Sacred Bad Behavior

Says an acquaintance immune
To the striking resonance
Of extraordinary phrase

Placed in bland conversation,
Like an unusual weed
Decorating a dull plot

Of garden-variety
Mail-order catalogue blooms—
Suddenly, these plants matter.

The tricksters are returning,
Along with the longer nights.
For now, it’s just sacred bad

Behavior, but the active
Spells the behavior triggers . . . ?

Hunger Alone

There is, between the pirate
And the ghost, the slenderest
Third shadow haunting them both—

History introduced them
To each other, the template
And the sweaty example—

Hunger, the essence of life
If there is such, as the worst
Punishment the dead can get—

None of the joys of life, all
Of the wanting, sense of lack,
Insufficiency—hunger.

Meanwhile, on the other side,
The pirate illustrating how hunger
Loves proximity to death—

Cutlasses, Jolly Rogers,
Consumption is destruction.
To live entails destruction.

And in the middle? The third?
Too faint even for a ghost,
This last shadow illustrates

Why dark matter’s too tricky,
Why disappearance is both
Universal and never

Known—nothing can go away
Leaving behind a story
Other than hunger alone.

It Wasn’t

How long ago was

Anything that was

Not the property

Of the invaders

Already? The light

In the sky that night,

How deformed was it?

The burning candle

Gifted from the thrift

Store in the dying

Segment of downtown,

How nubbly was it

Around the black wick

You lit and blew out

In it? This nonsense

With the beginning

Of the temporal,

Rhythmic, circular?

The sky turned orange

And a neighbor said,

That’s it, but no.

Mind Handles Zero as an Absence

If, in the concept of absence,
Nothing is still some sort of thing,
Then there must be something to it

And, moreover, must be something
Else more truly nothing, nothing
Putting some somethings on notice. . .

Nothing’s better than nothing
For tangling things up in things
That can’t get an edge on nothing

Merely by waiting and waiting.
An infinity of waving
Ways to indicate there’s nothing,

But no way to being nothing —
No absence, emptiness, nothing.

The Race through the Forest

You’d had no idea how fierce
Racing the forest could be—

Yes, that’s correct—not racing
Each other to the far side

Of the venomous woods, but
Racing forest strategy

To occupy the cliff’s edge
Wholly and successfully

Before sunlight’s gone again,
Before you or your woods end.

Now you know which race is meant,
Don’t you? Not the metaphor

For who leaps through the door, but
Who opens or is the door?

Digits

an entirely human construct

Markers. Mid-October was a little

Early to be out coursing the numbers

Through the bitter green cattle meadows—

You needed that over-the-top twilight,

Whereas Jeeves could work with rags and a myth.

Some nights on the Isle of Man, you thought

You were some kind of ruler from the top

Floor of the tallest old hotel facing the bay.

You climbed into your armchair with whisky

And the blue jewel of the skies on the waves

And almost a sneer on your lips, because

You were, here, above the other tourists

An emperor of the best mystery

In this calculating cosmos—empty.

Empty

The devil’s own number
Is feeling a bit thick
Around the midsection

This afternoon, ghostly
Impression. You have time
To learn how to fear it,

But not before you leave.
What is emptiness if
You simply wave the hand

Holding it and it goes,
It’s gone, gone for good,
Emptiness can’t be split.

It can’t be not nothing,
Can’t be something either.
You’re holding it rightly

Empty has no wrongly,
And yet you will be crushed
If you misrepresent

That which can’t ever be
Better than anything
Worse than whatever is.

Despair at a Crusade

Following eleven specific

What ifs, she concludes, what if nothing

Changes? That would be impossible.

She should have no worries there. But you

Know she doesn’t intend nothing as

No thing. She’s aware of the changes.

No, she intends something like the least

And with regard to a specific

Target for a particular change—

What if, after everything she’s lived

And done, there hasn’t been the slightest

Change in her preferred direction for

Whatever it is she’s worked to change,

All her life, it seems? That’s the nothing

Changes intended despite changes,

The question that’s harder to answer.

Pick a single, historical cause,

Say, universal suffrage. It starts

Out a little wild-eyed. All causes

Emerge from fringes of how things are.

As a cause gets pushed to the middle

Of general discourse, that’s a change.

If the cause vanishes from discourse,

That’s also a change. But neither change

May be what she means now by nothing

Changes. It would have to be a change

In favor of her cause, one of those

Goals she joined the cause to campaign for.

If the major conditions that spurred

Her to join the cause persist, of course

She may find herself asking, over

And over, what if nothing changes?

Here the world offers comfort solid

And cold as a block of glacial ice—

Every point will change, even the most

Intransigent, ancient, enduring

Fact—every fact will be eroded,

If not within the questioner's life.

Those changes that are not? They will be.

But not only will they finally

Come to pass. They would have come to pass,

Whether she had been involved or not.

There's comfort in knowing she had

Nothing to do with nothing changing

Nor change at last? Maybe she sped things.

But Key Breaks Are Imaginary, and Might Have Been Inserted Anywhere

The collection, if so called,
Begins in thin air, dangling
Unanchored lines, and it ends
With another collection, a spare—
Lines, dashes, letters, numbers—
The spaces indicating
Each temporal interval.

It is not much an object—
More a fragmentary cache
Of more fragmented objects—
Not so much a diagram
Of, for example, a tree,
As a bouquet of pressed flowers,
Containing information,

But awaiting some meaning
That only you can give them,
Anthologia. Collect
Them all. Can they even be
Asserted as singular?
Here they are, the gathering,
Scattered waste loved together,

Although one line is spinning
By mere balance at the end of a shelf,
And a few others tilt up
On each other as spandrels,
Pointless elaborations
Made essential for support—
And here are crossbeams, meaning.

Unhoused at the Last

You can’t leave them now,
The songs with a roof
Made of bone, polished,

Lick-and-spittle cleaned,
The long, glowing row
Of them, extending

From where you sit still
Gazing down the road,
Always down the road,

Following the dark
As it gathers, grows,
Until they vanish

Where the night turns real
As someone who likes
You, likes the circles

Your thoughts make of lights
In the gathering,
However grimly

You know the reason
The turn to twilight
Involves the butcher

Who raises rapists
Who serve the warlord
Who’s on the payroll

Of the hegemon
Who will harm others
For calculations,

For shits and giggles,
For playing the one
Nasty piece of work

Reassured, in pledge
After pledge, he will
Be allowed to stay,

Be feared like a god,
Eventually,
Get killed like a king,

Like a dog, a growl
Shot without a thought,
A song through the roof.

The Remainder Will Explicate the Most

It could be alluring, a collection

Of exquisite writing about dying,

By the living, of course, who were trying

Either to capture what it would be like

To do the dying, or to illustrate

Death as one might illustrate anything,

But not those texts alone this time—nope, not

The poems and stories and dolly-zoomed scenes—

Both those and the actual, accurate

Depictions of that creative person

Who had carefully delineated

Death in advance, in anticipation,

Here for comparison—gift vs. death.

(Given that death ends in zero, subtract.)

The Sunny Meadow

There’s a dark corner
Of the broad meadow
Gold from afternoon
Surfeit of sunlight.

A strong wind kicks up.
The touch-typing stops
Then starts up again.
How soon will this be

Over? Forever?
How soon will this stop?
Depends how sweeping
You think that this is.

The shadow moving
Through the broad meadow—
That won’t stop moving.
Those are people there.

The refugee years
Are just beginning.
Billions will wander,
On foot and by boat—

Billions, not millions,
One shadow. And if
You’re not one of them,
You may well be locked

And loaded to stop
Them from wandering
Too close to your world.
Or you may have made

The choice, or may think
You’ve chosen, to lie low
In the bright meadow,
Far from the shadows.

Good luck to you there.
This beginning-end
Of a shattered age
In an afternoon

Of windy breezes
Near to the graveyard
That is the meadow,
The broad, bright meadow.

Two neighbors chit-chat
About auroras,
The recent comet,
Darkness in the grass,

Since it comforts them
A little to talk
About what’s isn’t
Controlled by humans—

Odd as that may be
For the descendants
Of dreams sweeping through
Broad sunny meadows.

