Find and Uncover, Then Gather in Place

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the Book of Obsolescence

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

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

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

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

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

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

Danez Pulls the Trigger

Sometimes familiar phrases,

Applied in surprise contexts,

Can make those contexts explode.

Feel your mental furnishings

Suddenly slide to starboard,

For instance, when Danez Smith

Refers to a perfect perm,

The shade of the master’s face,

And means Michelle and Barack.

This isn’t just irony.

This is how expectations

Can build force like tectonics—

Were it Nancy and Ronnie,

Even Hillary and Bill,

How typical—the hairstyles

Of the tightly wound spouses

Of our plantation’s rulers,

Colonial, alien—

But the depth charge in the poem

Comes from Michelle’s perfection

And Barack’s firm mastery.

You could say it’s in service

To irony—My president was Black

Who exercised gross powers

Of war and hegemony

While we danced in happiness—

And, in this case, that’s for sure,

But it has other uses.

There is no expectation

About what kind of context

A word or phrase belongs in

That doesn’t store potential

Energy. Polysemy

Is infinite at the start,

And binding terms to contexts

Begins their definition

By constraining possible

Meanings—notice constraining

But not eliminating.

Every word’s under pressure

From conventional uses.

That pressure has energy.

That energy can be used.

What We Gained in the Fire

This is not whatever’s left.

This is a new world itself.

It may be less lovable—

It’s certainly scarred by loss.

But the scars didn’t exist

Before the fire. Now they do.

Ask anyone the era

That was the best,

And they’re likely to select

Something humans remember,

Somewhat altered by culture,

But prior to disaster—

Prior to which disaster

Doesn’t really much matter,

Just antediluvian,

In any case. Then it went

On its way, the world, until

It ripened into something

As antediluvian

As was before. This valley

That inhabitants now mourn

Was already burnt to stumps

Near the end of the boom years

Of mining, a century

And a couple of decades

Ago—old photos look grim,

Grimmer than this new patchwork

Of thickly forested green

Cut by swathes of blackish brown.

That first fire burned it all down.

Local school kids will be forced

To learn about the damage

Done by both historic fires,

Assuming there are school kids

Attending future classes

In the valley created

By that history, their worlds

Contingent on disasters

That made their worlds possible.

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

Hush in the assonance of dusk,

Herbert concluded. When I am

Gone what will you do? / Who will write

And draw for you? asked Silverstein.

The experts on eurypterids

Puzzle sea scorpion fossils,

Wondering how they could have been

So successful then quietly

Extinct—possibly the record

Is incomplete, or possibly

The gigantism enabling

Their long, globe-girdling migrations

Also doomed them. Other humans

Spend less time studying the world

And more time talking back to it,

As if it ever talked to them.

They apostrophize like crazy,

Addressing unresponsiveness

As a way of finding comfort,

As a way of making displays

To try to impress each other.

This may be part of their success,

To bravely address the cosmos,

This trait that may also doom them.

So You Said It Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

Signs of Life

Some mornings it all feels faked
Or a clerical mistake.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a world full of omens
And stray animal totems—

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

Of kitchen appliances,
The gopher snake that slithered

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Is Not an Accomplishment

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Get into a Poem

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

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

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

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

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

Human Sadness and Spiritual Peace

A new friend, made since

Your death warranty

Was gravely pronounced,

Marvels at the strange

Mixture of human

Sadness, spiritual

Peace she’s just witnessed

At a funeral

For another friend,

And you ponder this.

Your thoughts reshuffle

Nouns and adjectives,

As they always do

When you turn around

A phrase in your head,

As if it could be

A karakuri,

And you have to solve

How to unlock it.

Outside, thunder throws

Around the canyon

And winds flatten scrub.

Your thumbnail settles

On spiritual

As the first trick word

To split the puzzle.

You pry it gently.

How is spiritual

Parallel human?

Human is sadness.

Spiritual is peace.

