A Kind of Something

And then there’s the urge
To make a kind of something
Out of the nothing much
That flings itself your way.

If you could be maximally
Quiet along the way. Why
You would expect dying
To other than living, who knows?

Thirty Years Ago You Were Also Alive

Soon, the holograph
Will be the last
Resort of the facts

And the pen in the hand
The last ghostly jasmine
As a light breeze

Ruffles the air you recall
Driving home from a prison
You visited to teach a class.

The Soft Lives

The shadows are so long
They have lives of their own
And the life that was led

Seems tangled in the life
Its shadows are leaving,
As if tangled in the branches

And the language has grown
Simpler, simpler, the shadows velvet
The dark shadows comfort

On the Rim

There’s a small pile
You can arrange
Of dust while you wait death,

And making small islands
You’re never excavating
While clouds concentrate on the rim

Rim of the sky you rim and
There are sad coats out there
And columns of shadows,

Through lawns at evening,
The sun at last shining,
We can stay until we have to go.
Until we we have to go we can stay.

Usually, It Doesn’t Last Long

One conviction for those deemed terminal
Holds that, however you spend your
Last months, you hang on to all of them,
Every moment. There’s no sense allowed
That maybe the terminal are blessed
To not have to choose to keep living.

The grass and scrub carry coats of frost
This cold, clear morning. Nobody climbs
Uphill from here; the skies so cleared
By rare morning lightning. Take warning,
Death loves everyone, no matter
How you love life, no matter how strong.

When Do You Get to Stop Working on It?

We are survivors / of the Future,

Announced Michael McClure in a poem

More than half a century ago,

And you agree with him. The Future

Has been taking a blow-torch to you,

For as long as you can remember,

Sixty-plus years of fear and trembling

Takes a toll on any vehicle,

As prevailing winds sculpt a desert.

But you don’t care for the word, survive.

Endure might be better. There’s no word

In English, that sums up resistance

And surrender fused by the black hail

Of life’s relentless experience,

But the poets are working on it.

The Wandering Dream

Where the dream went, who knew?
A splash in the lap, mess
In the head? How to fit

The dream into the fizz
Of whatever this is
That won’t that much longer last?

Wriggle through dreams in the dirt?
You move, middle to middles,
Get in the car and wait to start.

Address This

The words cavort—for them, the day
Is just an ordinary day,
If wetter than most in this way.

The words are free to do
As they pleased, wander around
Drowning, go where they care to go today.

We wish we could follow the words
But we can’t. We’re not allowed today.

Escaping

 The rain soak soaks in, taking

A good bit of eyeball with

It, and you’re limited here

To what you’ve decided is

The line as you’ve decided

It to be this afternoon,

Fixed in the mossy woods, and

And chased here are chased by large

Animals meant to escape.

But you will, you could escape

Wet Afternoon

The sonata rebels,
As if sonatas could,

A smiling face over
An insouciant cover

And a round moon hiding
Behind dense haze a while—

You have to wait and hold off
From whatever you had planned

Quietly Xeriscaped Cat in the Closet

It’s the same spill of stones here
Since the building was complete,
The same xeriscaping,sprawled

Around the same townhouses,
Waiting for the same nurse practitioner
To show up and help with a shower—

Today is a similar
Day in terms of schedule, if that.
What will work, what will hold up.

Every day has its strangeness
Hidden in the similar,
And its similar hidden

In whatever about it
Might count as the same.
But the sameness remains strange.

Living by the Window

You set the trash out carefully,
Wondering if you’re the one
For whom this be should

Ordinary existence,
And then thinking, no, this is me.
This is me with a life still living yet,

Me among the cats by the window,
Me among the cats by door,
Easier to enumerate as they leave

Like the days of one’s existence,
Or so it seemed listing bedside,
So it seemed.

Endlessly Fulfilling

Her backpack’s a portable portal
She tells you, with a laugh about it
Seeming to swallow any item

That will fit in it, and you both think
How good the cats are at vanishing,
But how the time has, lately, started

Stumbling about a bit, no longer
The rush you remember fulfilling.
And you think as well of all the books

You’ve bought and read over years and years—
More portals that you’ve discovered, but
Here the task is just to show you’re here,

Here by the windows, whether or not
You’re about to, more than soon enough,
Make like a portal and disappear.

