When You Were an Adolescent, You First Noticed Ugly Houses Sprawl in Pretty Places

Half a century,
With all its doings,
Worked a lot of change,

But it’s true in North
America still,
That the homes folks make

Where the natural
Beauty is intense
Are almost always

Pictures of decay,
Of desuetude
Or incompletion,

Even on estates
Meant for second homes—
The perimeters

Conceal raw projects
Kept under blue tarps
Or canvas blankets.

It’s as if nature
Intimidated
With too much beauty

Or as though surplus
Of scenic beauty
Made a tidy home

Seem slightly foolish—
But this isn’t true
Around the whole world,

After all. Maybe
Something more local
Governs the habit

Of half-finished sheds,
Cabins in Tyvek,
Fowl pens, lumber piles,

Trailers up on blocks,
The last, too-large house
On a double lot

In the incomplete
Subdivision chain
Of pseudo-mansions,

Just sitting empty,
A lonely tribute
To the mountain range

Rising behind it,
Or to the ocean
Rising toward it.

Cauliflower Grows More Contagious

Stag beetles and buttons, Sequoia
Announced as the topics over lunch
On that penultimate afternoon

Of another astronomical
Summer, one that had happened to start
Under the threat of imminent death

And that was ending on this drive home
From home, that is from emotional
Home to legal place of residence,

From Slocanada to Springdale,
Still under threat of imminent death,
But an imminence that was feeling

Less imminent with every good breath.
Stag beetles, buttons, cauliflower,
Sequoia had amended her list.

We were dragging out that lunch, that last
Meal on the north side of the border,
Under a glass roof mesmerizing

In storms and blinding on sunny days.
We joked about food and what lives do
To make meals of more lives making meals—

In the end, we took a box to go,
Crossed back over the border in sun,
Turned to face an imminent season.

Dragonfly with Crutches

Do you, did you belong to the times
In which you grew up, or to stories

About what was happening to you?
What times exist without tales of them?

Probably not yours. Let’s guess you’re theirs,
Thanks to belonging to their stories.

You and all the stories part of you,
And all the stories that you’re part of.

The big, generational stories
That lump people scattered over years,

Historical stories of events
That shadowed the world during your life.

And the little things like when you went
To get a tattoo with your father

And pushed your way through nos and maybes
And one last-minute cancellation,

To wind up at sunset by the lake,
Getting a small dragonfly design

With a secondary black graphic
Of lean black crutches superimposed

On the insect’s abdomen to wear
On your wrist for the rest of your life.

There Waiting

The phrases started to show,
But then they came to a halt.

Outside a bedroom window
In a small, green mountain town,

Maple leaves, still large and dark,
Moved slightly in sunny air

Against a brilliant blue sky.
In your mind, another scene

Entirely had taken hold—
Dark, flannel-grey, filtering snow

Through deeply wooded evening.
Which scene were you living in?

Neither, you thought to yourself,
I am living in neither.

Blue Murder

My yard has no sun
My porch has no daughter

My sun has no forests
My moon has no father

The left world is closer
The right world is harder

My sun porch is sunless
My shade tree is murder

Thunderhead

Would you really rather know
Uncanny omens that worked,
Over the weather forecast?

It’s not uncanny enough
How often statistics work?
You still crave the ominous.

This is the human mind’s way—
Find and use something that works,
But stay in love with the dark

Hope that doesn’t really work,
That you wouldn’t want to work,
If you thought it really could.

Then They All Burned

It sinks down. Can you . . .
You can take something like this
But not this, later . . .

The light crawls along
The edge of the wildfire cliff
From this perspective,

Now the fires are gone,
So barely surviving pines
Look like a sad line

Of soldiers climbing
The thin, scorched crest to nothing
Much they know about . . .

You have. There were rules.
Seasons, time, syllable counts.

Things That You Will Never Do

Every day you do things

The way everyone does—

I don’t pay attention,

She grumps in the kitchen—

Mostly while you’re thinking

About things that you will

Never do, never do

Never shove remotely

Close to really doing.

And that’s pretty human—

To be doing something

While thinking of doing

Something that never would

Be finished in these woods.

A Several World

An obvious fact—
Each one is not one;

Everyone’s many.
Unity depends

More on not being
Any other one

Than on being one.
In our several

Worlds we’re wary
Of different things.

We know how discomfort
And pain can begin

With no intention
Ever of ending.

We stay in our world
Where fewer new things

Need to be understood
To survive. Sometimes,

We get past barriers,
Encourage each other,

Speak of wariness,
Leap past, become friends.

By courage, sometimes,
We reach out our hands.

Visitor in the Front Yard

Rummaged to the sun
In the maples ranged
On opposite sides

Of the Main Street, gold
At this hour, after
The downpour, before

Sunset commences,
You roll across lawn
That’s mostly clover

And dandelions.
You’re a show watching
A show that’s watching.

Was There a Coat in the Hall?

He became a fairy tale
With a talent for the dark
Arts of allegory,

Or an allegory
With a talent for the dark
Twist of a fairytale.

Last night’s rain left the street.
Now, clouds on the ice-field
Advance and then retreat,

Teasing views of new snow.
The weather has shifted—
Warmer, drier, weirder

All in all—but autumn
Still looks most like autumn
And no other season.

So, what’s the story here?
Man in a long black coat
Was recently spotted

Lurking under maples
As their leaves sifted down.
There’ve been two funerals,

And one death so far left
Unaddressed. That third death
Was the strangest. A man

Who had been sick for years
Had an uncommonly
Good and vigorous day—

Went for a walk, boasted
He’d gotten the better
Of death, strolled home and packed

For a trip he hadn’t
Planned to take. Gave himself
A hair cut. Then sat down

And waited for morning,
When he was found seated,
Still, dead, his hands folded.

Could have been fairy tale,
Maybe allegory.
What about that black coat?

With All the Writing and All the Lake

Morals and principles
Are not as well-suited
To each other as thought.
A principle is bound
To lead to immoral
Behavior, and moral
Behavior may require
Breaking with principle.

Do you prefer morals
Or principles? Either
Sounds good, and few people
See the contradiction
As inevitable.
It’s inevitable.

