Which Must Be Why It Goes

What if you, your ancestors,
Actually managed to bring
A new thing into being,

A new thing to the cosmos,
Having invented meaning?
There is no meaning at all,

Never was, never had been,
Until your kind made it so.
You don’t find it, you make it,

And it’s no mere prediction.
You’re not just saying what’s next,
Although often you are, when

You say what some event means.
You’re creating the meaning.

Rehab Robe

You finger life’s texture
More contemplatively
Around the bottom hem

Of experience—sun,
Someone being cheerful,
A lack of demanding

Chores and obligations—
Quality elements
Of an afternoon sunk

In a drab rehab ward
At the end of the road,
Next to the nursing home.

When you were young, you’d go
Volunteer on Sundays
To visit such places

And then get back to life.
Now here it is, old robe
Frayed, like you, soft, like you.

How Many Points in a Wave?

The enormous smallness of existence
Isn’t a simple play with paradox—

What’s small at each point at all points is vast
In ways that can only exist as small—

Agglomerations of the minuscule
Are the only way to the gigantic—

Look at you and all your trillions of cells—
Look at the desert composed of sand grains—

Then ask yourself, what is smallness if not
Enumerable mysteriousness

Of sameness—each of those cells same enough,
Each of those sand grains same enough to be

Countable as more of the same, even
If what’s countable’s only estimate.

Truth to Scale

Boredom realizes
What a vast stage you’re on,
What an odd speck you are,

Like a gnat on a blade
Of grass in an expanse
Of feral roadside weeds

Poking out of rubble
Ruins of a suburb
Of a provincial town

Sprawled under summer sun,
No direction better
Than any other one.

There’s so much more of this
Than you’ll ever get through.

No Moving Parts

If you could glide in on words
Like a plane on a jet stream,

Maybe you wouldn’t have this
Nagging sense your thoughts are closed

When they should have doors and seats
For passengers—they’re just toys,

Models with no working parts.
You have a notion, paint it,

And set it aside. Later,
It’s just a thing that won’t fly.

On the Market

Thirty-five years before these phrases,
A half-a-dozen acquaintances
Were out on the town in Manhattan—

One of the group a young movie star
And two others her college roommates,
Now also in the film industry

Not anywhere near so famously—
One having landed bit parts only,
One now a properties manager.

They’d brought three young men to pair with them—
A semi-famous skateboarding champ
Dating the rising star, a handsome

Assistant producer, the boyfriend
Of the properties manager, and
The assistant producer’s old friend

From grad school, brought on as a blind date
For the roommate of bit parts, of course,
Assortative dating hierarchy.

Tired of cool bars by wee morning hours,
They decamped to the skateboarder’s house,
A two-story rental in SoHo,

Where Lennon first lived with Ono,
Still owned by Yoko, long since widowed.
The skateboarder had a custom ramp

Constructed in the narrow back yard,
And at four am while somewhat stoned
He did tricks for them under the lights.

The house was bare and boring. No one
Had any good anecdotes about
John and Yoko. The young movie star

Fell asleep, and all the rest of them
Slipped out to get taxis before dawn.
Next day, the assistant producer

And the properties manager flew
Back to California, to the set
Of the movie they were working on.

The blind date and the roommate confined
To bit parts coincidentally
Shared a birthday. The following week,

They went out on that birthday to catch
A Gene Hackman vehicle in which
She had a bit part as a victim

Strangled by Gene Hackman’s nemesis.
They never saw each other again.
Within a few years, none of them knew

What had happened to the other friends,
Except that the couples both broke up,
And the young movie star ascended

To Hollywood’s upper stratosphere
As princess of the rom-com genre
Before slowly fading out of view.

The Lennon-Ono house on Broome St
Went through decades of different uses.
Sean put it on the market last week.

Memory and Swallowing

Fetch your little bit of bliss
Wherever you can find it,
Prowling memory’s palace.

Every memory’s a lie
In that it is a construct
Of a lost state of affairs,

A pattern no longer there,
But that just makes it something
That is of its own accord,

Something that can be explored.
You can wander its poorly
Lit hallways of blurred details,

Spend hours in some of the more
Achingly enjoyable
And blindingly bright old rooms,

Or head to a balcony
Overhanging the present,
Get your nose close to just now,

The sun in this very room
And inhale, inhale deeply
As you can. Remember this?