Look at That Light, at Those Flowers

Funny how much of your sense of what’s
Good depends on your sense that it’s not

Going away, that it’s going to stay, even when
Knowing it’s all going away, day to day.

You can keep this, you can have this moment,
If you feel you know that you can keep it.

The breath of the all good still hovers over
The lake, each breath that you can’t not take.

A Left Precuneus

No aleph here,
But a world, still,
Of a small kind,
Self to itself.

The damage done
Doing something,
Seeing something
That contradicts

This little world
Shakes terribly
When nothing else
Is going on.

Still, there’s the sun,
So much brighter,
So much vaster,
So bask in it.

Beware Gardeners

They live to give what they can’t
Eat away. They’re fungible
As kale and cauliflowers.

They worship the soil they make.
They’re not farmers or ranchers.
They’re horticulturalists.

They thrive where things are too good,
Which is one thing they’re good for—
Any place with gardeners,

Chock-a-block with gardeners
Giving away zucchinis,
Strawberries, broccoli, squash—

You’ll know there’s where things are good,
If that land bears gardeners.

The Dead of Living Memory

On a melancholy afternoon
It is difficult to remember,
And as it becomes more difficult

It only gets more melancholy.
You used to know a word for this state,
But now you are merely in the state,

Struggling to find that word in the blank
Gap where a meaning shaped like that word
Still sits in its dimpled cicatrice.

On the Origins of Motive

Tendrils curled around the art
Photographer’s weather-proofed
Prints, mounted on outer walls

Of her handsome mountain house,
As if the plants just wanted
To be a part of her art,

Or as if they desired it
For themselves, or hated it,
And wanted to pull it down

In their leafy green clutches
And buckle it, or as if
They hungered to eat it all.

It’s easy to imagine,
But it’s always hard to tell.

Observatory

If something marvelous happens one day,

But you don’t find out until the next day,

Then which of those was the marvelous day,

The one that passed, seeming nothing special,

But on which the event that was special

Descended, or the one that felt special?

This puzzlement comes out as well at night.

Those are long-ago stars you see each night.

Each supernova burst some other night,

But is any explosion anywhere?

If its outward ripples reach anywhere,

It’s as happened there as it’s anywhere.

Marvels total all their phenomena,

Including observing phenomena.