Feel Yourself Sinking Down

Here’s how you have to hunt for them.
They are not true intersections—
Not places real roads intersect,

Just crossed fragments of two short paths
Discovered in the shady woods,
The blocked back alleys, old meadows,

Two short strips. They appear lonely.
They look misplaced, as if someone
Had started some kind of project

But never got past the crossed paths.
These are the real crossroads where deals
Are sworn between souls and demons.

What is it devils crave in souls,
Currency common in heaven?

Getting Carried to Bigelow Bay

Waiting for the rain to clear
The last patches of wildfires
Smoldering in Valhalla,

Watching wet braids course the street
Through the core of the village,
Old, brightly painted buildings

Glazed now--survived another
Wildfire season—there are posts,
Remainders of foundations

And loading docks in the bay,
Reminders even older
Buildings once lined the lakeshore,

But fires ate them long ago.
Everything you see is more
To the world than there once was

As well as less than there was.
No gaining without changing,
No changing without losing.

Light Limbed

You like being home
In the warm lamplight
So much you’ll give up

Late summer weather,
Thrill to an autumn
Grown unromantic,

Just to sit, well-wrapped,
The darkness outside
Gathering itself,

The fire in the grate
A season early.
As they get rarer,

Early falls, early
Winters, will become
Precious. Silly soul!

You’re already there!
This is your last fall
In all likelihood.

Early and precious,
Your nights by the stove
And under the lamp

With black in the trees,
And peace in your limbs,
And frost in the breeze.

Days Are Ending Sooner

Dark outside the window. Nothing
Much to it — the world spins and tilts
Smoothly and quite predictably.

It’s autumn in this hemisphere.
The darkness arrives earlier
Every evening and will awhile.

You may never see it lengthen
Again, but you’ve seen it enough
Times to know just how it will go.

It won’t need you; you won’t need it.
Someday the light will just come back,
But you’ll likely be gone. You hope

That spring brings rejuvenation
To the child your death abandoned.

Push for Greater Trust

Trusting that the joy continues,
Will continue, come back, somewhere,
Is sometimes enough, sometimes not.

Depends on how you feel about
Now and the intermittent joy
Now is. Is the joy now enough?

If it isn’t, trusting will not
Be enough. Continuity
Needs to continue at greater

Frequency. Continuous joy,
Of course, would be plenty, and more
Than plenty, if perfectly joy.

Exactly how much more than now
Would imaginary future
Need in the way of joy, before

You can feel it’s enough to trust
Joy to carry on, not pure joy
But close enough, enough to trust?

Fish Gargoyle

The balcony of the Kaslo
Hotel has a spandrel painted
Like a large Kokanee salmon.

It’s 2D, not a gargoyle,
But something about it hints
At a monster’s curling sneer,

The bright fish leaping there,
Gift of the creator,
Bodies that carry life

Insist on bringing
Each package to death
Like a gift—Here’s life!

Time to Knock Off for a Day

Day six and the mountains
Are looking familiar

In a way beyond light
And shape—more familiar

Feeling than anything
To do with appearance.

Faith in Meaning

Someone brings out a soda,

Handing it over to you,

And now you have to decide

How this transaction’s going.

Where will you hunt for meaning,

Now meaning has been hinted?

In the transaction itself?

Something to do with context?

The man who bears a striking

Likeness to Solzhenitsyn

And is currently holding

Forth on the Apocalypse,

Jesus, and astrology?

Frost said the moment he held

His breath composing Stopping

By Woods was actually when

He committed to the rhyme.

What’s trickiest in this scene

And what can you do with it?

It has to have some meaning,

The ominous bystander

Growls, as meaningfully as

Solzhenitsyn lecturing

Secular Americans.

The Embodiment

The time to evacuate
Has passed. Now it’s time to go
To ground, start hunkering down—

When wise folks say to be here
Now, be in this moment, now
Comes belatedly, after

A lot of warnings to leave.
Be here now. The scampering moments
Have all fled and are busy

Being wherever there is.
Now, you’ll just to be here.
And you’re happy, so happy

To be here just being sun
Rising on the flooded square.

Frog in Focus

Look through pictures you’ve taken
Of parallel worlds. All are,
In photographs—parallel

To whatever memory
Is up to with receding
Events on mental half shell—

The narrative has altered.
The narrative never stays
The same. The narrative.

Lost and Found

Once, and this is true,
A discursive ape
Carved symbols for words
In the form of prayer
On a clean, bright bone.

What the ape wanted
To know isn’t known,
Since, once it was burned
And carefully stored,
Everyone lost the bone,

Except for the ape
Who discovered it
A few thousand years
Later, who didn’t
Know the system.

Master Sonnet Turns the Lock

You were turning; you were
Bending; you were twisting.

You were bound and fettered
By the very writhing

Left you writhen. Dove home,
Breast warm, end days coming,

The bones that had a plan
Had lost their way, long since.

Propped yourself in your chair
Where you could spare far shores

A long, scrutinizing
Stare. Might as well live there.

No more swimming for you,
Isolated master.

Lives Lace Times

On the bridge
Where she took
Pics long years

Since, the same
Man that had
Watched her then

And took pics
Waits now while
Their kid swims.

If Not

What is time if not a void to fill?

Asks a poet marooned

In an anthology

Of best Canadian

Poetry recently.

Interesting question,

Starting from the given—

Time, for starters, as not

A void available

To fill, void for filling.

The more usual trope

Is that time’s a substance,

A measure or resource,

A one-way bank account

That can be drawn down but

Never be replenished.

Of course, it’s not a void

Here either. Let’s not take

It rhetorically—

So, what is time, if not

A void for you to fill?

A lonely word, a slough

Poets wander into

Who confuse abstraction

With existential depth,

A cultural construct,

A system of measures,

A rhythmic kind of change,

Something to talk about

In an award-winning

Contemporary poem.

Criminal Soul

So far as you know, paranoia works
By other guidelines. If you’re paranoid,
You assume ill will in your pursuers,
Whereas, if you have a criminal soul,
You instinctively expect that you’ll be
Pursued simply since ill will is presumed
In you. They’re coming for your fluttering
Criminal soul, not anything you’ve done.
In that case, better just to wait for them,
Let them discover for themselves.