Down Canyons

How do you get down to the idyllic
Of people arm and arm, strolling along
An empty beach in greener countryside?

Or simply the idyll of getting on
With ordinary economic existence,
A couple of stones clunking down canyons?

Somewhere in there, someone fell,
And that was the end for you.
And where is the end for you,
The little scraping that’s true?

Indecision

If deciding were something
You did, something that happened
To you, you would decide it

Or let it happen to you
Quickly, and live by windows
All the time, window-living

Becoming your thing, your point,
The fulcrum around which
Your life went on rotating,

You would love a window room
Laid out just so for you—love
To live between windows more

Or less forever, living
Simply, with no other life
You would ever have to be.

Door Poem

Now the lawn is always summer,
The nights are full of tears

It’s taking too long, all this dying,
To the house you walk up to,

And this is all one quill you can use
That amounts to an answer.

There was a house,
Small and lime green

And it sat it the sun,
The hot Georgia sun

Decades ago,
And you would park in the sun

And you would walk
Up to the blazing door.

The Rock Wren

You want the peaceful ones, ones
That stay under these lines, brick
Scattering the forest floor.

Name them, name a few of them,
The ones that amount to rocks,
That you love, that you gather

In mind, trouble in mind, rocks
And rock wren’s only kind of trouble
That you find, past your own mind.

They lie corner to corner,
Peacefully as the first sin.
Then a roadrunner walks in,

And your first thought is this bird
Will go for them, not them for it.

Leave Them Sit, the Done Things, See What Happens

You ask if you have
To do this. Mostly you don’t.
But then it gets down
To everything you have to ask,
And some are wholly opposite
And dependent on the goal.

Do you have to breathe? Only
If you want to keep on living.
Do you have die? Only if you already
Started living. Now there’s nothing
Much for it but more until-you-die-living,
The kind you do since you do, since

You’re here and you’re up and about
Doing things, sometimes finding yourself
Doing things, finding which gets thing done.

Midday

The way we look for things
We’re waiting to start or end—
Mostly variates of simple events,

He wished to have the opportunity
To more or less wait forever.
To have an event under his control
But not his responsibility.

A Life Is One

It is done, my fading ghost,
My ghostly fader, it is
Done, not ever undone now,

This life! This whole thing and all
The many events in it,
Done, each fading ghost never

Undone. Happiness is not
Doing too much, too much done
Won’t be undone, but today

You’ve been gifted with neither,
Not too much doing in group,
Not too much doing alone.

Hours done of little doing,
Each eternally going.

Stop Trying?

You start trying to live
As soon as you’re told that you’ll die

With sufficient certainty that the doctors
Have given up—oh, then you start to try!

It takes so much trying to live
You don’t even realize how to just die,

Just notice what’s there on its own terms
Don’t try—be sunny if it occurs to you?

Can you relax but without the blues?
Notice what’s there on its own terms

All the Fun Critters in the Water

All the ways you didn’t get a room
Half as fine as this one, and slapped
Your forest, for being less, for fruit trees

Trees being confused. The forest itself
Less confused than you got for the forest.
Reading to yourself, thousands of your

Fellow, feral, forest kids out for first aid
Kits, who knows, who knows anymore
Who they acquainted with since.

Adding as Foil

Again and adding, let it it go, let it go,

Like a struggle on the beach, just

To let it go fast enough that she hasn’t

“Held it like a baby, like she can’t release fast enough to credit herself, with nothing

Much, we walked and talked, half ah hour

After our heads were cut off.”

The Reaching

Each line tries to reach the end.
So far no line ever has—

They struggle. Let’s go
One line at a time. Let’s count

If we have to, but let’s finish amount.
(Let’s know with what we haven’t

What it is that we haven’t known.)
Each line tries to reach then

To write with the goldeneye pen.

For a Thought

There were years
Spent molting,
Shedding goods,

Years spent sent
And ready
For a spade

And soft soil
To dig through
To a thought.

Simple Morning Near the End

Keep the simple words
Easily at hand
And easy to reach

The sun hits the cliffs
To send a gold shock
Through the acres

Of mellow sandstone
In a wave of warmth,
As the mind notes so

You’re here and ready
To get on with day
Whatever day is

Still Alive up There?

