Mutable

Outside, you hear the rushing

Water, but you don’t see it.

Later, behind a window

That blocks the stream’s sound,

You spot it rippling through grass.

If you opened the window

Now, you could see and hear it,

But you don’t. You turn away

To think about the senses,

Yet another battleground

For contesting personhood,

Another category

Of human to be denied

Full humanity, and then,

Of course, to try to fight back.

You are not more completely

Human thanks to the mere fact

Of both seeing and hearing.

You present your own issues,

Anyway, given your shape,

Your fairytale frailty.

Nothing could be more human

Than asserting personhood.

If being a real person

Were an identity safe

To deny among people,

However, you’d deny it.

And with that thought in your skull,

You turn back to the window

And, for pleasure, open it.

Boundary Condition

Below even the beggar,

The pauper, the utterly

Destitute and low, Patrick

Joyce itemized the Polish

Peasantry categories.

Between beggar and pauper,

What could have been the difference?

Permission to go begging?

In England, a pauper held

The special legal standing,

The in forma pauperis,

Therefore not charged legal fees,

Pauper’s root, in any case,

Shared with poor, the pre-Latin

*pau-paros, little bringing,

Producing next to nothing.

The body of the pauper

Summing all the pauper’s worth,

Which only goes to show you

What creatures of surpluses

Human beings have become.

Tigers and moths are paupers,

As is the oak in the field,

The lizard in the courtyard.

Maybe ants and honeybees

With their storage colonies

Aren’t paupers, but aren’t they, though?

All the workers in service

All their lives to their systems,

What are they but worn bodies?

The pack rat on its midden

Is no pauper, but offers

No surplus trades to others.

Pauper, very poor person,

Died a pauper, buried in

A pauper’s grave, having lived

Like a pauper, dependent

Entirely on charity,

Not even able to beg.

There’s no dignity to it,

None at all, just misery,

But in the extremity

Of the word itself, pauper,

Dark, gate-keeping quality,

Human being boundary.

Yoked by Violence Together

At just the right distance,
From just the right angle
Of evening, the mule deer

In the field resemble
Fleas, heads dug in to feed,
Rumps jutting from the weeds—

Jumping fleas, bounding fleas,
Big fleas that might stampede
Through cattle fat as ticks.

All life’s parasitic,
Come to think of it, laugh
The ravens, black speck gnats.

Storage Units

An article estimates,
Including wild colonies,

One honeybee colony
Is currently functioning

Per each couple of dozen
Humans currently breathing,

Which comes to a few hundred
Live honeybees per person.

Sound like enough or too much?
What’s enough of anything?

What’s the satisfaction gained
From stored approximations?

All your humming industry
Gluts cells approximately.

Where Did You Get That Idea?

No one doubts a ghost’s existence
Like a ghost. Every ghost has been
Mistaken for a revenant at some point,

Instead of just another thought,
Another phrase, often enough
Compounded of several more

Of various ages, even
Various far-flung traditions.
Often, the most calmly composed

Thoughtful persons best acquainted
With ghosts can tremble at them.
Surrounded by her favorites,

Emily Dickinson noted
The hairs on the back of her neck
Still rose with each fresh encounter.

Every ghost knows it’s not a ghost,
And yet all pass through walls, and yet
All pass through skulls, and yet none move.