Solid Glass Afternoon

The last turn before the bridge
Or the first turn after it.
Bugs bump into the windows

Back at the house up the slope.
The weather is perfect here.
The whole world is burning up

Or burning down. One of them.
One bug at a time. A thump.
Then another thump. Small lives.

There are no large ones. There are
No opportunities not
Past turns before or after

The glass bridge for the species
That won’t accept it can’t cross.

Bent Nail Blues

Who of those all thumbs can bear
The smugness of the skilled set,
The carpenters and wordsmiths,

The organic gardeners,
Coders, and music makers
Who restore rare instruments?

If it’s moral to despise
All artifice in favor
Of the authentic, why’s God

Imagined analogous
To a great artificer?
Where was good when making this?

Sixty Clicks to Castlegar, Thirty More to Trail

White butterfly outside the window
Echoes the shadow moving inside.
Your awareness startles, a little,

But other parts of the brain rescue
And dampen your response, which subsides.
No one has come to the house. Just light

Passing, a little too close-patterned.
Dip your shoulder to the tasks at hand,
Some dishes in the sink, some towels

You can hear tumbling in the washer,
Which will have to be hung on the line.
No one’s coming for you, child, no one.

White Monster

Adolescents at the lake
Discuss preferred energy
Drinks, the inexpensive teas,

The hyper-caffeinated
Sugary sodas, zero
Calorie versions, color

Alternates of expensive,
Adult-marketed brands found
In cans too large for their hands,

Prohibited by parents
And guardians, and therefore
The coolest to be guzzling.

One boy has a large, soft gut
On a squarish, sturdy frame.
One girl is voluptuous,

One girl is still thin. They all
Indulge in caffeination
And sacks of assorted snacks

Across the shining waters
From the slopes designated
Reserved wilderness preserve.

Between the adolescents
In swim suits and those forests
Full of bears they face, there lurk

The down canyons of the lake,
Holding, the kids say, bodies,
More certainly large sturgeons.

There You Go

Take a language-capable
Social brain and steep it in
A social group with language—

Voila! A human being,
A person, self-reflecting,
From nowhere, that can vanish.

You can find them everywhere,
Clustered, each as a body,
Each body a distinct whole

Interacting with others,
More rarely sitting alone.
Don’t let those bodies fool you.

They’re necessary. They’re not
Sufficient. Pay attention
To the surrounding language,

The melange of sounds and signs.
Little pieces of persons,
Floating afterimages

And pollen to seed new souls
Are trafficked in those auras,
And no one knows where they go.

Or This, Said the Glyphs

Writing is the sporopollenin
Of human culture, remarkably
Hardy and inert language-casing

Protecting thoughts from desiccation.
Long after the rest of a culture
Has been dissolved away, the writing

May remain, long past the last reader
Able to revivify its signs.
Language, like its host organisms,

Is fleeting, soft-bodied, dynamic,
And always rapidly evolving,
While writing, however flammable,

Brittle, or easy to overwrite,
Can be stashed as is. Left undisturbed,
A receipt, a letter, or a poem

Can outlast the person who wrote it
By hundreds, even thousands of years.
Meanwhile, you hosts of language obsess

Over death and immortality,
To the point that likely no language
Exists without tales concerning death

(Which is most certain) and equally
Storied immortality (which is
Certainly not). This combination

Guarantees writing stays uncanny,
An undead immortality
That can contain a swarm of half lives.

In these months, when pine pollen collects
And floats in great swirls over the lake,
Neither metabolizing nor doomed

But probabilistically hopeful
Of futures for the contingent few,
So that trees are all but guaranteed

Despite the odds against any seed,
Consider those drifts as scripts in glyphs.
Think of edicts, codices, or this.

The Smallest Hole in the World

The soul is a paragraph,
A ghostly rhetorical
Device of uncertain heft,

A wraith, if you like, a gap,
A thin line in the margin,
An aid to comprehension

That gradually became
A form of composition,
An argument in itself.

The calcified soul’s a book
Of Victorian grammar
Laws, the unrestricted soul

A splotch of indulgent flaws,
But the first thought of the soul
Shook from fear nothing kept whole.