But May Happen to Be, Anyway

Some say they live to write, or
That they’re most alive, writing,
Or, conversely, that writing

Is painful, even a kind
Of dying, a foul salt mine,
Some monstrous landfill screaming

With gulls and nightmarish smells
Writers crawl across, baskets
Cutting into their shoulders

As they try to cull a few
Chunks, pick a few rags to keep
Themselves this side of dying

For real. And other writers
Occupy every small niche
Of attitude in between,

While about all they agree
To agree on is the need,
The compulsion, however

Pleasurable or painful,
To keep writing, to do it,
Whatever it is, again.

Well. That’s the lay of the land.

Just to be different, cheeky,
Salty, and full of yourself,
Dumb narcissist, you could play

The I’m-not-like-anyone,
Self-deluded braggart’s game—
No, you’re not only alive

When writing, and no, you’re not
Suffering, and you can’t say
For sure you’re in a flow state,

And once you lived a decade
Not bothering with writing,
And it was a good decade,

Hardly the worst of your life,
Yet you prefer to compose,
You find contentment, a way,

Watching lines fall into place,
In this way that’s not a way
You or anyone must be.

Superstition’s DIY Religions

Superstition evolved after superstition worked
Just often enough, the reproductive benefits
To superstitious lineages outweighed the costs.
Physiologically prone to superstition—
Like most animals, frankly—you have to consciously
Convince yourself not to bob your head, tap your fingers,
To prove to yourself you’re not one of Skinner’s pigeons.
It’s entirely possible the fitness math has tipped,
And these days the less superstitious have fitter kids,
But, from local behaviors, you see no signs of this.
The more the rapidly changing world overwhelms folks
With jittery randomness trolling their helplessness,
The greater the urge to twitch, to pick up private myths.

For a Fistful of Quotations

Dragged around by your name,
Is that all you write for?
Maybe that plus the sense

You’ve expressed yourself well,
Gotten life off your chest?
For the moment at least

That does seem the model
For post-mortem esteem.
A few flashy prizes

Likewise attached to you
Won’t hurt, and equally
Quoted, feted poets

Linked to you socially,
Epistolarily,
Or, best, romantically

And tumultuously,
Make you more important,
More fun to write about.

Gossip canonizes
Or at least saves the names
Of not a few writers.

But it’s those quotations,
Snappy, pithy bon-mots,
Summations and slogans,

Again, linked to your name,
Which firm the foundation
Of high reputation,

Your palace, your grave mound,
Your tomb, your cenotaph.
Even those buried whole,

Their complete works preserved,
Are only immortal
As fragments. Well, and so?

Maybe you’ll be quoted,
Someday, maybe you won’t.
But no one’s stopping you

From writing for reasons
Of your own, which no one
But you will ever know.

Odelisque

Put the genre on display.
Lie it sideways. Show the form.
Undress it—it’s exotic—

Bare gift still in the wrapper
Of that alien empire,
The prosody of the past.

The content in that outline,
Model of the poem next door,
Hardly matters anymore—

Or rather, only matters
To show that what readers like
These days can be sumptuous,

Can cosplay with otherness,
Mastered and shared among us.

Where Else Can Squatters Move?

The mind’s a terribly
Crowded place—never mind
All this solitary

Roundabout of skull-bulb
Whispering to itself
Inside itself, being

That singular being.
Who has only one voice,
One set of scenery

Fluttering its fingers
Within interactions
Rehearsing in the brain?

Aren’t you sensing us now
In all the rest of you?

Peramulet

Katie was pushing the stroller
With Jack, down the bumpy sidewalk.
Clicket. Clunk. Clicket. Clunk. Softly,

Katie, softly. It was sunny,
The day, the light on Katie’s face,
The light on tiny, newborn Jack,

And you wanted to say something
To protect everyone in it,
To seal some phrases together

That could shield, that could more than mean,
That could be what language isn’t,
What myths and tales dream it should be,

A spell that can enact itself,
A verse transcending poetry.

Once Arranged

The phrase startles you—or rather,

You startle yourself with the phrase.

You’ve been a reading a short story,

Getting increasingly dozy

While mountains rise against the sun,

What with the evening coming on,

But does doziness explain this?

One sentence read, An encounter

Between two such specimens should

Not be avoided, but you heard

It in your own voice, in your head,

As, An encounter between two

Such specimens, once arranged, should

Not be avoided. Once arranged,

The phrase you added, felt solid,

Of a piece with the whole sentence,

Which, in turn, felt like you wrote it.

Was this was this just due to sleepiness?

Are you going a little bit mad,

Hallucinating extra text?

This has been happening of late.

You drift off reading, and go on

Composing your own words to read

But as if part of the same text,

In your head, until you startle

Awake. Even now, it feels right,

Your dream version of the sentence,

Once arranged, and the thought slips through,

What if the first draft had said that,

Then the phrase, once arranged, been struck?

What if proximity to death

Lets you read through the palimpsest?

The Long Way

Small white stand
For peach crops
Seems to plead,

Please don’t stop.
Real ripe worlds
Need to wait.

No one stops.
Dark gold fruit
Glows in shade.

Why Should You Have Felt That Way?

Last night’s dream was boring starlight,
A heavy net woven of woods
Hanging down from the dark to catch

Dream krill in the forests’ baleen.
You woke up neither sad nor glad
To know that the details would go.

Watching the bald blue now between
Chores you’ve accomplished and meetings
You’ve yet to begin, you wonder

What was boring about those stars?
The correct answer is nothing,
You surmise. Carved at the joints, dreams

Turn out to bind hybrid domains—
First, all things going on in dreams,
Events and faces in strange scenes,

And second, the dream emotions,
Which seem bound to all those events,
As if generated by them

But actually unrelated.
You feel dream emotions surging—
Joy, love, terror, boredom, worry—

While watching regurgitated
Bits of memory cross the screen—
But the emotions are their own.

It’s why nothing feels so vivid
Once you try to retell the dream.
What you dreamed was inadequate

Spur to how you felt about it.
Now, why? Why those two tracks for dreams?
You stare at the bare blue, trying

To see the stars behind the day,
To recapture fuzzy boredom,
But somehow boredom has escaped.

