

There’s some kind of law, somehow,
Operating in the brain.

It may have nothing to do
With quality of output,

But the sociality
Of creators

Who have to work together
To make anything happen.

Ambulance, Looking Backward

Forever amazing range
Of things you can’t influence,
Much less direct and control,

Until you realize, wait,
That’s everything. So from where
Do you get the sensation

You’re interacting with things
That are responding to you?
And where is causation’s edge,

The horizon beyond which
You recognize your absence?
Somehow, some seem to do just

Fine with proprioception
And yet still feel their impact,
The strength of their decisions,

Radiates around the world.
Others sweat their social selves
But see destiny past that.

Almost all feel some small sphere
Of activity to be
Altered or governed by them.

Presumably, the body
Requires this for survival,
But it’s not your survival.

Meaningless Opportunity

A character in a novel pleads,

What does it all mean?” and another

Character is written to reply,

What do you want it to mean? You stop,

Lifting your eyes from the glowing terms.

That’s a question that’s on to something.

In the book, the focus is narrow—

The query throws chiaroscuro

Light to illuminate characters.

But you could widen the aperture.

As far as meaning, human beings

Wield all the creative power of gods.

Meanings are what you want them to mean.

But if you’re wondering why you’re still

Begging wanly, What does it all mean?

Recall you’re not the only human.

Not only can meanings be social

Inventions—they can be fought over,

Both by groups and individuals.

They can be mutually exclusive.

They can coexist in a welter

Clustered around or close to the same

Phenomena—you can make your own.

You can always make your own. You will

Always make your own. But others will

Make their own, often with vast on-ramps

To your own, interstates plowing through

Your modest, once vibrant neighborhoods

Of your locally produced meanings.

Sometimes, however, you’ll get lucky.

You’ll find yourself in a wilderness,

In some meaningless part of the world.

Do not, do not, do not, do not cry

Out for help, do not panic yourself,

Or despair at the meaninglessness.

Shrieking will give you away to those

Who will rush in with their own meanings,

Specify for you what this all means,

And steal your wilderness forever.

This is is your best opportunity

For meanings you want the world to mean.

Ask, What does it mean? Start answering.

Silt City

An unbidden damp
Attracts the fly’s crawl
Through the obvious

Decay of drowsing
Mind—obvious, but
Deeply suspenseful,

The tension between
Decay’s certainty
And the thick, weedy

Uncertainty steeped
Within the decay.
This ecosystem

Is failing—that is,
Transforming into
Some other system.

The mind no longer
Maintains its sump pumps.
The damp is rising

Through the barriers
To sink the city
Like all the cities

Sunk before—it’s time
To become one more
Lost city legend

People may seek out
For quiet visits
In snorkeling gear,

Hoping to haul up
Rich finds by the pail.
For now—moss and snails.

Drum and Bell Declare the Hour

The Drum Tower and the Bell Tower both
Impressed the hell out of Marco Polo—

The Drum Tower beat out the start of day,
And the citizens of the Khan obeyed;

The Bell Tower rang out the chimes of night,
And the citizens on the streets took flight.

The message was the same in drums or bells—
Great Khan ruled the rhythms of time itself.

But notice the Khan never pushed his luck.
Drums were never beat, bells were never struck,

When the sun stood directly overhead.
Khan never chose to put the world to bed

When the world might be tempted to say no.
When you must go, announce your choice to go.

At Thirteen

She’s fire.
She started
Microscopic,
No identity,

And grew through the phases
Decreasingly standardized
Child, pudgy infant to small soul
With her own fine characteristics,

Who else would handle a tarantula
At the same angle as her sketching pencil?
Like flames now, she changes shapes and colors daily,
And you hope that, in your absence, she consumes the world.

Desert Island WiFi

And it can be a cheerful day,
Marooned on the island of ends,
Nowhere anyone would request

By choice to spend their latter days,
The body disintegrating
But the painkillers working well,

The nurses efficient and kind
The fierce desert sun outside flat
Against the double-paned window

And virtual conversations
With old friends making a chorus
Of soul crickets and fireflies

You can actually understand,
All the rhythmic, winking seme verse.

Turned Out in the End

Run into the phrase
In media res,
And bet it refers

To the beginning
Of the narrative,
Never to the end.

Ends dangle from cliffs,
Arrive at altars,
Sigh puddled in gore,

Letting you forget
Your human life ends
In media res.

Terribly ancient
Or tragically young,
You’ll lose your focus

At some moment when
The rest of the world
Is inconclusive

And you’ll never know
The outcome of most
Of what happens then.

Things That May or May Not Work

What are the right naming words

To resolve the paradox

That lifeless language outlives

The bristlecone pines it names,

Explains, romanticizes?

A nurse sings an ancient air,

Voices an ancient compleynt

On verse, on all poetry—

I just don’t get it. It sucks.

It doesn’t mean anything.

If you’ve got something to say ,

Just say it. Poetry sucks.

Sorry. That’s just what I think.

She shrugs and scans a wristband,

Then administers the meds.

Gallium Anomaly

In a plentiful, fanatically
Conservatorial cosmos, things keep

Coming up unaccounted for, either
In the sense of seeming to be there, but

Only indirectly detectable
In the otherwise inexplicable

Behaviors of detectable neighbors,
Or, in the sense of being predicted

By formulas brilliant for predicting
All sorts of phenomena, but not this,

Whatever it is, invisible mass,
Invisible source of vast energy.

How is this? Are all things conserved or not?
Physicists confer, compare observations,

Redesign models and experiments.
The universe files all of them away.

Futillery

When the future, and perhaps
Only when the future fails
To tower capaciously,

Whether palatially thus
Or ominously, so small
You can’t pretend anymore,

The math works like calculus
As your thoughts approximate
Nearer and nearer zero

In infinitesimal
Futures, and you glimpse the line,
Area under the curve,

Cannonball’s trajectory
Of your existence as was.

Accepting the Diagnosis

Knowledge of a changed world spreads,
At first, like oil on water,
A glossy, stillish surface.