Mixed, apparently,

They remain distinct,

Although that feels strange.

And how is it not

Human, precisely,

To be spiritual?

The word sits oddly

In the polished frame

But it won’t wiggle

Loose—maybe it’s not

The right spot to start.

Who Did This?

The relentless fantasy
Of decision renders acts
Difficult to understand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soggy Flowers in a Broken Glass

Can you embrace good fortune
Without liability
For whatever suffering

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

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

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

Black Leather Jacket in August

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

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

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

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

Every time she leaves the house,
You consider prediction.

And Then Next

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

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

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

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

And extraordinary
Information built in—
The scrap was a ticket

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bacterium or human,
Timing gets the timing right.

Always Gaining, Lost Forever, the Same

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Myths of Being One of Many Beings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life Outside of Truth or God

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to LaVerkin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blue Jets, Red Sprites, Gigantic Jets

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

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

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

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

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

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

Know Your Audience

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

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

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

Are composing
While you’re dreaming,
Really dreaming,

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

To hold abstract
Lines together
While voices lost

To you for years,
Voices never
Heard through your ears

Are whispering
In the dry leaves
Of late summer—

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

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

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

Now Picture What This Poem Means

When you ask someone to rev

Their weak imagination—

Or someone asks you the same—

What’s the actual request?

How many stories have held

Somewhere within them the phrase,

Imagine, if you will, or

One of its equivalents?

Often, the whole narrative

Amounts to such a request,

Where your attention’s the fuel

For your imagination.

Excavate your memory

To raise an original

Variation of the world

From the prompts mere words give you.

You won’t fail to be unique,

At least inside your small skull.

Those memories are all yours,

Even when they seem to be

Borrowed from someone else’s.

Fire up the workshop, the kiln,

The alchemist’s lab, the ring

Of the supercollider—

Nothing can be made from scratch,

But with enough memories

And fierce enough attention,

You can generate meanings

That didn’t exist before

In any philosophy.

Willing to Be Ignored

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remaining Escaped Is the Reward

Warble all you like
About the journey,
The destination

Has to be the most
Essential aspect
Of any escape.

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

The destination
Determines whether
You can stay escaped.

Life’s Weeds Wedge Enduring Seeds

To occupy the baggy days,

As Laing did with her gardening,

You origami lines instead,

Pleating, creasing, and sharpening

The minimal information

Typical of the lyric form

The way one might fold a napkin

To make a pointed corner firm

Enough to pick out seedy bits

Stuck in the teeth after lunch.

Shouldn’t that be what writing’s for?

To repurpose a flimsy hunch

To dig out some kind of nuisance

That starts trivial but can mess

With your focus and happiness,

Your health and life, left unaddressed?

It rarely works. The ad-hoc tools

Of napkins, poems, or greenhouse peat

Disintegrate. Weed seeds wedge deep.

But, hey, you filled some time at least.

Kiteezi

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

Of a landslide,
A rubbish slide
That killed people,

Many people,
In this landfill
In Kampala.

The photograph
Looks like the end
Of everything

As surely as
Any movie
About the end,

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

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

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

The efficient
Exploitation
Of human waste

At risk of quick
Or corrosive death
Is one among

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

Haunted by the Weather

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good Health, Master Count, for Many Happy Years

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

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

The Old Manse

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

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

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

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

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

A Nap in Forever

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

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

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

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

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

Becoming Unaccustomed to the Garden

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

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

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

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

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

Experimental Game Theory Sonnet

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

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

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

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

For a peaceful democracy,
Spread the responsibility.

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

The journalist wrote mournfully.
The dream of collective action,

Past mere vengeance or improvement,
Beyond the particular cause,

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

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

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

And since that raw exuberance
In rhythmic synchronicity

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

Never alien to small groups
Euphorically circling a hearth—

The more recent, massive events
Must be seen as demography

Amplifying inheritance
To the point of hysteria,

Sweeping through large assemblages
Irrespective of common cause.

