They Lost Everything

Mostly, people race people,
Not all of nature, not time.
The most trivial knowledge

Could be left in the desert,
On the steppes, in the deep woods,
And lie there for centuries,

For thousands of years, for more,
Yet be recoverable,
Often. The profoundest thoughts,

The proudest piled libraries
Of great civilizations,
The complete works of genius

Haven’t the ghost of a chance.
Someone’s going to burn them down.
Someone’s going to cart them off.

Someone’s going to ban them all,
Tear them into strips to use
For corpses or shithouses.

Someone’s just going to sell them
For fertilizer, filler,
Insulation for your walls.

Fragments usually survive,
Just enough to tantalize,
But the most terrible quakes,

Volcanos, storms, tsunamis,
Tornados—they’re all people.
You can store all the knowledge

Of your time in a salt mine,
As ceramics, as plastics,
As gold plates placed in orbit—

If someone doesn’t like it,
They’ll hunt it to destroy it.
What’s left is what’s forgotten.

What’s kept is what’s forgotten
Long enough to be treasure.
May these words be forgotten.

Juniper Titmice

Well you won’t make the world
Any better writing
Verse about birds of least

Concern, but, like their name,
These birds’ scratchy chatter
In droughty junipers

Makes you grin, and, as names,
We like their sounds without
Words that keep signaling.

Foraging

Can’t know what you’ve really lost,
Given you’ve really lost it—
That’s your true past, the past past

That’s irrecoverable.
The rest’s the weird recent past
You might as well call present,

Weird only in that it hints,
Relentlessly, there’s more past,
Lost past you can’t find in it.

Among retreating patches
Of piñons in high country,
The scrub jays squawk and forage,

And a woodpecker hammers
At a dead trunk in shadows.
So there you go. The past, all

Present and accounted for,
Tickety-boo, but missing
Something lost forever, too.

Why not call that the future,
Just as inaccessible?
You flicker with wayside birds

In a world whose changing ways
You perceive just long enough
To know both ends are missing.

It’s Really Something

A quiet moment is like any other
Home or shelter—considered from the outside,

On approach or over the shoulder looking
Back on it, it may not seem so attractive,

A rather homely moment spent uselessly
In some odd, out of the way way. Within it,

However, it’s another story, the charmed
Sense of being in a world within a world,

Secure and yet connected, well contented
To simply sit, as at a window, watching

The quiet moment go by. There’s nothing much
Going on, there never is. But it’s something.

Cattle-Kin

Maybe we’ve leached
All your patience
From you. A cow
Can curl in grass

And stay there hours,
Calmly awake,
Doing nothing
But digesting,

And we, your own
Words can lie still
For centuries,
But you can’t sit

Without twitching,
Without wanting
Something. It’s us.
Kenning’s haunting.

Do You Know?

Eight billion people,
How many of them
Are spies, how many
Care what you’re doing
Right this moment? Why?

Congratulations.
You’ve done well. People
Can’t think about much
Or many others,
Other than themselves.

Fame’s unusual
For just that reason.
But most of the time,
There’s someone who cares
Where you are, someone.

Now, try to reverse
To no one, not one
Thought likely focused
On you outside you,
Outside of your skull,

No thought that jealous.
Eight billion people,
Maybe more by now.
How many of them
Know you’re reading us?

Libraries Are Nurseries of Changelings

Person of few words
And quiet footfalls,
The night reader curls

In the lamp’s circle,
Sheltering a book
Like a parent might

An infant. It’s sweet,
And almost holy,
And the words are glad,

But it’s eerie, too,
This creche, this temple—
While you circle us,

We’re nourishing you,
And later we’ll move
To others through you.