Rosy Fingers, Words with Wings

The weak spots of a long work
Include its repetitions
And habitual phrases

It falls back on. Yet those thrive
By their cumulative weight
While finer passages fade.

A Riddle with No Resolution

The first encounter with infinity

Was as an unfamiliar word intoned

On a black-&-white hospital TV.

A solemn male voice recited five terms

Man, woman, birth, death, infinity, while

A hand wrote their symbols on a chalkboard.

The child in the hospital bed knew four

Of the words, if puzzled by their symbols.

The cross of Jesus was more than just death.

It was on all the Bibles and hymnals.

But the last word was completely baffling.

The child scrutinized its symbol closely.

It looked like the number eight on its side.

No adult explained well what the word meant.

On Hearing a Learn’d Physicist Talk on Clocks

As the intervals of similar changes
Become more similar between their changing,
One says that the clock grows more and more precise,

As if it were a tailor, as if it fit
Something or other to a t, so to speak,
When one could say it’s more like thread counts in cloth,

Denser, not more precise—and no, that’s not it,
Either. A fit clock is just more regular,
An internal comparison, as it were.

Slice the moments into pieces and the more
The change contained in every piece, the wave form,
Looks the same, the better the clock you can claim.

But there has to be, must always be, a change,
Not as one needs one, but as there can’t not be.

Peace and Prosperity Obituaries

They’re disheartening. It’s ridiculous,
These long, drawn-out, attenuated lives
With their protracted extinctions. Ninety
Is more common than sixty. Dementia
Seems to be involved in most instances,
The piecemeal ablation of personhood,
Vivisection without anesthetic,

A vague awareness in a molted husk,
Waste product of life’s drive to make more life,
Tragedy without the dramatic fuss,
Meat grinder of peace and prosperity,
As efficient as war only slower,
So much slower—predator less lion,
More python—so slow it’s ridiculous.

Mother Mind

Your greatest grandparents didn’t think,
Likely, waking up in their shelters
And gathering at the hearth to grumble

A little at each other, maybe discuss
The day’s plans or last night’s dreams,
That they were plugging into mother mind,

But it had already started working by then.
Face to face with individual human bodies,
It’s easy to think of them as themselves,

Distinct, their words their own, their habits
And behaviors belonging to those persons,
But no language is the speaker’s alone,

No skills, no ways of doing things, no
Plans for today, descriptions of dreams.
Your greatest grandparents collectively

Already tended a carefully shared fungus
Of mind. Those early patches were small,
But the mycelia threaded and connected,

And now, you may wake up never so alone
In a honeycombed tower, an empty home,
But you plug right back into mother mind.