Three Out of Four Horsemen Leave the Paddock

The storm brings steely hail, tinnitus
Drawn on window panes, and it’s eerie,
And it’s funny, when you don’t need this

To tell you how soon and easily
You could go. But here you go, a gust
Of wind chimes dancing tarantella

As dead brown leaves caked to ground for months
Hurl their flimsy mess through the melee.
It’s nothing much. It will be over

Soon, but maybe not before it does
Some damage, maybe not before you
Manage to find yourself the wreckage.

The Success

Let it marinate.
What does it taste like,
The dark in your mind,

What is the success?
Do you feel it’s yours,
Never yours, someone

Else’s at all times,
No one else’s? How
Do you conceive it?

Are you one of those
To whom no one seems
Successful, the term

Itself suspicious
As enlightenment?
Or do you see it

Everywhere but you?
Success. Hideous
Word, if words say so,

At least in English.
Success. Hard on lisps.
Like too much red wine,

Like you bit your lip
Drunk, not knowing it.
You shouldn’t say it.

Some achievements twist
Within it. Success.
Rest. Put up the rest.

In Fine

Yeh, well, what if it’s both—finite
In some dimensions, infinite
In others, the way a Koch star,

That monster, has infinite length
Possessing finite area?
You’ve already got those who think

A little too mystically
Maybe, of the whole universe
As a fractal. But the question

Is, then, if some dimensions are
Infinite, some finite, which one
Is the sum of the dimensions?

We Wonder if the Revolution

We wonder if the revolution
Brewing within third-person pronouns
Will ever extend to persons in

The first or second grades? Seems, so far,
Every ze/zem, xe/xir, e/em/eir
Self references as I/me—rarely

Do we see a we, usually mocked
As Queen Victoria’s royal we,
Sin to invalidate baptisms

If deployed by a singular priest,
And no one’s bringing thee or thou back,
Victims of the last revolution.

Frankly, we rather dislike ourselves
And would love to have new clothes to wear,
But words are chosen, can’t be choosing.

Where We End and You Begin

All space is symbolic space.

The invention of symbols

Made discontinuity.

The world is continuous,

But symbols invented gaps,

Made space possibility.

Politeness is intimate

Distance, the literary

Social theorist muses,

Concerning symbolic space,

Yet while the intimacy

May be physical contact,

The distance is metaphor,

The more metaphorical

The more it has to balance

The stress of intimacy.

Did people begin to lean

Away as they crowded in,

Or did people feel the need

To imagine empty space

When meanings became discrete?

Ruminants

What Mandanipour, through translation,
Calls something like self-preservation
Through moments of inattention sticks

In the mind a bit. His narrator
Is thinking of nature’s dependence
On the inattention of its parts

The better to keep its parts going,
But you may have had that sensation,
Once or twice in your life, that despite

Knowing well how distraction is death,
Without a little relaxation
Of attention, your grip on the world

Will get so bloodless, your eyes so tired,
You’ll end up dead of tunnel vision,
So focused you missed the obvious.

Obviously, in this universe,
Everything’s trade-offs and balancing.
That’s the mean and exhausted wisdom.

Must you keep trying and trying things?
Let it get you, since it will, between
Blinks of attention, inattention.

While wrestling with your foolish wisdom
One afternoon in the trees, you hear
A startled snort behind you. Scared deer.

Selfie

Who could stare at old snapshots

Or the shadows of fruit trees

The same way after reading

Kay Ryan’s weird little poem,

Album? It’s not that the Death

In it’s allegorical,

Or her neat conceit that Death

Has its own life in photos.

It’s a poem of grief. It grieves.

But Death lives in its album

And ages into softness.

Think of fading snapshots, now.

Those could / almost be shadows

Behind the / cherry blossoms.

Death must mature to turn shade.