Far Shore

A dog and a person look like a sail.
A person walking a large white dog
While wearing a light beige jacket,

Seen at a distance, looks like a sail
Seen across the water from the far shore.
The brain is delighted to discover this.

Sail! It sings out to itself within itself,
Then, No! Person walking a dog! Together,
They look like a sail. Brain has nailed it,

Handed it over to us to codify and store.
We’ll be here, waiting, when the brain
Gets lost and leaves us, looking like a sail.

Mesa Climbing October

A steady, soft wishing
Like the ghost of a stream,
Like waterless water,

Gold aspens are quaking,
Hissing, half singing
In continuous breeze.

Any sound that’s almost
What it isn’t, almost
Exactly what’s missing

From itself—these dry leaves
Like rushing water,
The cries of coyotes

In long, wordless complaints,
The poet who’s praying
To nothing for nothing—

Has a secret to keep
Not really a secret,
Since this can’t mean a thing.

Artificial Suffering

Given everything’s change,
How’s anything the same?
What is it to be same?

You know the moon’s leaving.
You’ve known it for some time.
You can be cruel

And believe yourself kind.
You’ve known it for some time.
Knowing is suffering

That helps you use your past
To shape the way your past
Changes. But how is it

Anything changes, when
It must arrive as past,
And some must stay the same?

You worry what you are
About what you should be,
And there you are, the same

Unavoidable change,
The same artificial
Suffering. No birds sing.

Who Can’t Understand It at All

You think about this
A lot. Who loves who.
Your people. Perished,
Punished, abandoned,
Privileged. All that.

Whether you once loved
A celebrity
You would never meet
And wept at the death
Which touched you as news.

Whether you were loved
By someone who was,
You see now, never
Loved by anyone
Much, including you.

Whether what love stands
Is something no one
Ought to put up with.
Whether what love stands
For means anything.

You wonder these things,
While people talk love
And sing love and write
Poems considering
Love and who gets it.

Four-Dimensional Chess

It’s reverse psychology to say
You’re using reverse psychology,
Those convinced it’s all psychology

Have actually argued, recently.
Wouldn’t it be lovely if the cosmos
Was as obsessed with psychology

In your everything’s-too-human sense?
Your creator in your image sits
Out there, brooding on a strategy

To make an indifferent-seeming
Potemkin universe of starlight,
The reverse psychology of which

Will convince ornery, weeping apes
To believe the opposite is true
And this universe is all for you.

Scales Falling Forever from Your Eyes

Sort of funny, you might say
Ironic, that the heavens
Were so long viewed as the sphere
Of stately eternity
Or a tapestry of tales
Of humanish gods and ghosts,
Given how ungodly fierce,

All the physical furies,
Everything raw that happens,
Is all going on out there,
Nothing to do with humans
Doing nothing much down here.
Are any awarenesses
As scale-afflicted out there?

Moon on a Line

What kind of food will you eat
Today? Can you pay your bills,
Your creditors? Did you get
Enough sleep last night? Your world
Wants to know, is asking you,
Is murmuring and seething
With questions for you, but you

Are perfectly well aware
All your answers, short or long,
Curt or windy, answer none
In any way that ends them.
So ignore them, when you can.
The moon hangs from a clothesline
Or appears to, in this view.

What’s Going Through Everyone’s Heads

You might wonder as you’re passed by
Vehicle after vehicle,
Each with at least someone inside.

Information is prediction,
As information reduces
Uncertainty, eliminates

Alternate possibilities,
And as the past is full of it,
And is key to all predictions.

Heads are full of information,
Writhing, active information,
Pasts reducing uncertainty,

Secured against alternatives
With the rigging of predictions,
And yet they’re all so uncertain,

Of that much, you’re certain. Going
Through all those information-soaked,
Past-collecting, past-morphing skulls,

Tsunamis of uncertainty
Reshape the drowned shorelines of thought.
Of course, you remain uncertain

Yourself of all their predictions,
All those other weather systems.
You couldn’t begin to grasp them

Even given access to them.
Like the Stasi, you’d start to sink
Under the waves of others’ lives.

More and more vehicles pass you,
Until the thought occurs to you,
The past cannot contain itself.