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

Surging soldiers, briefly hopeful
Hordes of revolutionaries,

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

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

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

Wild in Every Way

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing Must Mean Something by It

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later, Past the Story

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

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

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

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

Threading, left enchanted
By lingering vision,
The dozens fluttering

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

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

The Nature of Your World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Artificial but Intense

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

Smiling peacefully,
The department store
Mannequins. They are,

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

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

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

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

Spite Is Also a Freestanding Word

The people who can be spiteful
Are usually disappointed.

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

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

Not everyone who’s a victim
Of an authentic unfairness

Is disappointed, and many
Who are disappointed are not

At all spiteful, or are spiteful
Only briefly before finding

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

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

Disappointed, and there’s something
About being disappointed,

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

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

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

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

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

Fun House

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

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

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

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

You were the purple house
That never once shuddered.

Decoded

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

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

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

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

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

The Red Toothbrush

Here’s where definite
And indefinite
Have some leverage—

In determining
Narrative structure.
Stories about red

Domestic items
Have different flavors
Whether they waver

Indefinitely
Or call attention
To their uniqueness—

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

Smiling by Instruments

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

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

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

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

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

That Ship Is Canon

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

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

Is less frantically peopled,
Even in noisy cities,

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

In ordinary moments
Of quotidian function,

People carom and scatter,
Bouncing off of each other—

People fall into daydreams,
And boring activities,

And stretches of nothing much
To do with one another.

But in texts, relationships
Take over, grow entangled,

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

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

Entwining most of the time.
Sometimes, the easiest way

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

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

Pole-vaulting shadows
Catch the corner
Of your saccading

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

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

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

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

Are entertaining
In their startling way.
Wilder and wilder,

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

Invasions Mature in Ruins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luxury

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Airglow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unreal Estate

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

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

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

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

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

Partnered Undercurrents

When Audre Lorde wrote of Eros,

Our sense of self and the chaos

Of our strongest feelings, she summed

With poetry’s efficiency

And slippery polysemy

The fundamental arena

Of human being, not only

Erotic, but epistemic,

The heart of the situation—

The human sense of self, of soul,

Of self-reflective awareness,

Of being individual,

Which isn’t individual

In source at all, but from outside,

Borne on the pollen of language

And cultural inheritance,

Versus the human animal,

Host and sustainer of culture,

A more ancient inheritance,

Conveying our senses of self

In its waves as the deep ocean

Holds nocturnal phosphorescence—

No ocean, no phosphorescence,

Yet different wishes lurk in each.

The Ghost to His Daughter

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

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

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

Absorbing any of this?
But the you absorbing this

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

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

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

Reconciliation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fair Condition

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

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

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

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

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

Skyglow

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

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

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

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

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

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

The vital issue,
The serious hurt
Belongs to those who

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

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

Can bring agony
So great it carries
Terminology,

Vocabulary
All its own, its own
Bleak nomenclature,

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

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

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

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

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

Which will trouble them
And pile pain in them

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

Adela May Be Burning

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

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

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

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

Trepanning

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

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

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

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

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

Float Your Boat

Most annoyingly
And amusingly,
The architecture

Of your hospice dreams
Deliberately
Contradicts the walls

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

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

Receding stairwells
Of Piranesi
Ruination, then

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

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

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

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

Is it translating
Via negatives
Like a camera

Had to, analog
Apertures needing
Reversals to close

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

Of contradictions
For escape, the craft
Of the watertight

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

Trismegistus

For some strange reason you find
It feels good, at the moment,
To be short of breath. You haul

On your lungs like a sailor
Lifting canvas sail alone,
And it feels good, feels profound,

Although it can’t possibly
Carry good Implications.
Tristram, you say to yourself,

For no reason other than
Liking the feel of the word.
Tristram, and you remember

The black page in your fingers,
How a little of the ink
Rubbed off on your fingertips.

