Fire Lizards and Ice Worms

Algerian sand racers
Cleanse themselves of parasites
If wildfires are hot enough.

Glacier ice worms, inch-long, black,
Emerge fat in blinding white
Snowy alpine summer light

After dark-enough winters,
Meters deep in moving ice.
No one knows how they grew fat,

How or when they reproduced,
Exactly what they lived on,
How they evolved for the ice.

Burn certain species away.
Scour mountainsides of the bones
Of a million years of rime,

Something will find arrangements
Suitable, compossible,
Given rhythmic-enough time.

The cosmos rings its changes,
Missing nothing possible,
And life’s whatever lives try.

What Meaning’s Like

That this is not this
But is like this and
Is also like that—

Is like this a lot,
That a bit, or that
A lot, this a bit.

You do understand
No one understands
Why you can’t agree

On what exactly
To understand means?
The inexact map

Is the most useful
Map, is every map,
Since to understand

Means to see how much,
More or less, this is
And is not like that.

Anabler

Admit it. You’ve learned little
From the people who taught you

Face to face. Information
Has been your ocean, phrases,

Sometimes numbers, the voices
Half sounded-out in your skull,

Free diver, pearl forager,
Swimmer of deeper shallows

If not the abyssal cliffs.
Texts of every invention

Spilled our waves and you swam them,
Body-surfed and dove right in.

Sometimes you sank out of sight
To emerge dripping salt words,

Mer creature or wer creature,
Compound of beast and language,

Half lost in watery thoughts,
Half formed of the thoughts ourselves,

Anabler, neither helpless
Nor aiding anyone else.

Or With Virtue, As You Please

Earth’s just the largest rock

We know of for sure, say

Astronomers. Giant

Gas planets may have cores,

But we’re not certain they’re

Rocky. Other systems

Detected as wobbly

Variations of light

May hold bigger rocks, too,

And of course, we know there

Are lots of smaller rocks,

Including Earth’s own moon.

But Earth’s the biggest one,

So far. So there. Now what?

Prose poet Baudelaire,

Who drank too much, declared,

One should get and stay drunk,

Should always remain drunk,

If one wanted to slip

Time’s backbreaking burden,

Time’s crushing slavery,

But he hedged this a bit

By suggesting different

Kinds of drunks one could be—

With wine, with poetry,

Or with virtue. Your call,

He added, as if choice

Could ever be involved

For the drunken poet

Who wrote Les Fleurs du Mal.

But let’s consider it—

Certainly there are those

Who insist that virtue

Can provide the escape

Baudelaire claimed requires

Resolute drunkenness,

And, just as certainly,

The virtue-besotted

Sometimes seem unhappy,

Even self-destructive

As ordinary drunks,

Not to say sad poets.

But Earth’s the largest rock

We know of in our night,

And the virtuholics

We know of all remain

Dependent on this one

Rock, martyred to one sun.

Put those two together—

Virtue on a bender,

And a dense chunk of rock

Spinning virtue tethered.

Something snaps. Sobers up.

Where is this? How’d we? What?

Drama of the Arts We Aren’t

We have no room in our rooms
For the wet complexities
Of your personalities,

All your tinted characters.
We are grids. We work in lines,
Black lines, economical

In our worst profligacy.
We’re like Antara’s drawing,
Incapable of being

Any art we aren’t. You dream
Us, literally dream us
Some nights, wake to write us down.