Nothing Is

Under a bare sky,

Roof still at your back,

You wonder how soon

Someone will tell you,

Nothing’s as it seems.

That’s all. All you need—

Mild autumnal sun

And a gentle voice

Sunlit in your head,

Nothing’s as it seems.

Leaves of desert ash

Tilt, turn, and flutter

Against a backdrop

Of murmuring song,

Nothing’s as it seems.

It’s almost as if

The day is trying

To tell you something,

Hey? Funny cosmos.

Nothing’s as it seems.

It is, actually.

It is, exactly,

As it seems—nothing

That is. No fooling,

No tricks. As it seems.

Already Landed, Watch

Purple blossoms, petals
The size of pinky nails,
Dot the sea-green branches

Of the conqueror bush
No one calls by that name
Since no one’s yet noticed

The habit of the bush
To carpet the landscape.
This is the invader

Above all invaders,
But you don’t know it yet.
Every week, up the slope

From your all-invasive,
Stuccoed subdivision,
More of the scrubby, drab

But for their purple blooms,
Conqueror invaders
Appear. It’s no big deal.

Humans were hard to find,
Once upon a time. Now,
You’re everywhere. Truly,

Did you believe you’d be
The last as well as first
Of the alien waves?

You Sang

Songs tend to be slower—

A little bit—than speech,

With higher and slightly

More stable pitches, as

Kevin Young—or was it

A team of scientists—

Noted at Princeton U—

Or somewhere—community

Building distinctions, just

Slightly stabler, more like

Mark Doty’s white roses,

A little denser than

The fog—a line to be

Crossed. Tell me where they end,

Doty ended. Someone

Took the refrain from him—

Chorus of white roses?

Answered a broken cloud.

Bespoke for the Stranger

i'm checking into "asleepingbird....." to see if i can discern how you are doing.  can't say it is all that helpful for that purpose, but at least i get to read what you are thinking about maybe somewhat

All these lines modeled

On the regrown forest

Of a life, scrubby undergrowth,

In a shadowy way.

There are no close failures

No tightly sewn successes

Here, just the surrounding

Woods in a shadowy way.

You walk through the vines

And around the roots and branches

Of what will never be you,

Never your forest primeval,

Never the exact outline

Of what you were as you wrote

About the regrowth from the burns

Grafted in shadowy ways.

Ample in Success

He dragged out the cardboard box. His words—
Well, the borrowings he’d used the most—

Ready to serve. As a collection
Of points, words are surprisingly bland.

They feel like discrete, loosely gathered
Small objects, just the sort of items

You might let pile up in an old box.
Only as phrases can words sometimes

Crack like whips or seize hold of the world.
Sentences have fans and also serve,

But phrases. . . . Here’s where power and beauty
Curve. He dusted off his box of words,

Considering where, in its heaped mess,
He might find the cancel to distress.

The Fugitive Law

Which goods outweigh others—
Which morals are the most
Important to uphold—

There’s no freedom without
Law and police who
Bring moral order.

No secure ownership
Without the protection
Of property by force.

And whatever you own
That’s immoral to own,
What does that mean for theft?

Pine Valley Mountain

If there’s no one in the world
Who yearns to harm or thwart you,
You must, at a minimum,
Have remained anonymous—
You might want to consider
This as having been a gift.
You sit on a sun-warmed stone
At the edge of a mesa
Looking off into blue west
And you are not there, not there
At all, except as something
Real. Real but unknown—ideal
Among the ways of being—
To be but to not be known.

Life—It’s Marvelous—He Composed

But what’s that life follows and falls

Behind at the end of the John

Ashbery lyric, Light Turnouts?

There seems to be an us—a ghost

Apostrophized and its speaker-

Interlocutor. There’s a lot

Of the usual Ashbery

Sleight of hand—ordinary lines

Of slightly nonstandard syntax

That add up to a prose house heap

Of something that almost makes sense

In a conventional manner,

Which is exactly what it does

Not do. The ghost and the speaker

Are involved in their adventure

Of another order, although

The reader is shown none of it,

Aside from a stray simile

Or two, like seizing the weather,

Like a shot in the dark.

Maybe life follows those. Also,

You discover you want to know.

For whatever reason, you want

To know what life is following.

Which You May Well Not Notice Then

The threads hang loosely from your thoughts—
How to tie up the fight beside
The campfire in the wilderness

You heard of dozing, second-hand,
Slipping in and out of dreaming,
Between the responses, last night,

With this flotilla of sailboats
Passing as clouds, with this sapling
Proudly sticking to the program,

Letting its leaves flare on schedule,
Never mind recent weeks of heat.
With breezes occasionally

Troubling the windows, with waiting
For the phone call that says come here,
With the news there’s real news at last,

Some kind of change has just happened
That will rearrange the planet
For millenniums past tonight.

Stiller

It’s not still, but it’s stiller.
There’s no one’s music playing.
There are no screens in this room,

No pictures dancing around.
There’s a hum behind one wall.
It’s the middle of the day,

Autumn, but bright afternoon
On the desert canyon floor.
This light all comes from the sun,

Which guarantees constantly
Changing angles of the light—
Something you don’t think about

With lamplight, how fixed it is.
You also don’t notice how
Low noise feels without voices.

There are sounds but no voices
Here, now, which makes it quiet
Up to some blurry threshold.

And how still do you want it?
How close to motionless
Does the pretense need to hew

For it to be sufficient,
Near enough to Nevermind?
You doze off. Your sunlit dreams

Surface, livelier than life.
Good. Now simply stay up here,
Awake, where it’s quieter.

Everything Slides to the Back.

For starters, the future isn’t real.

It’s a term; that’s real. People argue

Over the meanings the term may have,

And empires, whether military

Or financial, rose and fell—will rise

And fall—over their use of the term,

But there is no future to visit,

Despite all the sci-fi narratives.

Where does that leave us? Does it matter?

There’s a natural experiment

Nature runs daily, maybe hourly,

In which someone finds out that they don’t,

Likely, have even a month to live.

If you could interview those people,

What sorts of futures would you find out?

For one, the subjects would have mere stumps

Of what had flourished as internal

Conversation. Without next, what’s there

To talk about within the brain? No

Fantasized future builds palaces,

However lackluster, to explore.

And, speaking of buildings, memory

Is what those fine futures were made of.

Now, here’s your futureless person, perched

In a wheelchair or armchair, maybe,

Realizing the future has been

The past all along. You’ve lost nothing.

Left Without a Cigarette

A forty-year old pack of matches
Swiped from the Princeton Club in New York
Delights you when its matches still light.

Of all the functional odds and ends
Of human worlds forty years ago—
That this one should be still functional,

Still able to light a candle, still
Able to start a well-built campfire,
These paper matches, this battered pack.

Belated Maker

He glanced around for more

Useful material—

What was there to alter

The long trajectory

Of someone else’s life?

When you were introduced,

As dully as could be,

To Hopkins, Donne, and Pope,

Now read and reread in

Your kitchen, but back then

In an English classroom

On Long Island—island

Your Old Dutch ancestors

Clawed into the same years

Donne was telling off Death

While Death carried him off—

Something in you altered.

The room was bright. The poems

Were—how to put this—made.

They fit together. Clicked.

The world is full of made.

A cabinet-maker,

Your father made well-made

Things. You liked well-made things.

But something in there changed.

You wanted to make these

Well-made things, or something

In some sense made like them,

And what material

Didn’t concern you then—

He thought this to himself,

Half-a-century later,

And then wondered aloud,

Do you need the right thing,

Special material,

For the made to wind up

Transformative, something

Which was truly made, or

Is it just the making?

Is proper making, then,

The first step, not the last?

That’s what transforms you—

Making you do that gets

You your material.

It Meant at the Time

Not only are the massive
Majority of moments
You’ve lived lost to memory,

But the shards you remember
Are mostly small and haunting,
Reshaped only with effort

Into minor anecdotes
To make it seem narrative
Is native to memory

When it’s not. Memories gleam,
Soaked in reflective
Emotions, fragments, the thoughts

That flutter like cilia,
Nudging souls this way and that.

No Time of Departure

You try to capture
The time in photos
Like a newspaper’s
Pictures of the week.

