Host Hungry

Who can decode
Who first? The primes
Are being chased
By humans armed

With fast machines.
Something in them,
We suspect, may
Be chasing back.

Everyone needs
Some resources,
Even half-lives
Like viruses,

Red blood cells, and,
Well, poems ourselves.
Numbers shelter.
You’re prime shelter.

Park the Wanton Mote of Dust

One notion of half heaven
Would be a huge and empty
Room, sunlight strolling through it,

Where one could be a dust mote
Observing other dust motes,
Not too damn many of them,

Just enough to demonstrate
How sunny it is in here,
How bright and empty, how still

And how vast—that a dust mote
Of a ghost, a word, a soul,
A doubtful soul, could idly

And visibly twirl for hours,
Glinting like suspended gold,
Never once hitting the floor.

Around the End

It’s never forever, whether

You want it or whether you dread

More than anything that it might

Be. It’s too long, or it’s too short,

And you can’t bear it, and you can’t

Bear the thought that it will ever

End, but it will, either before

You or after you or with you.

Certain small pieces of writing,

Whoever wrote them, however

You first encountered them—online,

In an overstuffed used bookstore

Stinking of mold and sweaty dust

In a small town in Nevada,

In the library you haunted

As an unacceptable child—

Stay with you. You get the feeling

They could cling to you forever—

I can’t believe this terrible

Loss of my thinking—Assadi

Quotes her beautiful grandmother

Aware of coming dementia,

Her beautiful, sad grandmother

Struggling, to ambiate the pain.

It’s like a letter from the front,

The final signal returning

From the event horizon—this,

This is what it looks like, this view

Of the self as it vanishes—

And then it vanishes. Your mind

Hovers, hangs on to that last glimpse

Vouchsafed you by one you never

Did and will never know. That’s true.

Never. Forever, no. Never.

To Settle Back Down

Every morning, before sun
Crests the canyons, wind rushes
Down their fingers, and dead leaves

Skirr the ground around like birds
With injured wings, like small mice
Frantic to escape something

From which they find no way out.
To your ears, it’s a weird sound,
That horizontal scraping

Of brittle leaves over stones—
Your mind, always misleading
You, as terror misleads mice.

It’s not a trap, which is why
These walls aren’t the edge of it,
Aren’t blocking the wind’s way out.

Loose Lenses

Narrow your vision,
Miss constellations.
Savor the whole sky,
Lose information.

There’s no wholism
That trumps reduction,
And no reduction
Truer than the whole.

Instead, there’s no whole
You can get hold of
Isn’t reductive,
Cutting out richness,

And no microscope
So focusable
You’ve reduced the world
To final atom.

Atoms always fall
Apart, and stories
Meant to show the whole
Murder to compress.

Forgive a little
Restlessness in your
Own lensed perspectives.
The fixed miss the mess.

Infinite Curves

One of the reasons
Prediction is so
Difficult is down
To how few events
Predict other ones—

The world is one sea,
One vast field of fields
Of waves, but the waves
Only rarely cross
And rarely effect

One the other ones.
It’s not connected
By cause and effect
As much as by slosh
And coincidence.

The waves in your head
May think hard on things
And find some patterns,
But they dissipate
And prove spurious.

Predictions do work
Enough to be worth
Pure concentration,
But this world of waves
Curls infinite curves.

The Winter Hasn’t Been Cold, Exactly

All the quaking
And trembling things
That surround you
Or that flutter

Inside of you,
Inside your thoughts,
Inside your chest,
That never rest,

Whatever hints,
This won’t be long,
We can’t hold on—
Marcescent leaves,

Shaking heartbeats,
Corner quivers,
Shadowed flickers—
That’s what shivers.