Can You Tell How a Hawk Waits Stealthily?

The drawing of the heronry

Is ink intertwined and spooky.

In Armitage’s Poetry

Of Birds, the heron, notably,

Vouches for Hamlet’s sanity.

Old French heronçeau was subtly

Corrupted to hernshaw, duly

Thence to handsaw, and you can see

Now why Hamlet said, sensibly,

He’d notice hawks in heronries,

Places where hawks ought not to be.

You squint at the sketched, inky trees,

Whose twigs can seem like beaks and knees.

Are herons what heronries breed?

Then Anes

Things link how they want to in the woods—

You think as you think and not as you should.

The most dangerous suspicion is that

Someone who’s not like you doesn’t like you

Since they’re not like you, and maybe they don’t,

But that’s just the first step to the excuse

That you don’t need to like people like them.

Tomfoolery. Bumpy soup. Bullet-proof.

Someone touts the term, nonce. You look it up.

You’d thought of something nonce as a one-off

And it was, although also varying

Value. Every thought that you bump into

In the woods is nonce and then forgotten,

Even the thought that the way to get through

The woods must begin with an incident

(Something happens, and you write about it)

Or a phrase (you like a wording, and you

Write about it—bullet-proof bumpy soup).

You could sort a great many poems in bins

That way—triggered by phrase or incident?

What they’ve got in common is that they won’t

Happen / if you ain’t paying attention.

Road Tar Smell

Threads deep past
Through just now—
Life makes sense,

Sense by sense.
As a child,
You loved smells

That burned well.
Wood, gas, tar.
You’re part fire.

After Salter on Frost

First by means of sound,

No, rather, rhythm—

And within the head,

Not out in the air—

Poems first win us when

We’re still small children.

It’s almost tactile,

A kind of bumping

Over the train tracks,

But pleasurable,

Soft whackety-whack,

Keeps us coming back

For more physical

Encounters with lines

Of words we don’t know

As terms with meanings,

As reference points,

As explanations,

And don’t need to know—

Back when we could feel

The separation

Between poetry

And making meaning,

Between language felt

And language used for

Communication.

It was ok then

To have no idea

What the verses meant,

But brain barks backward,

Becoming carved

Away by living,

Steadily losing

The ability

To love the rhythms

That cloak their meanings.

Alright, what this means

May be important.

Parse first, but recall,

However bitter,

Poetry remains

Language carrying

Echoes still playing

Around, foolishly,

Within. To entrance

The old, backwards brain,

To keep it on track,

Maintain attention,

Even grief’s haunted

With ghostly rhythms,

Even protests chant,

Even massive prose

Buries unmarked grace

In wisdom’s garden.

Piled Flake Dunes

Packed light terms,
Dense as stones,
Cliffs worn crushed

Up by quakes,
Down by love
From the grave—

Here’s your edge,
No more room—
Sands. Clouds. Noon.

Sailed Newsprint

Adhesive
Scraps rode waves,
Like labels

Glued to show
Kayakers
What went wrong.

Someone dropped
A paper—
Now that’s all

The news faced
Here until
It sinks in.

Life’s No Bourse, You Tragic Simpleton

Dive into any absorbing,
Thoughtful sort of activity,
And you’ll notice a tipping point

Where your absorption starts feeling,
In a niggling way at the edge
Of your awareness, like a waste

Of invested energy when
You could be investing elsewhere.
Then, for that and for no other

Reason, you start to lose the joy,
The pleasant, flow-state contentment
In continuing those actions.

This is a deep form of sadness,
Obsession over investments.

Parable of Her Most Fortunate Soul

The phone rode along
On the roof of the car

Where she’d set it before
Getting back in.

They called it and called it,
When she said she’d lost it,

And everyone could hear
The buzzing announcing

It was near, but no one
Could locate the phone—

Not anywhere in the car,
Not anywhere in the seats,

Not among the piles
Of coats and detritus—

Until one of them asked
Could it be on the roof?

And everyone was amazed
That the phone had survived

Driving all around town,
Unattached, in the dark.

Poem in Three Waves

Storms on ponds

Won’t touch down.

No one asks.

Young pond poems

Steal their spots,

Waves all ears.

Don’t leave yet,

One poem moans.

Waves shed tears.

Back to Dying as Living Again

Many times, in local settings
Of mostly elderly people
(Now more and more common to find),

You catch yourself glancing around
Considering the various
Stages of dying on display—

The minor (thin, white hair, soft guts)—
The on-the-way (limps and walkers)—
The circling-the-drain while trembling.

A lot of living being done
Through the processes of decay.
You consider a world begun

For everyone at middle age,
No infancy, youth, or childhood,
No growing, no reproductive prime—

A planet with one odd species
That steps out, maybe from seed cones,
Already salt-and-pepper haired.

How would everyone’s stages feel
On such a compressed timetable?
Likely much the same, the same.

The Lives of Towns of Human Lives

Peruse the news not for the news

But to absorb the many towns

News covers, and their differences.

Some people, just a few hundred,

Live in Jarratt, Virginia—small,

Scruffy community in green,

Nondescript, second-growth woodland

Housing the town’s main employer,

A deli meat plant that appears

Like a low, boxy fungal sprawl

Of pale buildings and parking lots

In a field scraped out of the woods,

Where a scandal has erupted

About contaminated meat.

Meanwhile millions of people live

In about the same acreage

In the legendary city of Cairo,

Where it’s so unbearably hot

These days it only comes alive

At night, when the streets overflow

With people—there’s just not enough

Fuel to avoid daily blackouts

And despite the crowds out at night,

A deep gloom pools under the lights,

And in interviews locals say

Things like, Everybody is dead

On the inside. They’ve surrendered;

They’re down. Egypt is a graveyard.

Maracaibo, Venezuela,

Rose on an abundance of oil,

But there people aren’t just depressed.

Recent hard times have been so hard,

A quarter of the city left.

Neighborhoods of abandoned homes

Could each pocket the citizens

Of all of Jarratt, Virginia,

With houses to spare—but no jobs.

