Stalking Apex Predators

Talk to yourself calmly in low tones.
This identifies you as human.
Walk off slowly, sideways, if you can.

Avoid eye contact. Do not approach.
Ideally, glide off like a shadow,
A shadow that’s talking to itself,

Suggesting you’re actually a group
Of shadowy humans. How pleasant,
How unthreatening, groups of humans

Talking to themselves in shadows are.
Certainly no harm could come from you!
Now you just have to wait to attack.

Giving Notice as Postscript in a Past-Due Obit

Phyllis Janowitz, Phyllis Janowitz,

Did you you ever get it? Did you really

Know what to do with it, then, when you did?

Sweet satin, how I would like

to lie in all that money.

I’d know what to do with it.

Born in New York to a cop and a clerk,

In the middle of the Great Depression,

Anointed by Elizabeth Bishop

Herself, then again by Maxine Kumin,

A lifetime teaching poetry students,

Running the creative writing program

Of an Ivy League university—

Somewhere in there, in fact in your forties,

You had a luncheon with the rich Marshalls,

Or shall we say, the first-person speaker

Of your 1978 poem did.

The Marshalls, so called, did not come off well.

Your words were vivid, images intense

Enough to want to nip a bit to quote

In this later, blander, post-hoc obit.

We’ll just say, concerning one verse, we know

The feeling, the envy, the conviction.

But we won’t lie. In all that rich, we’d quit.

More Leaves from Clive James’s Maple

Physical collapse models
Are badly ailing. Not dead,
But quantum weirdness has them

By the measurement problem’s
Gone probabilistic neck.
Yet, don’t things really collapse,

Truly? Clive James ruefully
Half apologized after
Surviving a few years past

His farewell poem for himself
Apostrophizing himself,
His last chance to see his tree

Shed its leaves. Then again, then
Again. He died, in the end,
Just later than expected.

Cole Harris, Peter Schjeldahl
Seemed acquainted with that tree
As well, elegant old men,

Who, preparing to die, wrote
Fine prose reviewing their end
And then, sheepishly, lived on

A few extra years, surprise,
More than doctors allotted.
This fall, they’ve both gone as well.

Don’t all things, in fact, collapse?
There will always be that camp
Declaring it’s illusion,

But whether you watch maples
Or rigorously confirm
Equations, things go missing.

Beard Hairs, Poems, and Cookie Crumbs

Is this what you want from a tenant?
Raise your hand or shake your head. Thought so.
But here we are. Similarity

And causation may be the same myth.
That’s as may be. If you’re a life form,
You live to ingest and to extract

What will gag you from what you can use,
Bacterium, fungus, or person,
The same. Chemoautotrophic life

A long time ago learned to compare.
Photosynthesis got on with it.
And so on. But sooner or later,

Something built the first distinctive gates,
And, depending which you sorted through,
You were similar to everything else

That sorted through that gate, in some way,
The same. From there, you only needed
One step backwards to correlation,

Two steps back to causation, the same
Leading on to the same. Now, if you,
Are a mite, you want to find those hairs,

Those crumbs if you’re a roach. And, if you
Are a person, mind in the corner
Of mind, you want to extract those poems.

Living, the Dream

If it’s all just a dream,
Then you’re always dreaming,
And right now you’re dreaming

Of being right here. What?
Well, if you’re daydreaming,
You’re ignoring your dream

For more dreams in your dream.
Either way, you did it!
If your life’s all a dream,

Then you’re living the dream!
Oh, you don’t like this dream?
Shouldn’t you wake up, then?