The Whole Odophonium

History builds in brick. Violence,
More than earthquakes, flattens it. Ages
Weather violence attractively.

Sooner or later, someone’s hymning
The ruins, or crediting their bulk
To a lost race of god-like giants.

Sooner or later, life grows over
Everything, and as lives are addicts
To even the faintest fumes of life,

Old violence greens into music,
The muskier perfumes for low notes,
The sharper scents piercing arias.

Violence well grown-over is lush,
So intoxicating to visit.
Then someone bakes fresh bricks from the dust.

The Dirt

The Earth will inherit the meek.
It’s not like they’re going to Mars.
It’s not like brash and arrogant
Tycoons survive here without them.

Assuming they survive, the meek,
They’ll continue on being meek
Right here, and when or if they fail
To carry on, Earth will carry

Their remains on for them, calmly
As all the other tragedies
Earth carries encoded in dirt.
Earth always inherits the dirt.

Fistle, Fistle, Fistling

Moments are among the gentler insects,
Moth-winged, perhaps burdened with parasites
Of their own, but in that minority
Of species that do not parasitize.

Sometimes, even common persons working,
On permission, to work for a living,
Get whole hours of moth-winged moments alone
Without chores or social obligations,

When their bodies sit quiet within them.
Then, those moments rustle in procession,
Fistle, fistle, fistling, fairies in gowns
To go with their wings, drab fairies, soft ones

Who never pause in their dancing to speak.
The moments themselves, like fairies and moths
Are going extinct. Some may pass through this
Winnowing. Some pass each time that you blink.

The Cell-Free Sensor

You stitch all the human olfactory genes

To live colonies of yeast or mammalian cells

And use them to identify odors. These cells

Are called cell-free sensors, apparently because

No human cells need be involved. The inventions

Of social species always involve outsourcing,

Unlike the inventions of the microbia,

Which always involve fortuitous ingestion.

There’s something of a competition going on.

The unholy representation of the real,

Someone calls the radiation damage to film

Of Chernobyl after the infamous meltdown.

What part of representation is unholy?

The part where the real speaks in the voice of decay,

Suffering, and death to its children, the living.

Oh, come on now, lighten up a bit. Wouldn’t it

Be a gas to have ready-to-hand little kits

Of cell-free sensors in which the yeast express genes

For identifying the rhythms of language,

Humor radiating through the air, irony

Fond of itself, poetry fond of holiness?

The Trident Sighs

Someone, many someones work
Hard on making equations
Other someones can work with.

Other someones might see some
And say, hey, I know that one.
That equation’s for a wave.

Think of waves as equations.
No matter how wild, they will
Always balance at zero.

The difference between them
That makes them equate equals
Zero, is zero. Nothing.

They’re shifty, though, equations.
Nature abhors the zero,
Sneak thief hiding everywhere.

And so the waves are never
Perfect, never perfectly
Equated, never the same

As their perfect equations,
Which means someone or many
Someones must keep measuring.

The measurements make oceans
Of equations collapsing
And reforming as someones

Measuring more equations,
But the zero keeps hiding,
Nothing wavering something.

When Waves Collapse

They foam at the mouth, send spray
Flying, spittle which you catch
And call particles. The point

Is waves will collapse in waves
And get caught by waves, one way
Or another. You’re one way.

You’re oceans of waves catching
Collapsing waves. Wave hello
And goodbye to passing waves.

Flowering

Good usually blossoms in retrospect,
Out of good enough, even as things slide
And have to be brought back. The small

Gifts of a simple Christmas that became
Sentimental favorite items to use daily,
The slippers, the mug, and the cap, tools

Of habit, part of daily rituals in a life
Attended to as if it were a houseplant,
Water in the mug, shade under the cap.