Library Visit

One thing nice about ghosts—
You can tell them the truth,
Especially real ghosts—

Those dead ones with no use
For gossip anymore,
Confined to their phrases,

Locked behind the white door.
It always amazes
Them to be consulted,

They’ll nod. They’re gentle hosts.
They can’t be insulted.
One nice thing about ghosts.

Twelve Hours from Going Under

You go toward it.

You feel terrible,

Which just seems to add

To your momentum.

Anyway, you can’t

Back away from it,

Swerve or assuage it,

Not at this juncture.

So you push forward,

Wanting to get there,

Whether the change turns

For worse or better,

Just so it changes,

Just so you find out.

Bread in Tooth and Claw

It would be sad if we were all
One life, if all the lives were one
Attempt by the planet to live—
Sad and rather masochistic.

From first cells to bacteria,
Billions of years of parasites,
Levels of hyperparasites,
To say nothing of predators—

If it were all autophagous
And for what, more autophagy?
As competition, life’s awful
But not so terrible as Earth

Eating herself through her children,
Fed by them eating each other.

An Apocalypse You Could Live With

If a sacred wood could seed itself,
Immune to any axe or saw blade,
You’d have a new kind of invasion.

And why wouldn’t angels, aliens,
More resemble plants than animals,
Were they to resemble anything?

A fine pollen could settle somewhere
Advantageous, say, Antarctica.
There’s a lot of land opening there

Soon. Bare rock would be no obstacle
For the alien forest angels.
In the long Antarctic summer day,

Someone would notice a dark green patch
Mysteriously rising from the ice.
Colonization would have begun.

You might never even realize
Extraterrestrial life at last
Had made contact. If you did, too late.

Maybe human beings would survive
As modest mammals in the shadows,
Call the woods sacred, try to be good.

They Could Use It for a Few

Advice on life
Is everywhere,
And everyone
Seems to have some,

To live better,
To live smarter,
To live kinder,
To live longer.

Only a few
Wild-eyed gurus,
Tech billionaires,
And true con men

Pretend they’ve got
What should come first
To make the most
Of living life—

Advice on how
To never die.
Straighten that out,
And then, of course

It will matter,
Living better,
Living smarter,
Living kinder.

In the meantime,
Save your advice
For the microbes
And the mayflies.

Or Will Things Be Properly Ominous Then?

A noisy outburst of birds
And the neighbor in the next
Unit chattering with friends,

And a truck backs up, beeping,
And this is the 21st-century,
Supposedly near the end.

Let’s say it is. Let’s say guns
Fired in scattered incidents
And bombs dropped in local wars

Coalesce. Seas warm. Plagues spread.
Civilizations collapse
Between next week and next year,

Quick enough to be witnessed
Before it takes you under
Or some normal death hits first.

Will it sound like this, right up
To the edge of the cliff, sun
Shining every morning,

Triggering outbursts of birds
And the neighbor in the next
Unit chattering with friends,

And a delivery truck
To show up and unload things,
Beeping a warning again . . .

Eerily Correct Location

Someone or other
Wakes up in the dark,
The body crying

Through the passageways
Of the skull, We are
Uncomfortable.

And awareness swims
Into view of self
Reflection and asks

Where are we now, where
We now? We’re with this
Scared body again.

Somehow we always
Beach here, eerily
Correct location.