And Then What’s Left Is All That’s left

As if there were an inch of this ranch
That had belonged to another world,
Once or twice upon a time, that had

Had the foresight to go underground
When underground had been doable,
That had not waited until this late

To imagine a bridge between dreams
Of escape and the means to escape—
A thought of every escapist,

Retrospective wish of refugees
Around the globe for who knows how long—
That there used to be a time when this

Was possible or, at any rate,
More possible than it has become.
Best wishes for fletching that arrow.

The last demographic continues
To grow until a day comes it can’t—
That’s all extinction is, anyway,

The day that the last demographic,
The portion of a population
That is owned by death, runs out of fuel.

Perspective Can Stretch Thin

The life you lived in
Was so much larger
Than you, was a world

Maybe much smaller
Than most, still vaster
Than what you could know,

Never mind become.
That largeness of life,
The enormity

Of ordinary
Human existence.
Human existence

Being so minor. . .
Perspective’s no use
If the scales collapse,

Can’t extend across
The range of measures—
If there’s no stretching

The mind enough steps
At a time to bridge
Without breaking down.

Reversible Two-Way Door

The man you’re talking to being
Ripped about by a year of blows,
A year not to be repeated,

Regales you, and all you can think
Of is how dead he ought to be,
How every life’s late-stage sequence

Is largely ridiculous, being
A kind of rehearsal for those
Who can’t appreciate the ruse

Of practicing to be what you’ve become,
Which amounts to being done and gone.
Plunge back in tomorrow, plain dead you.

Tomorrow should be made aware of this,
That death arrives double, both hit and miss.

Go Already

Well, let’s get on with it, one part of you
Mutters as the rest of the group concludes

That it would be wiser to get the hell
Out of hell before it revealed itself.

All the sorts of things the variously
Dying mind gets up to finally,

Bits at a time—there’s so much to stay for,
And yet the savoring prolongs the stay

And stalls the completion of the best way
To get through it all—cheerfully, freely,

Without procrastination. When you look
Ahead cheerfully—let’s go!—the going

Is always better than the let’s-just-not
That then tries to pretend you did, like ghosts.

The act of trying to go’s never worse
Than the act of pretending you done went.

The Worst Moment

Gentle as eyelid kisses
From a hesitant lover

New to the scenarios
Of effortful tenderness

This kind of kissing promised,
The confusion of labor

With love’s capital lost, dreams
Of a brave world requiring

Creative capacity
To think though the hours of night

The willingness to transcend
The effortful tenderness

In the name of rescuing
Everyone who might get left

By a too-inattentive
Lover at the worst moment.

The Old Means of Insurrection Won’t Work

You take out one brick,
Replace it with books.
Take out a few bricks,

Replace them with looks,
Smoldering stink-eyed
Glares from the border

Of the circular
Sick crew, churning well.
Take out the last looks,

Suspecting you’ll give
Up right about now,
But to your surprise

Find yourself ready
To take on a fight
On the books’ behalf,

The behalf of bricks,
Of anything used
To store dangerous

Intel on the world.
The world needs to know
Rather less these days

Than more. Put a brick
Back on the bookshelf.
There’ll be no ending,

Or it will be quick.
When no books are left,
Take out a fresh brick.

Steel Wind Coming

A thin wind to begin with,
Faint wailing, like a siren,
A passenger jet failing
To maintain altitude far off,

Then a little huskier,
More throat in the voice, closer,
And you think of all the times
You’ve braced yourself for anger

From a predictable source
With unpredictable twists.
Likely, this time will be worse.
The wind’s enough of a roar

To portend or to pretend
An actual, coming storm.
Difficult to tell with wind—
Can blow all night for nothing.

Or can lead in the great storm
Talked about generations.
Which one is this?
It has curl in its throat

And has grown loud everywhere
In the neighborhood. The roar
Is constant now, imminent,
Wind tunneling through itself.

This wind is targeting. How
A wind targets anything
Is impossible to say.
This wind grows conscious today.

Leaving Alone Alone

This is good, the sun on the table,
The music of no music at all,
The rumbling of the propane heater,

The handful of voices murmuring
Through the interior wall next door,
The shadow of a large roadrunner

On the glass door, stalking past stiffly,
The shift in upstairs noises, a range
Of solitary teenaged prepping

For a drive into town for errands,
This is all good. This is what you’ve got,
Which tends to be good, when left alone.

Not One Wait So Much As Many Small Alarms

You sat with a spade in the sun,
Considering what you had done.
Why you? Consider someone else,
Some other events than the ones
That flutter around your actions.

The soil remains damp, here and there
From yesterday’s rain, but that’s calm
And rich with local petrichor—
Why would you have an anxious twitch
When something moves behind you, why

A small rush of relief hearing
A shower start, meaning you have
More time to relax, up until
The completion of the bath? Why
Are you always bracing yourself?

The simple answer is right there.
You’re supposed be dying, but
The worst of it hasn’t started yet.
So you’re prone to trembly waiting—
Not what’s next. What’s last. You hate it.

Interiors

They’re all containers,
Translucent boxes,
However they’re shaped,

Algal necklaces,
Like rectangular
Paste-glass emeralds,

Or hollow glass tiles,
The kind restrooms use
That diffuse sunlight

Into clouds of gold
A kind of beauty
Easy to miss, say,

At a highway stop
Among Idaho
Hops and potatoes,

That sun caught in tile,
Life caught as a cell
Of sheer folded light.

Once a Life, Twice a Life Never

There would be no answers to these questions.

What won’t happen overwhelms

What will. There are so many

Alternatives through living,

So many things might happen

In the days that don’t exist,

But only just what happened

In the days that are finished—

It’s a good thing, all in all,

Our imagination’s weak,

Ghostly scaffolding that looms

Endlessly into shadows

In ranks that fade to black.

There are no alternatives.

You’re always just what happened.

The Well-Populated Apocalypse

Then the opposite obtained
For a little while at least—

You know that favorite scene
Of apocalyptic tales,

Where the protagonist wakes
To find out no one remains

Except the protagonist,
Lone person left in the world?

This protagonist woke up
In a jam-packed waiting room,

In a crowded building, in
A roaring city, crammed night,

No one appearing sickly,
Everyone looking well-fed.

That this was the real
Ending of the world occurred

To approximately no one
Until the dwindling took hold,

And by then it was too late.
Everyone? Let’s meet our fate!

Hidden Lines

The lines seem to want to hide
Themselves away from being
Labeled as just poetry.

They’d rather be personas,
People in costume as verse,
Or fierce creatures parading

Their evolved adaptations,
Occasionally sparring
Or preying on each other.

Each time you look at a line
You imagine moving scenes
Of stern character actors,

But not with words, not as words,
But as birds handy with words . . .

Hidden Lines

The lines seem to want to hide
Themselves away from being
Labeled as just poetry.

They’d rather be personas,
People in costume as verse,
Or fierce creatures parading

Their evolved adaptations,
Occasionally sparring
Or preying on each other.

Each time you look at a line
You imagine moving scenes
Of stern character actors,

But not with words, not as words,
But as birds handy with words . .

So Far Away

The night is open, clear-eyed,
And the stars are welcoming,
But hopelessly far away.

Stare up from the desert floor
And consider all those shores.
Whatever they hold you won’t

Ever visit, not ever.
The night is open, clear-eyed
And welcoming, forever . . .

Your Line

Such a thin line between
Knowing and not knowing,
Someone writes somehere, but

It’s a slogan, likely
Completely incorrect.
Still, you might hit something

Digging that thick, packed
Line between knowing
And not knowing, that line

Between where everything
Isn’t and then it is.
You might hit something thick

And then that’s it. You’ve crossed
The thick, dense line between
Pretending, not being.

Coral Made

If the sea-nymphs really
Did as Shakespeare directed,
The cacophony of bells
For the bones dropped under the sea
Would be extraordinary.

How many billions of bones
Have there been? And hourly!
If you were a creature tuned
By selection to hear those bells,
You would stand entranced on shore,

Like a sessile sponge of some kind
Swaying in the undercurrent,
Mind captured by the constant
Murmuring of the bells of all
The bones and souls of the bells.

Leaving Meaning Alone

Soul, mind, consciousness, hug,

To embrace, to comfort,

Think valiant, comfort, joy—

Consider. A lost word

Rediscovered, remade

By branding, marketing

Late-capitalist style

(As if capital were

Ever truly just late),

And now you have tourists

Seeking Denmark’s hygge.

Soul, mind, consciousness, hugs—

Knitting Denmark’s meaning,

Meaning for the making.

Picking the Lock

Just the shadow of a waving bough
Moving the moonlight over your bed,
Lengthy fingers feeling for a latch —

The night with a black knife in its teeth,
Long as your forearm, serrated edge.
It’s nothing, or nothing much at least.

