Quarry

It’s sealed up, now,
With spice and salt.
You can’t get it,

Wouldn’t want it,
And anyway,
You’d break the vault.

How many tombs
Turn cenotaph
Outside horror

Stories? Leave it,
Steeped in tannins.
Let the marble

Crumble. It’s done.
It’s a fossil.
Still edible.

A Word with You

Once you’re gone long enough
You can be young again.
You can be any age

You ever were or words
You arranged ever were,
And that’s the age they’ll be

To someone reading them,
And not the least bit strange,
The way it would be now,

Elderly as you are,
To encounter your words
Composed when you were young.

For now, what you’ve written
Is still yours, still belongs
To you, to who you are,

And who you are is old,
And young words are old clothes,
The gown, the uniform

That hang strangely on you,
If they fit you at all.
For now, since they’re still yours,

They don’t seem made for you,
Your younger lines—since they’re
Yours, they’re not yours at all.

Once you’re long gone, you’ll be
Another word, at most,
And you’ll fit into them.

That Pill That Is

Every pill you take you think,
Oh well, too late now. Too late
Not to take that pill, that is.

Not That You Mind

Like a mountain in a pond,
The mind confined in the bones
Of one sleepy, minor skull

Must consist of reflections
Or of nothing much at all,
Given it’s impossible

To fit mountains into ponds.
If the hours are still enough,
The reflections can pretend

To shape a single image,
As if there were one mountain
And it rose behind the eye,

The genuine property
Of the pond. The slightest breeze
Of active thought, however,

Reveals the many mountains,
Shapes varied and distorted,
Neither a peak nor pond.

Disinteresting

The nicer we are to us,

The worse we are to others—

If that’s a zero-sum game,

And it’s looking like it is,

It might be the most tragic.

Ratcheting human kindness

Would always amp violence

And cruelty at the borders

Between every us and them.

The mind recoils. Contrary

Anecdotes spring to defense.

And, besides, that would imply

The flip side, that cruelty—

Deliberate cruelty—

Must bring people together,

Bond torturers like brothers,

And surely that can’t be true.

The commandants of death camps

May tend to be as banal

In their evil as Arendt

Argued, but banal isn’t

Anywhere near angelic.

Still, the well-documented

Tendency of shared trauma

To bind frayed groups together

Suggests that, collectively,

The trend is to harmony

When there’s a clear enemy,

And how often have you read

Quotations about the love

And strong sense of shared purpose

People felt among vast groups

Of unrelated strangers—

Whole cities, nations, empires—

So long as all were members

And their agglomeration,

However abstractly carved,

Was threatened by entities

Imaginable as Them?

What if the best we could do

To ameliorate grief

And the unbroken screaming

Of great civilizations

Would be to annihilate

Fellow feeling? A species

Of people indifferent

To people would dissolve groups

Swiftly, but would that be worse?

No one would belong or care

To belong or care to know

Who belonged, what borders were.

Doodle Cosmos

Complex spirals, imperfect circles,
And long stringy, webby extensions—
Those are the patterns the universe

Appears to excel in. What is that
To do with humanity? you ask,
Doing your best to get on with things,

Wondering what to do with your life,
If you’re still young enough to wonder,
As if life were a storage unit

Of indeterminate dimensions
And contents that you’d inherited
And might be able to profit by—

Or just fed up with all the effort
Of whatever immortality
Project has suckered you—doing well,

Doing good, raising kids, making art,
Making heavenly reservations,
Making the world a kindlier place,

Making the world your private fiefdom,
Making yourself its most famous face.
What are spiral galaxies to you?

Nothing much. Maybe a little more
Than you are to them. You catch yourself
Doodling in the meeting, the lecture.

You hike past sandstone cliffs of rock art
Centuries or millenniums old,
You decorate your hands with henna.