Postmortem Hyperthymesia

It’s not especially fun
To resurrect your own death.
It’s not like you’re immortal—

Your past happens to include
Picture-perfect memory
Of the exact date you died.

Unsurprisingly, it’s not
An allocentric recall.
It’s mostly body centered.

The exhaustion as you stopped
At the dark overlook, but
Pushed on, a long-haul trucker

With a specific deadline,
Which you felt compelled to meet.
The solitude, the matter

Of fact way your brain went on
With whatever it still could,
Maybe talking to itself,

Maybe only hearing tunes.
And at some point, there you were,
The doom discovered, achieved,

All ready to tell someone
About how your last day went,
No one around to believe.

Little Books

Not just the sacred collections,
The canon, the anthologies,

Complete, selected, this or that,
Not just the tales, not just the poems,

The essays, or the sentences—
Every phrase is a little book,

A biblia, built of linked words.
(We could argue words, too, are books,

But that leads to the temptation
Of just-so etymologies.)

The phrases are the little books
You want, the chunks by which children

Learn to make their way in the world.
You’ll know the first truly human

Communities not by stone tools
Or by hearths. By their containers

You will recognize them as you—
The artificial boundaries,

Reusable interiors,
And carrying capacities.

Phrases are the first containers
Made to cup the wraiths of meanings.

Icositetrahedron

Angels and subtle
Personalities,
Great minds have nothing

On symmetrical
Crystals with dozens
Of gleaming faces.

The pomegranate
Seed of minerals,
Garnet was common

On the ground, upstate
New York, Saranac
Lake country, forty,

Fifty years ago.
Boys on canoe trips
Picked up garnet chips

On portaging trails
Through mosquitoes and
Dark clouds of deer flies.

Almost ugly red
Stones they pretended
Were rubies, filling

Their pockets, telling
Tales of getting rich
From one giant stone,

Their garnets glowed dull,
Flawed, wayside gravel,
Nearly all alike,

Each formed of crystals
So fine-faceted,
No storyteller

Could craft a villain
Or antihero
More complicated.

Counting Comes from How One’s Not

Unity, the oneness of the whole,
Is inherently duplicitous,
Multiplicitous, ambiguous.

Feel the shifting of surrounding day,
The way that night contains it, the way
The light, in turn, nets and surrounds night,

Bearing in mind how slight your senses,
What faint corners of radiation
You’ve been selected to sense at all.

There’s a lot out there. To says it’s one
Is fine, is one thing. Simple, it’s not.
It only connects by how it’s not.

Ties That Don’t Bind

It would be easier for you
To think of each other kindly,
Remember each other fondly,

If you never had to work well
With each other ever again.
The strain of your interactions

Makes it difficult to be kind,
Cheerful, happy to be chatting.
The most underrated virtue

Is the ability to be shallow,
To touch socially so lightly
Your link feels faintly magnetic,

A little click while conversing,
Easily released, quickly
Felt again in proximity,

A gentle attraction. Let go
Of each other without asking
For more than to meet once again.

So Close You’re Nearly One

No part of a pattern is
Wholly identical to
Any other part. Only

The properties alternate,
Alternation being time,
Tick, tock, tick, and symmetry,

The sense of repetition,
That the only slightly new,
The only slightly other

Is the same, returned. It’s not,
But it’s close. This shares many
Or most of the properties

Of that. But feel properties
Themselves, the silky fabric
Of their sameness, and it’s rough,

Nonidentical to touch.
What is it then in sequence
That comes back as pleasure, love?

Today’s Hazards Are Tomorrow’s Turns of Phrase

The wolves in shepherd’s clothing
Are the ones should worry you
Lambs. Sadly, you all grow up

To play at being shepherds,
And then some of you transform
Into wolves with shepherds’ crooks,

And where is this foolishness
Going, really, anyway?
Can’t you see all metaphors

Become cautionary tales,
And all proverbs hold nonsense
In their core comparisons?

There is no comparison
Won’t break down on inspection,
No bond between any phrase

And the world outside of words,
And this goes for numbers, too,
The beautiful equations

That you follow willingly,
Hopefully, content to graze
Wherever culture leads you.