The wind snaps the occasional branch.
Something must be trying to get in,
Although there’s no reason to want to,

Really, in this corner of the mind,
Containing nothing especially
Valuable or original

On the few dusty old hardwood shelves.
Let the world be the world in itself.

Archivalosity

You keep thinking it’s not
A text, so much as an
Object to be buried,

A thing, a container,
A box of something rare
Or at least peculiar,

And you don’t know just what
To do with such a thing—
Your bank that holds your words—

That preserves their patterns.
You’ve been replacing things,
That’s why. This container,

First found on a counter,
Part of the DMZ—
You’ve been replacing texts

With other sorts of things,
With odd little treasures.
What will become of this?

Can you wait out the hour,
The day? Can you get to
A place safe for your names?

What they are, anyway,
Right? A series of hoards
Of parallel insults.

No, you’re still lost in it,
The reading and writing,
The collections of grace.

You Could Start by Falsely Assuming You’re Safe, See How That Feels

Everyone on the lookout
For what they need to feel safe—

You lived on their planet, immune
To their toxicity, if not

To all their intricate agonies
And suffering they’d cause each other,

And you’re beginning to suspect they won’t,
Ever, any of them, find what they need,

Given each and every of them’s a threat
At least to self, if not to anyone else.

They’ll seek out their most fool-proof strategies,
And then, convinced they’ve made themselves secure

They’ll fall to mental illness, to fights
Inside the fort, inside the silo,

Or some aspect of their planning
Will unforeseen a circumstance,

Or it will turn out they don’t
Have a clue how to feel safe.

Rift of Rose

It’s a hammock of black evening
You sway in, trying to remember
Only enough to draw the paper

Over your thoughts for a thin blanket
In equally black ink, leaving roughed
Paper imprints for deciphering,

To scribble all over, every inch
A life, a torn scrap of memory.
When a safe place is taken away,

The question remains, are there others?
What is left, what is left for us now,
That we can do, that we may have to?

Can you wake up your phantoms for us?
Can we believe in phantoms, again?

The Orchard

There’s some character
To the wanderer
You know as sunlight—
Not only burning
And pure agency,

But a persona,
Maybe real as yours
(Yours being less real
Than each persona,
Of itself, expects.)

The sunlight, then, must
Want something, sometimes
Must experience
Desire and hunger,
Young lights in your life.

The sunlight’s squinting
At you from the back
Of a large boulder,
Taking your measure.
You would like to be

What the sunlight would
Like to be, what you
Can’t be unless sun
Drives you there, across
Fallen apple trees.

Meeting Someone On-Time

Can you synchronize
Your roll to the car,
Loading yourself in,

With your arrival
Just when expected,
No more and no less?

You can, but you can’t
Without a measure
Of good fortune, met

Along the tale’s path.
Luck is a compact
Way to sum them all,

The correlatives,
The field equations,
The endless impacts—

Large but far away,
Local and constant
But also minor, small.

Luck is your context
Sum-totaled, is all.
Can you synchronize

You and your context,
Your plans with the ways
Things happen to fall?

Soft Clicks and Murmurs

The air around you
Has all that it needs to
Sustain breathing you
Until you need food.

Food’s the deal breaker,
Hard to get, easy to lose—
Thoughts you can pretend,
But food you must choose.

What does that make you?
Alive as you go.
Thereafter dead soon.
You spoon chicken soup,

Think of Max Ritvo
And his charming thought
That chemo sounds like
Someone making soup.

Eight Years On

That day you woke up
To realize you
Had outlived the wait—

In front of you sat
The box of answers,
Of different answers,

Not the old answers—new
Answers on offer,
The greatest reward,

Being their newness
Not their magnitude—
That day you woke up

Holding the answers
That threatened the world.

Rock Meadow

Grass like silk
In coarse weeds,
Nests spider

Softer dust.
What threats thread
Through these terms?

Again, you—
You made it.
O be you!

Would That One of Us Stayed Dust

Light in the dust on the floor—
It’s like a passenger flight
Flown in bright winter daylight

Over mostly level tracts,
Say, the midwestern US
Or southern English flatlands,

The peering down at glitter,
Bare windows, iced-up windows,
Which are mica in the dust.

Down there the world is spread out
In elaborate detail
That looks intent on detail,

But it’s the details’ details
That make them hard to square
With the mundane sanity

Of the large picture, the way
This day grows up to leave you—
It’s just a big kid. It keeps

Accumulating itself,
Becoming a little more
Distinctive as its own day,

And if, unlike some, you’ll live
To see the end of the day,
The dust will lie still thicker

Than it did when you began
To notice time was growing.
Days don’t dwindle; days expand.

Complex and Plain

You would like to ask the day
To stash you more scent events
As you crack the door for air

And a breeze, almost apples,
Slips in like a luxury,
Which it is, as you doze off

Once more in the glorious
High-canyon afternoon sun.
Apples. A watery smell

From heavy rains overnight,
Little richer in the world
Than desert dirt after rain,

The intricacies of soil,
Creating complex and plain.

The Long Black Cloak

Anything that refuses
To stop doing eerie things
Creates a minor new world,

A cloak wrapped around itself—
One morning, the canyon wind
Settled into a vortex.

Sometimes it spun more slowly.
Sometimes it was howling fierce.
Sometimes it engaged with rain.

But all morning the wind blew
And would not wander further
Than its invisible core,

From which it pulled up the dust
That it spun into a shape
From canyon floors to haunt us.

Non-Titled

It dawns on you, silly sunrise
In the desert in the autumn,
That you’re settling into the last
Of your poetry—it’s getting

Diffuse, and your memory reels
From time to time or loses threads,
But that’s not your soul wasting time
Anymore. These are the late clouds

Of the long storm you’ve entertained
For more than a decade, at last
Dissipating. It’s all ok.
You’re doing what you ought to be,

Given a world with less and less,
Little or no, ought left, only
Increasingly beautiful naught,
The fine outlines of nothing yet.

Just Don’t Be Persuaded to Pay for Anything

If you could become lost
Anymore, if you could
Stare at the instructions,

While your brain spun its tires
In sandy attention,
Going nowhere faster—

Would you bother?
Would you rather body lost
In place or the place found

At memory’s expense?
A gust of wind kicks up.
What words are these here now?

The War

You decided to wait for the piano,

For the crash, so that the first crack across you

Would be your last, no preparing anything.

You turned the back of your thoughts to everything

That stank of daily news, so as not to see

Any hint of what the local disaster

Could be, within the war’s general context.

You wavered after you deployed the term, war.

Your whole life there have been wars, over there wars,

Never war in your town, never bombs near you,

So that nothing much seems more matter-of-fact

Than war, and nothing much more histrionic.

Is this the decade, the era, over there

Wars catch the wind blowing them homeward? Is this

The time the rumors become the real? You will

Not prepare for it. At best you unprepare.

Where’s the Lazarus Bunker At?

A light breeze swayed
The saplings staked
Against strong winds.

A magazine,
Old school, glossy,
Lay open there

To a story
Reporting on
Survivalists,

Doomsday sayers,
Basic preppers.
Seemed like fighting

Was the doom they
Mostly prepped for—
Some civil war.

You grinned, thinking
Of a bug-out
Bag for a stroke,

An underground
Armory stocked
With Glocks against

Slow dementia
And Alzheimer’s.
Bombs for cancer.

Oh, all ready
For the end
They’d prepped to fight,

If not for ends
They'd never thought
They'd have to fight.

The Calm Light

It’s not, but the calm
And pervasive light
Seems to be welling

Up out of the soil.
The Earth is a sun,
And you’re a witness.

Tell us a story
About the boy who
Cried lamb and then fired.

Be prepared to shoot
At all times. It’s all
Foolish isn’t it?

And yet foolishness
Hurts. The boy’s rifle
Fatally wounded

The lamb. The story
Wounded the teller.
The telling wounded

The story, which died
Chasing its own myth,
Yet left behind strong joy.

The calm light swells
Up out of the world,
And you’re the witness.

Sunshine

Watching a rocky slope do
Nothing much about what passed
Over it, not protesting

Even when the machines came
To collect the rocks and left
Only the unreconstructed dirt,

The wish to divide the world
Into the world of those rocks
Versus the wholly human

Grew nearly overwhelming—
If only you could divide
And then inhabit that part—

World of rocks, sun, and weather—
To which you’d never belong.
But your worlds would not divide

For you, and here you are, years
And decades later, humans
Still slaughtering each other,

As if something different
In human behavior were
Likely to have cropped up

In such a short interval.
You’re looking at another
Rocky landscape this morning,

Officially dying, but
Still you take joy in the light,
Still would pick worlds, if you could.

