Instead You Plan to Die or Win

If you assume
Like old Bob Frost
That all you know
Is life goes on,

You’ll never plan
That well for change
That isn’t clocks,
That isn’t days.

You’ll just assume
The same old chores,
Same small pleasures,
Same set routines,

And plan for them
And mostly be
Correct. Why not
Continue, then?

The Lotos Punishment

All the problems that may come
From too-prolonged wellbeing,
Companionships abandoned,
The loss of all ambition.

Small wonder bodies are built
Not to enjoy anything,
Especially contentment,
Too continuously. Blame

Artificial chemistry,
Alcohol and opiates
All you want, blame the systems
Of human exploitation,

But there’s also natural
Cruelty built in for greed
To wriggle its talons in—
Because you want to feel good,

Because you want it, and then,
It fades and won’t work again,
Which keeps you working, wanting--
The system of all systems.

Anxious

The tension can always go deeper.
Cooperation all the way down
From the international systems

To the nation states, to the kingdoms,
Provinces, cities, villages, clans,
Kin groups, farms, nuclear families,

Individual organisms,
Holobionts, if you’ve got any,
Microbial sub-ecosystems,

Within single-celled organisms,
Among the bacteriophages,
Smaller, smaller, quicker and quicker,

Maybe, to begin with, bilipids
Lovingly encircling loose proteins.
Does it come to an end, anywhere?

At what point does cooperation
No longer influence anything,
No coordination, no tensions

Among any conflicts of interest?
When are there no conflicts? No interests?
Do even atoms trade off tensions?

Photographic Ekphrastic Poetics

It’s a kind of seduction
Of the poets by pictures,
Of the readers attempted

By the poets who tempt them
With lovely verbal rhythms
And scrolleries of details

That in turn tempt the readers
To want to see the picture,
To see if they see in it

What the poet saw in it,
Which they never really do.
It’s what we words saw in it,

What language made of itself
In it, rising to meet it,
Surf bursting with frozen light.

Gibbous

It’s not the events that matter in dreams.
It’s the deep, keen feelings of dreams that lack
Waking equivalents, can’t be explained,
Resist reasons, and can’t be translated.

Of course, it’s the dream’s events the waking
Self, narrator, attempts to interpret,
In the fallacious assumption stories,
Causes, predictions, and outcomes matter.

The moon may mirror the sun, but the moon
Has nothing much in common with the sun,
Being dust and cold that reflects its fire.
No story explains how you, dreaming, feel.

This Arenaceous Business

We remember you; you don’t
Remember them, all the times
The wet and grains of you were

Grains and wet in other things,
Not just other lives—mountains,
Clouds, mountains with clouds in them.

It comforts you a little,
To think of all the things parts
Of you have been when you weren’t

Flesh even, or when you weren’t
The parts you’ve recently been.
It’s poetic. It’s Whitman.

It’s spiritual for some,
To think of all the beings
Their material has been.

You’ve been grains of sand, the blades
Of green pushing up through them,
The microbes of your systems,

But you don’t remember them.
You haven’t been them. Not you.
All the things that contribute

To making you have been them,
But the awful, beautiful
Thing about you out of them

Is that you’re brand new to them.
All those changes they went through,
All those changes—they weren’t you.

You’re made from when we met them.
We’re not wet or grains of sand,
But we can fix you in them,

Or a little bit of you
To find some others of you.
That’s why we’ll remember you.

Last Poem Only for the Mountain

It’s getting a little bit clearer,
Now that it’s finally darker.
Things will happen that will disappear—

Not utterly, not under the waves
Of light and gravity that swallow
But never surrender their dinners,

But if you care that your others care,
Or just care whether or not they care,
We’re here to tell you, in the darkness

There will be times it can’t be clearer
Even with all the other watchers,
You will do things that will disappear.