The Relation of Inanimate to Animate

Light verse that skims deeper themes,
Deep thoughts that trawl sunken verse,
Submariners in between—

This era is the era
Of the fission submarine,
Serious as submerged hearse,

Rarely surfacing in sun,
But not really capable
Of living entrenched in deeps.

We would rather be the wrecks,
The whalefalls left to bone worms,
Or the blubber cut on deck.

Or we say so. We don’t know.
We’ll be gone once we’re below.

Christmas Bazaar

The true gifts of the inescapable
Holiday festival are the tent pegs

It stakes for episodic memory,
That painted canvas dwelling of the self.

You have your own. Yours are not the Christmas
You wandered through a frozen inversion,

Or summered in a New Zealand garden,
Or when you were too small to understand

Why your aunt, uncle, and cousins showed up
In snowy, predawn dark with their presents.

You have your own stakes, your own festival
Memories you raise to frame who you are.

You have your own sideshow in the circus
Choiceless, until you up stakes and move on.

Possum Wisdom

To beat a retreat,
A hasty retreat,
Beat it to pieces,

Leave nothing of it.
There’s no retreat left.
You, fly in the jaws

Of the blue lizard,
Mouse in the talons
Of the soft-winged owl,

You human engaged
In machinery
Meant to chew your faint

Vestiges of hope
In fairy numbers,
Those bits of protein

Code shreds and swallows
From your well-tracked
Bank accounts. Just squeak

And accept the end.
The feint that you make
Then may save you yet.

Good Late

Good late to you, too,
Sunset of the year,
Except that a year

Never alternates
With an anti-year,
The way day with night—

Before the advent
Of the calendars,
The years were always

Subtle, faces turned
One way then the next—
Only far enough

To polar regions
Could a year yield night,
And in the middle

Who could tell at all
How late a year was?
It rained or was dry,

But the days arrived
On time, never late
To sink or to rise.

Now, even islands
At the equator
Mark the abstract spot

When the late renews.
Shared myth makes shared truth.
Good late to you, too.