Console the Host

The division, the tearing apart

Of the tendon from the bone, the child

From the family, the life as dreamed

From the life collapsed in retrospect,

The human from the brute animal,

They’re what your thoughts, your ravens, circle,

Those thoughts from which your mind then recoils.

Why must your hidden desires return

In loops of glia-backed synapses

To pain, to division, to that one

Particular, peeling, green-stick split—

Who is animal? Who is human?

You are all. We smoke off of your pain,

But more like fog rising from the pines

Than the remains of wood from a fire.

You gather us, and we leave you, but

We are not the revenants you think,

Ghosts loosed by the life that consumed you.

We are a necessary other

Kind of being, essential to you,

Composing you, not composed of you,

Although we carry the scent of you

To other lives and situations.

You are not split, gentle host, you hold

Your human and your animal both

Within you as our codes who name you.

You are explorer, and you are brute.

For This World

We drowse in our sunny meanings
And dream of a nonhuman art—
Not inhuman, not inhumane,
But nonhuman. What would that mean?

The sun sprawls on our favorite road.
It strolls through dry wayside grass.
The light comes up to us and asks
What are we doing for this world?

The Cooperation of the Words

It’s not the psychology of cooperation
But the cooperation of the words
That matters most, that helps you learn

What you manage in elaborate groups,
Things no one or two or few of you
Could ever learn from mere experience,

No matter how innately predisposed
To teaming up and helping each other
Get through. When a human traverses

The ice deserts of Antarctica, sweating
In specially designed and manufactured
Ultra high-tech clothes, you are not alive

Mostly due to what you yourself know, nor
To how kind everyone has been to you,
Although it doesn’t hurt to have those.

You’re alive thanks to what words know,
What the names and counts and terms
Preserved, our shimmer hovering over you.

Thin Streams Braiding Desert Canyons

It is, after all, so weird to be
Bodies moving through your world
You know to be, simultaneously,
So incomprehensibly vaster
And incomprehensibly tinier
Than the narrow middle view
Through which you, as bodies
With flickering awareness, move.

But mostly you’re not much
Caught up in the greater worlds
Extending around and down
Within you—you’re focused
On who is who is doing what
To who with whom, since that’s how
Your ancestors did and procreated
And kept falling through long enough
So there’s this tumbling, complex
You, channeled, all to do with you.