John Gower Shooting the World

The bearded gent’s bow is drawn,
And the arrow’s tip touches
The sphere itself already,

A pin to pop a balloon
Made of earth, air, and water
In tripartite compartments,

The red and blue clouds, green grass,
And crinkled lines of blue waves
Completely separated.

Allegorical image
For an allegorical
Writer—allegorical

But perverse. Is the poet
Intending to pierce the world
Or make a trophy of it,

Perhaps dress it like a deer
And serve the world for dinner?
The sphere just floats in the air,

Immensely simplified thing
Painted like a painted ball.
The absurdity’s the charm.

Poetry can’t shoot the world,
And his world is already
So caricatured, insight

Into it would mean nothing
Much about any real world,
But maybe that’s the whole point.

The didactic writer aims
At a toy too close to miss,
A crudely patterned model,

Always, and knows it, and pulls
Back on the bow anyway,
Since knowing is only play.

The Host

Jonathan Swift, commenting wryly,

Just past the dawn of microscopy,

Had no idea how prescient was his

Flea / Hath smaller Fleas that on him prey,

And these have smaller yet to bite ‘em,

And so proceed ad Infinitum.

He was taking a shot at poets,

The smaller ones biting the greater,

That macaronic Infinitum

There just for rhyme and to drive the jibe

Into satiric absurdity,

But it’s the joke that proved prophetic.

The smallest bacteria contend

With hordes of bacteriophages,

Among Earth’s most ancient and febrile

Parasite-host elaborations,

Some billions of years in the making,

Far more important than mites on fleas

Or fleas on humans (to say nothing

Of lesser poets on greater ones).

Electron microscopes trained at dirt

From unpromising yards and bare lots

Can image phages at densities

Of millions per gram, and the latest

Contenders for final parasite

Are fragmentary vampire phages,

Too stripped to invade bacteria

Or hijack bacterial genomes

On their own, that wrap themselves around

Flagellar necks of larger phages

Then hitchhike into bacteria

To use the larger phage’s genome

To command bacterial genome

To make swarms of copies of themselves

To latch on to more larger phages,

And so repeat, ad Infinitum.

Life is parasites, all the way down,

To steal another infamous phrase,

But who knows how high up hosting goes?

Abstraction’s Ratchet

To make a tool
With a modern
Human-type brain

Combines products
Of semantic,
Conceptual

Processes with
Mechanical
Neural know-how.

Now, in other
Tool-creating
Kinds of creatures,

We don’t know yet
All the neural
Architecture,

But would you bet
That in your brain
Words and concepts

Are already
The mind’s ratchet
To leverage

And hang on to
Each tool-making
Step? Step by step.

Lovegod

Whatever man loves is his god,
Wrote Luther, who also opined

That Copernicus was a fool
Trying too hard to be clever

Overturning astronomy,
Since the Bible said Joshua,

Needing more daylight to fight in,
Bid the sun to stop, not the Earth.

But alright, whatever you love
Is your god. Ada Limón wrote

Recently that her family
Loved singing together like faith.

That sounds nice. It would be cringey,
In Luther’s context, to simply

Say that you loved your family.
As gods? Some folks are worshipful

Of their ancestors, notably
Less so of their living parents.

What do you love that’s not shameful
To have as your god? Luther’s point,

Of course, was that you’d better love
The one God that he loved, the real one.

But you could love some spot sacred
To you, some sweet intersection

Between nowhere and nothing much
You’re careful to identify

Exactly to no one, a bend
In a country road, a stone shore

By a high pond or a deep lake,
Or just the alley by the side

Of a provincial city street
Where sun falls in and floods the bricks,

Since, god, it is the sun that seems
To move, and not Earth, isn’t it?

Shadow Puppet

Unimpressed by the body

Of your soul, as Wilde called it,

In a catchy line you love

And have loved for decades now,

The one that goes, what men call

The shadow of the body

Is not the shadow of the

Body, but is the body

Of the soul, which is stupid,

You’ve been building a shadow

Of your own, an alternate

To the usual dimmed light

Mistaken for a darkness

The obscuring body throws,

A real shadow for your soul.

Where others might write fiction

Or attempt to show bright truth,

You’ve had your fun pretending

That the fiction of a soul

Could project some dimmer truths

Through these material codes

That cultures make of language—

Ink, print, bits, recorded voice—

All densely compacted waves,

Decaying but more slowly,

You hope, than your flickering

Shadow, the embodied soul.