Later, either the oil burns
So that the new world turns hell,
Or waves whip up that break it

Into archipelagos
Of thick gleams within the spray,
Smaller and smaller islands.

Nothing unchanges change.
The latest dispensation
Is read into the record

Of the oceanic churn
However dispersed it grows,
However hotly it burns.

So it’s there. That knowledge is
There, but that it was of change,
Will itself be forgotten.

A Question for the After Life

Now the question uppermost,
As you dance around the door,
Seems to be, Do you believe

You’ll have anything to say
When you finally step through?
There’s a little eagerness,

Almost a nudge-nudge, wink-wink,
About those wanting to ask,
Wanting to know if you’ll try

To cross over with yourself
Intact, maybe signal back.
They remind you of minors

Outside gas-station markets,
Hoping to find an adult
Willing to take their twenty

And come back with a six pack.
You’ll get to go into Death
And ask their question for them.

Excuse me, Death, you mind
If I send a little note
Back to everyone living,

Let them know, despite it all,
That I’m still me on this side,
Except that I don’t exist?

Good Luck with Long Odds

Be funny if someone’s magic
Was just that, luck of the bad,
The bad beat, the darkest horse—

Anytime they tried to be
Sensible they succeeded
Behaviorally but failed

In terms of desired outcomes.
Things went skew-whiff and haywire,
Unless they were being fools.

But luck like that isn’t luck.
There can be no magic luck,
Since you could say that magic,

As such, eliminates luck.
And yet all imagine it.

Never Sublet to Your Dreams

Quick dreams rearranged the room
Like someone cruelly teasing
A blind tenant who was out.

You came to yourself and boom
All the dimensions were wrong—
Vertigo for a second.

Thanks to being sleep-deprived
And hospitalized, you'd let
Your sublet dreams pull this stunt

On you ten, twelve times a day.
The furnishings of your world
Didn’t seem yours anymore.

Ten times a day, you’d drift back
To where you were hanging out
With your daughter at the lake

And then you’d be back, the same
But not, no longer healthy
In any way, your daughter

Not even there. Erase that.
Startled back again. Your friends.
Weren’t they just talking to you?

The Gold Was Made of Angel

The evening angle swings around,
Beginning its consolation.

That light itself is forgiveness,
Or what forgiveness ought to be,

The weightless touch that lifts you up
The gold that’s free of all metal—

How unalloyed is that? The word,
Or the word in any language,

For gold, for golden, can’t have been
Begun as name for a metal.

Humans knew light long before gold.
The metal was the reminder,

While the forgiveness in itself,
The glow before silvered twilight,

Was the core originator,
The effortlessness of late day

That later made you claw the dirt
Craving more forgiveness from Earth.

The Empty Toolbox

Think of all the skills you have
For living, for dealing with life.

How many times have you shared tips
On how to handle this or that—

Deal with conflict, ask for help,
Not get caught in a traffic jam?

If you’re scared, there’s an industry
Of advice for every topic

And a library of efforts
From the past, deep past, deeper past,

All that eudaemonic input
For living the best kind of life,

And now here you are with your life
In hand, all that good stuff, facing

What isn’t life at all, and life
Seems suddenly irrelevant.

Scrawny Timber

The wolves of memory aren’t done hunting
The thundering heart and blood-flushed muscles
Of their prey still trying to get away.

They’re ravenous, they’re famished, they’re failures
At this essential coordination—
Look at how many of their hunts conclude

Nose to tail in the den, bellies empty,
Or, at best, half-sated on smaller game.
There are sleek, thriving, silver packs out there

Chasing the largest, darkest memories
By moonlight in the shining mountain snows
Packs that bring down the shaggy, rolling eyes

And gorge themselves on their recollections,
But this tatty pack howls and half-pretends
That maybe the forest lacks for recall,

Lacks midwinter’s trauma megafauna
So substantial any reader running with them
Could live on the marrow of emotions

The wolves were too full up to finish off.
These wolves of memory aren’t done hunting,
Won’t ever be until life’s by the throat.

A Mutant Raised on a Farming Planet

Manual labor breaks glass bones,
But you loved the smell of the world
Of tools, of wood and leather, dirt
And old machinery in barns.

Frail frame in a bar of sunlight,
You could hide out like that for hours,
Inhaling those musty hay bales
You couldn’t pitch, reading your books,

Science fiction, mostly, spaceships,
Gleaming equipment and weapons,
Summers at your grandmother’s farm,
Fantasy free of irony

As the warp speeds and hyperdrives
Easily slipped the speed of light.

After the Wind Cut the Cloud

Not all ghosts linger;                     But over the waves
Some have rushed themselves,     The air remembers
Whisked their wispy threads.

                                                        Something that seemed gone,
To delicate clouds                           Something that happened,
That traverse the air                        Behavior itself,
Like coastal towers,
                                                        Material moved.
Great as fortresses                          That it moved at all
But dissipated                                 Was all that remained
Like conversations
                                                        After anyone
Before anyone                                 Tried to be spirit
Had ever written                             As well as matter,
Or inscribed one word.
                                                        Losing the waving
You can’t be haunted                      But leaving the wave
By what isn’t here.                         Forever happened.

Future

You were downtown on a busy day,
Dodging traffic, scrutinizing
Opportunities and hubbub,

What was going on at the end
Of the street, evaluating
With an eye to efficiency,

Considering what would come next
And next after that, down the line,
All the calculations of time

Bustling along the horizon
Glimpsed in the gaps between events.
And then, a realization—

Your world would end in a few steps
And the rest would never happen.

All Possible Messages Are Equally Likely

You want the adventure, you do.
If you can just set it up right
So that you get that blurred window,

Dead in six months or in six weeks
Or, who knows, six days, but not clear,
Not certain, dying like a life within a life,

Coda, recapitulation
Of the whole pattern in the end—
It’s not hardly the ideal death,

But it’s still pretty fortunate.
You’ve been given warning and aid
And the sweet gift of certainty

Boxing the uncertainty, max
Complexity, max adventure.

