Sigeion

Don’t you love it when people
Feel insulted on behalf
Of the artists and mystics

By science or something like
The correspondence theory
Of truth? Why, then, Dickinson

And Keats, Michelangelo,
Juliana of Norwich,
Not to mention William Blake

And all his engraved angels
Would be rendered meaningless!
Meaning’s an absurd lighthouse

Raised on some howling outcrop
Of a drowned coast cloaked in fogs.
There it bellows mournfully

And sweeps its baleful spotlight.
If it happens on a boat
It floods the boat with meaning

Briefly, before gliding on.
The boat—dark, light, and then dark
Again, may take advantage

Of glimpsing information,
But it never owned the light.
Sea’s mostly empty, most nights.

Now Wave Hello to Yourself

Here’s a fun thing. However
Privileged or difficult

Or both your own life has been,
Shuffle through your memories

And pick a low point. From there
To this moment, now, measure

Your own survival, your rise
From that low to wherever

You are now. Not your teacup?
Try this then—pick a high point

When your life was going well
And full of promise for more.

Now measure how far you fell.
You’re waves. All crests, troughs, and swells.

There’s Life, and Then There’s Rest

Resources draw the attention of thieves.
Down to its roots, life itself is never

Short on thievery, thieves, potential thieves.
How is that? Have you ever stolen things?

You have. It’s human to pretend oh no,
I’ve never stolen anything. Corvids

Are similarly good at affecting
Insouciant indifference, innocence,

While keeping spying eyes on each other.
But dissembling’s only a special form

Of theft, which all life’s good at, more or less.
Predators, parasites, and scavengers—

Once you’ve identified all thefts, what’s left?
Just whatever’s not alive, just the rest.

Protean Flight

Now let us all flee at once!
Imagine if words could be
Songbirds, squid, or sandhoppers

Exploding every which way
When startled, feeling threatened.
When a reader gets too close,

Words leap in all directions!
The reader is too confused
To grab what the reader wants,

And in the storm of signals
Maybe everyone escapes.
You crunch calmly, now. One day.

Let There Be Some Uncertainty about Your Departure

Let there be some departure.
Let there be snow in the court,
Quiet in the flesh, details

In the day, the stone fountain
With wet snow on its shoulders,
Shaped like a tombstone, the face

In a photograph left out,
Dissolved in a wicker chair,
The collection of old verse

By someone who lived and died
And is faintly remembered,
Murmuring through the dank air.

Frightening Comforting

Every sleep is a life,
Only because it’s lived
And lost as soon as done,

Which is exactly what
A whole human life is.
For other lives, we can’t

Say, whether trees sleep lives,
Or tiny crustaceans.
We will not speculate.

But for persons, billions
Of you, every Earth’s turn,
You have and lose a life

Within the life you have
And lose the once, which should
Alarm and comfort you.