Really the Only Kind

Instead of a vessel of ghosts,
What kind of human could you be?
No such kind of human exists,

Or only in a prior tense—
They had their ghosts, but most of them
Have been mostly scraped out of them,

And now they’re doubly demoted,
Not just to ghostless animals
But to domesticated plants—

People pass a person mumbling,
Disconnected from the tangle.
Somehow, simultaneously,

Those observers casually
Refer to the person as both
Haunted and a vegetable,

Neither true, and both together
Impossible. The ghosts of ghosts
Are haunting the ghosts of persons

Cut from the world but still living.
Meanwhile, the skulls of all the rest
Still function as storage units,

Inns, and hostels for clouds of ghosts,
The real being haunted, no sheets,
No specters, no ectoplasm.

A recording of Cantata
66, chosen by AI,
Plays peacefully from a personal

Assistant, while you consider
For the nth occasion, the light
On the cliffs, peaks, and stucco walls.

A roadrunner is on recon.
It pauses beside a white chair,
The paint all flaking from the gray,

Cracked pine underneath.
The day is so brilliant, so bright.
But none of these are ghosts, either.

 Ghosts are voices you know, voices
Drilled into your skull for the shelves
Continually bartering

With other voices. The barter,
The exchange, makes you the vessel,
Haunted, hunted, human vessel.

Posterity

Not so much a vocation for art

As an impatience of all honest

Trades, counseled the cautious, famed writer

In reply to the query, Why write?

You smile at the impatience of all

Honest answers to such a query.

To stir a disturbance in the waves,

To get under the cold cuddlestones,

To rearrange the channel through which

Mind, locally, passes on its way

To the wanderer-consuming sea. . . .

This shift in the passageway of thoughts

Through a minor meander that risks

An oxbow for its posterity.

Death Against Pup-tent

It would be the most final,
Violent thing to happen
To Earth, if the sun—

Vast, continuous
Apocalypse—went
Rogue re predictions

And engulfed the Earth,
But some lives would end
Little differently.

Comparison’s all
Or almost, human
Minds do, as close

To continuous
As human minds get,
And yet, at the core

Of experience
Comparison fails—
On the one side, death,

Universal and
Inescapable,
Akin to nothing,

While on the other—
Details, memorized,
Imagined, unique

In every lifespan,
The time you camped out
In your new pup-tent,

Your birthday present,
Aged seven, set up
In grandma’s backyard

On grandma’s small farm,
The sopping wet grass
From late-summer dew

Soaking the tent’s sides,
The spider’s shadow
In dawn silhouette

On the tent’s canvas,
The bell on a goat,
The smell of old hay.

Loss Doesn’t Stop to Go Away

This has become the happiest
Bafflement, parallel sorrow’s
Bafflement at how anyone
Can swiftly restrict empathy,

The way events accumulate
Such that everything disappears,
But the events themselves exist,
Once happened, happened forever.

Once, there was a generation
Of siblings who inherited
The pioneer ranch property
Of their parents, siblings all raised

With the odors of old leather
And manure, pine planks, kerosene,
The wet soil and grasses in spring,
And every last thing that happened

To them, every morning someone
Climbed out of a bed and stood up,
Remains. It all happened, always
Will have happened as it happened—

And yet, the siblings are all gone,
No one lives on what was the ranch,
No living memory persists—
It all happened and was added

Forever, as it all happened,
And all of it forever gone,
The disappearances themselves
Having permanently happened.

Always Feel Better after Talking to You

The numbers shuffled.
The day grew older,
Accumulated.

For you, one or two
Hours of that wonder
That dark talk can do—

Just commiserate
With someone whose thoughts
Carry the same or

Similar shadows,
Whose sorrow weakens
The abundant light,

And you grow brighter.
So you grew brighter
As the talking grew.

Did you help? Did you?
Anyone not you?
One who never knew?

There’s much more world now
Than had happened yet,
Just two hours ago.

Seven Years

Pool and ebb,
The wavelengths
Taped the shore’s

Measurements
To a sort
Of freedom

Of numbers—
If you know,
You can go.

Even Though You’ll Never Know

You would like to feel you know a thing
Or possibly two about the world,
But you alternate between extremes

Of an overwhelming sense of your
Utter ignorance and a foolish
Confidence concerning this or that.

For instance, you hold unwarranted
Certainty that others are like you
In exactly this respect—they, too

Feel overwhelmed by the trembling world,
Transfixed by their inability
To comprehend what action to take,

Yet possessed of overweening pride
In their understanding of something
Vast and vague enough to fake it well—

How late-capitalism functions,
Why post-colonial governments
Don’t, what a good human being is.

Is there a way to make confession
Of ignorance, of lack of wisdom,
Without turning it into boasting

By the time you’re done genuflecting?
Dig a small cottage into a hill,
Maybe, make it livable, call it

The echo of your skull, that real place
Where whatever you’ve been thinking goes.
When your skull looks like the world, you’ll know.

Dawn at the Cave of Mind’s Bones

Morning, and the mind is hungry,
Lean predator at the entrance
To the cave of the Bones of Mind,

Surveying the broad, dun valley
Of pale waves of long grass—the cave
Itself, the true skull, holds the bones

Of the true prey, strange arrangement.
Mind is what . . . Autophagous? No.
Mind is autosarcophagous.

Mind obligately devours mind.
Mind can’t live on anything else.
No wonder mind’s lean and hungry—

Less hunger means leaner, regrown
Muscles lead to greater hunger.
You can ditch the analogy,

Drag the mind out of its skull cave,
Compare it to cancer instead,
Or to a swirling pandemic.

Still, any good analogy
Will have to move. And mind devours
No other kind of food but mind—

The mind is always on the move,
Always hungry and invasive,
Always forming and reforming.

Consider the life combining
All of those traits at the same time
And realize mind can’t be alive,

But also that life’s less than mind,
Mind doing the realizing,
Itself a small snack for the mind.

How to Become All Attention

You hold still, arms crossed,
In the simple hold
Earned by listening.

Whoever listens
Attentively earns
Nothing in the way

Of wealth or wisdom,
But there’s a pattern
Worth the attention

Of the listener
Who’s vaporizing
Into attention.

For the connoisseur,
The finest voices
Aren’t the podcasters

Or the broadcasters,
Haunting as they are
Falling from the dark

Of rural highways,
Driving, windows down
In the right weather—

A soft night, few lights,
Shadows of black cliffs
Or scents of spring blooms.

The finest voices
Are family members—
Children, spouses—

Or the murmuring
Of old, haunted friends.
Just sit in the dark

And listen, listen
As attentively
As you can to speech,

To cadences most
Of all, forever
Asking yourself, what

Am I doing here,
What is my value?
Paying attention.

Disintegrating Figure

You intend fire and ash,
But dirt’s been on your mind.
Arrangements have been made

For cremation, but dreams
Have been circling the grave.
Makes sense if you divide

Your afterlife between
What happens to the flesh
And to the words you’ve left.

Divide it as body
And soul, if you prefer,
And that also makes sense,

Up to a certain point—
Reversing the graveyard
Arrangement of bodies

As rot in soil and soul
As vapors dispersing,
Leaving body as text

And counting the soul as Earth’s
Pure disintegration.
Up to a certain point,

The analogy works,
The best you can ever
Say of figured language.

There’s no questioning—dirt,
For whatever reasons,
Keeps making itself part

Of such analogies,
Good or bad, that grab you.
Think of writing a poem,

This poem, any poem, lines
Of poetic language
You’d like to accomplish,

And you think of treasure,
Of a hoard in the soil,
Lightless below the phase

Transition to bright air.
You think of the hidden,
Sweet-smelling acreage

Under the roots, the roots
That shelter the treasure,
The poem that waits, date-stamped,

Dug to be discovered,
Passages made to be
Found as though always there

In place of passages
Always there, made to be
Seen as discovery.

Just Now As It Started Snowing

It’s not a strength you ought to have
Been given, not a strength you ought
To own—to be able to shift

The scenery, alter mundane,
Local weather, to break the rules,
To make it snow. Darling, physics

Is just to the real world what rules,
Basic instruction manuals,
Are to things like sports and courtrooms.

It’s not that they can’t be broken—
Breaking them creates different games.
Mess with physics, change your cosmos.

It’s not a strength you ought to have,
And until just now no one did.

Bad Faith

Your email asked,

Why did you choose

To walk away

From your faith in

God? And a whole

Theology

Rose in my mind—

To choose, to have

A choice to make.

There’s a kernel

In that question

As posited—

An assumption

That faith is good.

Faith is not good.

Faith is wicked,

And that is why

I walked away.

A Note

Two creatures pawing at a pill
That had dropped to the kitchen floor,
Then at a dried flower on a shelf.

Boredom’s a great motivator
For the brainier animals—
It’s not true curiosity.

These beasts don’t really want to know
What they don’t know, much as they want
Something to preoccupy them,

Staring at an apparently
Motionless, cluttered stretch of shelves.
It’s just a bit shocking to spot,

As one of the more murderous
Cooperators, a human,
Other monsters also get bored

And don’t know what to do with it,
Haven’t yet learned to worship it,
Either (few if any humans

Really have, anyway). Without
Boredom, what’s intelligence but
Residue of second-hand minds?