You take another deep breath,
Like someone about to do
Something difficult, and then

You watch the sun on your hands,
Decades now, decades after
They were ink-stained with Tristram.

The whole gift of memory
Is for experiences
To exist that don’t exist.

The Last Task

It’s never content,
Never a substance
And yet it’s always

Coordination.
Give yourself a task
To finish this day,

Done before sunset.
Notice, as shadows
Grow longer out there,

How tempted you are
To think of your task
In terms of volume

Of remaining time.
The sun is setting.
The stars are waiting.

Time is running out.
But it’s not—never
Was any amount.

More events add on
To the long accounts
Of what has happened.

No, you need to link
Daylight to the task
You meant to combine,

To synch up—you need
To coordinate.
You tell yourself this

As you watch the light
And start to notice
That you’re arguing

The point with no one
Substantial, while sun
Has pulled back the drapes

To open the night,
And in these stanzas,
Each part of your life,

You’ve never quite asked
The main thing—just clean
Forgotten the task.

How Could You Have Lost Her

As soon as you pointed out to her
That she really was a character
Generated moments earlier

On the loom of your interior
As you fell into a dream, she laughed,
A blurry-edged but grown-up figure,

Confident, even superior
In her attitude, folding her arms
Cheerfully before her conjurer,

As if to dare you to dismiss her,
Which you did, unintentionally,
By waking startled. Now you miss her.

Creative Change Is Ruinous

As is all change, but creation
Is change on fire, is Shiva
At escape velocity

Achieving the hurdler’s stride,
Is the counterpoint to time,
The arch straddling entropy,

The rocket-engine racer
Over the Bonnevile salt flats,
The robot spacecraft slingshot

By the gravity it fights
To fling itself fully out
Of the solar neighborhood.

To reach through to creation
Requires bursting barriers,
The sudden release that roars

You are actually making
Something new of nothing much.
It’s what you’ve made you’ve ruined.

Caution

It’s not that you’re more allied

With impersonal forces

Than with human characters

Those forces so frequently

Overwhelm. The inhuman

Forces neither have nor need

Allies. There’s no allying

With them. That’s one of the ways

Forces are impersonal,

And in fact you’re easily—

Too easily—overwhelmed.

You’re keeping close eye on them,

Those impersonal forces,

So you feel less overwhelmed—

No one grows more intimate

And warm by turning to lean

Into the storm—but neither

Are you aligned with the storm.

Graphomaniac Notes Made While Eating Breakfast and Reading

Activities preclude activities,
And even the universe as a whole
Must eschew some simultaneities,

Such that, though stars may explode and be born
While overlapping in their spacetime Venn,
No one star dies while being born again.

People care very deeply about this.
Magicking the world so tasks can be done
At once ranks high on the fable playlist.

The sorcerer who can be two places,
For instance, is a favorite conceit,
Although rapid task-switching is the best

Real people can ever hope to achieve
In the race to waste life efficiently.

Blue Cuckoo

Of all the synchronization
Involved in coordinations
Of humans with other humans,

It’s easy to forget the day
Is the original template
For the organizing of time—

The day, this evening light fading,
Half-scorned by an electric age
When culture is a hovercraft

Communicating with itself,
Floating above all diurnal
And nocturnal rhythms alike.

It’s what loneliness is good for—
To tie your pulse back to the world.

Air on Air

Bare blue contained
A hidden wind
It would unleash
In random fits

So that the trees
Bent and rooftops
Moaned as if storms
Roared over them.

But the day stayed
That barren blue—
No storms, no rains
Not even clouds—

Just dispossessed
Wind on its own,
A language cut
Down to its poems.

A Star of Eight Points

Sitting at the long table
Under paper lantern lights
While the home-made cake’s brought out,

And the guitarist pauses
For the Happy Birthday song,
You may happen to look up

At the star-eyed summer night
And for no particular
Reason think, Sumeria.