The Non-Existence Experience

Light-footed, the not being
Part of anything afloat
Found the seam in the shadow

And followed the sunlit thread
Up the golden afternoon
And across the unbroken

Waves over the lake’s surface
To hover right where the warmth
Of the afternoon reached down

To create a space of calm,
Deep green lights, something dreaming
Of not dreaming or being

Where not being was content
And comforted not to be.

Mixed Signals

Another day of paradox,
Courtesy of an odd body
That aches extra, getting good news,

That feels pleasant, learning some doom.
The lab and test results at dawn
Predicted acceleration

Of coming disintegration
Just as the torso felt better
And the thoughts seemed inclined to joy.

You never were an antenna,
Never good at reading the room,
You might as well ignore this flesh,

Or, better yet, ignore the news
And concentrate on contentment.

The Simultaneous Assembly and Disassembly of People in Hospitals

It’s hard to assess this.
You can be confident
Exactly this moment,

Whether measured by clocks
Showing the same numbers
Or by a slice through waves

Of the surf called spacetime,
Someone drew their last breath
And an infant its first.

In a coincidence,
While this is on your mind,
The hospital PA

Plays the lullaby chimes
That indicate a birth
Just now. Another life

On its way to being
Another person. Go,
Child, go! Someday you may

Pass through a hospital
Again, but that person
Hasn’t developed yet,

That you that you will be,
Material wisp dragged
About by the body

You’re also becoming.
Oh! Another chime rang,
Another starter kit.

Sundowner

No macroscopic creatures patrol
These rooms where the microscopic beasts
Require constant harrying to keep

Their numbers safely scarce. The humans
Have these rooms otherwise to ourselves,
Our cotton bedding, plastic wrappers,

Chrome-polished medical equipment,
Our innumerable inventions.
The idea is to protect the sick

And injured, stabilize the symptoms,
Process the persons and release them
Sufficiently healthy for the world,

Sufficiently healthy to survive
Another go ‘round in the wide world
Where micro and macroscopic run

Rampant around a minor planet
Only exceptional, if at all,
Thanks to elaborate survival.

Back in the hospital room, there’s work
To be done, units of transfusion,
Medicines in and as solution,

And, as sunset lights the surfaces,
The thought crosses that maybe there’s more
Than the elaborate survival.

Truism

Amber, the hospital tech,

Is talking about parents

And how parenting has changed

In the past generation,

And she concludes, It’s the same

Amount of crazy, but just

In different ways. You note this,

Since it strikes you that it’s true

For all human history.

The amount of craziness

Remains the same, summed over

Every epoch and era.

The manifestations change.

Amber checks your oxygen.

The Hermitage of Nothing Much

Once, someone bought a suburb,
A large subdivision, that is,
Before anyone could hold

Any home with money down.
From the air, you couldn’t tell
How strange that neighborhood was,

Wouldn’t even guess, unless
You scrutinized streets for cars
And noticed that there were none.

Otherwise, it looked the same
As all the other looping
Necklaces, chains of fish eggs.

A gated community,
No one entered by mistake,
And the homes stayed locked and bare,

With enough security cameras
That cats from nearby houses
Could be tracked throughout the night

And any would-be squatters
Could be quickly reported
And swiftly escorted out.

Once a month, maintenance crews
Swept through the whole neighborhood
To keep it in pristine trim,

And the owner, sole haunter
And possessor of all keys,
Never slept there, but wandered

In at any hour to taste
The peculiar emptiness,
The ultimate achievement,

Sublime apotheosis
Of purest suburbia,
Hermitage of nothing much.

On Waking from a Nap at Noon

When the surge of random

Happiness cleanses you,

You can’t help but return

To the notion that joy

Is largely stochastic

Fortune, as anyhow

As suffering but not

Often humanly sourced

The way suffering is,

Something that just comes up

Like the wind or the blue

Gap in grey through which sun

Pours through, at the world’s end

Somewhere, always that

Sense of loosed awareness

Detached from most of life

And its anxious centers,

Even in a city.

You could be on a train,

People packed to the gills,

Or in a central square,

When peace overtakes you,

Like Yeats at his table,

Empty cup, open book,

In a busy London

Shop, when his body blazed

And, twenty minutes, more

Or less, it seemed so great

My happiness. Those two—

A sense of the world’s edge,

A sense of bounded time—

Are traits contentment brings

In its wake, peculiar

In being redolent

Of melancholy, both

Of them, core traits of peace.

Song Past the End

The lark rises
After the scream
Almost shyness
And starts to sing

What has happened
Happened always
And forever
And may again

Song like a kite
String flown over
The dark ravine
To start the bridge

From what happened
To what will have
A permanent
Musical link

Not In Ever Again

Someone says, It was nice to see you,
And you say, It was nice to see you,

Too, but for the first time you notice
How easily you take for granted

The simple social fact of being
Alive—Nice to see you, Yeh, you too.

The real reason death’s devastating—
No more dropping in for a visit.

Coming into Focus

It’s no good, this dying
Before dying, dying
For two different reasons,

Trying to fight off one
To get to the other,
The first one ruining

What should have been peaceful
Months before the other
Really bit down fully,

A telescoping death,
Collapsing the lenses,
And only a small patch

Of the night in focus
As the rest reels away.

The Skull Is a House

You check the crawl space under the porch,
Not keen on black widows, skunks, or snakes
But drawn by the urge to check on things.

Some day a marvel will have sprouted
From spores that are this dirt’s treasure hoard,
Why you never dig anything up—

Coins and artifacts won’t drag themselves
Into the light, but you have to wait
On life to create its own entrance.

Until then, you can’t resist checking,
The way your mother would wander out
To check the mailbox multiple times,

The way people keep refreshing screens,
Although you’re not waiting on the news,
You’re waiting on a marvel to rise

From under the ordinary world,
To contradict everything before,
And then what? Who knows. See if it grows.