And there he slumped, top of the pile,
No idea left what he should do,
Or should have done, save leave a note.

Alligators Aren’t All Alligator Skins

What is it other people want
That is nothing wanted by you,
Waiting for your tribe to come to

Its senses? What is it you watch
Come crawling through swamps of events
Like a monster in a novel

Focused on moist biohorrors
That only you seem to notice
As such, while people around you

Still see a contest for something
Desirable to them, something
They think’s desirable to you?

You see hazard. They see rewards.
That’s what a monster shows when bored.

Moving the Furniture

Thoughts get in the way
Of each other, each
Day—it’s not just room

For the processing
Space of synapses,
Whatever model

You prefer for room.
It’s that thought
Negotiates thoughts

For other virtues
Besides compactness.
There’s weirdness factor,

There’s thought’s novelty,
The way thoughts connect.
Better you’re ready

Later, with streamlined
Thinking, than now,
Thoughts caught in the way

Half the time, unclear
Up there, in the ways
Of clear thoughts at all.

Night Music

More often, recently,
You’ve noticed nocturnal
Sounds clinging to music,

And find yourself saying,
Such and such a track sounds
Like music from small hours—

Inherently late-night
Music. You could conjure
With a sound like that, if

The world felt young enough
And your thoughts old enough
To switch places at night,

So that you held magic,
And the world did as bid.

Growth

The soil is damp enough,
A seed might have a chance.
Of getting through the night,

And from there to other
Opportunities Earth
Might provide, might provide.

Meanwhile, see another seed
Sitting on the sill’s edge,
Balanced to fall over.

The world’s been full of blooms
For so long now, it’s tough
To picture it without

A buzzy beard growth
Around the chin all ways,
And in all directions.

Planet Canon

After all this half a century,

Pachebel’s Canon popped up again,

And this time you were ready for it,

Not like when it slayed you at thirteen,

When you sat in a dusty classroom

Of a church school, watching a hand-spliced

Slide show made for a senior project

To lure adolescents to your school

And were wowed by phony sepia

And mawkish instrumentals. There’s still

That lullaby feeling to the piece,

Dreaminess that can lull like healing,

But no longer the invitation

To some kind of another planet

Of more orderly arranged music.

Now you’re simply delighted to know

That such planets can be imagined

And that you can still respond to them.

Just Our Last Apocalypse

Our last era after
The few we’ve known in our
Handsomely brief fashion.

Call it the sixth era,
And then say, solemnly,
Our last one. Leave the rest.

The paperwork can wait.
Can you, at seventy-eight,
Whatever age you’ve made?

Hard not to have in mind
Some apocalyptic
Landscape, setting aside

Apocalypse would have
To be traversed before—
No post apocalypse

Before apocalypse,
And wasn’t that the bit
You’d been hoping to miss?

Thoughts Kept in a High, Deep Lake

Each adventure, another
Bubble in your minor past,
Each block of concrete sheds dust

Without obscure allusions,
Abstract, aureate diction,
Or other clumsy displays

Of old lyric aesthetics.
Wait. Back to those concrete blocks,
Really more easy-to-hand

Cement bricks. They can crumble,
Since compacted dirt is all
They are. Packed dirt, compressed clay,

Orderly blocks of baked soil—
These things were and were useful,
Well before anyone scratched

Or pressed messages, concrete
Or abstract on them. Sequence,
What sequences bubbles make.

The highest abstraction, say,
Ritualized, symbolic
Deep cave signification

Precedes the humble baked brick,
And commodification
Precedes, perhaps, the epic,

And then you look back across
The dust and the flood and see
The bubbles being swallowed,

And the whole scene lineless field,
No, not even quantum field.
The whole one choppy surface.

Bernice

Active soon for the latest
Bloom of music from woodwinds,
He’d been fine watching the real woods

Do their sort-of-feral thing.
Go back to scratching the hand
That fed her what it felt like

To be it in this tableau
Of brine, destruction,
And an affection for truth.

The Quarrel

Now the two texts are running
Near simultaneously,
And it makes you realize,

That one’s very relaxing,
While the other tangles air
Into impossible thoughts—

And which one will win’s the mad guess
No one can avoid guessing,
Once caught in the tangled gasp.

The wish is to flatten this,
Make it two-dimensional
So you can come home again.

What’s most startling
Is that, whatever home is,
Is here and nowhere near here.

Blue God

Others also claim to worship
Gods of peace and monotony.
And very possibly they do.

But you’re not going to service
This long and boring afternoon
By splitting the true from the good.

At the height of your faith, years ago,
When you could pray a spot of light
Up the wall with your gravity,

You cared for what your faith could do,
But now, no. Boredom is greatness
Of a most particular sort.

You Were Asleep, That’s All

Everything thanks to everything
Else—how else can you put it well?

It slips up on you—you don’t feel
Ill anymore this afternoon.

There’s a moment when you’re surprised
To check for pangs but to find none.

And you were going to call it peace!
Suppose it is peace, after all.

The one well-being from other,
Do we, should we, really care which

Was felt first and by whom? It’s time
To commence our famous call.

Swear You’ll Never Tell

Most individuals are awful
At holding secrets. That’s the reason
For the moldy feeling at the back

Of the store, forever
Implicit threat to a pretty
Emotion, decrepitude,

The tepid sewer water
Of mere family drama,
The reason real families

May involve screaming and rage
But rarely revelation
Of the kind belovéd by

Good storytellers, cherished
By an enthralled audience.
And if individuals

Are weak, families are worse—
The great family secrets
Always less secret than myth.

It’s the sad look at table
Everyone has of knowing
What everyone and no one

Really ever wants to know
What no one really wants to know,
Sadness without a secret.

They Were Good Then

First of all, they were good then.
Does that make them good enough

Now, as memories? Enough
For what? Other memories?

You’re judging the decisions
That led to those memories,

Memories merely outputs
From the system that would know

Itself but doesn’t, as yet,
Couldn’t. Your good memories—

You sort through them now, re-feel
Associations. How much

Do they gain or lose, sharing?
The second function. Can thought,

Whether what’s remembered was
Vicious or sweet at the time,

Offer you something could be
Used now? This has been good, now.

Fish Left Blue

An early 20th-century
Craftsman’s bungalow, floating in space,
Impossible flourish of simple

Surrealism, appeals to them.
There it glows on its own moonlit lawn,
Encircled by heavily leafed trees.

You imagine padding through the grass,
Barefoot underneath that summer moon,
All the shadows a silverfish blue.

Linear

Elinor Wylie emphasized

How years go by in single file,

An image tough to assize.

Are we seeing bipedal years,

Their heads conjured from calendars?

Are we seeing a cattle drive?

Could these be lobsters or angels

And across what kind of backdrop?

Anyway, what do years look like?

Maybe they smile in single file,

Or maybe they appear severe.

Can you picture years passing here?

If It’s Real

Late autumn afternoon sun
Through dust spots on house windows,
Turning the fake stucco blond,

A flycatcher stops hopping
Along the porch to study
Your shadow inside the walls,

Seems to decide you’re harmless,
And goes on hopping along.
Gold. The afternoon. Golden,

Soon to disappear, but so?
What if it’s real? This really
Is how dying goes for you,

An increasing frequency
Of pain in unpainted days,
A sense, not of loneliness,

But of fecklessness, the worth
Of the moment well-worshipped
As now as now worth nothing,

No reason at all, loose ends,
A sloppy demonic deal
With the devil for some peace

You needn’t lunge after, seize
Foolishly out of the air, since
Peace was always, sort of, there.

Keep It

Here is where you wanted to get to.
Precious little’s being asked of you.
You have supplies meant to keep you well.

The obvious paperwork’s been filed.
You still have a job, obligations,
But they’re far more minimal than most.

It’s quiet in here, sunny out there.
There are hours for you to sit and stare.
It would be a good time not to think

Too hard about what’s needed of you.
There’s a breeze through windows from trees
That nod affirmatively—it’s yours.

Right now, whatever’s been happening,
It’s yours, this that can’t be kept, to keep.

What Would Be Most Useful to Do

So much of life you lived with the rest
Of your life in your thoughts, on your mind.
Memory returns to a marble

Baluster you recall as smooth stone
As you walked past on your way from class,
Considering, where would you land next?

In what country or part of this one
Should you start your career?
Back then, futures always came with plans,

And there was always some strategy
Or daydream passing for strategy
About what steps would be cleverest.

Memory returns as boys smoking
Stolen cigarettes around a fire
In a drab campground, What will you be,

What will you become? A roadrunner
Strides to the window-door in the sun
That is the most recent happening

And peers in at you, safe from the cats
Stuck upstairs for too long. Memories
Of their own must haunt all these lives some.

But every time you remember you,
You not only dredge up past but past
Futures you remember, absences

That finally strike you now as strange,
Given they flicker and sputter out,
And you can’t think what would be useful.

