Being Where You Sleep

Don’t you think it’s eerie
That most of you arrived
From beyond the body,

Transmitted by bodies,
Libraries, and machines
Manipulating waves,

Settling into a brain
In drifts of sediments,
Words, spores, and parasites,

Shaped by shifting contexts
Many generations
Deep, millenniums deep,

Yet, despite your diffuse
Parade of origins,
You’re tied to one body

So long as you’re a mind?
Your thoughts head everywhere,
But you live locked in there.

Pinned Down by Candelabra

Evenly spaced as ornaments,
Small saffron birds, no more than wings

Remaining of leaves on each tree
In the orchard outside of town,

Sparse crowns of wings, dark candle flames,
Inexplicable arguments

For a world of orderliness,
Of Plato’s hidden ideal forms

Lurking underneath the nonsense
Of what really is as it was

Without further explanations,
Accidents, thought experiments,

The papery gold cut the clouds
From the ground’s impaled perspective.

On Losing the Plot

Software estimating relatedness
Of extant genetic lineages
Can also be used to extrapolate
How many lineages have been lost,

And the same strategies can be deployed
For, say, medieval romances, to tell,
By surveys of surviving manuscripts,
How much of that tradition has been lost.

When such results are published, some lament,
The way one would lament extinct species
Or dead languages, all of those wonders
Gone, those stories now never to be told,

But, although particulars of telling,
Unique alleles of tales, really are gone,
Are you sure any story, any plot
From the suite of highly conserved designs,

Has ever left the human atmosphere?
Perhaps the best way to guess how much goes
Is to monitor rates of creation.
No new plots under the sun, then none gone.

Continuous Integument

If poetry can be what’s left
After the story has been lost,
It begs the question—does story

Change the world to make poetry
Possible, or was poetry
There prior to story as well?

Think of the hours you used to spend
Eating lunches alone, outdoors
At the Irrigated Cafe,

Reading stories beside your plate
Before turning to compose poems—
Did the tales enable the verse?

Were stories more stillsuits or cauls?
Neither. They’re never lost at all.

This Won’t Take Long

It scars you for life,
But the actual
Cutting ends pretty

Quickly. That’s the way
With the past—it cuts.
It doesn’t take long.

The major events—
Sudden falls, gun shots,
Great supernovas—

Occur at a speed
Unfathomable
To the dawdling crawl

Of the minor days.
Big past happens fast,
But for the most part

You bear with their facts,
And your days go back
To slowly aging.