Truism

Amber, the hospital tech,

Is talking about parents

And how parenting has changed

In the past generation,

And she concludes, It’s the same

Amount of crazy, but just

In different ways. You note this,

Since it strikes you that it’s true

For all human history.

The amount of craziness

Remains the same, summed over

Every epoch and era.

The manifestations change.

Amber checks your oxygen.

The Hermitage of Nothing Much

Once, someone bought a suburb,
A large subdivision, that is,
Before anyone could hold

Any home with money down.
From the air, you couldn’t tell
How strange that neighborhood was,

Wouldn’t even guess, unless
You scrutinized streets for cars
And noticed that there were none.

Otherwise, it looked the same
As all the other looping
Necklaces, chains of fish eggs.

A gated community,
No one entered by mistake,
And the homes stayed locked and bare,

With enough security cameras
That cats from nearby houses
Could be tracked throughout the night

And any would-be squatters
Could be quickly reported
And swiftly escorted out.

Once a month, maintenance crews
Swept through the whole neighborhood
To keep it in pristine trim,

And the owner, sole haunter
And possessor of all keys,
Never slept there, but wandered

In at any hour to taste
The peculiar emptiness,
The ultimate achievement,

Sublime apotheosis
Of purest suburbia,
Hermitage of nothing much.

On Waking from a Nap at Noon

When the surge of random

Happiness cleanses you,

You can’t help but return

To the notion that joy

Is largely stochastic

Fortune, as anyhow

As suffering but not

Often humanly sourced

The way suffering is,

Something that just comes up

Like the wind or the blue

Gap in grey through which sun

Pours through, at the world’s end

Somewhere, always that

Sense of loosed awareness

Detached from most of life

And its anxious centers,

Even in a city.

You could be on a train,

People packed to the gills,

Or in a central square,

When peace overtakes you,

Like Yeats at his table,

Empty cup, open book,

In a busy London

Shop, when his body blazed

And, twenty minutes, more

Or less, it seemed so great

My happiness. Those two—

A sense of the world’s edge,

A sense of bounded time—

Are traits contentment brings

In its wake, peculiar

In being redolent

Of melancholy, both

Of them, core traits of peace.