Last Lace of Self Somewhere

So they die, and their days die,
Or go, let’s say, go, going
Being key feature of death,

Trying to recall their minds,
Which are busily learning
Life with less recollection.

They fade out of their presence,
Absences in their own work,
Or the work stops. Less and less,

And their fans rarely notice,
That the voices they cherished
Rarely spoke out near the end.

That’s the work you’d love to find,
Lace of self lost to new mind.

History Seeping into the Meadow it Made

This day can’t not become that
Day that will never exist—
Then it becomes that, and you say,

Hey, here it is, this day is existing,
But it isn’t, not as that day that couldn’t
Not become, never existing.

You peruse this day’s news, read history,
Biography, memoirs. Push your thoughts
Like corkscrews into the boards.

You won’t live to see it, but that day
Will come, the stable one, since this day
Can’t not become that day that wasn't.

Garden Gate on a Windy Night

This swinging gate’s not helping much.
From your shoulders you’re behind shoved
Further out, while the gate itself
Slaps you back in the neglected

Garden, and here you are, certain
Kind of not-work-work around you,
Along with the sense that you need
To be more clearly meaningful,

Yet also letting the world’s cape
Finally slide off your shoulders.
The one you want’s the nothing much
That’s more than ready for nothing.

You need to work on your timing—
Hang back when the end wind’s strongest,
And then rally to make a dash
Home as life slams shut behind you.

The Salvage Operation

There was a hiking trail,
Threading the city park’s
Meandering third growth

Woods. Here and there, flat rocks
Made good ledges. You spent
Many hours on that trail,

Most sitting and thinking.
Trying to be all there,
To feel, This is enough.

Whenever you came back,
You felt you almost felt
What you tried to have felt.

Golden

Box that’s hidden,
Terribly tough
To find, easy
To pry open—

In it, a life.
That’s the hardest
Part—who were you
Worth enough to,

That the details
Of each moment
Had their moments
Worth detailing?

The tiny box
Holds glass, stories,
Gold memories
That nicked your hands.

Nothing Left Except Affection

Comparing, winning, losing,
Comparing wins and losses,
The needle-eyed human soul

Stitches tragic tapestries,
Stories it makes, tales it needs.
Comparing. At the smallest,

Smallest levels, life survives
By discriminating, by
Useful comparison—

The warmer spot in the sunlight,
The greener patches on the log—
But there’s not no comparing.

Still your thoughts dream toward it,
Old man on the brink of no one,
That world without comparison.

No Dream That You Could Take

Like some kind of creature that opens
At a touch, unfurls, then closes up,

Only to show you, if you’re watching
Alertly enough, nothing’s enough,

You had a day you could not reduce—
The plan, to make the most of nothing

Went off the rails when nothing itself
Got involved. The ratios altered.

You sat, and dozed, and jolted awake,
But dreamed no dream that you could take.

Mostly, you weren’t. Meanwhile, the day was,
So that later, in the greying light,

You could feel cheated. You had nothing
To show yourself in memory—time

Took its opportunity with it.
But wasn’t this it? More gone with it.

The day, it turns, could not be reduced.
The thoughts were as compact as they seemed.

Then Memory Moves On and Other Dreams Move In

Wake only when the dream gets stuck,
Jammed like an old film projector.
You have to set the one going
Again, to not be forever

In the other. The smell of old
Wood logged and made into this barn
More than a century ago,
The smell of tackle and harness,

This spot where you want to pause
And inhale the last of that world.
It’s all a compound, all injured
As memory tries dredging it

Out of the massively tangled
System of synapses, it is.

Obligingly

You have a day

Where all you do

Is blink in and

Out of being

Aware you’re there.

That’s all you do,

Hours in your chair,

There and not there,

Going nowhere.

The day is gray,

Obligingly,

And the latest

Ways of joining

Language weirdly

And vividly

To the world

Refuse to join

Meaningfully.

Now, where were you?

Variations

On disaster.

Stereophonic

Can’t stay asleep.
Can’t stay awake.
Name the wise risk
The clever takes.

The clever one!
Who stays asleep,
Who stays awake,
Risks being wise.

The People in the Dark

Once the black paintings
Have been destroyed, and
The puppets appear
To act alone, ghosts
Can skim through the dark

Like whales filtering
The ocean for food,
Like an audience
Absorbed in the tale
Across the fourth wall,

Gathering stories
They can use later--
Then you can attend
To the puppets'
Travels and travails.

Ok, Here We Are

You spent a day as a guest
Of someone you’ll never meet
With a mansion near the coast.
Or, you’re pretty sure you did.
You could have been daydreaming.

The lawn was so extensive,
It felt like a city park—
You sat where you could
Follow the shade easily
Around an enormous trunk,

Spiral shell to trace the day.
Someone owns this, you whispered
To yourself while noticing
How skillfully the trees embraced
The variations in the light.

What is ownership, exactly? you asked
Yourself for the thousandth time.
You feel you’ve never felt it,
The sense that someone or something
Really, wholly belonged to you.

Privilege and provision, sure,
Those you can sense as plenteous,
Abundant piles of supplies.
Consumption you comprehend
In your bones, your hungry bones,

But ownership? Once you stood
Beside a scuffed compact car,
Holding a slip of paper
Indicating ownership.
What did you feel? Just okay.

On Going Away

The body doesn’t like the day,
Which arrived dark, in too much pain.
Maybe there’s something you can take,

Or maybe today’s that day reached
When the pain stops going away.
Maybe there’s nothing you can take.

You sit, quietly as you can,
Trying not to move any way
That offends the tumor and friends

Who are busy at their buffet—
The body’s bones, organs, and veins—
Try not to annoy them today,

Let them eat your remains today.
Remember, now, who goes away.

Ehh?

Whenever you startle awake
From dozing in the wheelchair, you

Twist to look over your right side
For the contents and characters

You’d just now been dreaming about,
As if you expected them there,

All the apparatus of dreams,
Never in front or to the left—

Always over your right shoulder.
You’re not awake until the world

Redistributes itself smoothly,
And the empty corners have gone

Back wherever emptiness goes,
One side world, other glowing void.

Inner Alien Nation

One writer writes, It’s foolish

To think you’re anything

But alone, while another

Writes, You are never alone.

Ha. You’re never of one mind.

One skull, sure. Too many minds,

A world of mind, which you hold

As much as one hotel room

In a megalopolis

Holds human population

Of the whole world passing through,

But only that slim fragment

Of inn that for the night is

Whole. When it comes to the mind,

Whitman called it first—the skull

Is small, but it does in fact

Contain multitudes, and they

Do contradict each other.

Not only are you alone,

It’s foolish to think you’re not—

Or are—or aren’t both at once.

Therefore, the bits of mind fight

In globes of bone, and all this

Gets called something like a poem.

Say a Soul Is Whatever the Body Is Not

How do you begin? How on earth
Do you end? How do you keep going?

In retrospect, one might advise,
Live so you’ll never be missed.

But that’s a useless wisecrack.
Reading of a survivor

The other day, and of all the misery
The survivor had been surrounded by,

It’s hard not to be impressed,
Simultaneously, by the news’ evidence

For the extraordinary frailty and equally
Extraordinary resilience of a body.

Flesh is soft, easily damaged. Injuries
And breakdowns are common.

But a body does not like to die.
Drag it to the point of death, and then

Watch it survive. How does it begin?
How does it end? How does it keep going?

There Is No Key

Daily, little emissaries
Short-circuit small loops in your thoughts,
And this is called anxiety

Or something similar. Will this
Or that minor catastrophe
Be endured, stopped, or avoided?

Behind them or woven through them
Lies chronic imagination.
It’s all memory, being used

As an adaptation, but one
That runs away with how things are
To create what will never be.

And what of the bigger monsters?
Every ancient mythology
Features terrors from caves or seas,

And warns, if monsters aren’t conquered
They must be tortured and punished
Eternally. The brain makes fear.

The brain makes fear, effectively.
Shoo away the emissaries.
The big monsters depend on small,

Cumulative habits thinking
The key is anticipation.
No. Float alone by a window.

Full Life Spilt

The idea of giving a creature a full life,
What is that? What’s the appropriate
Moral term for it? Is it patronizing?
Is it the core of all other kindly notions?

You find it often among other thoughts—
Watching some organism seem to savor
A moment you seemed to have enabled.
Let the cat out the door to explore. Rescue

The cricket that the cat caught in its jaws.
From small acts that you’re pleased
To consider mercies that you’ve yourself
Given, to lifelong commitments, even

The most enormous of those—parenting—
Have you done the most possible to give
This creature whose soul you've attended,
Whose life you've fed and shepherded

A full life, a good life, a rewarding life?
Hard to think so when you know you are
Dying. Not so bad for you, selfish you.
Nothing isn’t bad. Nothing’s no good.