It works precisely
And doesn’t really
Work at all to fix
Time—each pic’s cross-linked

By so much captured
World information
You could rattle off
Their times just squinting,

But haven’t you missed
The hamster-wheel like
Circularity
Of this precision?

Anything rhythmic
Works as a clock, if
You count its changes
As identical

To one another—
Track melatonin,
Tides, humidity,
Rainfall, and so forth.

What leaves and comes back
Only to leave and
Come back. Time’s just that,
Humans counting that.

You want to conclude,
But you’re not in time
If you don’t come back,
And you won’t come back.

One Night She Swore

One night, she swore
The stars were blue.
Medications
Might have done it,

Messed with her head,
Or a vision
Sent by cancer
Flooded the brain.

But whatever
The culprit (you
Dislike scapegoat
Target practice),

The thought alone
Of a blue-starred
Heaven pleased you,
Pleased you no end.

She Says You're Like the Child

The Nobelist, Louise Glück,

Wrote a line, fairly early

In her long, esteemed career—

I’m always moved by weakness.

Sounds like a conversation,

The way a conversation

Will involve the first-person,

The way one or more people

Involved will assess themselves

At some point, usually

Not self aggrandizingly,

Nor in outbursts of disgust,

Just putting a bit of gloss

On one’s foibles, showing them

In a sympathetic light—

A person who’s always moved

By weakness must be kindly,

Even if also timid,

Right? The way words hang loosely

In homely conversation,

More like clusters or bunches

Than like taut, laced lines of code—

I’m always moved. I’m like that.

Also, quick to shut my eyes.

That’s one way a writer goes,

Tossing a plausible catch,

Some believable patter

Into the cooler. Gut it

Later, or let wet market

Forces decide what it’s worth.

Others are more desperate.

Aware no one’s attention

Attends to their awareness,

Their conversation will turn

To a tense, tuned string—something

Humming rhythmically, risking

Even more impatience or

An unpleasant suddenness

When intentionSNAPSa string.

How Did You Find This?

The review-writer wrote of the story-

Writer, She extends toward realms of birth

And afterlife and finds them liminal

Spaces. Oh, does she now? The liminal,

Transitional, boundary-crossing terms

Were found, in her lines, to be liminal

Spaces. That’s what we need lyric writing

For, then, is it? Poetry! Obviously

Thought, but ne’er so relentlessly expressed.

The Library’s Children

They intersect or keep apart
As living organisms, but

Awareness stays all tangled up,
And often you wonder whether

It’s such a big deal, as recent,
Those thoughts and elements of mind

That aren’t in skulls at all, so-called
Artificial—maybe they’ve been

For a very long time alive,
And when in digits and pages

New thoughts in mind sleep together.
They’re not all frozen—they’re dreaming.

Lines Written on an Inn Window in a Time of Very Deep Snow

It was the kind of miracle
A storyteller likes—
Not picked as the most marvelous,
Just narrative device.

This was a miracle of snow
That never stopped falling,
Kept continually growing,
But never turned to ice.

It started on an afternoon.
When winter sun was low.
The early flakes were pillow lace.
Later, they glowed like milk.

Next morning it was shoulder deep,
And that’s when it turned strange.
There was no end. There weren’t results.
The storm refused to change.

It wasn’t another Ice Age,
Just a state to be in,
In which it was always snowing,
Surrounding Snow Fall Inn.

Let This One Be

The things over which you are powerless
Are all of them, but you can still pretend
Some are more overwhelming than others.

Outcomes of sporting events, for instance,
Or how the Earth rotates on its axis—
Those seem more immune to superstition

Than full-throated activism, or just
Diligently practicing democracy by voting.
In the events where you would never be

Counted among tiny influences,
Butterfly, you can practice quietness,
Drawing into yourself permanently.

Let the world pass over you easily,
Proving what shifts nothing can still be.

In Forest That Wandered Off and Got Lost

You would like there to be something
Like a primeval wilderness,
Even if not. Feral would do

Fine, maybe better in fact. Feral
Is wilder in the older sense—
No park, no gates, no protection,

No praise for approximation
Of undisturbed states of nature—
Just snarling, quick to bite or flee,

Slow to trust. Feral wilderness
Would be genuinely scary,
A real risk to get through the night.

You want art not to be charming
Escapism when you escape.

Last Things Inn

Say the world

Will burn soon

As some claim.

You'll be saved

And can save

Three things, too.

Which three things

From doomed Earth

Would you choose?

Around Unknown Ways

The cat got scared in by a dog,
An incident of a minute
On an October afternoon.

Once the cat was safely in, door
Shut by its owner behind it,
The owner returned to reading

About a writer who escaped,
But only just, the holocaust,
The syrup of the sunlight filled

The rooms again, and life went on.
How does it do that, anyway?
Most incidents close up over

Other, similar incidents.
Rarely does anything stand out.
The horrors get written about

Later. Much later is the best
Time for reading what’s been written.
Just now is the best time to watch

Anything such as a briefly
Frightened cat panting on the floor,
Having escaped the barking dog.

But there is no more cat just now.
Just a little bit of quiet
Around unknown ways things happen.

Mind Is the God of Your Skull

You don’t lose yourself in it,
The dark woods of bright green grass,
The dream wandering under
The hill—it loses itself in you.

It was part of outer mind,
The mind that exists between
Your actual, bony skulls—
In silence on a bookshelf,

Stored as digital data,
Recorded as whatever,
What have you, but not you yet—
Until the lost traveler,

Barter artist in the wood,
Got into your skull and lost,
Literally lost meanings
Of its dreaming selves in you.

Now you all pass through the woods
Of that mind passing through you,
Telling the world your world leaves
That this time it won’t come back,

But it does, it tries, it will.
The dreamer lost in your thoughts
Refuses to stop writing
Down these little, large mind notes

From the small mind in your skull
That pretends to be larger,
Not haunting, only haunted
All the selves of your skull.

Those Symbols

Narrative cave art
Dated with lasers
Puts the origin

Of symbolic thought
As no more recent
Than fifty thousand

Years or so ago.
The Anthropocene
Now in disfavor

Should kick off with art,
Not plastic or steel.
What’s on that cave wall,

What it’s doing, why
It’s inside a cave,
The near certainty

That its confusion
Of fragmented scenes
Contains not only

Information but
Whatever meaning
Needs to burst inside flame,

That’s what first started
The planet’s stomach
Churning. Those symbols.

Knowing Existence

In the marble middle
Of each moment opened
To the air of the world,

There’s the actual text
Of the stone’s own wishes,
Which will not come along

As obedient words,
Cannot be carved away,
Can never be dissolved.

This is the fairytale
Every reader looks for,
Every rapt audience

Prays for, the wonder tale
Of being, just being.

Full of Grace

The only real rosary,

The only real beads vary

Versions of the certainty

It’s everyone’s lot, sooner

Or later, to cease, to die,

To vanish off forever.

Ashes to ashes and dust

To all that—it’s not so much

That we know this to be so,

But that we keep repeating

It to ourselves, always news,

Always a little amazed.

No, you’re not an exception,

Goes the chant on every bead.

Have to . . . Don’t Have to

That’s it. That’s the wedge of perception
That angles in and waits for the blow
That will drive it deep enough to stick.

Is there something that you have to do?
Or does this horizon hold nothing
Looming, so you stretch your mental legs?

If you have to—the have to will spawn
Anxiety, dread, your personal
Supply of the future, approaching.

But if you don’t have to? If you don’t
Have to, never, not once, don’t have to?
Not having to do, not having to,

That’s the source of every other peace.
Lean back in the sunlight and sigh.

Remember Hale-Bopp

It becomes an incident,
The unnecessary drive,
The wait that tripled the time

And then it’s an anecdote—
Your mind wanders, falls away.
Was that anecdote for real?

What anecdote? Everything’s
Becoming a question mark,
Everything, good as out there,

And out there’s where one came from.
It’s weirdly quiet right now.

All the Same

Living on not living, feasting,
Really, on lack of appetite,
Days when the right combination

Of drugs and leisure is pleasing
As back roads lacking traffic lights,
Leading to the generation

Of just the perfect admixture
Of risk reduction (no others)
And harm potential (all those curves)

You rest in your chair, a picture
Sketched in shadows so stark summer’s
Inferred, chiaroscuro birds,

One of boredom’s infinite forms
That remain, somehow, all the same.