Nobody seems to be fleeing,

Or so down they’re dead, in Görlitz,

Saxony, abutting Poland,

With an advanced economy,

Diversified enterprises,

A good fifty-five thousands folks,

A power plant beside the lake.

But the coal industry’s near death.

Nativist sentiment’s rising,

Along with right-wing politics—

Think of the border, the places

Hemorrhaging people elsewhere,

People so different from Germans

Who are being allowed in here!

Our way of life must be preserved!

That’s not the worry in Pokrovsk,

Ukraine,

Dead in the path of the surging

Russian war machine. One more place

People are more than despairing,

They’re fleeing, and not gradually.

Trains are filling up every seat

With the town’s old inhabitants

Suddenly themselves refugees.

A sampling. That’s all. A sampling,

Unrepresentative, of towns

Around the world where humans live

That happen to be in the news

For their recent ways of being

Diversely unfortunate. Years

Will haul this metal-cored pebble

A few more times around its star,

Just a few will do, and these towns

Will no longer be in the news—

Well, none except maybe Cairo.

Cairo’s an historical beast

So large and ancient it can make

It’s own fuel for newsworthiness.

But there are so many places,

Each with its own sets of stories,

Where humans have pockmarked the Earth,

And you know they’re all connected

If you squint a bit, but they feel

Like so many wandering worlds,

Untethered, lost in their stories.

Twenty Five Feet

The depth of the Great Salt Lake
Is a lesson for us all.
That greatness is a puddle,

While a fingernail of lake
In British Columbia,
Slicing three hundred meters

Deep between mountains, and not
Impressive on any map,
Could drown Chicago’s skyline.

What’s the lesson, exactly?
Pause, while the lecturer paws
Through available options—

Things are never what they seem?
Still waters run deep? Big things
Come in small packages? No,

Certainly it’s none of those.
The lecturer glances up.
Trust me, there’s a lesson there.

It’s something about being
Misled and/or misleading.
The big one holds less water

Than the small, and there’s meaning
Somewhere in that paradox.
Shallow can mean many things.

So can deep. But that’s not it.
Try this: the unexpected,
For whatever reason, makes

You pay attention, makes you
Feel that you missed some meaning,
Makes you sure there is meaning,

There must be meaning. So you
Produce your choice of meaning—
Life’s not like that. It’s like this.

The lecturer nods sagely,
Underlining the wisdom.
The Great Salt Lake of Utah

Is just twenty-five feet deep.
It means the world’s surprising,
And wisdom evaporates.

No Bells, No Cathedral

Hummingbirds, lizards, finches,
Coyotes, quail, and mule deer
Are common in these canyons—

Nothing so haunting as bells
Ringing over the peaked roofs
Humans built to spook ourselves.

We echo forms of the world
And then notice how those forms
Remind of us of our echoes.

Don’t those bird songs sound like bells?
Those cliffs look like cathedrals.
We craft our imitations

For poppets in the forest,
Then sense ourselves in the woods,
And feel haunted, as we should.

The Stream

Clouds laced up the pointed cliffs
Like white laces through high tops.
It was the end of summer,

The start of a long weekend.
A nearby, once-rural town
Was celebrating peaches,

Once an important harvest,
Now a nostalgic party
Involving vendors and booths

In the city park, plus games,
And, yes, some competitions
Involving the quality

Of peaches and peach cobblers,
Pies, preserves, ice cream, and such.
In the canyons under cliffs,

Tourists from around the globe
Focused on their adventures—
Hiking, cycling, scenic flights,

And pictures of each other
Having all those adventures
To celebrate being here

As you have celebrated
Being there and there or there.
The clouds all dissipated

After flaring up briefly
In the late afternoon light.
What were you celebrating?

What were you most focused on?
The many changes of pace
In the way everything changed

Each instant of the weekend,
The ordinary weekend,
Ordinary holiday—

The speeds of the vehicles,
The milling of the locals
At the peach fair, the surging

Of the internationals
Boarding at the shuttle stops,
The clouds winding, unwinding

Around the steep, crumbling cliffs
That defied you to define
Beauty in inhuman ways

Not even to do with life—
Just stone compressed, lifted, blown
Grain by grain into the stream.

Simplified Rococo Hypocrisy on a Picnic

Whenever the pace
Of the incoming
Slackens, memory

Springs into action.
Haven’t you noticed
How most thoughts amount

To entertainment
For the troubled self?
Even dread’s a show

Seizing attention
With macabre puppets,
Since horror’s better

Than boredom to mind.
Poor mind. The dullest
Moments are down deep

More richly detailed
Than memory’s props,
Garish collages,

And reused costumes.
That’s all of future,
All of fantasy,

And yet you turn back
To start rummaging
Memory’s attic

For more mummery
Of what might happen
The very instant

Your attention flags,
Bored with the moment,
With the nuances

Of, for instance,
A drive down the road
You drive every day.

You defend yourself—
Hey! Of course! It’s dull!
The same every day!

And I’ve got so much
I should think about,
So much on my plate,

And won’t it be good
To get everything
Done, and can’t you see

Me living the life
I should be living,
And what if I don’t

Get these ducks lined up,
And that set up done?
All done would be great.

Alright. No lectures
Then—you’ve had enough
Ambitious people

Haranguing others
About how to live
In the blissful now.

It’s not that the now
Is so damned blissful.
It’s just that it’s strange

That the world’s details
Bore you if they don’t
End up as threadbare

Bits of old costumes
The mind wears to play
The set narratives,

The three or four tales
It can’t help but stage.
No one dares to say

Imagination
Is a poorer place
To spend your hours in

Than the dullest, most
Quotidian hour
You ran away from.

You might want to try
To see if you can
Remain nonhuman

Enough not to need
To hide in tired thoughts,
When you could be free.

A Good Soak

You have about an hour
Of direct sun left you.
You park yourself in it,

The way you’d position
Yourself in a shower,
To get the best of it,

Ignoring dinner-time
Hunger and setting down
Screens full of books and news.

The world will carry on
Or maybe it will end.
In the meantime you’ll watch shades

Forecast the Earth’s shadow
And haunt sun-warmed meadow.

Unlike Unnatural Words

Scrutinizing some writing

Someone published in Paris,

Roughly three decades ago,

You realize you are struggling

To analogize language,

To say what language is like.

