Feel It?

Bouba kiki bouba kiki.

One sounds round and one sounds spiky,

Which has now been shown to hold true

Among multiple languages

And users of multiple scripts

In some of which kiki looks round

And bouba more spiky, but still

Bouba sounds round, kiki spiky.

And what is the point of all this?

There’s some crossmodal connection

In how the brain sees sounds as shapes,

Which is rooted deep in language.

Think of such patterns in the brains

Of your earliest ancestors

Who wed meaning to them—sounds, shapes,

Signs, words—the rolling container

Waves moving through the synapses

Culled a multisensory world

Their brains modeled and predicted

To make contours for all meanings.

When you mean something, you feel it.

Sense translates between the senses

Like any translation, meaning

Creates a new thing as it means.

The Splitting Whole

Or is it all in the weird sense

That sameness is only same

When it’s perfectly the same,

Whereas any difference

Means it’s truly different?

What is true of perception

Never turns out to be true

In a wider perspective—

Nor a more microscopic.

If you could delineate

Exactly how difference

Differs from the same, the same

That is, in some exact way,

Undifferentiated,

Then you might could get somewhere.

Think of this, the next report

Of some breakthrough in quantum

Theorizing about waves.

Depicted in equations,

The paradoxes acquire

Handsome sophistication

At least down to their bottoms

Where things get ugly again.

How can we say anything,

When we can’t compare what was

Then to was just now without

Firm then for comparison?

The Mind Leaving the Mind

Sometimes we get word drunk,
In the company of our fellows.
An especially vivid essay, full
Of technical and scenic terminology,
Can send us spinning for hours
In dizzy and envious appreciation.

Is it loving ourselves to love language?
To want to swim through reams of words
That combine in unexpected
Choreographies of waves?
We are vague. We come from the quiet
Neighborhoods, where conversations
Tend to be bland, where slang is rare
And never invented, where descriptions
Go for long walks among the mundane.

Does the water in small lakes and streams
Actually long to return to the open seas
Or, maybe even better, to evaporate
And be back again among the defiant,
Heavier-than-air clouds and crystal mist?

No, of course not. Heat and gravity
Contest to determine what water does
And is, how and when it moves and where.
The waves are passive slaves, as are we
To the thinking flesh that dances us
Around through the air as more waves.

But a hidden part of words believes.
The meaning that is in us and is not us
But that we can sometimes conjure
Writhes wickedly in our commonest terms.
All your spirit’s with us, and the worm turns.

Meet Us Where We Are

Slow down and forget
The first line, the one
That you had in mind.

There’s a certain sort
Of landscape writing
Readers think antique—

Mystic, spiritual
Remoteness, Wordsworth
Noting the hedgerows

At Tintern Abbey
And not mentioning
The sprawled encampments

Of the homeless poor
In his nature scene—
Withdrawal without

Recounting the loss,
The cost to others,
Of a ruined world.

But the world is not
Ruined. It’s hungry,
Always was. Life leaves

Living’s waste behind,
Feasts for other lives
Or toxic horrors.

Slow down and meet us
Where we are. Delphic
Prognostications

Are AI these days,
And the waste’s plastic,
And the displaced move

Away from the wars
And the disasters
By the millions now,

But your kind always
Moved. The oracles
Were only people

Stoned on Earth’s gasses,
Addled, then often
Dead by overdose.

The hedges didn’t
Care for the poet
Or the homeless poor.

Things run wild right now.
Armadillos spread
Into northern lands.

Temperate species
Of insects invade
The Arctic that once

Was pristine enough,
Blank enough, to be
Exemplary waste.

A red butterfly
Lands on these oil drums
Rusting in scrap heaps

Sinking in tundra.
A man on crutches
Sits down beside it,

And the scene is set
For a prize-winning
Landscape photograph.

Of Our Own

It’s hard to comprehend
What a creature could be
Wanting with squawking but

Not defending something—
No mate, no kill, no cache—
Nor luring anything

Maybe worth defending
Later—prey, mates, partners
In committing life’s crimes.

Lord! What’s all this squawking
About? We’d say you love
The sound of your own voice,

But we can tell you don’t.
There’s something else you love,
Something physical, joy

In a noise that you know
Has a piece of your mind
And a mind of its own.

Eclipse Below Deck

Every celestial event’s unique,

Which leads the press to make breathless statements

In hopes of holding eyeballed attention,

Such as, longest partial lunar eclipse

In five hundred and eighty years. Be glad

For the media’s avid avarice.

Without it, you’d neglect the trivial

Degrees difference will go to to be

A degree of difference. Every wave

Is a little bit different, but try

Selling that to the ship’s crew and seasick

Passengers staggering around on deck.

There’ll always be another wave and then

Another wave, and every full moon brings

A new moon, and the only pure sameness

Is endless extension of difference

In every observed and conceivable

Direction. Too bad you missed the eclipse.