Indicator

In the Book of All,
Poetry isn’t
A part of the text,

Not the main body—
Poetry is just
A small manicule,

A pointing finger
The poet has left
In the book’s margin,

Calling attention
To something
That seemed important

Or fascinating
In the Book of All—
Calling attention

To itself to point
Attention away
To yet something else.

Scribble

What survives surprises—
The egg in the latrine,
The moccasin in clay,

The rags pinned to foundlings
By desperate mothers
To identify them—

All in museums now,
With notes on provenance,
Centuries past the deaths

Of everyone who used
That latrine, wore muddy moccasins,
Was abandoned at birth.

No matter how many
Fossilized ancestors
Get dug up, it remains

The case that most records
Of human existence
Are more like the tunnels

Scooped through soil by the worms,
The worms long since vanished
But their scribbles now stone.

Gatekeeper in the Ruins

You’re the last one with a gun,
But you’re also nearly done.

You perch on top of the wall
Scanning the wreck of it all,

And you have to ask yourself,
Were things better? Back on the shelf

In cool storage, soon. Honor
Dictates you stay, until order

Returns and someone claims you.
Meanwhile, it’s something to do,

Pretending you’re the center,
That you decide who enters.

Spot the Coach

Ask someone their strategies
And advice for social scenes,
Dyadic interactions,

Or conflict resolution,
And you’re sure to discover
What they don’t do well. We learn

To cover our shortcomings.
That which we know best, we do
Poorly. That’s why we studied.

A Burning Forehead

The last of sunset lit
A heap of rumpled sheets
Like scalloped, golden dunes.
Centuries ago, Keats
Wrote an identity
Equation for beauty
As synonym for truth,

Unintentionally
Exposing the weakness
Of merely being true—
Unalloyed, truth’s stillness
Makes a barren heaven.
Unalloyed, beauty’s just
Another empty jar.

The lovers in the bed
Had shaped a humid mound
Of linens once they did
Catch up to each other.
It took sunset to turn
Beauty back to desert
Dunes glowing in dry truth.

No Such Thing As Mistaken Happiness

They had turned his face in the direction of the open window he might have seemed to have suddenly become.

Mature poets steal.

Senile poets steal

From themselves. Sometimes

You lift a good line

To convince yourself

You still remember

The distinction, still

Have a functioning

Sense of aesthetic

Proprioception.

Then you turn your head

After reading one

Image you assume

Is of a deathbed

Scene, in which the corpse

Has been turned to face

An open window,

Face the direction

Of your own open

Window, and become

All window at once.

Extraterrestrial Postcolonial

Standing alone the white walls
Stained by the waves at their base
Echo a loneliness white

Could not possibly contain,
Walls ever keep for themselves.
They share. They boom back the surf

With such force it reminds you
To take an hour to wonder
About all the empty worlds

Of sound and light, textures, smells,
But maybe nothing alive
Beyond waves chewing ruins.

Standing alone the white walls
Waiting for constellations.

To Be Dissolved into Something

Every time the pain subsides
You rush for the poetry
And wonder if this is when

Others might rush toward prayer
Or meditation cushions
Or out the door for a walk.

Capitalize clarity,
Make grace while the body shines
Or at least glows in the dark.

To compose while still composed
Feels efficient, but who knows
If it benefits the poem.

Probably not. But it does
Outline the hour calm anchored
So peace remains remembered.

Aphelion

Quick, while the days remain long
In high mountains and the sun
Is still far away, find the song

With the most beautiful words,
Those names like drugs of forgiveness
That ease you into small peace

With yourself—small words, old words,
Common ones, the kind love songs
Use for pining—not angry,

No tale to tell, no pursuit,
No frustration, no breaking
Apart, only the longing

That would be ridiculous
Were it not the loss is real.

Opiate of the People

Personally, don’t you imagine
God’s grace, any god’s grace, if it were
A name with a referent, rather

Than one of the intransitive nouns
Of fully omphalic existence,
Such as god, for instance, or heaven,

Would prove addictive? Once that first burst
Lit up the mind like a snow angel
Backlit by spears of piercing sunlight

Dispersing the worst, most dreadful storm,
Wouldn’t you be on your knees all night
As soon as the glow was gone, praying?

What’s scary then is to contemplate
The possible side effects of grace.

What Brings You Here?

Probably, you tend to assume
All things happen for a reason.
Probably, the human species

Could be binned by majority
Who feel that way deep in their bones
And minority who allow

Coincidence to play a role,
A real role, not just in the wings,
A real role, if not in all things.

Find the weird individual
Who’s comfortable with meaning
Nothing--casual, not causal--

Merely impressed by numerous
Independent variables
In this believed connected world,

And you will discover the world
Rather poorly distinguishes
Causation from sheer consequence.

Coincidence plays its own role,
A real role, not just in the wings,
A real role, if not in all things.

Grandfather Chimes

To the extent you can sense a difference
Between your past as it has been and your past
As it is now, every aspect of that change
Is a faerie flag’s revenant. If you could

Lift the changes like lace, like leaf skeletons
Out of the mulch of the composting fallen,
You could trace the architecture of sameness
That structures your awareness of what has changed.

The elaborately dendritic wayang
Of what remains of what has happened allows
You to narrate time and confuse it with change
Of any kind, when it is only kindly

Time, the stablest, most rhythmic aspect of change,
Change wearing the leafy-vined clockface of same.

Cicada

Again, the loveliest manners and phrases
Emerge—the bearings, escapements, balance wheels,
Mainsprings, hairsprings, gear trains, pendants, and jewels—

Of quintessentially mechanical time
Shaped from unplumbable synchronicities,
Conversations ticking over quietly

Among the elegantly powerful,
As charmed by their own invented precision
As alarmed by evening’s stochasticity

That will soon corrode such coordination
And, again, scorch their exquisite times to rust,
Ash, and broken springs, their fine manners to trash.

Time’s machined of fragile inequalities
And, like faith, can’t be spent, only broken with.

