Posterity

Not so much a vocation for art

As an impatience of all honest

Trades, counseled the cautious, famed writer

In reply to the query, Why write?

You smile at the impatience of all

Honest answers to such a query.

To stir a disturbance in the waves,

To get under the cold cuddlestones,

To rearrange the channel through which

Mind, locally, passes on its way

To the wanderer-consuming sea. . . .

This shift in the passageway of thoughts

Through a minor meander that risks

An oxbow for its posterity.

Death Against Pup-tent

It would be the most final,
Violent thing to happen
To Earth, if the sun—

Vast, continuous
Apocalypse—went
Rogue re predictions

And engulfed the Earth,
But some lives would end
Little differently.

Comparison’s all
Or almost, human
Minds do, as close

To continuous
As human minds get,
And yet, at the core

Of experience
Comparison fails—
On the one side, death,

Universal and
Inescapable,
Akin to nothing,

While on the other—
Details, memorized,
Imagined, unique

In every lifespan,
The time you camped out
In your new pup-tent,

Your birthday present,
Aged seven, set up
In grandma’s backyard

On grandma’s small farm,
The sopping wet grass
From late-summer dew

Soaking the tent’s sides,
The spider’s shadow
In dawn silhouette

On the tent’s canvas,
The bell on a goat,
The smell of old hay.

Loss Doesn’t Stop to Go Away

This has become the happiest
Bafflement, parallel sorrow’s
Bafflement at how anyone
Can swiftly restrict empathy,

The way events accumulate
Such that everything disappears,
But the events themselves exist,
Once happened, happened forever.

Once, there was a generation
Of siblings who inherited
The pioneer ranch property
Of their parents, siblings all raised

With the odors of old leather
And manure, pine planks, kerosene,
The wet soil and grasses in spring,
And every last thing that happened

To them, every morning someone
Climbed out of a bed and stood up,
Remains. It all happened, always
Will have happened as it happened—

And yet, the siblings are all gone,
No one lives on what was the ranch,
No living memory persists—
It all happened and was added

Forever, as it all happened,
And all of it forever gone,
The disappearances themselves
Having permanently happened.

Always Feel Better after Talking to You

The numbers shuffled.
The day grew older,
Accumulated.

For you, one or two
Hours of that wonder
That dark talk can do—

Just commiserate
With someone whose thoughts
Carry the same or

Similar shadows,
Whose sorrow weakens
The abundant light,

And you grow brighter.
So you grew brighter
As the talking grew.

Did you help? Did you?
Anyone not you?
One who never knew?

There’s much more world now
Than had happened yet,
Just two hours ago.