If only you could get to nothing, without
Breaking your child’s full, rewarding life
On the way. And you ask yourself, in sort
Of a desperate way—this idea of giving

A creature a full life—What is that? What is
The appropriate moral terminology for it,
Especially if you fail to accomplish it?
Of all kindly emotions, was that the core?

But Masks Don’t Have Voices

A mask meaning
This isn’t you,
A postcard dropped
Indefinite

Numbers of years
Before it’s yours—
You picked it up
For the message—

Who was writing,
What the past had
To say and to
Communicate—

Or you picked it
To hide behind,
To substitute
Its voice for yours.

Seed Treasure

Carefully trowel away
The layers of soil and moss.

If you do not damage it
In the act of opening

The history around it,
The packaging of long lives,

The world to which it belongs,
You will discover treasure

Has come to nest in your hands.
Pandora had a sister,

And the marble jar that held
Her delicate, glittering,

Staggeringly valuable,
Tiny set of jewelry

Was itself a great wonder,
Carved from stone to such a fine

Thinness full of narrative
And incident, it ended

Translucent and frail as lace.
And what treasures did this jar

Of Pandora’s sister hold?
Among many small wonders,

The shimmering amulet
That, worn on the wrist, could shield

The wearer against any
Of all the many terrors

Hidden in Pandora’s Box.
That amulet had a name

Once, but now there is no word
Anyone remembers for

Magic extraordinary
Enough to protect a soul

From tragic ordinary
Sorrows one lives with to show

Solidarity with those
Who need seed treasure to grow.

The Astonishing

Smaller and smaller,
You want to forge frames
For barely phrases—
Miniature hoards

Of astonishing
Value dug into
The unforgiving,
Denser and denser

Earth—here’s your fossil,
What’s been left to you,
Worth more than most banks,
Ready for barter,

Painting sprung to life
Over the city
That tried to bury
The astonishing

Small Hours of the Suburbs Before the War

The urge to preserve and to cast away
Seem related somehow in human brains,
There with the urge to burn down and conserve.

Does it necessarily have to be
Anything to do with opposition,
Or binaries, or built-in positions?

Maybe it is just a case of the brain
Knowing something that the self does not know,
Like a neighbor who is in on something

About the nature of the neighborhood
You are not and likely never will be,
Although it is a place you never leave.

The lights on in the bedrooms every night
Glow to show dark is close to taking flight.

The Psalmist’s Archives

What is ambition, exactly, in the body
Of an aspiring, just-now beginning poet?

Awards? Campus status? A cushy position?
Being welcomed by the embraces of others

Who embody cultural prestige as poets?
Not much of that to spread around, really, is there?

Close to the neighborhood of spooky, quantum glands,
Wherever self and soul are thought to lie these days,

Perhaps the cherished, hidden ambition remains
To be one of the great poets, major poets,

Familiar name within some familiar canon,
A blurry magnitude of famous quotations.

Or maybe you’re dreaming of changing things
With poems that do good. Forgive yourself all your hymns.

Autobiography of Meme-X

October 1962,

Along with all the other stuff

Carrying on with the Cold War—

Space race, Cuban missile crisis—

Engelbart conceptualized

A sort of mechanized private

File and library, a future device

To augment human intellect

For which he coined the name, meme-x,

Suggesting we would need to use

Its own power as tool to control

Its social impact. Failed at that,

And here we are with whoever

Was punished, whoever got rich.

Thirteen-Character Verse

What next, pocket poem?
Can you make yourself
Fit for a napkin?
One-line equation?

That’s the elegance
Your maker wanted,
Mathematical,
But shifty, bal-peen

Hammer in velvet.
Four, five characters
Crammed per tongue-tied line,
Concrete as highways,

Gorgeous as clear nights
Over deserts left
Far from city lights,
Showing the season,

Outlining the theme,
Incomplete without
The calligraphy,
Iconography. . . .

Astronaut, don’t leave.
Sun chews horizons,
Bleeding battlefields
Where no one can breathe.

Into the Valley

Bit of basalt in one hand,
Other fist, chunk of ochre.
Who else is in the shelter
But the artist concluding
Something never seen before,
The first image of this god,
This therianthrope, this breach

Of what nature can manage?
You don’t know what’s going on,
But you’re creating the past
That can only keep growing.
The birth is of division
Between representation
And transubstantiation.

Outside the mouth of the cave,
On a chilly, wet fall day,
One lean, limber child in furs
Looks down into the valley
Alert for any danger.
In all probability, this child
Loves to hear and tell stories.

In the stories, this dream shape
Made from ochre and torchlight
Comes to terrifying life
To inhabit the valley,
So that the past can begin
To be the past of worship,
The growing monster

Asserting, in the future
This past will be god, and gods
Will inhabit the future
In such a way you can’t win
Against your divided dreams—
In which you can create worlds
That transform lives into words.

Words Already

Which changes more most,
Tunes acting on words,
Words acting on tunes?

A couple of senior
Couples carry on
About the way that

The car you’ve driven
The past fifteen years
Appears with its dents,

And you overhear
And turn up your tunes,
To see what happens—

A candidate says,
No more chattering
About fast-food meats,

And another laughs.
Wait. Those can’t be tunes.
They’re already words.

Cold Wild Honey

The winds in Alice Meynell’s summer,
Brimming with pathetic fallacy
And a kind of ruthless agency,

Pursue their enemies. Be careful,
And don’t get in the way of those winds.
You’re drawn to the notion, admit it,

Of wind on a mission, no empty
Motions. To be such a wind, stalking
The echoes of this narrow canyon,

Mingling raw ruckus with mangled yips
From the coyotes up at the rim.
Oh, you’re not howling for being pushed

Around, chivvied through the artifacts
Of animal worlds hugging the ground.
You are the hunting wind, rough weather,

You hiss as an assassin and snarl
Like a lion pride warning the rest,
To survive has to mean surviving

At a safe enough distance from them
And their blood-foaming muzzles. You’re worse—
Solitary, unassailable,

The lion of dark midday, hunter.
The wind is not, in you, a warning.
Your wind, beyond bare living, savors

Immunity from dying, searches
Out challengers for top predator,
And, finding none, will go on hunting.

Agnosis

He considered the map she
Had carefully folded for
Him, somehow managing to

Place every crease awkwardly.
The wind was picking up. Would
They still have time to get

A shower before it got
Too wild? He lifted his head.
Where had he been all this time?

And what would happen if, now
Without the map, she got lost
While he had it but couldn’t

Read it? This was long ago,
Even in human ages.
The wind picked up. She wasn’t

Here yet, and he had to go.
Already, he was having
To go, why or where, he did

Brief Debriefing

Did you walk on eggshells
During this conversation?

If not, why not? If so, why?
Do you know any format

For such a conversation?
Don’t say the world grows colder.

Say, More things have happened now,
Than had just an hour ago.

More things have happened. Always
More things have jumped on the pile

Of, This is what has happened—
More and more, and more and more.

You stomped hard on all those shells,
As if stomping them to hell.

And Your Realize Your Name Is Heal-All

You lift your head, sunward.
You could do with a name.
There’s a narrative twitch.

The monsters ride the fog
That your mother unleashed.
Wait! One just disappeared!

That’s your finance mountain,
Your estate? One monster
And a small coffee drink?

You need an adventure,
But you’re not quick to die.
So you watch the sunset.

The world’s a golden worry.
One vanishing monster
Named Jim like your monster.

And there goes the ridge glow.
When is the beginning
Of any adventure?

Let’s say when horizons
Begin moving around
As if the sky hemmed them.

The sky hems everyone,
Even the astronauts,
In the end. Adventure

Isn’t miraculous,
Except when the monsters
Turn out all on your side

And something blows to bits
That heals you, makes you rich
With one narrative twitch.

Neither Footnote nor Marginal Comment

These poems don’t seem like true poems
Anymore—more like the frames
For Cornell boxes, or windows
Pretending to be portals
Pretending to be to worlds,
Or tiny wedges of prayers
Slipped in between the real poems.

Between the true poems, maybe
There’s always a wailing wall,
Always an alternative
World only portal to more,
Each window a world itself
As assembled—translucent,
Crystal, sealed—locked arrangement.

Floating, First and Last

How many people have you

Floated through who are no more?

How many people will you

Float through? What’s meant by you?

You imagine someone home,

Reading beside a warm fire,

The way you always wanted

To be sitting and reading,

And look! That name on the book,

That old-fashioned, paper book,

Is yours! You’re moving through them,

Your phrasing, your borrowed thoughts,

A long braid connecting them

To much, much earlier ghosts.

Pacifist Dinosaur Army

Who hates the past
Someone else bought
And suffered for
Back then, back then?

Below the floor,
Layers of stone
Swallow fossils
Small children would

Love to handle
And show to friends—
Megafauna
Being the main draw—

Dinosaurs best
Of the best, yes!
Values converge
Where time’s submerged.