There’s a tune being played
On someone’s cheap guitar

Upstairs in the townhouse.
It’s a good tune, thank you,

It’s a good tune to be
Used so simply to say,

Someone is still up here,
Playing at their guitar

The House Cats Fight

You don’t know the name, the name
Of the tree that’s still yellow
Just outside of your window—

It has a little green left
Yet, and it hasn’t started
The sudden drop of all leaves

That seems to characterize
The local change of season.
You’re waiting for a phone call,

You’re not really ready for
Just at the moment the cats
Screech and tumble down the stairs.

All Knit Tightly on the World

Magazine on the table,
Elegant illustration,
For a cover of New York—

For last week’s issues know
Many things about the past,
Many things about the world,

But not what it’s come here for,
This magazine on the world,
Old fashioned thing, this salad

Of mysterious phrases
All fit tightly together.

Beware the Day

Wary the occupied silence
That would normally be louder—

You’re mainly concerned it won’t last,
And then, it’s also ominous,

Prolonged, so not so ominous
As a second ago you thought.

You could live this quiet all day,
But we’re sure the day won’t let you.

Paradoxes of Uncertainty

You should watch now for the moment
The clear idea disappears, and
Sleep steals over the waiting page.

What were you planning to write then,
What were you planting in your long rows?
Was it anything or was it

Reflective parrying of words,
Phrase against phrase, old reflexes,
Sentences that only further

Suggest dementia for being
So quick to the tip of the tongue—
Suggesting that these are the last,

Most reflexive, automatic,
Not a word one has to think for.

To the Bright Light Crossing the Floor

All that seems to interest life
Anymore is light, the patterns
Its shadows make across the floor,
The long way it shifts left to right—
The speed of pattern slowing
Until one wall is a solid brick
Of white painful to be by.

You don’t want to write, aren’t keen
On talking so much these hours.
You’ll stop here and wait an awhile.

When Lost in a Dark Wood, Do What People in a Dark Wood Might

Some traditions had hunting
In the desert light at dawn,

Others—friendship, wine, farewells.
Others—romantic appeals,

Others—mostly prayers and hymns,
Others chose to praise great men—

All the distinct traditions
For what should be poetry,

What should be made and retained—
Phrases beautiful themselves

Reverberating with joy,
Ugly themselves but moonlit,

Depicting heartbreaking blue
Landscapes of twilights, the small,

Troubled face of a child, lost
And aware of being lost.

The Cottonwoods Out of Control

Just keep painting, one
Character’s father
Instructs her—Painting,

All you have total
Say in, he explains.
She doesn’t think so,

Painting, to her mind,
Being as far out
Of her control as

Other, unsanctioned
Activities, but
At least she likes it.

I’m wrapping up here.
You might as well paint.
I might as well write.

The late cottonwoods,
Down in the canyon,
Buttered orange gold

In the old sunlight
And the character
In the novel keeps

Painting, given that
Is what her father
Says gives her control.

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.

Tombstone Fields

Scented candle flickered
On the coffee table.
What was there to create
When every hour or so
You were greeted again,
More waves than pleasantries?

You two loved making jokes
Of inscriptions to carve
On tombstones, to the point
Where you got the idea
Of buying a whole field
For a single person,

Only one tombstone not
A cenotaph parked
Over a patch of dirt,
One over a body,
The rest all the same,
Including the same name,

Date of birth, date of death,
But a different verse
Or epitaph for text,
A different goodbye—
Joke, aphorism, pun,
Fierce expostulation—

A whole graveyard that way
For the storyteller.
See the graves by moonlight,
Anything discovered.
The tidy rows of white
Rectangles how you’d like,

Exploded among all
The names, the passages,
The sorts of things printed
Or carved thousands of times
Over thousands of games.
The simple goal not to say.

Mountains Swoop the Best Ideas

You would like to move stones about
Whatever passes for your thoughts,

An exercise in landscape art,
In learning to let the earth talk—

You think of monumental art
As a massive conversation

With leviathan at the mouth
Of whatever you have to say,

The rocky throat of whatever
Your thoughts need to roar in chorus.

