A Long, Unscheduled Afternoon

Do you ever consider
How much of nearly nothing
A real hermit must have done?

They had so few texts back then,
And many of them had none.
No wonder they kept praying

And chanting and attending
To vegetable gardens.
What else was there but staring

At just how slowly the world
Proceeds with no distractions?
Listen to that wind. Listen.

A Star or a Civilization

Life runs through all its fingers,
Chuckling, leaving them nothing

But bone. Minerals, that is.
Fossil echoes of what lived.

But life has so many hands
And paws, cilia and fins,

All sorts of palpable things
To extrude, wriggle, and ditch.

If life makes contact with you
Never ask it what it is,

Never fall in love with it
Or ask it to stay with you

Forever. Never! Never!
Breathe as little as you can.

Lie still. Lie low, and then wait.
Pretend you’re only a flame.

Try not to lick your fingers.
They’ll burn. Pretend you’re a star,

A pattern of changing thoughts,
A few words, a few numbers,

A civilization built
From bricks piled in rammed-earth walls.

That’s the meaning of The Flood.
Life runs an ocean that crawls.

Inside the All-Swallower Is All Light

Praise Claude Shannon’s flame-throwing trumpet,

The purpose of which remains obscure.

He built it for the information

Carrying capacity of mixed

And perhaps hazardous metaphors,

The trumpet that signals with no noise.

The Seraphim all blow such trumpets

While covering up God in their wings.

Only the most eccentric prophets

Glimpse truth’s heart of eccentricity,

The great, aperiodic crystal

At the core of the final black hole.

Allowed As Long As You Don’t Get Out

And if Earth is a lazaretto
Among the stars, would you wonder, then

At the loneliness and the silence?
Well, humans, where else would you be from?

No, you were all born to this planet.
You’re children of the lazaretto.

But life itself, Earth’s cruel kind of life,
May have been placed for observation

To see how its patterns might turn out.
Four billion years of silence suggest

It’s not going well. The first you hear
From the universe may be the last.

Wandering Cherished Laws of Reality

Just for fun, think, what if
Unitarity did
Not always, everywhere,

Hold. What if the cosmos
Were just determined
To give more than its all,

One-hundred ten percent?
You protest, we wouldn’t
Be here, nothing could work

If that were the case, but
Aren’t you just invoking
One more commonsense law?

How surprising, really,
Would it be to find out
The laws that fence all in

Were local, actually,
Within a largish fence?
It’s all free-range physics,

This world in which you live,
No edge that you can see,
But beyond, it’s hungry.

Ghost Wells

This thin skin of old crust
Is riddled with digging,
Your world of idled wells.

They sag and are noxious
Holes to the underworlds
Holding the resources

People drilled and tunneled
To claw through time to get—
Water, metals, gems, oil—

Any goods from the depths.
All old wells are like this,
Valuable, poisonous,

Cholera-handled pumps
In swarming city squares,
Rustic stone rings in moss,

Abandoned oil derricks.
Anything might come up,
Climb out, invisible,

Faceless life, faceless death.
Any word, any text,
A scratched brick, a road sign,

Carves with an acid drill
Down through layers of years,
Eating into the world

As it ages, until
What’s carved can serve as well
For ghosts to crawl back up.