Posited

The beauty and the horror are the same,

At least if you’re considering the small

And obscure parasitoid wasps, which work

With ovipositors, not with stingers,

To accomplish their grisly successes

As vivisectionists, placing egg plus

Venom and cooperative viruses

In the flesh of a living host, their yolk.

These are often extremely pretty wasps

And never likely to give you trouble,

But even Darwin found them disturbing

For the dark arts of their reproduction.

Here, we only point them out to suggest

That, of life’s mascots, they’re among the best.

Ripple Effect

The happening will ripple
Over all species, unless

Things stop happening. You think?
Happening could stop often

And restart, like a sleeper,
Like a sleeper’s awareness

Between bouts of dreams. Who’d know?
No events, none, arriving,

As if all the trains had stopped
Before arriving again.

Anyway, you were saying?
Happening’s a hummingbird,

Or it will be, eye level,
Checking out your irises

Before it moves on, and then
It will be those little flies,

Whatever they are, not house,
Not fruit, not sand, that show up

As a flutter in your ear,
Quick wings alarming your skin.

And then? And then they’ll move on,
And the happening will spread

Through other species, yours, too.
You’ll catch yourself whispering

To something like a cane toad
Something about how humans

Have made a thing of poison,
And the toad should consider

The sugu and be wise. Once
The happening has passed through

All life’s species, then at last
It will have really happened.

Recreation Sonnet

Wind up creator and trickster.
Creator gives trickster a task.

Creator tells trickster the rules.
Trickster can’t resist breaking them.

Yielding to temptation creates
The world as we know it, which is

Apparently not creator’s
Original intention, but,

However flawed, maybe it is?
Creator punishes trickster.

The human world unleashed by this
Debates what creator wanted

But identifies with trickster.
Tales run down. Wind them up again.

Kronos in the Cave of Nyx

Caves exhale. How folks find them.
People loved living in them,
In the bellies of the beasts.

The contents of a cave’s guts
Can be art, can be grisly,
Can be both, often enough.

The ones without bones or paint
But other undigested
Revenants of detritus

Are the spookiest. Stone masks,
Knives, human hair, modeled skulls,
Splinters, anthropoid statues.

How much inherited mind
Spawned itself from cave stomachs?

Astronomically Complex Inside

Could someone set the learning
Algorithms to learning
The terms of the old debate

Whether it’s better to have
Loved and lost than to have not
Ever loved at all? Train them

And their inscrutable paths
On that conundrum, or pose
The more Biblical version,

Whether, given suffering,
It would be better to be
The stillborn than the rich man

Who has no joy in his wealth,
Inevitably losing,
To death, at the best, it all?

To have been formed in darkness
And departed in darkness
While never aware at all—

Does zero in the balance
Outweigh wild variations
Positive and negative?

You wonder if stars could know,
But for all their long fury
Have they lived? You don’t think so.

Mahpiohanzia

The toddler in her
Gauze ladybug wings
Would stand in the wind

On desert mornings
Or climb park benches
To jump off of them.

Later, planes, gliders,
Helicopter rides,
And hot-air balloons

All failed to assuage
Her disappointment.
Flying’s not flying

With roaring noises,
Not as in good dreams,
When your feet pedal

A bit and your arms
Barely have to move
For you to ascend

With a quiet grace,
All but effortless,
The way anything

That really belongs
To a kind of life
Takes casually

To the medium
For which it was born.
You’ll know the right place

When it lifts you up
And floats you over
Where you’ve been stranded.

Old Hallways

Architecture’s a fun stand-in
For memory, if you grew up
In a part of the world possessed
By large, many-chambered buildings.

Likely, memory palaces
Never entered conversations
In cultures without palaces
Or castles, prisons, towers of flats.

It’s easy to imagine mind
As having attics and hallways
That extend back into darkness
Or lead to forbidden chambers—

Come to think of it, palaces
Notwithstanding, architecture
As metaphor for memory
Tends to the gloomy and gothic—

Memory, after all, goes dark
Or becomes increasingly blurred
And spooky, the more it’s explored.
If you were to make up your own

Metaphor, the architecture
Would combine deceit and ruin,
With a false front or grand facade
For forward-facing memories

While progressive desuetude
Ruled the deeper interiors
Until they opened up again
To roofless, cracked walls on nothing.

Back there, where the weather’s never
The same as outside the front door,
Various shadowy figures squat
In night or hazy morning light,

Living rent-free as animals
And chimeras who wouldn’t know
A splendid memory palace
From a toothless hole in the wall.

Deserter

In memento mori we
Show the inevitable
Loss of life to death weirdly

By symbolizing the loss
With an item that remains,
A skull. You, at the moment,

Unless you are a machine,
Which you may well be, reside
Mostly in and always with

A skull. Memento mori,
The skull that’s been abandoned
To being by awareness,

Has to stand in for the loss
Of you who abandoned it.