We Need Your Undivided Consolation

Is there any way to sum,
To total, tie together,
Sequences of lived events

That makes sense of them, if not
Quite meaning, a way that’s not
A scorecard or a story?

The merfolk, at ease in waves,
Busily stitch tapestries
Tying those waves together,

Which seems like a metaphor
For futility, but look
More closely at the results.

Their weaves front no narrative
That runs through the whole, although
Fragments foam up here and there,

And, estimate what you please,
Their long threading of patterns
Finds no final dimensions.

You say there are no such threads,
No tapestries, no patterns?
Now who’s playing the cynic?

The whole is as it happens.
If you study any waves,
You’ll notice they’re connected.

Abandonment Takes So Much Time

Intimacy escapes everyone
At some point when you were wishing it,
And leaks out of you at some point when

You really wish it hadn’t. That’s that.
You could, of course, try to evade it,
But most people can’t handle absence

Of other people well, never mind
The surrender of intimacy,
Which itself is only surrender.

Language is a boon in the meantime,
Prayer and sacred beads for confession,
The intimacy of diaries,

The more dangerous intimacy
Of purely epistolary friends,
The faux intimacies of fiction.

The deepest appeal of hermitage
Is the fantasy a hermit is
Emotionally self-sufficient,

A human happy with just the world,
Not only never craving touch, but
Never truly lonely. Cold Mountain

Was supposedly such a hermit,
But he also supposedly had
A bosom buddy in defiance

To slum with in the monastery.
Dickinson had her close-knit circle.
Stylites likely had anchorite chums.

Still, the heaving global news machine
Coughs up color stories of hermits
Regularly—one on an island,

One by a loch, sometimes a woman,
Usually white-bearded, grouchy men.
If they can do it, you think, I can.

We suspect it’s easier to be
Alone far from human irritants,
Far from conversation’s temptations,

But it’s probably hard, even then.
Give us a chair in front of a door
Facing onto sky in good weather,

A chair by a strong window in bad,
And never ask us how we’re feeling.
Leave food baskets. Take these lines away.

Whole Day Dancing

The shift is slow, but it goes,
It has its sometimes curvets.
It has its sometimes pauses.

The only way to notice
Long patterns have disappeared
Is to be a long enough

Pattern of watching patterns
Yourself. Look up, the sun’s set.
Think back. What did you expect?

The Dying Art of Exact Change

We are a kind of lichen,
You and us. We form a crust
That covers the rock, sometimes

Flakes off, might land somewhere else.
Without you, we’d not exist.
Without us, you’re animals.

But what lichen doesn’t know,
Maybe never can, is what
Sort of partnership we’ve got.

Commensal? Mutualist?
Are we words exploiting you?
Are you beasts deploying us?

And for what? To cover rock,
Glow in the sun and hang on?
And maybe there’s some third thing

Between us or emerging from us,
A kind of life that’s not us,
As if thoughts dreamt for themselves.

Unhand the Poppet

Your view of yourself as if
From the outside is foolish
Except as a way to live

Among people who likewise
Are updating assessments
As if viewing from outside

Themselves their own lives. It’s worth
Updating as survival
Strategy, but it’s no way

To live—that is, if you want
To appreciate living.
Viewed from inside, the world’s worth

Everything it’s worth to you.
From the outside, you’re puppet
Jostling among puppeteers.

Midnight Extension Lecture

The unwinding of the world
Will be slow as well as swift,
Unnoticed and prophesied—

Both—will make a bumpy ride.
Times collapse in retrospect.
They lap at the shore betimes.

Somewhere, a generation
Will arrive for whom this world
Is all a pattern in stones,

Nothing but facts and fossils.
It won’t have happened to them,
But they may try to locate

Exactly when. No matter
What times they hypothesize,
There is no exactly when.

Waves are quanta in hindsight,
Only thumpingly choppy
Beneath any bow of now.

They dissipate. A shoreline,
A box with parallel slits,
The date the libraries burned,

These all provide sudden breaks,
Interesting to contemplate.
But the unwinding that ends,

Or appears to, past such points,
Was unwinding all the time
And continues to extend.