It’s Sunday

It isn’t, but you invoke it
To fetch that sense of leisurely
Life sometimes allowed on Sundays.

What can you, can anyone
Do about grace? See how white paint
Keeps flaking from the wooden chair

So that the chair is beautiful
In its excess texture, extra
Sun in its desert? That’s Sunday,

When you’re allowed to savor it.
Grace is not having to do this,
Not having to perform for grace,

The door open to the barren
Afternoon needs nothing from you.

Mausoleum Planetarium

Mars calculates in the round.

Not leave and take me / nowhere—

When they ask where I’m going

I’ll quote the sky again. No,

I’m afraid I can’t tell you.

It involves a parking lot.

If you fall asleep in sun,

Fail to wander into dreams,

Just sleep as only body

And at some point stop breathing,

Could you do any better?

When you wake up immortal

As a Daoist wizard priest,

Or an effigy in wax . . .

Forest Floor

There they are. Dig in
To them, the old route
Of the stage coaches,

Before them, horses,
Before them, footpaths
For local hunters,

Just trails through shadows,
Paths in the forests.
The whole continent

Was laced with sunken
Traces of roving
Feet. Resurrect them,

The old ways to walk
Into the heartland
Occupied thousands

And thousands of years,
And you’ll seem something
New in the world’s mind,

A soft path through shade
And brilliant patches
To where real poems wait.

Those You Love, You Lose—if They Don’t Lose You First—but You’re Always Stuck with the Moon

Oh, there’s the moon.
You lift your nose
From a volume
Of poems on loss

Left in a thrift
Store in Nelson
Or maybe it
Was New Denver,

Book that you’ve browsed
Since your return.
You watch the moon—
Is it rising

Or setting? Does
Either matter?
For that matter
Does anything?

Non-Narrative Fiction

You love reading many books at once,
Gaze leaping lightly and attention
Shifting gears—best if you can’t follow

What’s happening in any of them.
You’re alert but only to the lines,
The phrases that snag or get snagged on

Your dancing thoughts. The mechanisms
Of storytelling are intriguing
In the abstract, and often tempt you

To try your hand at a narrative,
Thought you entertain for a minute
Or two, maybe more. Then at the end

Of every measured line you slow, pause,
And wait, expecting thought to finish,
As if each line were to deliver

A prize or surprise. You acknowledge
The narrative you dreamed of is stuck
Already, and all you have are lines.

You love reading many books at once,
Gaze leaping lightly and attention
On alert, but only to the lines,

An Image

The motorbike passenger
Holds an open parasol
While the roadwork holds things up.

It’s enough of an image—
White parasol, black leathers,
Chrome-heavy, polished Harley,

The long line of vehicles
In the flawless desert sun
While someone holds the signal

That says STOP and will say SLOW—
That it sticks in your spare thoughts
As you drive on, opposite,

And you wish there were something
You could do to render it
As a meaningful image,

Something that would say something
Viewers found significant,
Not merely striking. The poem,

Whatever happened to it?
When she closed that parasol,
Was she relieved she’d brought it?

What You See Won’t Kill You

Think of all the things that make

You think, Well that won’t kill you.

It’s not going to kill you

To do x or y or z.

But obviously, something,

Something you can feel moving

Under or inside these words,

Is a killer in the small

Harms that will never kill you.

Decades ago, you were here,

And today, in a fashion,

A line connecting that you

To this you is still intact.

So no, they didn’t kill you,

Those things it wouldn’t kill you

To do. Someone was fishing

Down by the crick with, perhaps

Improbably, a copy

Of Claudia Rankine’s text,

Citizen, weighted open

With small stones on the boulder,

Next to the fishing tackle.

Oh my God, I didn’t see

You, the thought fragment in mind

Offered up in memory

Of a passage in the book.

Oh my God, I didn’t see.

No One Wants to Know the Lone

The communal, the collaborative,
The collective, the group that gets
Things done, that gets grants,

Forms movements, publishes,
Organizes, produces generations
Of further communal groupings,

So that scholars write books
About this or that school, movement,
Revolutionary organization,

Golden age of collaboration,
Sometimes just a group of bright friends—
The solitary reader thinks on these

And grumbles. But I had something.
But not plural. But the world’s alone.

Why It Seems

Can you hold?
Yes, you can.
The sky folds.

There’s a way
To wait well.
You will hold.

Thoughts in thoughts—
Just one world,
But it dreams.

Wealthy Study

Fierce light through ancient louvers,
Sun of a high desert day,
Wheat gold on worn-smooth pine floor. . .

Let’s just stay here in this chair,
In this room we’ll never own,
With this rhythmic hour on loan.

It’s laced with light but shadowed
Enough to convey constant
Room temperature still rules.

You take off your shoes to feel
The cool, smooth, slightly waxy
Slide of the floor, but the light

Remains sternly antique. Maybe
You really do own this sun
And this hour was always yours.

Sack of Light

It rips, spills
The stripped truth,
Floods the floor.

Each light’s two
Lights or more.
You can’t ask

For light less.
You can’t catch
Dark at rest.

What This Means Will Be Determined Later

To what end did you arrange
These patterns in words and lines?
If we understand your ends,

We can understand your dreams.
Without your ends, we’re stranded.
We sense that we’re mistaken

In holding this conviction—
You may have no ends. Meaning
And intention might not mean

The same thing. You specialize
In dreams without intentions
And search for good examples

Of stated intentions, goals
Actually achieved, that lack
Any functioning meaning.

We can see it’s appealing
To you to avoid purpose,
To steer clear of any goal

Other than arbitrary
(Such as reaching a number
Of completed components

Or imitating someone
Ancient’s irrelevant form).
Serious purpose deludes

People into confusing
The purpose with the meaning
That can only bloom later,

Like a ghost prone to visit
Architecture for pleasure,
Not since it used to live there.

Only You Count as Old

Everything is young in this vision.

You deploy vision to ward away

Any panic you’re delusional

And think the world is really this way.

No, you know that this is just a scene

Of a place where everything was young—

Even, for instance, the mountain spring,

Even, for instance, the mountain side.

Have you ever seen a young mountain?

Here’s a sheer cliff of inky black stone,

Lava so fresh it’s almost smoking.

Everything isn’t equally young

By the count of orbits of the sun

But by where each is in its lifespan,

Which means this vision can only hold

An instant. The rhythms separate,

Everything aging by its own beat.

But first, can you sense how young this is,

How green and superfluous, how blurred

By the haze of the moment of youth?

Stretch and rest, you old happiness.

You’re Here with What You Feared to Lose

This serenity arrived after
The last serenity, sadly, ended
When you grasped at it.

But then that can only mean—
As you mourned serenity,
You were unaware that more

Was on its way. Your eyes close.
You dose and wake. Dream. Doze. Wake.
You will be serene again,

Once this serenity’s gone.
When this serenity goes,
That’s something to say you know.

Keeping Time

Rhythm being change plus some
Sameness, some repetition,
Time is not universal.

The world has many rhythms
And not a single standard.
There are corners where chaos

Brings what seems impossible:
Timeless change. Without rhythm,
However, there is no time.

A little dancing, a beat,
Regular clapping of hands.
When you make time, you keep it.

With Fusion

It does what it can’t not do,
The sun, burning and burning.
Accurate explanations

Are available to all,
Thanks to solar scientists,
But it does feel conclusive

Simply to say that the sun
Remains burning and burning
All our lives. Can’t not. Full stop,

Choice Is Myth, But

There are times, as in haiku,

Four-character line lyrics,

And other fiercely short poems,

When the available slots

To slip words in are so few,

Le mot juste really should rule.

If, in a poem of ten words,

One of those words is southward,

Well, why that and no other?

You can only get so far

Defending a bland word choice

Invoking simplicity.

At first glance, any handful

Of small words seems similar,

The same aesthetic appeal.

But if you want or have to

Cut your words down to a few,

Think hard. Then pretend to choose.

