Seven Years

Pool and ebb,
The wavelengths
Taped the shore’s

Measurements
To a sort
Of freedom

Of numbers—
If you know,
You can go.

Even Though You’ll Never Know

You would like to feel you know a thing
Or possibly two about the world,
But you alternate between extremes

Of an overwhelming sense of your
Utter ignorance and a foolish
Confidence concerning this or that.

For instance, you hold unwarranted
Certainty that others are like you
In exactly this respect—they, too

Feel overwhelmed by the trembling world,
Transfixed by their inability
To comprehend what action to take,

Yet possessed of overweening pride
In their understanding of something
Vast and vague enough to fake it well—

How late-capitalism functions,
Why post-colonial governments
Don’t, what a good human being is.

Is there a way to make confession
Of ignorance, of lack of wisdom,
Without turning it into boasting

By the time you’re done genuflecting?
Dig a small cottage into a hill,
Maybe, make it livable, call it

The echo of your skull, that real place
Where whatever you’ve been thinking goes.
When your skull looks like the world, you’ll know.

Dawn at the Cave of Mind’s Bones

Morning, and the mind is hungry,
Lean predator at the entrance
To the cave of the Bones of Mind,

Surveying the broad, dun valley
Of pale waves of long grass—the cave
Itself, the true skull, holds the bones

Of the true prey, strange arrangement.
Mind is what . . . Autophagous? No.
Mind is autosarcophagous.

Mind obligately devours mind.
Mind can’t live on anything else.
No wonder mind’s lean and hungry—

Less hunger means leaner, regrown
Muscles lead to greater hunger.
You can ditch the analogy,

Drag the mind out of its skull cave,
Compare it to cancer instead,
Or to a swirling pandemic.

Still, any good analogy
Will have to move. And mind devours
No other kind of food but mind—

The mind is always on the move,
Always hungry and invasive,
Always forming and reforming.

Consider the life combining
All of those traits at the same time
And realize mind can’t be alive,

But also that life’s less than mind,
Mind doing the realizing,
Itself a small snack for the mind.