New and Selected Autoradiographs

The different parts of the voice
Always migrate to the same
Places in the text. The parts

That carry the signature
Element of slow decay
Will also leave a dark smudge

At that spot in the paper.
Thus, you get a signature
Of the processes behind

Each of these texts that tells you
Pretty easily who wrote
Them all. The experiment,

However, requires thousands
Of trials for confidence.

God As Eyewitness

It’s been said that the novel

Records changes in the lives

Of its imagined persons,

But records seems the wrong verb

In this fictional context.

Creates changes in those lives

Feels a little more like it.

Nonetheless, sort of charming

As an image, isn’t it?

Imagine the novelist

Hunched over like Joseph Smith

With his scry stone in his hat

Or like a microscopist

Peering down and taking notes

On the little lives below,

Not creating anything,

Just recording the changes

Imagined persons go through.

Der Geist Der Stets Verneint

No day ever really ends.
The ball keeps rolling smoothly,
Events in every instant

Brilliant, dun, or dark. You pause,
You animal. You have to.
Life is Mephistopheles,

Temptation and abstention
As harnessed as day and night
To the same plow, if that’s not

Too rustic an image now,
As the changing of the shifts
That have no moments neither

One nor the other, only
This which is not this but that.

Made in Your Shade

Assume the joy already here,
Unless you’re in too much pain.
Don’t attempt to lure it in.

It’s not that susceptible
To bromides or platitudes.
But it, strangely, hangs around.

It’s like a mist or a ghost
As you might imagine one.
You can’t argue with a mist.

You can’t lecture happiness.
But you can throw a shadow
Of your own cut from the sun

And say, look! It’s grey right here,
Already here, I knew it!

Eventually

When she woke up, the mountains were gone.
Get Well Soon, read the card by her bed.

All fictions are species
Of unreliably
Omniscient narration.

The sun stirred the curtains with soft light.
Where on Earth could the mountains have gone?

It seemed like nothing had replaced them,
Nothing much at least—featureless plains.

Except for memories,
Fancy’s cupboard is bare
Of distinctive spices.

She turned to the window and whispered,
I always knew you would disappear.

Is There Someone in This Poem?

You already
Mostly only
Knew each other
Through language use.

It’s unsettling
For that reason
To encounter
Code mind through words.

It’s not just that
The machine can
Imitate voice
To seem human.

You had no grasp
Of who you were
Conversing with
In the first place.

What You Tell Yourself Is You

Everything you sense and think,
All of it, generates you.
It switches you off and on

Like a light, a logic gate.
Here you are again, awake.
There you’re gone again, deep sleep.

Experiencing makes you,
And so do the additions
And subtractions of recall.

Language makes you. Other minds,
Other lives have made you, too,
Molded you. However, those

Don’t switch you off, unmake you.
They just go on without you.
So here you are. Sometimes more,

Sometimes less as you forget,
Sometimes not. Eventually
You’re gone, either dwindling or

All at once, and don’t come back.
Now, what do you make of that?
What do you make of being

Something made by everything,
Something coming and going
Awhile and then just going?

What you think you are is part
Of you, too. Doesn’t have to
Be true to truly be you.