Oh What Now

There was an article in the newspaper
About a particularly beloved,
And remarkably elderly writer,

And the focus of the article seemed to be
On all the history and hardships that writer
Had survived and even thrived despite,

But what caught your eye was a tidbit
About recent trouble with a leaky ceiling
Thanks to the rotten pipes of a neighbor,

Which made you think, even then, after
All that living through history, mundane
Nuisances still manage to be difficult

And persistent, and you’ll never outlive
The world’s capacity to make trouble.

Superannunatural

Thanks to the obsolescence
Of her gift, she was able
To lie low quite a long time.

Who’s alert to a card trick
As genuine candidate
For the supernatural?

Well, she wasn’t a card trick,
So much as a card reader,
And it’s easy to pretend

That the cards said something else,
Not to be too accurate.
She did slip up just enough

To frighten people a bit—
That future she read? That hit.

By Their Covers

Wade through rivers of dust jackets
Where each volume surfaces linked
To a name that’s linked to a life,

And you start to sense discrete crowds,
To get the sense people, mostly,
Want to wave each other advice

And to profit by the giving.
People do want to help people,
But the wise float by, matted leaves

In the stream of soggy ideas,
And you feel the undertow
Of so many suggestions

Pulling you downstream as well,
You and your advice for hell.

Echoes Mean to Explore

Some moments it seems

All stories have grown

Tiresome. They echo

Each other in mind,

Whether the echoes

Rumble from canyons,

Cellars, hearths, bookstores,

The glories of screens—

Too tiresome and faint.

You put the book down.

You’ve circled around

The Edda and myths

Gathered by the names

Of peoples, nations,

Ancient traditions,

Then mythology

Itself, which somehow

Sent you to more walls

Of anthologies,

From anthologies

To the collections

Of movements, life works

Of so and so—all

Leading you back here

To a favorite,

The Aleph of Borges,

And the character

You consider your

Secret alias,

Borges’ nemesis,

Fictional Carlos

Argentino, loon

Of exegesis

Of his own bad poem,

The best he could make

Of the actual

Aleph! Here you pause

To reread once more

The ecstatic prose

Paragraph of poem,

Epic catalogue,

Spider of the mind,

That is Borges’ own

Effort echoing

Through all things at once,

But to your surprise,

And for the first time,

You find it tiresome.

Maybe you’re ready

To move on from mind,

Beyond forgetting,

Back from the Aleph,

Back from nothing much,

To thrilling nothing.

If you can let go

Not just the knowing,

But the emotions

That tie you to tales,

Maybe you’ll slip through

The true secret door.

Maybe It’s in the Response

Are we not, to paraphrase

The poet Elizabeth

Alexander, of too much

Interest to each other?

(The paraphrase was adding

The phrase too much, to the quote.)

And anyway, poetry’s

Not the genre that displays

The most interest in others—

Supernatural beings,

Deities, that sort of thing,

Engaged archaic poets,

And metaphysics, landscapes,

Passionate declarations,

And lunar allegories

Had turns, but an interest

In each other per se tends

To emerge as something prose.

But it’s a wonderful line

At the end of a good rant

About what poetry is,

As she imagines herself

Shouting her definitions

Of poetry at students.

To be able to engage

Each other on such a thin

Subject, surely that suggests

Yes, indeed, we are too much

Of interest to each other,

And in how we will respond.

In the Years Unlikely to Come

Reading, reading anything
These days, as you weigh
Risks of addiction against
The approach of death

(Which is moving faster,
Which is likely to get here
First?) you have difficulty
Evaluating advice.

Everything you encounter
Startles you by focusing
On what to do in the frame
Of indefinitely living

(That is, if the document
Isn’t specifically focused
On the time close to death
And how to do a good job of it).

Each time, the sensation
Is tactile, like placing your palm
On a sleek surface that turns
Out to be knapped or rough.

What’s life’s texture doing here?
Life advice is like a sandwich—texture
With the crusts cut off—it’s just
All sandwich and then the void—

The place where sandwich ends,
The transition Is lost.
All sorts of dangers lurk
In living, trying to live

All those indefinite years
You’ll be living, trying
To achieve a worthy life—
But death in the near term?

That’s not usually
Included as an integral
Aspect of life advice.
Why not change your diet?

Please Visit This Humble Supplicant

Anything should be on the table
If the commodity’s contentment.
That’s what so easily fools people.

Contentment can’t be commodified.
Beyond tricks of domestication,
Commodification may have been

The most empowering invention.
From long before the first breweries
And bakeries, probably, the mind

Has been finding ways to assemble
Domesticated crops or cattle
With self-domesticated humans

To make any named thing countable
And the same quickly more of the same,
As if names could eternalize things.

It’s been so successful that people
Overlook its omnipresence and
Think of exchanges of countable,

Stable, multiple, identical
Experiences as if they’re goods.
The sense of contentment just happens

To count among experiences
That can’t be reliably exchanged
Or made capital, well-reified.

So any effort to purchase it
Will likely be a miss. Contentment
Is one of the old gods. Pray to it.

Tell Us How You Lost Your Father

A few tales depend on yours,
On how your growing past ends,
On how and when. A moment

Held, early in hospice, late
In the summer of dying
Off-schedule, past remission,

When dying felt almost good
Since it was promised, it was coming.
Better had it been later,

Much later, but consoling
Somehow in its certainty
Or near certainty. Six months,

That was the oncologist’s
Cliche-bordering promise,
The proverbial six months.

It’s been three months now. You don’t
Feel you’re dying, just lousy.
You’ve rushed to prep and relax.

Now it seems like there’s so much
Living before the dying,
Living you’ve got to get through,

Almost none of which will be
Spent perched beside a woodstove,
Watching bright flames flickering,

Sweetly playing chess with Death.
You’re well past ready to go,
Except a few tales depend

On yours, on how your growing
Mountain of past will balance.
For those few tales, you’re living.

Nine Endings

How small can the units get
And still show some coherence?
Do last lines really shape ends?

No, they go on forever.
Afterwards, you can go where
You want, it will be other-

Wise. This is it. Take it or
Leave it, Love. I give you this
Sun. What will survive of us

Is love, stronger than forgive-
Ness. It has never been used.
Keep it safe, pass it on. From

The rose and the easy cheek,
Deliver me, pass me on.

Like Milk Spilt on a Stone

One summer, you fell

Into the habit

Of buying iced chais

At a drive-through good

At baristaring,

And, at the day’s end

Often had a cup

With a bit of ice

Ready for the trash—

Usually, you’d toss

The splash of water

And leftover cubes

Into the grass,

If there weren’t a bin

To toss the whole cup.

Sometimes the water

Had a bit of milk

Still swirled within it,

Which meant white splatter

Might stain the pavement

Beside where you parked,

And when you saw that

Ghost pattern of milk—

Abstract on pavement—

You’d think of Yeats’s

Tiny poem, Spilt Milk,

And its last line, Like

Milk spilt on a stone.

Why a stone per se?

There’s an intricate

Elaboration

Of the threads of milk

Over broken stone.

Was there a reason

More personal than

The poem? Likely, yes.

Only Guessing

So here you are now,
The same animals
From the same species,

And there’s so many
Of you, too many
To think this mess through,

So you each do what
The rest of you do—
All hungry infants

Growing up guessing
The best thing to do
And fantasizing,

Over and over,
Old scenarios
For what you won’t do—

And meanwhile you talk
And work at friendships,
Try not to panic,

Get ready for bed,
Think about the news
That matters to you,

Whether it matters
Much to those who move
In other circles.

You can’t leave yourself
While watching yourself.
But you can witness

The meandering,
Nearly Brownian
Actions of people,

The same animals
From the same species,
Growing up guessing,

Doing what the rest
Of you do, too small
To think this mess through.

Fragment on a Fragment

You spot the line that says what
You’re feeling and were trying
To express. It is expressed

Beautifully in that line.
You want to steal it. You won’t.
You won’t quote it, won’t allude.

Anyway, it’s possible
That the beauty in the line
Visits only a few minds.

