After the Intricate Grudge Matches Flare

Only where the land’s burnt over

As upstate New York following

A decade of tent revivals

Or as London after the Blitz

Will you get rosebay willowherb,

Bombweed, fireweed in abundance.

Get it? You have to wreck the land,

Burn things to the ground to get it.

A fairly rare medicinal

In Britain until the railroads

Started ripping up countryside,

Fireweed bloomed with geology,

Both granted sudden exposures.

An indigenous invasive

Has its traditional uses

As salve, supplement, soothing tea.

There are other seeds lie dormant

Longer, but there are few quicker

Colonizers. If Jean Thompson’s

Narrator’s right about poets

Hoping to blossom like fireweed,

A hundred years or more from now,

Maybe you ought to keep in mind

How much destruction that requires.

Day Planners

It’s a terrible thing to need
To coordinate with others.
It creates your mythic future,

Your wraith-filled lands of scheduling.
When there’s no one you have to meet,
No timetable, schedule, or date,

No last chance to say your goodbyes,
To set out the trash, catch the flight,
Cash in your rewards, take the test,

Meet your contact with the package,
Then there’s really nothing to dread.
Of course, it would be inhuman

Not to form a hunting party,
To agree to meet at daybreak,
To keep an eye on patterned skies.

It’s terrible to be human
Hellbent on coordinating,
To have to hurry up to wait.

A Lull in the Endless Fighting Between Signifying Rituals and Insignificant Patterns

There’s a pause that birds observe
In the Kootenai mountains,
Just before a summer dawn.

They’ve let rip first with loud bursts
Just past first light, and they’ll sing,
Loudly, most of the morning,

But there’s an odd pause that seems
Coordinated across
Singing species before dawn,

A lull with no obvious
Explanation, a swift hush.
The early twilight goes on

Growing the light, with the birds,
Who had started out singing
And will resume singing soon,

All, presumably, alert
In their moment of silence.
Maybe the birds are grieving.

Mother’s Yearbook

Information, energy, and matter,
Forever young in one another’s arms,
Generate likenesses, which are patterns,
Quiet likenesses, with various charms,

None of them proof against the departures
That are the specialties of likenesses.
Filigree light and lighter, dark darker.
Quiet’s kin—but not quite what silence is.

Your Names Have to Change

By drift, by fiat, or request—
We’re swapped out, rotated, ruled out
By revolution or conquest—

Whole chunks of discourse, reference,
Historical names, toponyms,
Sets of pronouns, fresh acronyms.

We change internally, as well.
Use wears our edges, turns our guts.
Vowels mutate. Contractions shift.

What sounded most colloquial
To poets in centuries past
Is what sounds most archaic now.

We’re fought over and torn apart,
Banned, abandoned, and forgotten.
Names change like you wouldn’t believe

To litter language with phrasal
Bones. No lives, not even the leaves,
Have made so many skeletons.

Headstone

Truth can have its hauntings, too.
All truths, like all people, die,
But wraiths can haunt the cupboards

Of a perfectly boring,
Ordinary truth. That’s why
Folks never tire of noting

How chemistry descended
From alchemy—while looking
Around, as if alchemy

Might suddenly shake tables
Of elements. Predictions
Of all kinds have ancestors

In their methods, sortilege
Revenants in scatter plots.
Truth has its cemeteries.

They may hold mostly harmless
Bones and earthworms, but young truths
Whistle, passing in the gloom.

Lakeshore Near Sunset

There’s one person.
From a distance,
Looks familiar.
Bony woman,

Leathery skin,
Long limbs, short white
Hair, wading now
Into the waves.

You knew her once.
Go say hello.
She’s lost some teeth.
She smiles at you

And remembers
Your daughter’s name.
You should swim out
Deeper, she says.