Vaguely a Vagabond

You drift along best alone.
You don’t have to own a home—
Rooms to rent, credit to rent

Whichever rooms you might want
As long as you might want them,
All the paperwork you need,

All the documentation,
ID, local currency,
Traveler’s health insurance—

Oh yes, no doubt about it,
You drift along best alone
With privilege for your home.

Your Advanced States

You’re reading an article
On the laptop, all about
The flirtation of Russia

With North Korea—muscle
In potentia for the war
In Ukraine, more fresh soldiers—

And one of the cats decides
To mark the laptop corner,
And only a lunge prevents

The whole set-up sliding off
And crashing onto the floor
So that, in your advanced state

Of drug and cancer-addled
Desuetude, you’re briefly
Sure that a cat’s behavior

Could be connected to war,
As if domestic moggies
Could influence wars’ outcomes. . . .

Well, causation seduces
The finest minds, so why not
Imagine cats as agents

Of apocalypse, why not?
Sun floods through the open door.
Soon you won’t think anymore.

And Then What Happened?

It was late in October,
Back in twenty-twenty four,
And the balance of the world
Registered precarious.

There were people caught in wars
Or fleeing collapsing states.
There were people expecting
Wars and preparing escapes.

Democracy resembled
Endangered, charismatic
Megafauna—far too cute

To allow to go extinct,
But not a beast most people
Wanted to clean up after.

Donation Store

The idea here was equable
Treatment breaking down barriers
Between those with and those without

By convincing those with plenty
They could cheaply get even more.
Those without were confined to hope.

People have needs. People have wants.
To get at all their needs and wants,
People have people help them out.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes it won’t.
If you feel like it worked for you,
Does that mean someone else was screwed?

You wait in your wheelchair as parked.
The sun’s brilliant on the concrete.

Compos Mentis

Can you sync with the air,
With the planet’s breathing
As apart from human rhythms?

Peel apart completely
From the pulse of the news.
Keep from living too long

Within the violence
The era promises.
Die peacefully in bed.

The glow of the sun goes.
The evening will not spare
Quietists from vengeance,

No more than activists
Or anyone else caught
Between inhalation

And coughing helplessly.
But nor will the evening,
As an evening, attempt

To harm you. You watch night
Arrive. The old human
Hearth occupation—watch

And listen to the night
For whatever’s out there.
Watch the night. Be the night.

You can sync with the air.
Live your last without fear—
It’s not next. Next there’s here.

Searching the Seam in the Rhythm

The evening settles slightly
Blue and green at horizon.
Everyone’s planning what’s gone.

It’s ok. It’s got to be.
Every excess leads to dusk,
Every dusk to excess dark

Or the lights of the cities—
Evening’s going down to ground,
Taking its jewel box of lights.

Calm means no obligations
To the quiet you’re craving.
Blue along the garden fence,

Here where there are still gardens
For those without small fortunes,
And the birds sing blue to bed.

Living With It

It’s weird to be dying and thinking,
Frequently, that everything works out.
After a bizarre day Halloween

Costume shopping around town with doom
And the death of the free world at hand,
Or at least at the backs of our minds

(One teen, still too young to vote, asking
A group of friends around the table
If they felt as anxious as she did,

Nods greeting her, a generation
That may soon undertake resistance
They’re not yet prepared for as they shop

For items with which to craft costumes,
Scary but silly, for now, for now),
You noted how that day’s obstacles

And trivial, personal worries
Worked out well, worked out just fine, ok?
The way everything keeps working out,

A fine life, another holiday,
Another holiday, calendar
Full of them, so many quirky days,

Leading you to chuckle at yourself,
Thinking, You see? Everything works out,
And your death sentence you just live with.

When Conditions Were Good

The sudden swell of pink light
Surprised you that morning. Dawn

Is a gradual device,
Even in desert canyons,

But that time, if not a switch,
Then sort of a dimmer switch,

Surging background radiance,
That made you lift your head, look,

And notice the rush of pink,
Day that knew how to begin,

How to wave a bright hello
And wink at good things to come.

A really old-fashioned poem
Would claim humans light dawns, too.

On the Need to Stay Uncertain

What would certainty
Obviate? A doubt,
Any need for faith.

Can you imagine?
You can’t. You are not
Anymore evolved

For life without doubt,
Faith, or mystery.
Leave it alone.

Even a shadow--
Eliminated
By a firm scholar

From the scenery--
Could make you quaver
With uncertainty—

You need it. You might
Perish without it,
Your uncertainty.

In the Waves

You’re so far gone, not only
Do you catch yourself dozing
While in the act of reading,

You catch yourself translating
From English into English,
Though what’s in your head isn’t

Really English, really words
In any language, is it?
There’s a rush of proto-speech

You’re more or less aware of,
And then you pull out of it
Before you break in the waves.

Joy

Waste time. You won’t find, can’t find,
Joy, unless you can waste time.

But wait! Weren’t these poems a source
For advocacy of time’s

Absolute nonexistence?
Yes! Maybe! So celebrate,

If you wake up confused,
Losing what no one has had.

It’s a challenge, isn’t it?
To feel no anxiety

That you’ve completely
Lost an hour. A day. You won’t

Care later, likely. But right now,
The thought that you simply slipped

And forgot your life, dropped it,
Lost the plan . . . Your visitors?

The podcast conversation?
A beetle wanders the floor.

Nope. No beetle was ever
Wandering here. But you are,

Determined to embrace this
Loss, this lost loss of nothing.

Yet Another World to Go

And there it is again,
A screen this time, a jolt
And a panic something

Has gone missing. But look
What you’ve gained—a roadrunner
Big as you’ve ever seen

Has wandered to the door
You left open, and looks in.
All this mystery while

You dozed off, phone in hand.
A few flicks of rhythm,
And it’s another world.

A Person on Business

Scare yourself. If you’re dying

As quickly as doctors said,

You’ve got a lot to get through,

And it will hurt, and will burn,

And be terrifying, so

Start practicing daily now.

The cancer, the opiates,

The nights your sleep’s demolished—

They all distort how you think,

Creating a world by turns

Confused, disoriented—

Which is what dying will do.

Might as well get used to it.

If poetry, per Ada

Limón, is the true language

Of mystery . . . the unknown,

Might as well try unknowing

On for size. In blazing sun,

Someone knocks at the west door,

Casting a shadow. Answer,

Even if they’re from Porlock.

Poetry Adjacent

For some reason, right now,
Every poem you compose
Doesn’t feel like a poem,

Feels like the middle of a poem
As pastry, a kind of treat or filling,
Or it feels less anxious, less

Like the effort at capture that it is
And more like the composition
Of an empty form for readers to fill.

Or they feel like stacked, cardboard boxes.
Or like leftovers of real poems. Whatever.
Well. Well, welcome to this one.

Attention Is All

Builders xeriscaped this subdivision
With swaths of stone in various sizes
So that water would be trapped under rocks
To pool, then to be absorbed more slowly.
By and large, the design performs poorly,

And, as a consequence, sort of a wash
Has evolved along the margins of stone—
Dry and sandy most of the time, faintly
Damp after the odd shower, and rarely,
Rarely but alarmingly, a flash flood

Of brown gook that could snatch your ankles,
Club you with tumbling fist-sized and skull-sized
Loose rock. Today, the bare stripe is fine sand,
And, as a teenager, you don’t notice it,
Except when your attention’s called to it.

What’s Next Is Also Past

It went on. Nothing much clenched
In dread anticipation
Way back then, but it went on.

Two patterns, especially,
Remained reliably fixed—
No matter what you dreaded

Or how much, it came and went,
And then it went on. And then,
Fresh anxieties moved in.

That was it. But when you looked,
All you had of dread was past.
It went on, and all of it past.

Do Not Risk Closing Your Eyes

Dozed into a dream someone
Recently deceased argued
With a more senior lost soul

That this couldn’t be the place—
Then things disintegrated,
Not into waking, into

The next dream, people chatting
About the previous dream
In which you were painting and

The painting was of a boat
The point of which was to float
Away from all these faces

But now the boat is crowded
And new dreamers float new dreams.

Of Memories

Peace recently located,
Or relocated perhaps,
To an easy-to-find place—

Only requires accepting,
Fully, truly accepting,
That how this turns out for you

Will never matter for you.
Can you embrace that absence?
It’s not just you don’t matter—

It’s not all wise perspective.
You can’t possibly matter
To your disappearing self,

So let yourself disappear.
It’s all always behind you.
Of what could you feel afraid?

Drift

It’s already done.
Let go of the ropes.
Feel the way your boat

Rocks back and forth
But floats. Will you coast
Out of the harbor?

Go so far as half
Way through the Bay,
Then sink forever?

Given it’s matter,
It doesn’t matter.
Mattering is for

Precisely those things
Immaterial,
For which meanings are

Created so that
They can be proclaimed
To really matter.