Why you’re bothering with this,

Who knows? Nothing’s to be solved.

Who cares what language is like?

Three times you’ve started drafting

A poem in response to it.

Three times you’ve spun out in sand.

It’s not there’s nothing to say.

There’s too much depth to soft sand.

Sometimes the means have no end.

Identity Post-Politics

There’s no use in railing

Against identity

As a measure of worth,

Privilege, suffering,

Entitlement, honor—

Even Jesus is just

Part of Identity

Among devout Christians

Preaching through latter days—

My faith in Jesus is,

One missionary tries

Explaining, a huge part

Of my identity.

Identity constructs

Identity these days,

An acknowledgement now

Spanning political

Spectra—identity

Is something that is made,

Not eternally fixed,

Not even for warriors

In the cultural clash

Over who is what sex.

Everyone must define

Whatever position

They mean to champion.

The missionary’s faith

Seems very real, and yet,

It’s also just a piece,

A huge part but a part,

Of an identity

That, like any other,

Is labeled, part by part.

A Laggard Companion

I brought my teacher Camembert

Because she said she didn’t know

What it was, said a high-schooler

To her best friend in the lot

Adjacent the bakery

Where kids hung out after school.

What kind of teacher’s never

Heard of Camembert cheese? the friend

Replied. How sheltered is she?

You mean, like, how ignorant?

The girls laughed delightedly.

The ignorance of adults

Peaks just before one joins them,

When one still has some distance,

A last shred of perspective.

The spare adult listening

Just wanted to know one thing—

What classes did this teacher

Give instruction in? Adults

Don’t care all that much about

Ignorance, but adults hunt

Down vulnerability,

Usually by specialty.

What’s your specialty’s status?

And what’s your status within

Your established soecialty?

Ignorance of cheese is fine

For engineers. Janitors

Don’t have much status to keep.

But high school teachers waver

Between the ranks, on the brink

Of pity, on the margin

Of respectability.

Adults are slow. The gossip

Had moved with the laughing teens

Back into the bakery.

Daunting

You can rehearse all the good
Things on your vicinity,
Itemize what makes you glad,

Or should, about the bright day.
But gladness goes beyond counts
And anyone, any day,

Can draw up lists in combat
Of the reasons to be glad
And the reasons to be sad.

The direction selected
Says either already glad
Or already sad. The mind

Casts about for evidence
That will affirm what it feels.
Evidence is always there.

The chemistry that goes on,
That orchestrates all of this
Has no care for your affairs,

Is an evolved reaction
To other combinations
Of the ancient molecules

That generate behavior.
Chemistry tames chemistry—
Tames—the same root as daunting—

To vanquish, to fill with dread,
To domesticate, to tame.
All you need to go feral,

To be ferally content,
Glad, satisfied, enlightened,
Is for awareness to hold

The reins of your chemistry,
So that you aren’t forced to think,
Can never be forced to think

Of anything too daunting.
Hasn’t it occurred to you
That all your meditation,

Prayer, dances, opiates, booze
Have been weapons in one war,
For awareness to refuse

To be tamed to being good,
By brain’s social chemistry
Evolved to remain subdued?

Both sides deploy the weapons.
Mostly the taming side win.
But when they’re stolen, unearned,

Gladness, peace, contentment
Are always small victories
For you against things to do.

A Hot Air Balloon

How many years until everyone
Alive as these lines are typed is gone?
And how many years going backward
Would you need to reach the point at which
No one right now alive was yet born?

The second one is easier, more
Amenable to an estimate—
Even if the soul designated
As oldest at the moment is not,
They’re unlikely to be that far off.

Let’s round up a bit to 120
And predict things won’t change much, as well.
In 1904, no one alive
Now was already born, and no one
Here now will still draw breath

By the time 2144
Is announced, assuming years still count.
Of course there’s nothing about that stretch
On which you could safely bet. What did
1786 know of this?

Miracle Hunger

People die for miracles,
Die questing for miracles,
Somewhere in the human world

Every hour of every day.
The simplest explanation
Seems to be relentless hope

That solutions can be found
When the one hoping believes
That solutions can’t be found—

So, sometimes, when one is found,
An actual solution
After all, people insist

That it was a miracle.
Continuing to find none,
However, doesn’t stop hope,

And hope is exploitable,
And people exploit people.
People die for miracles

From people who exploit them.
Still, that’s somehow not enough.
Solutions may not be sought,

And still the hunger remains
To witness a miracle.
And who knows why it remains,

Why supernatural tales
Are loved by level-headed
People—why Taoists accept

Emptiness in the Way, yet
Constantly play at magic.
What is it the hunger’s for?

Say gravity could switch off
Locally, killing no one—
That would be a miracle.

Would people be happy then,
Live contented, so much fun?
This hunger is for something

That could make life miserable.
Think of just how terrible
Life might be with miracles.

One Person Playing a Silent Scene

That’s a handsome bit of melancholy,
He said, Although it does risk self-pity.

He waited to see what she’d say to that,
In the peculiar suspense invented

By phone-texted conversation. Dot-dot.
While he waited, he wondered what he’d meant

When he had incorporated handsome.
Handsome how? Fine? Elegant? Masculine?

How could a melancholy emotion
Suggest any of those connotations?

He knew he had a tendency to link
Oddball adjective-noun combinations.

She didn’t answer him, but he began
To understand he’d meant he’d imagined

Some handsome and melancholy person
Expressing that opinion she’d sent him

And then had unconsciously elided
The person from the imaginary

Situation in which the person said
Such a handsome, melancholy thing,

Leaving behind a floating emotion
That seemed to risk being self-pitying.

That, too, was his thing—removing persons
From spoken settings, leaving only terms.

He thought of Stevens—Life is an affair
Of people, not things, but for me it’s been

The reverse, and that has been the problem.
He gave his phone a last glance at the screen.

Over the Blue Aegean

You’ve been so many places
You can’t say you’ve ever been.
You tremble over the blue

Aegean near the ghost town
Created by cruelty,
And you lust for its beauty,

Its overgrown masonry,
To spill from inside your mind
Out over surrounding life.