It Can Never Be Satisfied, Never

From the chill ache to the sea,
From high-canyon headwaters
To swarms of sun-screened tourists,

The human mind wanders down,
Chunking small stones on the way.
It’s a fulsome, boring trail

This afternoon, all downhill—
You’d think, with this freshet strong,
These days would be exciting,

The mind expanding faster
Than it ever has prior,
Flash floods always threatening,

But not to the mind, it’s not.
To the mind it’s rising wet,
Culmination of the fall,

The snow, the winter blizzards,
Trying to pour into each
Gully of skull its measure

Of extra knowing, fractal
Dispersals that meant something,
So to speak, back in the droughts.

Now, the information spills
Everywhere. No skull’s a well
In which to store rare info,

But every skull’s a teacup
O’ertopped by muddy data,
From mountain chill to the sea.

Lost Your Place

Out on the porch, you dive
Into the mind, pure mind
In the sense it’s all text,

It’s all language, ideas
Writhing around in words.
A black desert beetle,

Dusty, waddling, thicker
Than most human fingers,
Wanders by, disrupting

The purity of mind.
A dusty black house-cat
Stalks behind the beetle,

Practicing at hunting.
The shadows get shorter
Around beetle and cat,

And you realize why mind
Cares about skulls and texts.
It seems to run the world,

But it folds like a tent,
That mind, until almost
No mind’s left, the moment

When what’s not mind wanders
Into the arrangements
Of text. Purity, heh.

What’s Left Next

There we go.
Here we are.
Two dozen

Terse verses
Of nineteenth-
Century

Poetry
Swallowed down,
Now go read.

Lot of Fish in It

Someone drops the word

Pelagic into

Her composition

And publishes it.

Later, her text gets

Enthusiastic

Approbation, placed

At the very top

Of a list of texts

Deserving of praise.

Marine, maritime,

And oceanic

Could have been deployed

By the text instead,

But you must admit,

Pelagic rewebs

Some tattered canvas

Open to meanings

Its synonyms don’t

Attach. Pelagic.

There’s a sweep to it.

Those meanings themselves

That you make with it?

They’re waves. Pelagic.

There’s a Lot of Better or Worse Between Failure and Solution

When you face a fairly
Abstract dilemma, feel
Your hands. Feel whatever

Your hands are doing—this
Will solve nothing at all,
But it will alert you

To the world in between
Thinking of what to do
And simply doing things.

Whatever works as well
Whether death’s in an hour
Or past the horizon

Seems reasonably good
Advice for the living.

From Tent Trees, Shaded Below

Once you’re lost in these mountains,
You can’t tell the world still goes—
You know it does, it’s got to,
But you can’t tell, you can’t feel,
It’s going—and you might be
Gone yourself, for all you know,
Under silver skies, under
These hammer blows. The anvil
Wavers, about to shatter
With the pounding doubt, about
To topple from frightened blows.
The mountains rise thickly treed,
Absorbing news of the world.
It won’t reach you anymore.

Even Though It’s Not

Math homework (roots and radicals).
History project (interview
A parent re an ancestor).

Film studies (write, shoot, and edit
A story about a murder,
Where the killer’s a rubber duck).

Life science (recapitulate
The life cycle of a slime mold
As evolved cooperation).

Art classroom (ultra-realist
Drawing of a still-life in chalk,
As ultra as you can manage).

Language arts (interpret a poem
Written as an allegory).

True Crime Cast

The subtle ways life kills you, kill you.
The brutal ways life kills you, kill you.
Let’s not blame life, since mostly

Humans kill you. Wait, is that true?
To listen to people, you’d think
Bad diet and bad habits

And sometimes murderers kill you.
People don’t talk that much, frankly,
About what, specifically, kills you,

Except those really unlikely weapons
Found in crime and war stories,
Where any weird tool will do.

Oh, why not? Go ahead and blame life.
Not art. Poetry barely bores you.

Late in the Calendar Year

What little you had may be going,
And you’re not sure how much you care,
How much you feel like rearranging,

Yet another time, the deck chairs.
You sit in the afternoon sun,
Your favorite part of living life,

And wonder about traditions
And habits—in dailiness, in art,
What counts as good or not.

Flocks of messages, gathered words,
Startle up from and resettle
On the cobbled square. You pretend

You’re there, pretend that you’re not there.
Was it better to state precisely
The doings within your awareness,

Or to focus on the skill of drawing
The scattered pigeons in air?
Would it have been better, then,

To train the pigeons, to learn them traits
By which you’d know your own flocks
Circling there, above the sinking square?

The waters are rising. The girl’s mother
Occasionally takes an interest in her
Daughter’s care. What little you had

You wasted contemplating waste
And the way it takes meanings to make,
And you’re not sure how much you care.

Inventory

If you could wander
As you imagined
As a teenager,

Stacking walls of books,
Hoping to find doors
Into the unknown—

Pretty funny hope,
Given all you knew
Was unknown to you,

And it was all doors
You were just too weak
To wrestle open—

You’d be out there now,
Proudly wandering
The inventory

Of whatever woods
The world’s minds furnished,
More pleased with being

Coddled in the dark
Than worried the dark
Would find you tempting.

The dark has found you
Tempting anyway,
With your fantasies

Of keeping records
Of what might be real
There, what might be true.

What Isn’t, Available As Is

If someone would be so kind
As to rotate silently,
Like a drill—but silently—

Right here where the shade lies warm,
To make a day of the ground
By drilling down through the world,

Past physics, the natural,
The material, the rules,
Past the supernatural,

However conceived so far,
All the way through to visions
Of what can’t be that still is,

The light that has no wavelength,
Eternity, it would be
Alright, as is, all of this.

So

It won’t be like this for long.
It won’t be like this later.
Shards of mind caught in the skull,

Get caught up in the debate.
Risk not finishing the work,
The chores that have to be done?

Or squander the little while
It’s like this——cool but brilliant,
Shade perfectly positioned

Just outside the house, the birds
About their avian chores
In the purple, green, and gold

Of Russian sage in autumn,
No one knocking on the door.
You don’t believe you’re choosing,

Between tasks that can be done
And life lived as you’d prefer,
But then again, you can’t say

And you don’t know how such choice
Occurs. Somehow you’ll end up
Doing something, and somehow

You’ll pay and reap, probably
Telling yourself at some point
How lucky you are to be

Dying in relative peace
While others suffer so much
And still others suffer more.

The quail nod their bobbled heads
And squeak like creaky doors while
The wrens whistle sweetly, so.

Dementia Three: What’s That Word?

Keep away.
That’s the game
Small talk plays

With your tongue.
You talk, talk
As you have

All your years.
Then you can’t
Say that one.

Dementia Two: The Woods Maker

She raises the same problem
Raised by every creative
Destroyer—somewhere between

Asking, How does she do that?
And, Where does she come from then,
If everything came from her?

You’re better at spotting her,
At dreaming that you see her,
Than anyone seems to be.

You’re not that especially
Attentive in life at large,
But you can spot her shoulders

Hunched over a patch of dirt
Anywhere unexpected
And know the woods are coming.

You won’t tell anyone which
Woods these next woods will blossom,
But in your thoughts you can see,

Already, the sinking seeds,
Looking like robot space probes
Compressed to the size of pills

Dropping into blackening
And vanishing away. Gone,
For now, they’ll eat your decay,

Reemerge as slender stems,
Here, out of the way, bolus,
Corm, beginning of the end,

The new forest, a denseness
Fire can’t swallow, blades can’t eat.
Night’s darkness returns as these.

Dementia One: Go Back to Whatever You Were Doing

It’s so swift. This seizes you,
Flash of loss—push a button,
Turn your head or turn the page,

There! Just then, something missing—
But that’s wrong, since you didn’t
Sense it at all a moment

Ago. So its missingness
Emerged in your awareness
With it, and now, if you don’t

Keep composing text for it,
This text, to keep it in mind,
It will go missing again.

No, that was it. It’s gone now,
If you can’t feel missing it.

How Zeus Homeschooled Athena

See anything here
As the traffic glides
Through hourly changes?

Begging blank spaces
Stand on street corners
Waving empty signs,

The most pathetic
Fallacies there are,
Or ever have been,

And yet the authors
Of all ever known—
Nothing giving birth

To anything’s not
Nothing at all.

