Meaning Exactly None of This

You can’t give them your attention,
Can’t give anyone attention,
Can’t give anything attention,

Not even the addictive games,
Shows, news, sports, porn, revolution—
That’s how you broke everyone’s hearts,

Or wallets, or grand ambitions—
By permanently withdrawing
Your last measure of attention.

Attention was your one good trick.
Even when labor fell useless.
There was some worth in attention,

But now you’ve gone and taken it,
Meaning you’ll make no more magic.

Fool at the Barbed-Wire Fence

Afforestation never
Ends, and won’t until no one
Controls the land—not the Crown,

Not the Party, not the rich
Who compete to collect it,
Not occupying armies.

That’s a lot of not. Not hard
To see why you might accuse
Quietists of collusion,

Of giving up, giving in,
Doing nothing much even
As the most powerful win.

You might want to contemplate
What it would take to beat them.

Whispering

Someone mints,
Coins, invents
A new word.

In context
It works. Eyes
Alight, ears

Perk up, and
Poets sniff
The breezes.

The new word
Will show soon
In phrases

Using it
However
Poets feel

It will seem
The coolest—
A fractal

For instance,
A fractal
Susurrus.

All Only Grew from Nothing, Given There’s Nothing to Use Up

Briskly sweeping conclusions
Into tidy heaps the wind
Scatters all around again,

Nothing’s left us—it’s all fresh
Creation piling up fast.
Now was something happened once

And again to the past, but
There was never anything
Left to make mess from the start—

Meanwhile, everything’s sweeping
Dusty stuff under the rug’s
Infinite patterns and parts.

Don’t ask what’s left to expend.
Ask how much more you can add.
Don’t want anymore? Too bad.

To Repair Ruptures in the Trail

Ants and humans assiduously
Clear away extraneous debris.
Humans like to observe ants,

From childhood, in any land.
They find ants fascinating.
They try to figure them out.

They make up many stories.
They take many measurements.
Individually, most don’t

Learn that much about ants, but
Collectively, humans know
A lot of things about them,

How they forage using scents,
How they build their colonies,
How they evolve strategies.

Ants seem uninterested
In humans, altogether,
While making good use of them

As sources of resources.
Will there ever be an ant
As adapted to humans

As head lice are, or fungi?
Or will the ants stay siloed
Within their social ant worlds,

Parallel to humans, less
Nuisances than termites, less
Useful than the honeybees?

A child on the trail pauses
To scrutinize lines of ants
Intent on maintaining links.

A Plain Watch

An unremarkable tree
Tied to a stake against wind
Bends in the wind as you watch.

Nothing much threatens it now,
So you don’t expect your watch
Will catch any strange event.

The tree’s been growing there years,
And its priors would suggest
It could last ten, twelve decades.

You can watch, but you won’t be
The measure of this tree. Young,
You knew one line of a poem

Suggesting trees were lovely,
Lovelier than poems, at least.

An Outburst of Birdsong at Dawn

It seems to be getting precarious
And scarier and scarier, and yet
We’re still here, and when we’re gone

You’ll still be here and you’ll still be here,
So maybe it’s only scarier from the inside
Of a body, any body, which will dissolve

Slowly and painfully or violently
And painfully, or just sit in its own
Disaster of apparently bad choices

Until we have to go and you have to go
And someone else has to carry on
To continue all these scary goings on.