Fight, Fight, Fight

Right is the ghost of wrong,
Wrong the ghost of right. Paired,

Of course, that old canard,
Can’t have the one without

The other, and the one
Is always positive

Or has the upper hand
Over lesser other.

Makes it easy to think
Right is day, masculine,

Yang, and wrong is moonshine,
Yin, feminine, so on.

Then you can write your books
To right that wrong: wrong’s right.

But that’s not how they haunt
Each other the other.

Right haunts wrong, wrong haunts right,
Since they embrace the fight.

Earth That Wakes

The geologists have done their job

Confirming Emily Jane Brontë.

The lonely mountains do hold glory

And grief more than any life could tell.

They’ve done their job by excavating

So much of the old past in the near

That what really dizzies you, or should,

Is an awareness of what’s unknown.

Given these fragments, what was the whole

Glory and grief of millenniums

By the hundreds, by millenniums?

Yes, these were some of the bones, and these

Are some of our best reconstructions,

But how many more millions of lives

Went underhill, into these mountains?

Small wonder folks imagine spirits

Or fairies, various huldufolk,

The little people of traditions

Found in so many parts of the world.

It’s a typical failing, of course,

Of imagination to conceive

Of all haunting lives as humanish,

And even Emily Jane Brontë

Wasn’t thinking of the bones of fish,

The lives of reptiles, extinct cousins

Of Subsaharan megafauna,

Etc. She had history

And maybe prehistory, or Nature

Alone, or something spiritual,

Most likely on her mind at the time.

But she got it right. There’s more to tell

Than any one life could of how lives

Held both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.

Trickle and Lake

Shallow black water isn’t good.
There’s no depth swallowing the light,
Only dirt or darker contents.

Never drink a shallow darkness,
Much less try to take a deep dive.
Your guts will turn. You’ll crack your skull.

But you know that, don’t you? You’re not
A clueless creature, after all.
You can sense that trickle’s poison

Coming out of the great drain pipe.
Still, there’s always people down there
On their knees in a crowd, drinking,

Claiming a ritual cleansing,
Determined to jump in headfirst.
It’s a mess, that shallow darkness.

Meanwhile, up at the last clean lake,
Depths so great clarity shows black,
Few souls wander down to the shore.

Forecasting for the Last Remaining Biped

The lion’s share of destiny

Is a family history.

The rest is local circumstance.

Family history provides

What’s called innate inheritance.

You are who your ancestors were,

Give or take a few mutations,

Most of them low impact, accrued

In every new generation.

What your ancestors accomplished

Is a only a poor guide to this—

They had their own circumstances.

But what they were capable of

Probably brackets pretty well

A range for your own behaviors.

Circumstance looms large, however,

Since frankly, human ancestors

Have all been pretty much the same,

The same operating system,

While circumstances have varied,

And will carry on varying,

Widely. Therefore, the distinctions

That matter so much to humans

Are, when visible, visible

Mostly thanks to circumstances.

But step back. Individuals

May vary circumstantially,

But, planetwide, what humans do,

The species’ share of destiny,

Follows family history.

Do Be Do Be Do

The problem with satisfaction
In getting things done is that most
Of them have to be done again,
Again, again, again, again.

It seems obviously better
To find greater satisfaction
In doing than in getting done,
Since then you’ll get to doing things.

But think of all the things you do
That you enjoy simply doing,
And how it always seems an end
Comes too quickly to doing them.