The first symbol that you learned
Looked to you just like a star,
But not like a star you’d see,

More like the diffraction spikes
Created by nearby stars
In Webb’s deep, galactic views,

And you wonder how people
From Sumerians to kids
Drawing at kitchen tables

Could have known about that view,
Or intuited that view
Of such depth that local stars.

Never spiky to mere eyes,
Would shine long, distorted points
When the future probed the past.

Aren’t You Special?

Cancer’s a multiply selfish disease,
From the rapacious pirate cells themselves

To the manner in which you turn inward
To consider the extraordinary

Sense of being singled out, even though
Nothing much is commoner than cancer.

It’s sort of an inverse apocalypse
Or extremely modular pandemic—

Rather than a panoramic collapse,
Millions of invisible assassins

Cull the population, one at a time,
And everyone knows someone, but just

Bespoke disaster in a single frame
Each time, so each can claim, Death’s mine, all mine.

Lie Like an Old Tear

Sexton’s worms and elves that tend
Dickinson’s palpitating
(Palpitating!) vineyards sing

So pale, so frail, counting bees
Under Clive James’ maple tree.
This art’s phraseology

Fore and aft of everything
Else that poetry can be—
Any astonishing knot

Of words that alter reading
The way an unseen vortex
Captures rafters as they float

And spins their boat in its whirl
Before letting them go.
The phrase may be fixed in verse

Or exist as a sudden,
Passing change in register
In a steady flow of prose,

But it’s the phrase you’ll recall
After the rest of the text
Has dwindled to an address

You keep so you can find it
Again, that remarkable
Twist in the language, that phrase.

Every Day As if It Was Your Past

There’s no need to make your dying
Into another competition,

No necessity to worry
About how you spend this time—

Whether you seize the day,
Whether you make each moment count,

Whether you’re a font
Of forgiveness, wisdom, and meaning—

Heavens, people. If you know
You’re going soon, if you’re lucky

Enough to be given a preview
Of which exit door gets to be yours,

Why spoil that grace with determination
To waste none of it? For the irony?

Leave all the tomes on dying well
For the living still trying too hard

To make their lives into a fine story
Others can admire, others can

Seek to emulate, others can
Believe in, only so that they themselves

Can feel duly unashamed of the end
Of themselves. For yourself,

You don’t need to die just right
To avoid dying wrong.

You want to indulge in dull
Extensions of your same old quotidian?

You want to watch bad television
And scratch yourself in bed?

You feel like daydreaming in sunlight?
You go ahead. You’re alright.

Verifying Circumstances

One writer uses this phrase

Where someone else might have used

Supportive community

Or affirmative context—

That is, to suggest somewhere

A writer is encouraged

To write, to be a writer,

Somewhere writing is noble

Or at least admired labor.

Verifying hints distrust,

Fact-checking, certificates,

ID cards, permission slips.

Circumstances indicate

Transitory happenstance.

But maybe the writer slipped,

Unintentionally spoke

Another truth—where writing

Is affirmed and encouraged,

Writers likely congregate,

And to be a writer there

Among so many writers

Is to be compared and judged—

A lot of verifying,

Under the circumstances.

Not That Anyone Looks Forward to Sleep

Samuel Johnson
Refused to believe
Reports David Hume
Faced death serenely.

No atheist could
Possibly be calm
Contemplating hell
Or absolute void.

Probably, that night,
Samuel Johnson
Planned to get some sleep,
Another visit

To relative void,
And in the morning
Expressed annoyance
If he’d been disturbed.

Thanks for the Clarification

In the app, it defaults to

To No Aadditional

Text, if you give it one

Line but nothing further.

It must assume one line

Is a title, two lines

Or more are something else.

But isn’t it always

True, wherever you stopped,

For now or forever?

After the Odyssey,

No additional text.

After the last entry

In the dictionary,

No additional text.

Some day, when these poems stop

Appearing, please whisper—

No additional text.

You Can See You're Gone

Where were you in this?
Is this a fable
In which you’re the ghost?