After the revolutions,
Genocidal replacements,
And grief, it comes down to this—

Once all locked rooms are roofless,
Ghost thoughts can enter what’s left.

Why Haven’t Cave Cats Evolved?

If you’re in the right frame
Of mind for world-building,
Then adding blind cave cats

To your cavern planet
Might be a good idea.
One good idea, at least.

You’d have to have a lot
Of species that made sense
In those ecosystems

You imagined for them,
Deep in conversation
With stalactite tunnels,

Hunting the blind cave mice.
And then—since you’re human,
Narrating for humans—

You’d need mysterious,
Troglophilic persons
Haunting the caves themselves,

Beautiful, slender-limbed,
And elvish, near-sighted,
Nearly ageless as olms,

Maybe hunting with help
From those predatory,
Magical, blind cave cats.

Can you sense the darkness,
The intimate absence
Of illumination

Lacking changing weather,
Yet? Now a visitor
Sets in motion the chain

Of events that upend
This quiet, settled world,
Propelling your hero

Onto the harsh surface,
Into the terrible light,
Where aliens from Earth—

No—portal travelers
From your world and your time,
Have arrived, having found

A link between the worlds,
One tunnel in a maze
Of networked threads binding

All the worlds together.
The cavern world’s woven
With diamonds and metals,

Which humans find, meaning
Your hero’s sweet people
Are doomed without the help

Of that first visitor,
And the fact that what ties
All the worlds together

Is one vast tapestry
Of squeezes, belly crawls,
Windows, speleogens,

And boneyards that only
Blind cave cats can traverse.
Hero and visitor,

Turned lovers, assemble
A blind cave cat army. . . .
Now you have a story.

Homo ligare

Cuneiform tablets confirm,
Prayers left at temples confirm,
It’s been true for a long time—
Debt is scarier than death.
There is no bottom to it,
No end to ostracism.
Death is often punishment

For debts, which proves their ranking.
Pay back your debts, you can live.
Die, and debtors will still come
To visit your family—
And not only for money.
Debt is the depth of being
Human, is obligation.

Dreams Are Feints and Misdirections

For yourself, iIt dawns on you,
You suffer far more conflict
In dreams than in waking life,

Far more. But are dreams the source
Or the storage? Once again,
The question no one’s answered

To others’ satisfaction
Is, What exactly’s the point
Of all this activity

In the resting body’s brain?
The intensity of dreams,
Even more than their nonsense,

Doesn’t fit explanations
Of health or prophecy well,
Although such explanations

Are plentiful, each of them
With its ardent champions.
You sleep. You survive more dreams,

None of which are true killers.
You wake, rattled, to a day
That will be, for most of you,

Much calmer than your dreaming,
And yet it’s one day, dull day,
That’s going to have to kill you.

Porcelain Dishes

What foolish things might you do
If you could keep on doing
Dumb things indefinitely?

Clattering porcelain dishes
Annoy you making breakfast.
What if you replaced them all

With wooden bowls, something dumb
Like that? What if you spent years,
Or aimed to, replacing all

Non-native plants in the yard?
That would be dumb. Warm winds blow
Through the window screen, and you,

You think of free afternoons
Stretching to infinity
In which to think of dumb things

To take forever to do.
Then it hits you—only one
Such afternoon, like this one,

Can bloom an infinity
Of nothing much, mostly dumb.
Watch how this dust spins in sun.

Every Poem’s Unsolicited Except for the One You Can't Find

Spent part of an afternoon alone
While crowds were consuming the world,
And all you consumed were short poems—-

Old ones, canonical, minor,
New ones, intimate, from war zones—
Trying to sate that same hunger

That has always pushed you to poems,
Throwing them back by the fistful,
As if reading were a taste test,

And you’d lined them up like samples,
Amuse-bouches you filched yourself
From the trays in the kitchen fridge.

You’re racing to get to the one
That stops you, makes you swear softly
To yourself in satisfaction,

This is it, this is just the thing
That a poem should be, that I’d want
A poem to be, that I envy.

You’ve eaten yourself sick this way,
And here’s the thing. Ask any chef—
It’s hard to do with a mouthful

What almost no one manages
To do with a multi-course meal—
To not so much sate as transform

The hunger into awareness
Of an experience never
Previously known and forever

To be sought again, a shudder
In the way the world can be sensed.

What You Never Wrote in Terms of What You Did

The sun is in the window.
The sun’s all over the floor.
You could be doing nothing.

You could be finishing chores.
The worst thing is to be torn.
The sin of accomplishment

Taunts even the fulfilled life.
Have you done all you needed
To feel you needn’t do more?

Yes, and yet here you are, cloaked
In contentment’s own daylight,
Soaked in the pleasure of sun,

And quiet, and nothing much
Needed until tomorrow,
Still thinking, should you do this

Or better you should do that?
That letter you want to write
(More truly, to have written),

The parts of tomorrow’s tasks
You could maybe get done now.
A ground squirrel, its cheeks stuffed,

Waddles up to the glass door
While crossing over the porch
And eyes its own reflection.

Everything’s more important
Than this moment, than writing
About this, than reading this,

And then, there it is. The bliss.
You’re getting to the bottom
Of being while you’re dying

Happily in your rocker,
Bathed in sunlight and watching
That squirrel determined to live.

You’re the Last Frost

She said her father said

To her on his death bed

And then laughed, We were all

Just horse thieves anyway.

One of her listeners

Enjoyed the anecdote

But was fascinated

By the unintended

Pun in, You’re the last Frost.

Something ominous stirred

In that phrase. While the thin

Edge of changing climates

Pressed various places,

Surely some place would soon

See its last snow, its last

Blizzard, the last hard freeze,

The last frost for the years,

Maybe millenniums,

To come. Finality

Rustled its trailing skirts

On the floor of the mind.

End of a line or end

Of a global era,

It’s not the end itself

That haunts the empty house,

But the thought that the end

Will never be undone.

The anecdotes moved on.

Other stories were told.

Each was anything but

The final one, although

What couldn’t be undone

Somehow left one undone.

