Zodiacal Dust

Faint, inconsequential,
Barely visible, but
Still there, in existence—

Scattered and numerous,
Not worth the work to count,
But sometimes luminous—

Give us light, spring evenings,
Let us have observers
From Earth’s toy horizon.

Fly by an Empty Highway

Wind, jet, truck—it can be hard
To tell which at a distance,
But the nearby fly’s a fly.

Is any creature besides
You as frantic as a fly,
As distinctively aimless?

We’re not aimless! you protest,
As you dance on the surface
Of Earth coming to a boil.

Don’t take it personally.
The fly serves a fly’s purpose,
As you yours, noticing death.

At the end of everything,
For you or for everyone,
Chances are, there’ll be a fly.

The Blankness in the Dark

Although the notion is appealing, no one
Starts from zero. You cannot start from zero.
Zero lingers, hidden, in all things. That’s why

It had to be invented—surfaced, hauled out
Of the waves like a whale, like a lantern fish
Of perfect blankness, which is also perfect

Darkness. But that zero, that useful, human,
Beautiful zero is an art, a symbol,
A notation that acknowledges absence

Lurks in all things, every balance and exchange.
But that’s not nothing, not absolute zero,
Ex nihilo. The mystery is nothing

Pervades us, calls us, all of us, words and lives,
The lightest elements and supermassive
Black holes out and on toward it, but is not

Ever in anything itself, cannot be.
If there were nothing, then there would be nothing.
There would be nothing if nothing could be.

Then why is it so tempting to try to scrape
And clear away, to reach to the origin,
Some origin, any original blank

And start, again, from there? Artists and prophets
Crave this the most, but everyone knows the urge
To wipe it away, to start over. You can’t.

Socratorial

Old heaps of plowed-up snow
On the side of a road
With no traffic on it,

Melting, sound like footsteps—
Soft, abrupt, crunching sounds—
And the deer lift their heads.

Overhead, a few jets
Deserve no such notice.
So, what is natural?

A City Known for Its Poets

What you would really like is a city
Known for its poetry. Not its poets.

No sizable group of poets ever
Amounted to much as human beings—

And why should they? They’re the usual mix.
If you’re human, you know what that mix is—

Bigoted, kindly, greedy, self-righteous,
Heroic, inattentive, forgiving,

The whole of it. But if not the poets,
The poetry, the good stuff, chill-filtered,

Distilled, and sampled. That’s worth a city
Dreaming of a reputation for it.

The Parasitic God

Bodies didn’t evolve
To hold this mind that blooms
Hydra-headed in them—

Humans evolved to hold
Their social relations,
Group coordinations,

And shared skills in words, sure.
But this phenomenon
Of emergence isn’t

Guaranteed pleasant—
Enough talking bodies
Of social, shifting apes,

And talk becomes something
Like an organism
Of its own between them,

Something small animals
Can hardly understand
That they host, that they are.

And Close with Love the Way You Do

Meaning’s that letter
You wrote to the world,
Pretending the world
Had sent it to you.
It came postage due,

But you ignored that,
Since part of you knew
Who really wrote it.
That was your mistake,
To ignore that blank

In the corner where
The stamps should have been.
Bare manilla glares
At you, reminding
You what should have been.

You’ll never get mail
Back from the world, but
You could have kept up
The pretense better
With a stamped letter.

You’d have had to paint
The stamps on yourself,
But you could have made
Them so gorgeous and
Felt the world loved you.