An Afternoon Ghost

Bows, gentlewomanly, I’m enjoying

The decay. She’s welcome, often as not,

Given her preferred time of day. Stately,

Neither clothed, nor nude, nor robed, she’s a glow

Without limbs, not floating, an upright shade

Like a pillar self-contained, a soft light

With a kindly face and a kinder gaze.

She’s here to offer you her assistance,

Her advice on death after life. (During

Life and dying, death is terrifying,

But after they’re over, it’s not even

Death. It’s being as nonliving being.)

The difficulties aren’t heavens or hells.

The difficulties have been left behind

To add suffering to the left behind.

You see, she clarifies, decay is birth,

Exactly as so many old poets

And self-congratulatory mystics

Have said. Fun as any change to observe.

What’s sorrowful is your amputation

As unique behaviors, cut from the minds

Of everyone who would like remain

In contact with you. Instantaneous,

Unlike the smokeless burning of decay,

From the moment that you left, no one could

Carry on any real conversation

With you, be comforted by your presence.

She brightens or fades but does not waver.

She gathers her afternoon skirts to her,

Dhaka muslin woven of sheerest sun.

Maybe It Is a Prayer

There’s braille stamped on the handle

Of the hospital table

And on no other surface,

Which seems, well, inadequate

And wholly superfluous.

The Sunday School child in you

Feels homily coming on,

The wonderful way pastors

In the long-form tradition

Of weekly Baptist sermons

Could take any anecdote

Or random observation

And make of it a lesson

Illustrating biblical

Principles, sinner’s weakness—

This line of braille, for instance,

Could remind the Youth Pastor

Of all things mysterious,

Of love’s mysteriousness,

Cryptic, private messages

In the manner of romance—

What might seem like a guideline,

Like useful information,

But is so inscrutable

And simultaneously

Woefully inadequate

But also superfluous,

Unlike God’s love, radiant,

Unconfined and abundant,

And so forth. The point isn’t

A bit of braille as a source

For the rich target of love—

The point’s to take the random,

Tie a spiritual meaning

To it, then stretch the conceit

To the snapping point, weaving

In a Bible verse or two

From, say, First Corinthians,

Chapter 13, about love,

The greatness of divine love,

Which is at once both ample

And essential. Close with prayer.

No Vacancy

There’s no emptiness since there isn’t room.
There isn’t room for any emptiness
As emptiness would require all the room,
Any emptiness. Swallow everything.

That’s the source of fear in everything
That has fear. Should emptiness crack the door,
Nothing. And emptiness will crack the door,
And there is nothing on the other side,

Not even another side. Which is why
Insofar as you are, you’re on this side,
Where there’s no room for any emptiness,
As emptiness would require all the room.

Recognition Scene

The thick-felted piano hammer,
Freshly repaired, clamped down on the wire.
The listener leaned his head . . . Nothing.

If this were a fiction, you’d expect
The phrases to have been invented,
The whole scene to have never happened.

Scholarship would suggest the scene did,
But that the phrases weren’t plagiarized.
And, if a literary lyric,

Then, however inventively phrased,
Readers could safely expect the scene
Came from the poet’s experience.

So this bit’s fiction, except it lacks
Narrative structure, so far, nothing.
Wait. She recognized the listener.

Trimming the Crust

Waking in the sun-foxed
Hospital afternoon,
One more comatose nap,

You recalled visiting
Nonagenarians
On a bright day like this,

And how often grandma
Had told you she didn’t
Want to end up mindless,

Motionless, strapped to bed,
And yet, there she was, pinned
And vacant, and you thought

As you recollected,
(Since you could recollect,
Still, such a luxury),

Maybe you're plumb lucky
By a couple decades.

Evidence of Selective Imitation Based on Persuasion Outcome

By deploying examples,
By citing authority,
By building analogies,

By listing natural signs,
The would-be persuader yields
An epistemic frottage

Of what counts as good knowledge
In that persuader’s culture—
You won’t hear many numbers

Out of tribal war councils
Or auguries from NASA—
And what counts as good knowledge

In turn outlines convictions
About what leads to good outcomes—
Trust holy writ, double-blind

Trials, symbols in the stars,
Eyewitness testimony,
Replicated studies, Mao.

The old man smiled at a thought.
Whether any of these work
In a way superior

To any other depends
On what defines good outcomes
To those who lived those outcomes.

Clocking up from the Basement Rocks

Delaware’s surface area, crumpled,
Would fill the Grand Canyon close to the rims.
Somewhere, there’s someone who’s hiked the Canyon
And walked the length of Delaware as well.

Information is shameless. It degrades
Itself repeatedly and has to be
Redressed. Trivia. What will Delaware?
A shame, and, as with shame in general,

The source is a species of deception,
Either the kind with its tail in its teeth
Or the kind with a fresh head for a tail—
Meaning, it’s not meaning’s escape that makes

Information’s blushing degradation.
If data’s ferrous, meaning’s oxygen.

Whole

Or you could pretend it’s all on hold—
That is to say, will all be on hold—
Taking a wait-and-see attitude.

Maybe some version of you will pop
Back up in the hall of ancestors,
Some sense of your continuity

Not much more deceitful than the one
That has popped back up every morning
Of your life, pretending you must be you,

The you today the you yesterday,
You you anticipate tomorrow.
Maybe someone will reconstruct you,

Beginning with a facsimile
Capable of thinking of itself
As you, which it will do. Who are you,

Long since returned to nothing by then,
To lecture not-you about pretend?
Anything on hold ever’s pretend.

No Containing You

When you’ve got no more bucket,
Worry less about your lists.

How exciting it’ll be
To be beyond all haunting—

That is, instead of being
Haunted to do the haunting.

Watching other people go
Makes people indulge the strange

Notion that the gone person
Will come to the point of view

Of long solitariness,
Not of nada’s new freedoms

But of something like exile
Or prolonged prison sentence,

A heroic misreading
Made possible by longing—

Also, oddly, by the trap,
Also, oddly, by the fact

That people live in the trap
Of story, of narrative,

That closes when the buckets
Are revealed nonexistent,

Like a variant version
Of Sorceror’s Apprentice,

Nothing enchanted, nothing
To clean the floors with at all.

