On the Unknowable Variety of Gone

Gone to you, gone to everyone,
And gone. Gone, but present to you,
Gone but present to everyone,

And gone. Gone as in never was,
Gone as in never knew, gone as
Just some memory in one skull,

And gone. You know there are things
And persons gone to you, gone
But present to you, or not gone,

Which you never knew, not gone but
You’ve forgotten. You know there are
Phenomena long ago gone

Where they were but present to you
And everyone, light years later.
You know there are things that were lost

And unknown to everyone, then
Dug up as part of a present past
Hundreds, thousands of years later.

But you don’t know what might have been
That no one remembers, can’t be
Recovered, if such things ever were,

If such things could exist to leave
From any form of existence,
That were, that were, that were, that were,

And gone.

Whose Fault Is That

Every damn word I’d written in my entire life was meaningless

You’re not going to like the answer.

It was your fault, all yours.

Meanwhile, others found meaning

In those same words effortlessly.

Know why? They paid attention.

It’s a beautiful thing. Word-composing

Can be done without any success

At finding the meaning the composer

Dreamed of, aimed at finding

And still end up blossoming meanings

Like a meadow full of wildflowers

If the readers attend well. You don’t think

This is for real? There are so many writers,

Worshipped, half-worshipped, at least

Admired now, decades and centuries

After their deaths, who died distraught

At not finding the meanings they hoped,

And there are some pretty bland

And awful texts that turned out to mean

A whole lot they never had intended.

Call it reader-response theory if you like

Labels like that, but the first reader

Was the author, the phrase composer,

And it’s not the reading, exactly,

So much as the act of sustained attention.

No such thing as a meaningless word

Compared to any of the rest of them.

Busy Day

The hermit sits listening
To the rain—not to music,
Since there are no musicians,

Not to his own voice chanting
Passages from books, of which
He owns four of the classics

And has read each so often
That right now he’s sick of them.
He won’t bother gardening,

Not in this weather. He has
A little bit of food left
That he hopes will see him through.

No one for him to talk to.
Nothing to do but listen.

Exit Bardo

Soft summer, a white butterfly
In lavender, blue sky through glass,
Manuka framing English lawn,

You remember. Every scene there
Was a miscellany tossing
Native and invasive species,

Tuis and fantails on a walk
That dawn with a startled hedgehog
Caught crossing the path to the lawn,

Afternoon and the honeybees
In lavender and manuka,
An almost industrial hum,

While you sat out endeavoring
To do nothing. Evening driving
Out to visit a local stream,

A thread of water cut so far
Down into its narrow chasm,
An able-bodied person could

Leap the gap where the waterfall
Tumbled several body lengths
Down under the tussocky field.

You stood on the wooden footbridge
And contemplated falling in,
Then drove back to the sod-roofed house

To stay up all night, the whole night,
Clear through to a rainy morning,
Anniversary of the death

Of a friend, afterlife reduced
To a chimeric paradise
Of ghosts haunted by invasions.

Eating a Sun a Day

There was a belief lightning
Came when the door to Heaven
Cracked open for a second,

And light flashed through our dark world.
Then the door was quickly shut.
Human, of course—everything

Inhuman gets imagined
As a human behavior—
Having a home like a cave

Lit with fire on the inside,
Opening the door a crack,
All that. As long as people

Have been around and then some,
There’s been a star in the sky,
Just a star, that wasn’t one.

Turns out it was a quasar
All along, most luminous
Object ever detected,

Staggeringly far away,
Its core a black hole the mass
Of seventeen billion suns,

Eating mass equivalent
To another sun a day,
Not that a black hole has days,

But, you know, human again.
Every time the Earth spins once,
Another sun is eaten.

Let’s say the quasar’s Heaven,
Angels always falling in,
Blazing door hanging open.