Wind Blowing at the Sun

All day like this, morning east,
Swiveling through south at noon,
Blowing west by afternoon.

Nothing much. Coincidence.
But it feels slightly spiteful
To someone standing in it,

Imagining the wind’s grudge
At the god that made its world—
Or maybe the atmosphere

Wants to pretend it’s in charge,
That it blows the sun around.
No one but human beings

Would pretend to such a thing.
No one but human beings
Would imagine nonhuman

Things behaving as humans,
But you can’t stop a human
From imagining the wind

Has attitude, intentions,
And pretensions, anymore
Than you can stop pretending.

Emergence of Semantia

Once thought, were it possible
To rhyme and chime in meanings
Only, meanings directly,

Maybe poetry would be
Translatable. Well, too bad.
Now you know, meanings also

Can’t be matched or mapped, language
To language, without slippage,
Falsification, and myth,

Nor can myth to myth be mapped.
It’s not just rhyme. Everything
Is what’s lost in translation,

For the sake of a new thing,
Some strange new thing. Oh, cheer up,
Self-loving bacterium.

Translation is sexual
Reproduction for ideas,
Fresh routes of evolution.

New Findings from Mindbeasts

Iridescent wasps
That parasitize
Broods of gall wasps that
Parasitize trees
Are not one species,

As their appearance
Led you to believe,
But a score of them
Or more, compacted
In one bright package

Using similar
Strategies to get
At varieties
Of similar hosts.
Seems generalists

May be chimeras
Of specialists,
The take-home message
Of which is to be
Quickly suspicious

Of generalists.
This, from the species
Of generalists
Par excellence. You,
Mindbeast chimeras.

Continuity

An addiction to the continuous
Underlies all the various habits
Of doing the same thing over again—

Can’t be satisfied with a breath without
Wanting to take the next breath right away,
Can’t savor a day without another

Immediately following the first,
And then another. It’s the way life is,
Just a junky for continuity.

If you see someone knocking back colas,
Chainsmoking, doomscrolling, carrying on,
Suck in your next breath and remember this.

The Microuniverse

What an eerie thing for mind,
So far, to only sense self
In a microuniverse

Of human organism,
A local sack of breathing,
Aching, hungry, excreting,

Pleasure-craving, mortal flesh,
Given mind isn’t mortal,
Isn’t an organism,

Isn’t confined to any
One animal, is a mesh
Of minds in conversation,

The sum of interactions
Between them, going on now
For millenniums, longer

Than enough generations
That the bodies have evolved
To better host mind meanwhile.

Yet whenever it comes to,
In daylight or in small hours,
The mind discovers itself

As an awareness confined
To a small, burbling cosmos
Of one animal, grumbling.

The Call Back

Comics talk about it a lot,
The joke late in the show that plays
On the audience recalling
A bit from back earlier.

People laugh because it’s clever,
But also because they’re clever,
It makes them feel clever, linking
The jokes, memory as pleasure.

Every morning that isn’t yet,
The brain, which is animal, swims
Up from the dark, shakes off its sleep
And reconstructs its sense of self.

What a clever comedian,
Each new day, waking, the call back
To a sly set of references.
You laugh at your resonances.

It Is

It’s the things. It’s the things. It’s the things

In their thingness, those bumps in the waves

That aren’t humans, aren’t drifting people

Caught in human cycles of abuse

And forgiveness, love and groupishness,

The long dance of power relations

Through intimacies of families,

Small brutalities of coworkers,

The surging conflicts of nation states.

It’s the things. Not the words, just the things.

In the middle of interacting

With people via language, voices,

Letters, screens, half-folded magazines,

Your head so full with your people things,

Like right now, meeting these human words,

You might glance at a combination

Of mute, lifeless, guiltless artifacts

Or plain gravel and think, It’s the things.