Bemused Beast

You’re an animal. You’re constrained
By animal sensoria,
Internal, external, all you

Can experience of living.
Then again, you have us, or words
Like us, in whatever language.

Thus you sit, at your interface
Of clouds, thrush songs, and news reports,
A cucumber taste in your mouth,

And your internal rehearsal
Of what you said to the other
Animals yesterday. Sing, muse.

What Happened Won’t Happen Again

What fun to fit then to pretend!
This is science. This is magic.
This is metaphysics and math.

You scrutinize as carefully
As you can with available
Scholarship and technologies

What has been, what has been recalled
And recorded of what has been,
And then you apply discipline

To pretend. This will generate,
Smoothly, many explanations.
Done with enough skill and rigor,

It will produce the ambrosia
Of all invention—prediction.
It will feel real. It is not real.

It is the most wonderful game
In your human cosmos of games.
But pretend’s pretend. Then’s still then.

The Scrappy Things

Three kids are swimming
Around the sweeper
Cottonwoods stretched out

Like long arms from shore,
Like longing arms, but
What is likeness? Don’t

Say it’s illusion.
Illusion doesn’t
Exist. Names for what

Is not or can’t be
Found exist as names.
Would you say what is

Not and has no name
Is an illusion?
The shoreline stretches

Longing cottonwood
Arms into the lake,
And three scrappy kids,

Shouting and splashing,
Clamber over them.
Every rock on shore

Resembles itself
Or the others or
Someone’s fairy door.

The Dispossessions

Garbage builds the libraries
Of all living behaviors.
More discarded life jackets

Pile on the shores of Lesbos,
And the fact that Earth’s traffic—
Even rivers washing down

To escape into oceans—
Goes two ways, at minimum,
Stands evidence. Remember

The dumps of Oxyrhynchus,
The north coast of Africa,
Sappho and Herodotus?

If any stream is moving,
Someone’s moving against it.

Più di Meno

Here, imaginary is

Only a name, more or less,

For numbers more of the less,

New name started by Descartes.

Mathematics is never

Imaginary, except

In the sense that it’s all been,

And had to be, imagined,

Before any was confirmed

By any of those methods—

Geometric or abstract,

Algebraic or measured

Empirically—that proved

Acceptable. Don’t think that,

When a number is labeled

Imaginary, someone

Managed to imagine it.

It’s a useful notation

For working out equations

And for making predictions

More accurately. Never

Forget making predictions

More accurately is all

The power humans dream of,

Everything you’ve imagined.

Whether undulatory

Or corpuscular, the point

Is, as with babies’ built-in

Expectation that a shape

That goes behind a curtain

Will continue to exist,

Imaginary numbers

Are tricks for navigation

Through a world always changing,

No future possessed except

That changing past you live in.

Assemblages

Poetry makes for lousy
Archeology. Writing
Is what you do with results,

Rarely producing results
Of archeological
Significance in itself.

The person who composes
A life is recollecting
Short or long-term memories,

Not excavating items
Directly. Material
Assemblages would suggest

The remarkably different
Life which the writer has led
From these lines of phrases ranged

While the mind was fairly free
To think through things at a desk,
On a drive, curled up in bed.

Local Thoughts for Global Acts

Moon in the rustling kitchen,
A laptop glowing with news,
And now what are you to do?

You bemoan the extinctions
You’ve caused and are causing, more
And more daily, and you should,

But life’s not going away.
It presses in everywhere,
Wherever species find cracks,

Ants invading skyscrapers,
Cockroaches in the suburbs,
The mouse turds on the counter

Of your house armed with mousetraps
In the disappearing woods.