The Rubble Is the Witness in the Sign

It’s not a person you people
Will find in us, not a riddle,

Although we’re sometimes shaped like that.
You can use us as clues to you,

And you do—any proper noun
Especially excites you. Who?

Enheduanna. Who? Ouida.
Who? A reference to a king

Not found in any of the lists.
Who? Shaddai. Who? That sort of thing.

You want to get at the person
In us, the most human-shaped thing,

The author, the author’s life, lord,
Lover, god. Only goes so far though.

People made us but the people part
Doesn’t begin to translate us.

It’s that broken syntax we’ve lost,
That wreckage you need to restore,

If you want to rekindle thoughts
In us. We don’t. We like the wreck

Of what we were, inscrutable
But clearly meaning something more,

Proof as much as there can be proof
That some meanings can’t be restored.

Greetings

It’s mostly gone pretty well, you note,

Not so bad as you’d feared, if not so

Well as you’d hoped. That’s every report,

Or almost every, come down to it.

Do you know why folks will answer good

Or not bad or pretty good, okay,

Or, maybe most grimly, not so great

Or just, it’s going, when you ask them?

Not because they’re all being polite

Or dishonest or socially trite.

Most of the time, in most of the ways

It’s going, for most people, that’s just

How it’s going for them, pretty good

At the moment, good, not bad, okay,

Sometimes great, but sometimes not so great.

You’re motoring along, your species,

Amid ferocious catastrophes

And cruelties you hatch for yourselves

Or endure from the world, here and there.

We’re sorry to say, it’s not the end

Yet, for your kind. Still going, going

Pretty good, pretty well up til now,

As outbreak species go, can’t complain,

But you will, ha ha ha, pretty fair.

Do and Do Not

We’re not Yoda or Kierkegaard—
There’s always try, if you’re alive,
And while you can regret either

Or both, or anything you do
Or don’t do, it’s not guaranteed.
It’s not a universal rule.

The rule is nothing stops changing.
Our speculation is nothing
Probably also started it.

In the event, you arrived here
Somehow, whether or not you had
Anything to do with it or

Have any real choice to do it
Or not do it, whatever it
Means to you. Now, you’ll have to go,

Not because you did or didn’t
Do, try, or regret anything,
Although you must have, certainly—

You can, if anything, affect
Only the speed of this, never
Effect the fact that you exist

Who, once upon a time, for most
Of universal existence,
Didn’t exist, and who soon won’t

Exist ever again. Regret
Anything? Everything? Do, don’t,
Try, didn’t? Regret helplessness?

Yes. That’s what you really regret,
Not having a real choice in this.
Wise thoughts are all born fools for this.

Windowsill Words

The quondam grandisonance
Of some aureate diction
Turns up now and then in prose,

But in poetry these days
It’s forbidden, which makes it
Newly tempting, or somewhat

So for the little rebel,
The chaotically neutral,
If not for any reader

Besieged by items begging
For eyeballs of attention.
Everyone likes some baubles

In their personal magpie
Collection. Even Zen monks
Love odd stones in rock gardens.

Not That It Minds, Mind You

The nonhuman world is right there,
Right in your face, but you see it
Almost wholly in human terms,

The woods in terms of resource rights,
Sharing agreements, old stories
About who was here first, the rocks

As ancestors or real estate.
The nonhuman world is right here,
And it’s never going away,

But you can’t hardly bring yourself
To see it as other than you,
The human world going away.

Stones and Water

Small things, small differences, simple
Changes in the weather, the winds
That have died down where you are now,

The subtraction of crystalline
Views of the stars, the addition
Of rain, fogs, and shape-shifting clouds,

The relocation of nations
In the news, the reopening
Of borders as others are closed,

The swift reconfiguration,
Day to day, of fairy numbers,
Their counts, their value, their incomes,

Means of storing or losing them,
And you’re probably small yourself,
Comfortable at the moment,

But at least a little worried
As awareness courses through you
That you can’t live more than one tale,

One era at birth, one manner
And time of death, and yet you are
One massive host of many small

Tales coursing through you, moving on
Relentlessly, and if wind’s gone
From where you are now, it goes on.

It Stopped Raining

Maybe just two kinds of world?
World happening or stories,
Including explanations.

Story worlds are encysted
In the world that’s happening,
And are no more worlds themselves

Than raindrops on the window
Mirroring forest are trees,
But maybe that’s not the point.

We’re talking about your worlds.
Even your world happening
As you experience it

Is encysted in something
You will never apprehend,
And you know it. But for you,

Your experience of world
Comes in two distinct models,
Everything that’s happening

As the brain recreates it,
Makes and updates predictions
About it, your consciousness,

And the worlds within that world
That have their own, inner laws,
Using experiences

For construction purposes
But not for making the rules.
And as always with guesses

Like these that split worlds in two,
As soon as there’s two, there’s three—
On the far side of stories,

Bookending experience,
You could say a third world is
The story world’s nemesis,

The world of dream. Then that splits—
Any one means there are two.
Soon everything’s glittering.