The Pledge

A pink blossom handed over
For safe-keeping while it wilted,

Handed by offspring to parent,
Who made a show of saving it

As a way of acknowledging
That the offspring loved the parent—

A gesture that’s been enacted
In many forms and with many

And various sorts of objects
Playing the part of affection—

What was its enduring value?
Many would say sentimental,

But it’s somehow vaster than that.
I would rescue you, if I could.

Incomparable

Has anyone tried
To search for the first
Point used to anchor

The comparisons
Essential for you
To explore your worlds?

The first point, the first,
To which anything
And everything else

Was analogous,
Was comparable,
Could be contrasted

In spreading webbing—
Was there such a thing?
Or were there many?

In the beginning
Was no description
And then something was

Like something other
And already known,
The light, the first day.

The Menga Dolmen

No written language. Rest there,
Then circle back to musing
On all the giant structures

Stone-Age humans assembled
At far-flung sites around the world—
Dolmens, henges, and temples,

Heaps with varying functions,
Varying shapes and meanings,
At varying altitudes.

Doesn’t it make you wonder
A little why anyone
Bothered to begin writing?

It wasn’t necessary
To organize anything.
It wasn’t necessary

For civilization or
To simply survive.
Some early writing contexts

Were much less awe-inspiring
Than the mounds and weapon hoards
Of non-literate neighbors.

You know the answer. Writing
Had ulterior motives.
Writing blossomed for itself.

Against Role Models

She brought him something she adored.
She wanted him to adore it.
At a glance, he knew he couldn’t.

He tried not to comment on it.
He tried to steer her to her own
Capacity to create worlds.

Limitations don’t limit us,
Not like appreciation does.
We get held back by what we love.

Could we be freer if we chose
To admire nothing no one did?
It’s unlikely the choice is ours.

Our admirations confine us.
We’re limited by what we love.

Kindness and Generosity

When death within a year or less

Approaches to near certainty

And becomes common knowledge, watch

For all the surprising kindness

That can blossom out of people,

Their startling generosity.

What possesses humanity

That pettiness can get a rest

For someone so undeserving?

Admit that at a minimum—

You are not, nor were you ever,

Deserving of the kindnesses

Shown to you once the news got out

That you were caught in a vortex

That could not be escaped without

Medicines not invented yet.

First, everyone’s in that vortex—

People love to remind themselves

No one gets out of life alive.

It’s just that you’re spinning fast now.

Second, when were you generous

And kind to the extent people

Are now being kind to you? Once,

On impulse, maybe twice? Perhaps,

If that. No one would mistake you,

No one should mistake you (you!)

For a paragon of goodness,

And until recently you were

Confident no one ever had.

And yet here people are, helping

To extraordinary degrees.

If you were planning a tombstone

(You aren’t), an honest epitaph

Would read, Here lies old-and-so,

Of whom nothing much comes to mind,

To whom people were truly kind.

Poetics of the Bifungite

You become increasingly
Interested in the gone parts
Of your ordinary life

You witness fast becoming
Collections of trace fossils—
The living that shaped them lost,

Lost without fossils themselves,
So only their tracks remain.
All preserved writing’s like that—

Whatever invertebrate
Soul wriggled itself through the clay,
That lived part left no substance,

At least not here. Here are trails
And hollows of those gone thoughts
That pressed up against language,

And although the written words
Are valuable and useful
And easily repurposed

As tools for the fresh thoughts found
Living in them and through them,
Opportunists, as thoughts are,

They’re never those first, lost thoughts.
Yes. Yes, that’s hard to accept.
Don’t you read for the ideas?

Isn’t most of what you know
Of people, of who they were,
Derived from their trace fossils?

It feels so. You know the gone
Parts were once alive, were parts
Of your life, of other lives.

But thoughts are too brief, too soft
To preserve themselves. Thoughts left
These tracks while thoughts lost themselves.

Do Cells Suffer When They Die?

Bizarre small sounds coming from
Your own stomach woke you up
In the middle of the night,

Just before the storms began.
At first you thought it was a mouse
Caught in a mousetrap in your bed,

Squeaking piteously in pain.
Then you realized there was no trap
Set anywhere, much less your bed.

Lightning flickered on your eyelids,
And you opened them. Your stomach
Was whimpering—not liquid sounds,

Not bubbling with gasses—crying
In a tiny voice to itself.
As you woke to this awareness,

You kept listening, and you asked
If these noises you’d never heard
From your insides in six decades

Should be considered surprising.
The cancer’s not in your stomach,
Yet, not that you know of, and yet

It’s around the vicinity,
Swashbuckling across the torso.
Maybe those were the dying cries

Of captured, burning settlements
Of citizen cells surrendered
To the marauding berserkers.

More lightning and the rain began.
Nothing much more ordinary
Than a late-summer thunderstorm

In the southwest’s monsoon season—
Nothing much more ordinary
Than an aging man with cancer.

The sad, shrill cries of the stomach
Sank to the back of consciousness
Like the news of people dying

Horrendously in other parts
Of the terribly human world.
Rain beat the window, and you slept.

The Night Cycle

It bears down out of the stars,
A shadow machine driven
By the absence of engine,

A well-oiled system of gears
That spin smoothly, silently,
A nonsensical techne.

It’s hunting down Ptolemy
To tangle him in its wheels.
Telescopes can see the spokes

In exposures too short-lived
To collapse in the spinning.
Sooner or later, someone

Will shake loose from that spinning,
To become night’s rim and hoop.

Elegy to the Spanish Republic

The poetry he liked the most

Was the poetry of titles

Picked by artists and musicians

For paintings and compositions,

Songs, sculptures, etudes, what-have-you,

For any art mostly wordless

Or entirely wordless, except

For the effort to title it.

The beauty of such poetry

Is that, whatever’s been titled

Has no responsibility

To hew close to connotations

Suggested by that single phrase

Or word or line—you can listen

For the sea surging in La Mer,

But it’s not necessary, and

When Liszt names a piano piece

Years of Pilgrimage, you can’t be

Disappointed by the absence

Of any stories or haunting

Descriptions of far-off places.

Paintings, too, may have lyrical

Names orthogonal to the art.

He collected these, secretly,

And shared them with no one, hoarding

The sense of freedom they gave him,

That it could be permissible

To invoke a vague atmosphere,

Which any further poetry

Could only dissipate, then split.