Cut the Eyes First

The greater the stakes,
The greater the risks
Carried by mistakes,
The harder things are
To fluidly carve.

The afternoon sun
Is a golden block
Of ivory holding
Your daughter’s person
In potentia.

How could you reveal
That real persona,
Doing her honor?
She’s in an armchair
Leaning toward you,

Her phone in her hand
So she can show you
The clips that she’s made
Of herself with friends
Swimming and dancing,

And then questioning
Each other on dreams
And absurdities,
Hers the most surreal,
As her eyes reveal.

True

One thing to being human
No philosophy can take
Is that the situation

In which you find yourself spins
On incompletely conjoined
Axes, one sense, one symbol.

Someone arrives with good news
Of zero instant impact
On physical maladies.

Or, there’s no good news today,
But the sun delights your face.
Neither teams with the other,

Except by coincidence
Or remakes of memory
And storytellers’ habits.

It drives war poets crazy,
Flowering meadows they sense
Co-exist with coming hell.

To be human is to know
What is is not what you know,
Even if both may be true.

Craquelure

It’s almost always deciduous
Winter among the arboreal
Figures of branching phenomena.

The sentence-trees of grammarians,
Family trees of genealogies,
Even Darwin’s twiggy tree of life

Are all bare. To labor over leaves,
In addition to sheer tedium
Would imply a kind of fruition,

A completion of the incomplete
Branching that inspired the metaphor.
Nerve-cell synapses would be better,

But they were discovered late and made
Figurative trees themselves—dendrites
The medical Latin for branches.

Fractures would take us far from the trees
And lose the organic suggestion
Of preordained unfolding in growth.

Speciation splits like craquelure.
Ancestry’s a series of ruptures.
Sentences are shatterproof windshields

Stove in just enough to be lacy
With complex patterns tracing impacts
From whatever crashed into the mind.

And Knowing’s No Solution

There’s a tension between wanting

To know the meaning of something

And wanting to experience

The meaningless thing in itself.

When a poem’s vocabulary

Is rich with names and allusions

Suggesting precise acquaintance

With local flora and fauna,

Relishing exact species’ names

And geographical details,

The reveling’s in the language—

The more anchored in specifics,

The more the poem conjures real things,

The more library poem it is—

Not irony, parallel—

Use the rich structure of language

To emphasize, by mimicry,

The richer structure of the world.

But then there’s the contrary urge,

Which creates its own paradox.

Whitman tires of astronomy

To look in silence at the stars.

Dickinson picks an unnamed flower

Irked when, a monster with a glass

Computes the stamens in a breath,

And has her in a ‘Class.’

Who wants dry names as substitutes

For the perfect thing in itself?

But then, there’s only the pointing.

Whitman ends with the stars, nothing

More specific of stars to say.

Dickinson’s most vivid image,

In that poem, is not the nameless

Flower but the monster with a glass.

Language draws richness from language,

Not from the richness of the world.

The Darwin Flower

An anecdote can become
A parable, if you choose.
Supposedly, Charles Darwin,

As a schoolboy, came to class
One day with a garden flower
And the mistaken notion

That his mother had told him
If he stared at the center
Long enough, it would tell him

Its name. He and his friends stared
With great concentration, but
The flower, for its part, stayed mum.

The mistake seems to have been
Confusion from a lesson
On the Linnaean system,

In which one counts the stamens
To know the type of the flower.
The system contains the name.

So much for the anecdote.
Now bring the system to bear
To create a parable.

The world’s as full of riches
As a tangled bank of flowers,
But the flowers have no meaning

And will never speak their names.
The world’s as full of meaning
As human naming makes it.

The naming’s not inherent
Except to human systems.
A flower is full of meaning

Made of your names and stories,
And you can add more meanings—
Fables of flower origins,

Mythologies of martyrs
And demigods explaining
A flower’s blood red or snow white,

Or order your myths by traits
And sexual strategies
In a story of one God’s

Elaborate creation,
Any magnifying glass
Will help you peer and confirm.

Oh, there’s an infinity
Of meanings that could attend
To any wildflower. It’s just

That the flower itself will not
Speak any of them to you.
Flowers have other things to do.

It’s All Middle Anyway

Is it a dial, though?
Continuous range?
Do pain and pleasure,
Peace and suffering

Fill out a smooth scale,
Calibrated cline?
It’s not the minor
Question that it seems.

Equanimity
As eudaimonic
Target for mystics
And philosophers

Depends on balance.
There’s nothing golden
About a mean if
It doesn’t exist.

Feelings alternate,
Sure, conditions change.
Intense suffering
Is far from pleasure,

But that doesn’t mean
They’re scaled opposites,
That they correspond,
That there’s a midpoint.

The lure of balance
Is that it seems not
Greedy but modest,
Possible, cogent,

While hedonism
Is obviously
Unsustainable.
But what if it’s not?

Not Even a Title

There were those days, usually
Saturdays, where, weather good,

You stayed inside anyway,
Waiting for something to change

In some unexpected way,
For a strange light to descend

As dome over the bedroom,
Maybe a violet glow,

You couldn’t say, anything
To indicate world off track,

Sparks, sudden grinding noises,
But nothing ever happened.

Empty Words

The proof of a hollow
In every word only
Needs God to sanctify

Abhorrent emptiness.
Sometimes you stare at words,
Your own insides swimming

With sickness and wanting
To come clean. Absolute
Vacuum’s another thing.

The beetles go trundling
Down the page, shiny, gold
And not quite capable of life.

The hungry bird, hungry
Lizard know what’s in there.
The reader never will.

The City at Evening

Maybe stop asking
What the world’s doing.
Can you find someone
Who articulates

Precisely problems,
But doesn’t lay them
At the feet of those
Defined as a group

Defined as hateful
To the group defined
Or implied one’s own?
What could get people

To step back, aside
From collective fights
Fighters celebrate
As the champions

And lyricists sing
As the surviving,
Heroic victims?
Unkindness was not

What locked you in this
Body, this barred bed,
And unfairness may
Have played a role, but

It’s rare unfairness
Can be evened out
Without unfairness
From the evening.