The sagging cushions
Tied to the old rocker
With no one in it

Would slide to the floor
If ties released them.
Someone’s arguing

Somewhere in the room
And it’s upsetting,
Until you wake up

With a little jolt
And there’s no one there.

The Best Undesirable World

When people insist everything
Works out for the best in the end,
You know they’re wrong—just look at things.
You don’t need Voltaire to show you.

And still, there’s a scale, or a stage
Within self-similarity,
At which, remarkably often,
Disappointment yields improvement.

Maybe the sequence of events you’d planned
Falls apart, or your first choice flees,
Or you’re shoved away from your dream,
Or your mistake is fixed in stone,

But the actual sequence soars,
Your backup ends up a winner,
Your dream is replaced by waking,
And your mistake’s a monument.

These fortunate swaps may depend
On wanting the original
Too fervently in the first place.
Bad bets raise loss to be saved from.

Soft Cap

Aside from kin selection,
Another social forcer
Of ant and bee phenotypes

Appears to be insulin.
Various ant, honeybee,
And wasp larvae can emit

Chemical cocktails that drop
Workers’ insulin levels,
While low insulin, in turn,

Keeps them from ovulating.
Queens, meanwhile, produce buckets
Of insulin and lay eggs.

Jack up workers’ insulin
And even after millions
Of years of selfless nursing,

They’ll start trying to lay eggs.
That’s how close to the surface
Of eusociality

Antisocial striving lies.
Tug on one genetic thread—
The sweater, the comforter,

The tale-spinning tapestry
Unravel. Society
At every level consists

Of barely restrained desires
To exploit society,
And don’t say you don’t feel it.

Why So Many People Say They Find Perspective in the Stars

The heft of moral neutrality,
Like the weight of a lifeless body,
Feels immense, magnified by its lack

Of participation in the game,
Neither resisting nor assisting,
Neither sacred nor profane. The night—

Which is everything minus this world,
This one planet everything to you—
Won’t ever adjust itself for you.

Small wonder, when you’re craving release
From your species' mad obsession with teams
And your own strong compulsion to judge,

The solemn neutrality of night
Comforts you to lean your gaze against.
Small wonder others have done the same.

Heavy Rotation

Think any ordinary day—
What a day, what a difference it makes,
All unknown to the day itself

And to most people living it—
Too large for ants to comprehend,
Too small for the sun to notice.

Think any ordinary day,
Radiating through pasts it joins
And alters and elaborates,

And no one knows the scope of it,
Nor ever will, nor ever will
Undo it. And then, another.

You Are Your Enchanted World

Meaningful because of your meaning,
Wonderful because of your wonder—
This arrangement is unshakable,

Why not embrace it as sufficient?
If you really need meaning outside
Of you, you could leave heaven alone,

Define your fellow human beings
As sufficiently outside of you—
You’ll find that they’re all meaning makers

And many of them possessed by wonder.
Now your world has meaning and wonder
You never needed to make yourself.

But isn’t it wonderful to you
You can and do make meaningful views?

Dragging Writing in and Out of Sleep

At some point in each waking cycle

You try another experiment

At composing right along the line,

The seam between waking and sleeping

And dreaming while sleeping then waking

Again—how closely can you trace it,

The wavering edge of consciousness,

Without losing the thread that outlines

The jigsaw of being unaware,

Aware of what isn’t outside you?

At least we are communicating,

Intones a robotic voice. You twitch.

That was dream. And now this is waking.

Or wait. If there are words here, there was

The Sweet Hour

Comes for every animal
That needs and knows how to rest,
The cat stretched out like a sphinx,

The teenaged daughter browsing
Old photograph collections
In pajamas on the couch,

The snowy-bearded father
Nodding off in pools of light.
The sweet hour is boredom

Sieved through fine companionship,
That doesn’t always need talk
Or engineered distractions,

Double-sieved through surrender
To hunger for surrender.