This Wasn’t for You

Talking to other humans,
Talking to other humans,
If only there were someone

To talk to wasn’t human,
Someone who liked human words,
Didn’t make them but knew them,

Was happy to peruse them—
Small wonder lonely humans
Imagined giant beings,

Gods and djinns, angels, demons,
Anything wild listening,
Spirits in rocks, woods, and clouds,

Just someone you could talk to,
Someone who wasn’t human.

Hashtag Octothorpe Pound Sign

Robin, squirrel, raven, raven,
Word of the day, on the hour,
Blurts, chirps, and throaty chortles—

You can hardly hold your pee,
Vast mind thinks to the body,
Which is thinking through vast mind.

The raven balances, drops
A long, white dollop—why white?
Do birds digest inversely?

Then it plummets from the branch,
A black knife cutting clean air.
Beauty and waste for beauty,

But it’s the redundancy
That’s truly mysterious.

Don’t Do It

It’s a rare day, rare day
You can let come to you
Without having to go

To it. On that rare day,
When it comes to you, you
May not recognize it,

The rarity of it,
In your human, pulsing,
Chattering existence,

You may run after it.
You may chase it away,
The one day, that rare day

You could have let happen,
Could have let come to you,
Asking nothing of you.

Retrospective

This war hasn’t left living
Memory yet, but it’s close.
The friend who was a small girl

Paints memories of herself
With doll, in her kimono.
She’s reached her late eighties, now,

But parades of planes with bombs
Still file across the top frames
Of her recent canvases.

No Flies on You

The web between the windowsill
And the back of the wingback chair
Involves an awful lot of lines.

But they’re not really lines, are they?
The word line is a metaphor.
They aren’t really spun threads either.

They’re analogous to worm silk
But made of quite different proteins
With different enough properties

That, despite a lot of science,
No one can wear web underwear.
Even web is a metaphor

In its Indo-European
Etymology: it meant weave.
This spiderweb is not textile.

It is not a technology.
Its strands of extruded proteins
Do not indicate practiced skill.

If you crave an analogy,
That’s it—your compulsion to speak,
To signal, to play at charades,

To comfort, attack, groom, describe,
Narrate, identify, and bond
By symbolic grunts and gestures

May be your set of behaviors
Most like the spider’s compulsive,
Obligatory spiderweb.

Words are snares. But then, we are learned,
In our specifics, like bird songs
Or whale calls across the oceans.

So we, too, are technology,
Unlike the elaborate web.
Call it whatever you want, then—

Lines, threads, architecture, parlor—
You were always your own target,
Snagged in your own entanglements.

The Clearing

For a long time, now,
Nobody has found
A good place for them

And their kind, wasn’t
Once someone else’s,
Someone dispossessed.

Something deep in you—
Your origin tales,
The world’s first people,

The world before you,
Unpeopled and new,
How this was given

To you—condemns you
To believe yourselves
This land’s forever

Or discoverers
Of new homes, open,
Unspoiled, all for you.

For a long time now,
That’s meant cleared ghost towns,
Abandoned ruins,

Places you pretend
Were left here for you
But for what haunts you.