Course Correction

There’s no formula for it,

That’s for sure, and who could say

Whether the person one meant

To receive the formula

Were not, in fact, the starter

Kit for the peculiar script

Any such formula would need

To enact? You bump down the road.

There’s a little road through the woods,

A two-track rut into grey scrub

That you turn left to bump onto.

The woods are the ones that greeted

Bishop on her chemin de fer—

Impoverished scrub pine and oak—

You won’t get out of them without

Some pleasantries from the hermit,

And if you get lost arriving,

Remember, there’s no formula—

There might be an alligator

Or startled swamp deer.

There might be some tattered pages

That seem to contain corrections. . .

What the Fish Spell

They will not wait.
They will not happen.
They happen.
They have happened.

Will they happen?
If they are at all
They will have happened—

The most solid existence
Anyone’s accorded
Within this happened.

Everything you can be
Or be aware of is among
The things that happened.

Linny’s tragic, scrawny story
Doesn’t yet exist— hasn’t
Happened yet, then, has it?

Hasn’t had been, hasn’t been yet,
Has it? Linny’s story—how soon
Can it have happened?

Can it have happened?
Wait—did the girl who crouched
Here happen?

Pale Peach October Sunset

The outer light
Started to fail.
You asked yourself
Of your safety—

Make clear what was
Happening here?
Or be cryptic,
The take that is

The more trusting?
Years had taught him
Right laziness
In the artist

Creates a gift
For the viewer—
The chance to make
The meaning yours.

Dawn

Three months into six months
To live, there hasn’t been
Much dramatic decay,

Although, oddly, the squad
Of thoughts, trouble in mind,
Has grown haphazardly

Anxious, random moments
About time left right now.
You may sit in cool dawn

Of a loose day, reason
To relax with angels—
Who can be like you, free

Of work and effort, so
Much free time? For no good
Reason you freeze, thinking,

Something’s almost gone now,
But you can’t think of what.
It goes, and you feel fine.

Inheritance

The door is ajar.
The teen is upstairs.
The patient, dying

Feels only too stoned
From medication
Gulped down in the well. . .

And down in the well
The mind could relax,
Except it’s spooky,

These conversations
The ghost faces start
In opium dreams—

And down in the well
They’re half an army,
And all talkative.

You surface, alarmed
For your sanity,
But down in the well

You can’t defeat them,
Debate them clearly—
They’re ancient versions

Of people you knew,
Mangled together
With a chance to prove

That down in the well,
Bottom of the drought,
What you can’t know yet

Can scare you to death,
Yet not directly
Harm you at all.

Still, who wants to talk
Through an open door
To twisted shadows?

It distresses you.
The teen is upstairs.
This world will be hers.

Everyone Hates Mr Tate

Say the children in middle school.

It has that jangly rhyme to it,

Just enough clang for chanting it.

Let us contemplate Mr. Tate,

His name being taken in vain

By unfortunates on the bus

Who have no one to pick them up

From these ex-urban nerve endings

Of all-American learning—

When did his decision hit him,

That he should be a school teacher?

And did he ever consider the state

His career would have to be in?

The kids on the bus would, loudly,

Chant Everyone hates Mr. Tate.

Practice Is Learning How Not to Sink

During the solo
Meeting in the room
For practice alone,

People visit you—
People and their pets.
You know you’re dreaming,

Hallucinating
People who aren’t there,
But they’re returning

And you can’t stop them.
Dangling like convicts
From the ripped, white edge

Of drawing paper,
Just before dropping,
They’re consoling you.

Otherwise practice
This solitary
Would eat you alive.

On the other hand
They’re shadowy and
Alarming—oh, wait,

Dark water’s building
And the light’s fading.
You should be bailing.

Your Name Here

Words so rare
No one cares—
The tongue still

Works for those
Grown in it—
Not dead yet,

Just stuck with
Words so rare
Who could care?

Apples and Oranges

Life, not yours, just life, still has
A long way to go. You have
No evidence either way—

No other living planets
Known that died so suddenly
Everything crisped in a day,

Or so slowly, five billion
Years made barely middle age—
No points of comparison

To triangulate a world.
For all you know, worlds don’t die,
Can’t die. Life, once it gets started

May be impenetrable—
Which would only make the small
Lives with mandatory deaths

Seem that much more tragic, no?
Or repeatedly starting
Over again—maybe so.

Textbooks give wise estimates,
Not that they know. Your best guess?
Life's got a long way to go.

Wanting for Nothing

What people believe they want
Haunts them in too strong a way,

Until almost everyone
You talk to has their own way

Of staring far, far away.
Is it the intensity

Or the density of wants?
How ferociously

You want or how many wants
Cluster around you at once?

Either way, not so simple
As a straightforward desire,

Given belief is in there.
It reminds you, you can’t be sure

Of one thing about wanting
Except you’ve encountered it.

What you’re convinced you want now
May be the last thing you’d want

In another hour. What haunts
You then might be what you miss

Out on today, not wanting
It, you thought, at all. So what

Want do you want, and why that?
See? You’re already haunted.

Graphic Design

See those words printed
In factory-bright colors
Along the outside of the mug?

Everyone who composed
One of these memorable strings
Of phrases in the English language

Is dead now. The phrases
Were chosen by someone else,
Presumably at a desk,

Maybe working at a screen,
Maybe surrounded by piles
Of papers and books. Probably

Only searching other screens,
Scanning lists of famous phrases
Of various kinds to use

As designs for this novelty mug
For avid readers, stocking stuffer,
Between reading lights and bookmarks.

Imagine being clubbed to death
By a colorful coffee mug—that is,
If it hadn’t shattered?

This, That You Never Wrote Down

An extremely bright afternoon
Sprawled, life inside it, in the sun.

This was several days ago.
An old friend, hallucinated

Out of long-sunken memories,
Seemed to be sitting in the sun

Offering, from the other side
Of the table, some good advice,

But you were writing it down
You forgot what it was, and now

You sense that not writing it down
Amounted to the same advice.

They’ve Already Given Out All the Awards for Participation

Break through your veils of lawn—
The gauze of medicine
On the gauze of sickness

Have muffled what’s left you—
To feel that you’re still here,
That there’s something to do,

Requires that you forget,
Can’t be bothered to care
That there’s something to do.

The ten small things at once
That you should be doing
Will leave you, all undone,

Unless you find a way
To completely resist
Any doing of them.

Fame, Curiosity, Greed

A Norwegian chronicler
Near the end of the era
Of Viking expansiveness,

Maybe sick of it himself,
Asked the page what made people
Go to Greenland and why fare

Thither through such great perils?
Risky question. Short answer.
Man’s threefold nature, seeking

Fame and curiosity,
And lust for gain.
Fame. Curiosity. Greed.

Nobody wants to hear that.
Bravery. That’s what we want--
Divine plans for everyone.

The Alumni

You never expected this,
Although, really, you should have.
Among all the alumni

Of life, why wouldn’t the group
Include those unexpected
Alumni of other plans,

Of other universes,
Other forms of awareness?
Something’s humming in those lines.

Tick Tick

How about no legacy?
No oeuvre, no books, nothing left?
Not merely no one wanting

To dive into the archive
Curved like a body pillow,
Held close for too many years,

But physically nothing
Of remains but dust, trash, and ash,
Black hole cloud of horizon.

How about no audience
Or bizarre non-audience,
Consisting of aliens

To all of earth’s history
Maybe scanning their own skies
For signs, recognizing none,

Or free-range intelligence.
There goes your best legacy.
Or leave it to the machines.

They can read it, store it, they
Are storing it even now.
Your motorized legacy.

The Night Is Young

How to climb in
The right story,
The one you want
To just live in—

The one that haunts
You with it gate,
Its treed entrance
Into more trees.

That’s the story
You don’t break down
Trying to write.
Write what you saw,

Fast as you can.
This is that one.
These are your woods.
Although you’re old

In Which Case You’d Lack the Power to Shed It

Power isn’t powerful
In the way it seems to be.

Consider the State’s power
To seize control of aspects

Of the most ordinary life,
To brutally constrain acts

Too small to concern power
as an actor on the stage—

Already it’s confusing
To wander around these parts—

Power, by definition,
Can destroy the powerless,

But how do those words help us?
How can knowing anything

Help us in our helplessness?
What are you talking about

When you refer to power—
Power wants this, seizes that,

Corrupts the other? Power?
There are people, stacked inside

The halls of power. (Power
Palaces only have halls—

No one ever references
Their bathrooms or libraries

Or kitchens or cupolas
Of power. Halls of power,

That’s it.) Those people have it
For whatever stretch of time

They’re carrying what’s granted
To them by powers that be.

And what are powers that be?
Who are they? Those who have it,

A share of it, thanks to those
Who had a share before them.

Power’s not an entity.
It’s neither god nor angel,

No one individual.
It’s something coursing through you

That you’d be wise to shed, if
You were wise, not powerful.