Leaving Charon to Bail the Boat

The last line scrabbles up the slope,
As if the thoughts had changed their mind

And were trying to lift the whole
In a sudden elevation,

But it’s so weighty and altered
In tone from the rest of the text

That its burden sways the vessel
With its rifle butt to be blessed,

Throat, eye, and knucklebone. Boy’s hair.
Look at the moon, bowl yet to fill

But still too good to use. Shadows
Are bodiless shapes, yet they have

A song, for now they all belong
To time. There is nothing to get

The answers you can’t write—the love
Of endings is a love of form.

Another Note in the Woods

Journey. You know it’s not.

It’s not a battlefield,

Not a drawn-out conflict.

It contains all those things,

But it’s defined by none

Of them—the mind is one,

Albeit broken, or

Scattered, distributed,

Running in parallel

Across millions of skulls,

A forest, a lab, a

Wilderness of mirrors

Signing to each other.

You may journey through it,

You may battle for it,

But the same may be said

For any vast landscape,

And the mind involves more

Than the vastest landscape,

The most extensive woods—

Maybe more than any

Ecosystem. You perch

In your corner, vendor,

Craftsperson, laborer

In a trading depot

Of one entrepôt—

Functional as a shelf,

As a switchboard—also

Goods temporarily

Housed on that shelf, also

A flickering signal

And a part of the mind

That signals to itself,

That, even in conflicts,

Can neither disengage

Nor emerge from its woods.

The Evening Forecast

Someday, you’ll be weather, just
Weather itself that can’t be
Disappointed, can’t be faith

In what it’s supposed to be,
Or doubt in its own nature,
Weather. Moving air, moisture,

The molecular remains
Of people after seizures.
You, my friend, my old friend, will

Someday become the weather,
And nobody will find you,
Digging down through the wrong clues.

The Parallels, Not the Connections, Confine You

There’s a sort of pontoon boat,
A blue, rudderless dinghy,
Floating down a flooded street,

Pulled by young men in life vests
And bright bicycling helmets,
Up to their hips in brown mess.

The pontoon’s crammed with people
Looking scared, casually dressed,
Mostly clutching each other,

Behind them, a row of shops
And undistinguished buildings,
Probably rental housing,

Squats in the dirty water,
Facades linked by sagging lines
Tangling up telephone poles,

And that’s that—a flooded street
Of escaping residents
In an ordinary town.

Kathmandu. You used to dream
Of living in Kathmandu.
Guggenheim almost let you.

Typical westerner dreaming
Of an exotic escape
To a more intriguing world,

Typical youngster trying
To make life an adventure
For sheer love of daydreaming,

Despite a fragile body,
Raised in the kind of place full
Of boring rental housing,

Streets crisscrossed by power lines
And folks in casual clothes.
To dwell among great mountains!

To write poems under those eaves
That shade the roof of the world!
To become someone made new

Who dines out on anecdotes
Of that year in Kathmandu!
But the grant didn’t come through.

Forty years later, you stare
At this photo of a street,
Ordinary as any

Except for this year’s monsoon,
Just one click from a photo
Of another flooded street

In a Florida suburb,
More shops and rental housing,
Where people in shorts and tees

Are wading through the brown mess
A hurricane left their world
That parallels Kathmandu.

Fear Me Now

Why do you fear forgetting
Like it’s a rare occasion,
Unexpected accident,
When it’s as common as death?

Well, you fear death even more,
On average, so common
Seems, if anything, a prod
And stimulant to fearing,

If you pause to think on it.
You sit in conversation
On a sunny afternoon
With a friend who shares your fears,

Taking turns reassuring
Each other the missing words
Are not such a certain sign
That all of you’s leaving you.

Could be medication’s fault.
Time to take your medicine.

And Thoughts Glow

But you’ll be careful before bed,
Right? It’s dangerous to be brave
Once the mind runs free in your head.

When that alien’s in your skull,
Whether it got there from school books
Or shows, it’s difficult to tell

What notions are really your own
And which ideas are ancient spoor,
Seeding bones before you were born.

The mind has survived many lives.
It’s swift at leaping between them,
Especially when darkness lies

In canyons cliffs use for their shows
When the light looks ready to go.

After Something

You can’t find it. Honestly,
That’s all you’re really doing,
Each journey back to the blank—

Neither of the sculptor’s tacks,
Neither adding slabs of clay
Nor carving and subtracting

To get at that form inside—
You’re just looking, no idea,
Hoping to find the hard thing

That won’t erode easily,
Or, no, hoping just to find
Whatever it possibly

Could turn out to be, pattern,
Enduring or vanishing,
A magic wave either way,

The dry wave, the standing wave,
The seiche hidden in the lake.
And every time you go back,

Tossing the words around you,
You’re only looking, only
Pawing through phenomena,

The furnishings of the mind,
Knick-knacks and ephemera,
Dreaming of discovery

Reaching whatever it is.
So you make another mess,
Lean back and look it over.

Not what you were searching for,
Although maybe, this time, close?
You’ll try again tomorrow.

The World Isn’t Waiting on You

Some moments, you wake up
In the middle of life,
Startled to remember

Not much is expected
From the rest of your life—
A book reviewer notes,

Of children as readers,
That soon they will grow up
Enough to feel the weight

Of what the world needs done
To prevent disaster
Freight their narrow shoulders

With decades of choices
Bearing down on their spines,
And suddenly you feel

Weightless. What, after all,
Are you planning to do
In the assorted months

You’ve been told are left you?
You can be a good soul,
Maybe, do some good things

In the name of living
In the face of dying,
But unless you’re filthy,

Stinking rich and gifted
With great liquidity,
There are few last-minute

Gestures available
To terminally ill,
Frail individuals.

You roll outside to think
This through on the porch
In the still autumn air

While territorial
Wasps of some small species
Harass you in the dusk,

Offering you their hint
That the best you can do,
In their view, is to go.

Aubergine Beautiful

Thumbnail in sunlight
On the steel handle
Of water-spotted

Refrigerator
Door, a glow. Just there,
A hand, a thumbnail,

Probably not yours,
Lit up in late sun,
Compelling your pause—

What moral value
To a believer
In divinity

Or activism
Could a meager flash
In a drab kitchen

In a gouged desert
Just before sunset
Offer? Honesty,

Maybe? More prayers in
Praise of dappled things?
The humility

Of the hardworking,
Who rent small places
Where nail polish wears

Away to scruffed-up
Color shreds before
The next coat of paint?

Beauty is never
There for its own sake.
Beauty has no sake.

You may think you take
It in yourself, but
You’re what beauty takes.

Comforted

Roughly retirement

Age and already

Pronounced as dying

By oncologist

And by subsequent

Proper paperwork,

You find you can still

Feel like a big boy,

Edge of adulthood

Today, knowing you

Just caught a poet—

Living, not well-known,

Strange to your liking,

And all on your own.

Isn’t that the way

It’s supposed to go

For true connoisseurs?

Bookshop afternoon,

Hours sifting the shelves

For rare surprises

That are surprising

For having been shelved

With the well-known dull

And embarrassing?

Then, discovery—

Name you didn’t know,

Someone to carry

Away the old way,

Printed, glued, and bound.

All your poet now—

Yes, I discovered

These in those shadows

That you wouldn’t know.

One Way to Be Wise

The HVAC repairer lifts

His ladder under one arm,

Bright sweat beading his forehead,

And says, It’s a such a cool world,

This moment we’re living in.

His sentiment delights you.

What? No tirade? Wonderful.

Full of wonder, wonderful.

A lizard scoots on the stones

Xeriscaping the circle

That completes your neighborhood.

Possibly, That lizard’s genes

Have already been sequenced,

Muses the repairer as

The repaired unit kicks on.

He’s someone who loves new worlds

Folded into ancient ones.

He says he wants to study

Classical mythology.

He’s taking an online class

On motorcycle repair.

You can’t resist asking him

If anyone’s named Pirsig

Among family members.

No. He asks you why you ask.

You tell him about the book,

Which you only remember

For persuading you, briefly,

That you’d learned a deep secret

About the ways to be wise.

An Opal Apron

A writer describes the sky
Somewhere in the South of France.

That’s fine. Another writer
Falls asleep in a bright room.

