She Only Wrote It, After All

Meaning isn’t understanding, either.
Understanding—comprehension—gets it.

Meaning more or less irradiates it,
Whatever it is you make meaningful.

Understanding’s reverse engineering.
Understanding’s priors, consequences.

Meaning is numinous, your creation,
Your monster. You want it to come to life,

But since you can’t understand it, it can’t.
You implore it, but it won’t come to life.

O Tent of Hope, What Glorious Days You’ve Known!

and some were pleased with his reign, while others lived in grief and sorrow

Peer in on any era

And you will find fine mixtures

In the grain of sad and good.

You can’t say awful wasn’t

Awful, and you shouldn’t turn

To try to avoid the sight—

It won’t work, and it’s not right.

This is the harder sermon

To deliver—the mixture

Is intricate as language,

As immunity, as genes,

As never simply blended.

There are two things, not a blend.

If there were both, there’d be one.

Earth, despite what myths call it,

Is not a middle, never

The mean of heavens and hells.

Earth is iron in the night,

Writhing, intricately wrought

By its own magnetic fields,

And, instead of outer rings,

Rings its surface with species,

Lives alternately pleasing,

Or lined with grief and sorrow.

X Is Dead

The need for the copula
In English summarizes,
Accidentally, a fact

Tricky to encapsulate—
Unlike living, being goes
On uninterruptedly,

Smoothly as a current flows
Around its limits and back
In serene cyclicity.

You can’t get your living back,
But your dead can never leave.
Whatever is dead will be.

Can’t Fail to Fall

The lengths of days again do shrink.
The key word is again. The world
Of pattern lurks in each again,

And yet, you can’t say what again
Is, since it always contains change.
It’s not exactly what happens.

You never fall the same way twice,
But you do keep falling. The falls
Feel familiar in the river

Remaining in going again.
Maybe even nothing begins
Again and again. You need words

To state that words are weak. You need
Language to say what language can’t.