And We’re Back to the Sun Again

It’s always too much not enough
And not nearly enough too much.
In a thousand generations,

Someone, or something not someone,
May sit with your back to the sun
As it sets, to make sense of this.

God! Damocles and that damned sword
Strung round the pommel with horsehair.
In the anecdote, it’s the threat,

Ooh, the ever-imminent threat!
But the king had been sitting there,
And then Damocles sat a while,

Before he went weak at the knees.
Then king went back to being king
Under the sword of Damocles.

That’s it. The fearsome sword never
Snapped its thread and stabbed Damocles
Or the king. Both died other days.

Sure, cruel kings often live short lives,
Sometimes because of their own stunts
With swords and other sharp objects,

But you could wait a whole lifetime,
Breathlessly waiting for that sword
To break its horsehair thread, or turn

Your head and miss it. Start over
With another arrogant king.
This kind of thing goes on and on.

It went on thousands of years past.
It goes on in these horsehair lines,
And it may still be going on

In a thousand generations
As you puzzle out this ancient
Poem, you with your back to the sun.

Too Much Architecture for Nothing

Peculiar projectors, thoughts.

Sink a body in a tank

Filled with saline solution,

Body-temperatured, dark,

And almost utterly still—

Then, oh, the places you’ll go!

Imagine an empty set,

Hypodermic of nothing.

It will prove analogous

To other concepts of sets,

Which must be things in themselves,

With or without things in them,

And so cannot be empty

Other than on the inside,

Confined within curly walls.

Think of what you call white space,

And immediately mind

Is moving around in it,

A buyer imagining

All the possibilities,

An architect designing

Angles between the blank lines.

There’s no nothing without you

Somehow turning up in it.

Thuban

Great snake pole star
Of the early
Bronze Age, writing,
And pyramids,

Irrelevant
To sky watchers
Now, but less than
Twenty thousand

Orbits from now,
Pole star again.
You won’t be then.
Your world won’t be—

Only the Earth,
Spinning under
A star no one
Will call Thuban.

The You

If you’ve got even a decade
Or two of memories to pull,

Feel for the strangeness of the cloth—
The sense you didn’t live those lives

That were lived in another world
Discarded by now. Replicants,

Everyone. Just because no one
Deliberately planted those dreams

Of a you in a childhood world,
Of you in a blurred adulthood,

Doesn’t mean they’re any more real.
Dripping gold afternoons or dark,

Cold alleyways, kind eyes or cruel,
Your past never happened to you.

Wishing

This time doesn’t settle it.
This time never does. The thing
About being young was thought

About a slow hour felt not
Incredibly valuable
So much as pleasant enough.

Later times would settle things,
Thought thought. For now, this now’s nice.
The temptation of aging’s

Encroaching decrepitude
Is to think this time must mean
Something now, must settle things

Within itself, since little
Time’s left. Funny reasoning.
There was never any time

Left, except experience,
Which could stop any second
Or not. If you’re here, then not.

If you’re not here, then no less
Not. If you’re young you’re aging.
If you’re old and still here, well.

Nothing will be settled now.
This moment’s not important.
Do you like this moment? Well.