Only All This

People tend to buck and shy

Entering the windowless

Stall of singularity,

Of not having any choice,

Being denied fantasy—

If this is the only world,

Never any other life

Other than the life you’ve known,

It seems, somehow, soul-crushing.

You don’t want this or nothing,

Do you, now, do you? You want

Some sort of alternative,

Although you differ on which

Kind of magic is magic—

Which expanding ring to ride

After the wish and the coin—

To only transform yourself

While the world remains the same,

To reform society

While the world remains the same,

To alter humanity

While nature remains the same,

Or to pass through a portal

To a cosmos that isn’t

Even of the same patterns,

Neither for life nor physics,

Maybe somewhere true heaven—

Whatever, you want the choice.

No one squeals with excitement

To not have an afterlife,

To not have other planets

Possible, other systems,

Other, more just, arrangements,

Better selves to aspire to,

Transforming reasons to live.

No one sinks down in relief,

Thank heavens, this is it, this

Body, these hungers, these aches,

These people, this gravity.

Or maybe someone, someone

Finds this only actual,

This only possible, best.

If only this and nothing,

This is, after all, the whole,

Wonderfully not nothing.

A Hall of Fame Performance

One nonsense stunt sports sites do

Exaggerates the greatness

Of a peculiar stat line

By showing how few cases

Of that exact line have been

Achieved by prior players—

So-and-so is just the third

Player ever to have more

Than a dozen dinks, three flurfs,

Four woggles, and six gimmes

In the first half of a match!

You could do this with your life—

However little you earned,

No matter you never won,

No matter your lack of fame—

First, take away all the lives

Shorter than yours, and, of those,

Cross out any with no kids,

And of those, remove any

That never visited more

Than at least twenty nations,

Never married at least three

Spouses on two continents,

Never dropped out of college,

Never finished at least three

Advanced degrees, never saw

More than one solar eclipse,

So on and so forth, ending

With your rarest rarity,

Whatever that is for you,

Say, arriving in the world

With a unique mutation,

Say, breaking a hundred bones

Or more. And now, look! No one,

Or maybe just two or three

People before you, ever

Achieved your stat line of life,

That exceptional a life,

As frail, anonymous you!

It’s Not a Cave

It’s a small cell
With a bad view,
A thin window

Through a long wall,
Sealed at both ends—
All day you pace

The unlit room,
Locking your eyes
To that slot of light.

At the far end
Of the window
Is the outside,

And what you squint
At through the glass
Is your whole view.

From this info,
More than shadows,
Less than presence,

You choose.

Long Home

Home, like romance, many wish
Singular, one and only,
To find home, come home, be home

And then rest, a marriage plot,
Of sorts, happily ever
After. No more wandering.

But then there are many homes,
More for some than for others,
But more than one, most often.

There are temporary homes,
Temporary forever
Homes, homes away from home—

Some call heaven the long home
In nostalgia’s home syndrome.

The Lonely Glowing

It never began.
It had always begun.
Never more begun than before
But always begun.

Back to the light in the window,
Ordinary sunlight,
Extraordinary technology,
The well-machined double-paned glass.

It’s been flooding the room
With old thoughts about photons,
How what’s bouncing around
Came so far to sink into these walls,

Direct or by relay,
Each one bumping one
A further wave along
Until the eyes absorb

The few that arrive
Out of all the passing,
And the interpretation
Begins that had always begun.

Peril

It’s a silent movie
With a piano score
And alternating shots

Of a train rushing right
And a train rushing left,
Piano thundering

With the billows of steam—
A head-on collision
Looks inevitable.

But then, that’s it. That’s all.
The scene’s never resolved.
The piano goes on,

The trains keep billowing,
The camera keeps cutting
Between the trains. Your eyes

Cut back and forth quicker.
C’mon, c’mon! Which train
Is more interesting?

You could die in your seat
Malnourished on popcorn
In the dark theatre.

Well-Treated Goats

If you’re nice enough,
You’re welcome,
It’s allowed.

If you don’t believe
In human universals
Across all cultures,

Consider that candidate—
It’s ok to take stuff,
If you’re nice enough.

Hunting societies
Address prey with respect,
Thanking them for the nourishment,

Using terms of kinship,
Father whale,
Grandmother deer.

Or you tap the trees
To let their spirits know
You wouldn’t plan without them.

Consultation and respect,
Gratitude and flattery—
If you’re nice enough,

You can take stuff
Without repercussions,
Without punishment,

And from where do you learn
Properly nice behaviors
Addressed to the mute world?

From the chattering world
Of conspecifics,
Your model fellow humans,

For whom what matters often is
If you’re nice enough,
Respectful and grateful,

Maybe obsequious.
However many kinds
Of etiquette exist,

There are no populations
Without manners,
Beliefs about manners,

And an instinct
To address the world,
When you want something from it

With good manners
That are your local manners—
If not polite to whales and deer,

Then grateful to God
For the gifts of whales and deer,
And if not polite to God,

Then to whatever entity
You see as a source of resources.
Surely you’ve overheard

People thanking tools that work,
Stop lights for changing,
Alarms for not going off

While they get what they want,
Knowing if they’re nice enough,
It’s ok to take stuff.

A Secret Joy in the Flame

Is there a third shadow possible,
Subtle, walking between the others
And disguised by their companionship?

Creation, work, one kind of shadow,
Thrown by fresh past that had to be made,
What’s next as novel you had to make,

Your say in how the story turns out
But your burden to keep it churning,
What just happened, what just happened next,

Or its partnered polar opposite,
Discovery of what was waiting,
What was written, you as the reader,

Ease of the shrugged shoulders, acceptance—
But if it’s not the tale you wanted,
You can’t remake it, not what happened next.

