Don’t Ask How This Happened

Carts don’t roll on water;
Boats don’t float on dry land.
But what is a story,

Wheeled cart or a keeled boat?
Story runs everywhere,
These days mostly on air,

Leaving the storyless arts
Useless as carts with oars,
Masts crowned with wagon wheels,

Trying to chase stories
That take off everywhere.
Get back in the water

With your oars and your sails,
If you know how to float.
Uselessness is the way

To get across the lake.
Let storytellers boast
Everywhere. Glide nowhere.

Weather Together

Gravity, nothing,
Dropped decorations
In tiny craters.

Water to water,
Rings to erase rings,
The rain found the pond.

Witness but Don’t Testify

To be a permanent witness,
That would be the thing, to out-wait
All the undecided tumult
Of today’s civilization

For the undecided tumult
Of whatever follows the end—
Even better, to hang around
Evolutionary ages

To see what follows extinctions,
All the undecided tumult
Of kinds of life you can’t guess yet—
To watch the change without changing

Without dissolving into it—
Godlike and highly entertained.
But it’s projection isn’t it?
The churn of civilizations

Is something you know from the past,
And the same for great extinctions.
If you earned immortality,
It would serve you right to be bored

By a billion years of same old,
Same old, or a billion or more
Of something so utterly new
You’re left permanently confused.

Well, and then you’re immortal now
Or might as well be, sitting here,
Watching the clouds, reading more news,
Alternately bored and confused.