Shadowy

It’s been August, and every night
Not too cloudy or hazed by fires
There have been Perseids to see,
And Cassiopeia has been
High and beautiful on the bridge
Of milk and tales, while Titian
Paintings involving Perseus
And Danaë and the monstrous

Contests between humans and gods
For who can be more violent
Have been collected together
For once-in-a-lifetime display
The far side of this continent.
All waves comment on each other,
Ocean lights, seas of tear-water,
The stars clear or obscured at night.

Titian’s Perseus tumbles
Headlong toward the monster’s maw.
From this scene alone, who would guess
It’s the monster who’s tormented,
Confused, soon to be defeated
By trying to bite the shadow
Of the hero? So goes the tale.
Art knows the monster’s the shadow.

When Galilean Moons Occult

Once you learned how to bend the light
To get more in your eyes, you were
Finally off and on your way,
No longer mere monkeys in trees.

No longer mere bipeds in grass,
You’d learned how to use your numbers
And languages for prosthetic
Purposes, and robotic craft

Photographing Jupiter’s moons
Were close to forgone conclusions.
So you learned you weren’t the center
Of the universe. Well, oh well.

You’re not even centered as you—
You and your words rotate around
Your torsos’ thumping and burbling,
Linked, orbiting, dependent moons

Locked to your microbes’ gas giants,
Asymmetrically regular
As all periodicities
Seem to turn out in this cosmos,

Elliptical, not circular,
Gravity hauling everything
Down to everything else, and yet,
Exact centers rather emptied.

It’s a skew-whiff world, which allows
For all kinds of eccentric frames,
All scales of framing devices,
From telescopes to microscopes,

To thought experiments on trains,
To atom smashers underground,
To continent-spanning lenses,
To mental shifts in perspective.

If you’re trying to frame the cosmos,
It’s hopeless. You’ve nowhere to stand.
But anything less than the whole
You can zoom in on to expand.

If your frame is all of culture,
Then writing’s just a chunk of it.
If your frame is all of writing,
Then poetry’s small bits of it.

But shrink your frame to, say, lyric,
Then maybe there’s something in this.
Even moons in pools collect light
Animalcules occult at night.

The Hermit’s Complicity

Big moon bright in broken clouds,
Crickets and poorwills crying
On an empty road tonight

In clear air in the mountains,
Postcard-perfect loneliness—
What can you do with beauty

In the moments you’re in it,
With you and your times dying,
Everything on fire somewhere,

Every moonlit breath a cloud
Complicit with agony?
So many lives are dying

And what are you doing here
But dying apart from them?
Don’t you want to be with them?

No. For now, your own dying,
Made of living and breathing,
Remains glad for the moonlight.

How It All Comes Out

You’ll never know, no matter
How long you live, no matter
What disasters you witness.

All will go on without you.
However long these words last,
No matter how young you are.

Fantasize madly, the most
You will see are some changes,
Still changing the hour you cease.

How to Borrow Generously

Speaking of Respighi,

After playing Ancient

Airs and Dances, a voice

From live-streamed radio

Observes, Ottorino

Borrowed generously.

Not necessarily

Oxymoronic, that.

There’s a way to borrow

That casts a glimmer back

Over the long ago

Neglected, forgotten,

The contemporary

Unknown. There are two rules,

And neither one easy—

First, indicate somehow

The source material

Glows beyond this setting

While also managing,

Rule two, to do something

Transformative with it.

If you can honor it

And add something to it,

Yes. You may borrow it.