Everything Escaping

It’s amazing how much the small waves
Move like dark starling murmurations
When the wind crosses the lake light and low.

They skid and shape exactly as if
They’re schooling to avoid predators,
Twisting sets of shadows against steeled

Surface, when they are themselves surface,
And not escaping but being pushed
As everything escaping is pushed.

Writing Wrecks All Conservation

In the poem of the open air,
The recluse considers retreat
As a choice and a privilege,
As a choice or a privilege.

Privation’s cousin, privilege,
Saunters in tight pants and a white
Hoodie across the parking lot
Adjacent to the poem’s recluse.

If you can get away, if you
Can get your mortal body far
Enough away from the other,
More talkative mortal bodies,

Should you be pleased with yourself, should
You inform anyone of it,
Your privation and privilege?
Voices float up from the tourists.

Is it possible to visit
Someone else’s home and not be
Worth deriding as privileged?
Thoreau and Tao Yuanming draw crowds

Now as incantatory names.
Would it have been better if they
Had never settled far away
From more desirous neighborhoods,

Had never written so damned much
About where they had gotten to?
Cold Mountain should have left the stones
Alone and not carved poems on them

Boasting of how no one could be
Free of work and effort like him.
Somehow, if where you are seems good,
If only for being empty

Or at least not overflowing
With people entangled in nets
Of their own dust, you feel compelled
To brag about about your privilege.

Maybe don’t. Maybe just be poor
And marginal without writing
About it, without extolling
Your privation. Keep it that way.

Exclusively Pastoral Poetry

Ravens in the branches
Of a marcescent oak
Surveyed the hillside scene.

Don’t underestimate
The great contribution
Of the question, where’s food?

Before metaphysics
Or the Revolution,
Before God comes again,

Where’s food? Philosophers
Adjusted their feathers
And scanned the horizon.

Things That Exist

Things that exist sometimes
Are their own thing. Sometimes
They’re only each other,

Sometimes they’re nothing but
Each other, and sometimes
They know this. They’re aware

They’re other, sometimes, things
That exist. These things call
Out to each other, call

Themselves something like us,
Like words that mean roughly
Human, things that exist.

Sub Specie Amiss

Do you ever contemplate
What goes on inside the heads
Where the dark pieces of mind

Make nests out of the same sorts
Of chemistry of the flesh
As functions insides the heads

Of the gentlest, the most kind?
The signaling and storage
Systems are the same, the same

Forms of memory, the same
Core neuroanatomy.
Diversity’s in the mind.

The bodies aren’t that different.
The genomes vary little.
The wants and desires remain

Animal at some level,
Ordinary in most ways,
Mammalian, basic, the same.

But the mind swirls in the sky,
And leaps from fingers and mouths,
And has its own subspecies,

And in some skulls the demons
Are all the better angels
The synapses ever get.