Is that a third shadow wedged in there,
Thrown by an unseen figure of speech,
Some other allegory of change

As storytelling? Not as writer
Of the worlds that will have been to come,
Not as reader of what was waiting,

But as . . . what? Neither the responder
Nor the responsible to story,
What would you be then? The burning page?

Needles Through the Tapestry of Dust

They flick across the sky mostly silently,
Forever metaphors for speed and surprise—
Meteoric. That’s the only word you need

For a sky-wide range of associations.
Anything fast and brilliant out of nowhere,
Gone before you know it—anything like that.

Collected and scrutinized by the thousands,
They are the most fragmentary of messages
By which to infer what’s actually out there,

And still the best reminders Earth’s not alone
But embedded in the tapestry of dust.

Cassandra’s Cousin

There was one prophet who was safe
From his own prophecy. He saw
A sorrow, a grave disaster

Visited upon not millions
But billions of human beings,
Trillions of other lives as well,

Yet he foresaw this disaster
Would narrowly spare the planet
Without any action at all—

He suffered seeing the vision,
But it was a horror that would be
Averted, and none but him know.

And so he did not have to preach,
Nor lead himself to martyrdom.
In his later years he wondered

Sometimes, late at night by the fire,
Why it had been given to him
To know the horror and to know

How close to all life it would come—
What could be the use of silence
In a prophet? By not preaching,

Had he somehow caused things to swerve?
He had no followers, of course.
Even God didn’t talk to him.

Interview a Dream Directly

Dreams often insist
On the opposite—
Ordinary dreams,

That is, including
The kind found in naps
From which you’re startled

Awake—in the dream,
For instance, someone
Was there in the room

Arguing with you,
And then you started
Awake to empty,

Peaceful afternoon—
The opposite. No
Person, no quarrel.

Why do dreams do that?
Go find another
And ask it point blank.

How Would You Rate Your Pain?

You know your body best, said the nurse,

And you knew he meant, You are the one

Who knows that body better than us,

But you felt as if the stress landed

Between your and best, as in, You know

Your body better than anything else—

Of what you know, you know your body

The best—and it felt like being told,

Of the vastness of the universe,

You’ve never gotten beyond your room,

The cell that is also the cellie

As well as you, prisoners inside,

The only body you’ll ever be,

But also just one in the sequence

Of ever-changing bodies you’ve been,

Which are also the sole animal

And the territory it’s explored,

And, if it’s all of that, this body

You pretend is in your possession,

How can you possibly know it best

Of all of that, silly solipsist?

What you’ve really known, really noticed,

Is how unlike most other bodies

Is this body with which you’re in league,

Somehow. That’s why it lands hard, the sense

Of being extremely limited,

With nothing but secondhand access

To the embodiments of the rest

Of the beings that can be questioned

And addressed, You know your body best.

In the Isolation of the Sky

Feral pigeons were made

By humans, reads the lede,

Reminding, good or bad,

No one resists hubris—

Humans, humans did this.

The planet is dying

Of humans—it isn’t.

The planet can be saved

By humans—no, it can’t.

Responsibility

Is social currency

Traded in exchanges

As detached from under-

Lying fundamentals

As any stock bubble.

Pop! What made the pigeons

Feral were accidents

Of pigeon-ness combined

With new environments,

Contingent accidents

Of humanness. Take charge,

Now, though belatedly,

Of how you want pigeons

To be, but keep in mind,

Beyond your intentions

Will rise consequences

As feral as pigeons,

Dusky, extended wings.

Not As Costumed, But As Costume

There are so many little worlds
That we could share with each other,
And it’s not that we don’t come close
When trading facts and anecdotes,

It’s just that we never get there,
Except in memoirs or onstage,
To where someone shares the whole years
They’ve lived as someone else hasn’t,

Like lifting an old uniform,
A winter coat, a wedding dress,
Solemnly, out of a cupboard
And handing it over, folded,

Here’s the whole thing, surprisingly
Heavy, isn’t it? I wore it.

False Front

Disintegration, quiet,
The appeal of the ghost town
May be that it matches you,
Your own traits softly echoed.

You can imagine yourself
As final, mute resident,
Maintaining a post office,
General store, and cafe.

You’re open if someone shows,
Closed when no one’s visiting.
Dozing behind the counter
You hear voices anyway,

Dream scraps of conversation
Keeping you from loneliness.
Every now and then, you snap
Out of a nap to notice

Your hands shaping empty air,
Something you’d been dreaming there.
You wish you could put it back
On the dustiest bare shelf.

Go Light

Another gauntlet for the body,
Another unpleasant assignment.
Take a moment to appreciate

Being bathed in sunlight in advance.
Would you be more content if you had
No memories to warn you what’s next,

Or would you be more likely to die
From the shock when the gauntlet began?
The sun cups you as if it held you,

As in a way it does. Close as you are,
It’s the planet that grasps you tightly,
But you know the sun clasps the planet,

So, you’re falling for the furnace, too.
Time to do what you can’t forgive you.

The Unlocked Drawer

Most secrets aren’t except due
To the accident of not
Being something repeated.

The majority lie there,
Untold, without injunction
Not to tell. They’re the good ones—

Or, they include the good ones,
The best, statistically,
Since they outnumber the kept—

So many things that to know
Might change the world, that are known
Like seeds in barren ground, like

Data in the collapsed dust
Of torched palace libraries,
Like small fields of expertise

In the minds of marginal
Brilliant thinkers, Mendel’s peas
For instance—The true occult

Sits behind the door ajar,
In the loose specimen drawer
Since no one’s ever looked there

Who could infer what they saw.
Those are the secrets deserve
The name, the unprotected.

The Sameless

The sun sculpts in dust,
Winged beings being
Coaxed out of sameness,
The secret of waves.

There is no sameness,
Truly, just enough
Similarity
That the infinite

Can be introduced
Through the countable—
The most worn-down flecks,
The most burnished lives,

They all look the same,
So that counting breaks
In the uplifted
Eyes of an angel

The sun carved of light.
No, it didn’t mean
To make the nameless
The impossible.