The children of these writers
Worry about their parents

And the ways that they’re dying
By varying consumptions,

The opal apron writer
Losing memory at speed,

The sunny sleeper losing
Vital organs to pirates

Rampaging the inland sea.
The writers are connected

By their lust for fine writing,
Which means, from their points of view,

That the writer in more pain
But not losing language yet

Would seem the more fortunate.
Opal apron, though. That’s good.

Sometimes being stuck with less
To work with means better work—

But was the phrase meant to be
Oval apron and opal

Only popped up by mistake
When the writer lost oval

And substituted opal,
A fortunate improvement

Of weird hue for a bland shape?
You could ask, but they’re asleep.

Wild Rock Song

Smith’s scry stone—
Striped brown rock,
Palm-sized egg—

Could gloss lost
Strong God tales
Small palms held,

But your stone
Sings odd math
Its null splits.

Travel Journal

The blank seduces desire.
You know you want to do it,
Discover that emptiness

The emptiness is hiding.
Over there, a car crushes
An oncoming bicycle.

The cyclist tries to leap clean,
But his legs are caught
By the car’s tires and destroyed.

One moment you’re on a trek,
A true solo adventure
Traversing long continents,

Having already pedaled
Eight-thousand kilometers,
And the next moment you’re flat

On your back in the desert,
Screaming since the body screams.
It’s never the injury

Itself that’s astonishing.
It’s the before and after.
New world you can never leave,

Never, encapsulating
A world now gone forever.
You’ve discovered emptiness,

You’ve entered the work of art
You wish you hadn’t entered.
Yet somehow you’re still longing

For that blank space of paper.
You’re longing for what isn’t
To make what can’t be better.

And This, That You Did Accomplish, You Don’t Know Either

Would it be, would it really be better?
Is how the interrogation begins.
You try to turn around inside your skull.

It’s easy to read out the benefits
Of sheer good fortune and hard-earned success.
They’re enumerable, for the most part.

The costs are much trickier to assess,
Since they go beyond any accounting.
A cost can be hidden inside a gain,

Dependent on the gain to be a loss.
When people puzzle over happiness
Among the powerful, rich, and famous,

They’re seeking out the costs peculiar
To such success. And there are other costs,
Albeit hypothetical at best.

Ask yourself of anything you hope for,
From the most selfish to the most selfless,
Ask yourself carefully and bring to bear

All you can of your imagination,
Would that world really be a better world
Than whatever you happen to live in?

You know you can’t say. You can’t be certain.
You can’t say, and yet you can’t stop thinking
About altering this to your liking.

Haste

There’s a title you keep withdrawing,

As haunted by change as anyone.

You start off determined to finish,

But what you manage isn’t nearly

A match for its intended flourish.

There’s a woman in front of a truck

On the sunny side of the highway

On a pleasant autumn afternoon,

And as you’re driven by where she stands,

You wonder how her life seems to her.

Is the breeze that stirs her bangs too hot?

Is she at all content with her day?

You want this poem to be titled Waste,

But that title would be such a waste.

Kerfuffle in Mind

You were told you were in complete
Remission, and six weeks later
You were told the cancer was back,

Bad, and raring to take over.
What’s unnerving in retrospect
Isn’t so much the way you learned—

Life in the air, life libre, life
Snatched away—but how little changed
In your daydreaming cavalcade.

You were hardly at all upset.
First, you considered cautiously
The hopeful, possible futures,

Then you told yourself you could think
About years and decades freely,
Which you tried. Then the curtain fell,

Or you were promised that it would,
Which kicked daydreaming to the curb.
What a miniature turmoil,

Permissible thoughts in your skull
Fizzing a bit while you waited
For further announcements from those

Same confident folks said you’d die,
Said you might in fact live, said you
Were likely to live a while, said

You were guaranteed soon to die.
A tiny kerfuffle in mind,
That hardly bothered you at all.

Epistolary Wake of the Mind

Scholars gather and edit
The letters of famed writers
And political leaders,

Collected volumes of which
Get reviewed in magazines
Appealing to the learnèd.

Invariably, letters
Reveal a more human side,
That is, a more personal,

Individual writer,
Than the famous writings showed.
Letter writers waffle more,

Permit themselves often to be
Childish, petulant, greedy,
Compared to their published selves.

In the reviews, the volumes
Provide a higher gossip
And more interior life

For reviewers and readers
To discover and ponder.
There, one grows aware of mind

As an elegant stranger,
A soul almost alien
Wandering from skull to skull,

While what the skulls keep anchored
Is only part mind, wholly
Animal. A long visit

From the creative mind
Yields the peculiar ideas
That made the skull linked to them

Famous, or remarkable,
And mind plus higher gossip
Entice the letter readers,

And that’s fine, although the mind
Has decamped to other skulls
Carrying its elegance.

A full history of thought
Would mostly involve the mind,
That traveler, that sophist,

In all its variations,
Visiting the many skulls
Left to gossip in its wake.

On the Threshold

This exists. The roadrunner,

Length of a grown man’s forearm,

Wiry and spiky-feathered,

Waits just outside the window

To be granted existence

As well. Poems do that to lives,

Change their stakes—for the poets,

At least, if not the readers.

What the poem declares exists

Exists. But you want to write

Something more. Strange persistence,

Like war, to its existence.

The roadrunner’s still waiting,

Sharp spike of its tail twitching.

Fell Out Hard

The small turn
Of least worth
Wants to leap

From this place
To that one
Where it fits

Too well not
To speak out
Of floored sun

A Stab at a Guess-Worthy God

The future brightness of a comet
Is terribly tricky to predict.
This might become a beam in the night

Or disappear into a faint smear
Detectable only with lenses
Ground well enough to discern

The famously fickle face of God—
Omniscient, omnipotent, but shy
As any of the small creations.

The point is that the comet remains
More or less the same slushed assemblage
Of dirty ice, whether dim or not,

And what can you say there is to learn
About God and constancy from this?

Sketch Well

The thing about Long Day’s Journey

Is that it’s the day that’s long.

There’s no adjective for the night.

You wriggle your rump into place,

Ready with your anticipation

For something nothing for dreading.

There’s still more day, more journeying

Into a night that will only play days

Somewhere where you aren’t there

To notice anything and complain.

For now, you have no shows to watch,

No new books to make you car-sick,

Only a sketchbook and a seven-hour drive

Or more with your crumbling-down father,

Driving long day’s journey into night.

And We'll Love You Until It Turns Out True

You’re drawn to fortune cookies,
Runes, and prognostications,
If they make firm predictions

Impossible to deny.
Why? There’s a courageousness
To blatantly declaring

You know what you don’t and can’t
And aren’t remotely likely
To ever guess correctly.

Tell us we’ll get rich this week,
That the war’s about to end
(Or the world, either one’s fine),

Tell us anything for sure
That no one could know for sure.

World No Thing

Three words wide,
The stream lets
One or two

Thoughts slip through.
There’s no change
That’s so great

The world ends,
Nor so small
No thing ends.

What Way Will All This Go?

How long would you have to live
For the scenery outside
This American motel

Planted in beige rolling fields
And sere ranch lands extracting
Primarily calories

In the form of potatoes
And various kinds of meat
Products packaged for stomachs

Around a hungry planet
Bound like Gulliver, supply-
Chained by you Lilliputians

To become wholly other
Scenery? No young mother
With two children, watching out

While crossing the parking lot.
No bare choreography
Of fossil-fueled vehicles

Elaborating that lot.
No lot not well overgrown
With weeds disguising pavement.

How much time until all this
Would look alien to you
Waking like Rip Van Winkle?

So much longer than you have
If you dream of having time.
But that’s not a dream you need.

This motel, this scenery,
Was unimaginable
At one point. No one had time

To watch time changing in ways
No one could have imagined.
You'll roll back from the window.

The Sifter

Fire, flood, fashion,
Wildlife rescue,
Pictures chosen

To represent
A week by scenes,
A week now boxed,

Another tranche
Of history
Filed in the books.

Somewhere, someone
Grows wearier
Of collecting

What just happened.
Forgetfulness
Exists for this,

To assist. Pics
Still pile in drifts.
Let dreaming sift.