Stones sit in slabs at each cliff’s edge,
And the finish on the concrete

Is partly the worthy polish
Of thoughts grinding against themselves,

As in one of those childrens’ kits
That grind gravel to glossy rocks,

But imagined on grander scales,
So that the broken mountains gleam

As they did years ago, shining,
Artificially smooth ideas.

Peace

Making and living or
Watching and existing?
Most folks, most times, would vote

For the former, except
Some of us, sometimes still,
Most fondly remember

The moments of watching
And remaining as still,
As close to existing

As possible alive,
Watching and existing,
Happily, joyfully

Less than living and making.
Some music is playing.
The shadows move closer

To when you have to go,
And you don’t want to go,
But you will. You will but

Not a moment ahead
Of necessary, not
Any moment too soon.

Lines of Meaning Begging You to Bury Them

There’s an urge to write about the dirt
Or the silhouette of the small tree,
An ornamental variety

Tossing in wintry late-autumn sun.
Every combination of phrases,
Remarkable or wholly cliche,

Feels like a sealed glass container
With a slight crack allowing tendrils
To invade—a box of glass-green thoughts

Grown in an unclear relationship.
You realize that the silhouette
Is matched up to the invasive vines,

That the dirt and the branches remain
The same system, and you want to see
The silhouettes through the moss-green glass

Echoing not only each other
But the phrases each performed as lines
Intertwined with dirt and mystery.

Daily Organizer Sonnet

Disliking what you’ll go through
To get to next, you forget
You’ll get through next to the next,

This list’s alien burden
Of the things that seem to loom,
And they do loom, but you’ll live

Them, live through them, and they’ll be
Gone, or you’ll be. Got through them,
And half the time pleasantly.

The brevity of the hours,
Proliferation of next,
More next to next to do.

The sun that has to go must
Come back as more sun again.

Nice if It Weren’t So Bad

Presumably, it’s unpleasant
For everyone who goes through it,

And admiration for the few
Who seem tranquil all the way through

Reflects on a shared cowardice,
The wish to simply miss the worst.

If anyone’s really at peace,
Maybe it’s possible to float

Into an easeful death, the best,
The noblest, the sweet coward’s death.

The Stare

So you say to yourself, it will all work out,

And you draw the circles fiercely for

The zeros and ohs. And it will; of course,

Until it doesn’t, until it completely fails

And then carries on from there, since

That’s it, isn’t it? The dangerous

And the threatening, you survive for now,

As anyway, that stuff’s all you, all local.

What rocks are about to slide all over you?

You know the others that break loose

Are almost bound to roll over someone,

But there are so many more someones

Than rocks on the loose. So you say

To yourself, it will all work out, and you

Draw circles fiercely for zeros and nose.

Whatever It Is, It Won’t Happen Again

A new recording of John Dowland’s
“In Darkness Let Me Dwell” passes by,
And the playlist shuffles somewhere else.

You’re about to shuffle off yourself—
Not very far, not very far yet,
But with permanence not far behind.

So you wait in the school’s parking lot,
Considering the trivial nearby,
Impermanent darkness, and with it

The permanent no that isn’t dark,
Permanently gone beyond any dark.

Old Leaves of Paper

A staked sapling outside the window leads
A contradictory existence now,
In autumn, its mottled leaves yellowing,

As ancient, more or less, as any leaves,
Dangling and falling from a silver trunk
That has finished only a small fraction

Of its possible life. Seems a lesson
Might be had here—something to do about
The meaning of youth, being young at heart,

Possibly a paradox, a sermon,
The sort of thing the nineteenth-century
Was so good at. Old leaves, good wood, young bark.

Slow Down, It’s Hospice

You’re not racing. You’re barely
Moving, you notice. And still,

You want to move more slowly,
And have even less to do.

Your free thoughts are all about
How your thoughts could be freer.

You’re drifting off and away,
Or would be, soon as you could,

If you didn’t work against
Yourself with your indulging

Of contrary fantasies,
How you need to keep writing,

How your remaining notions
Are better-off in motion.

Boy Reading a Book Long Ago

The birds are inside pouncing range,
Or nearly, on the outside branch
Beside windows that shield and stun.
The cats want badly to join them
From the other side of the glass.
But then the birds fly. The cats cry
Pathetically, hopefully
At the door to the birds of the world.