The Black Hound Never Barks

The appropriate model
Is not a Nostradamus,
But Holmes. No one, actually,

Prophesies a real future.
At best you predict some facts
You’ll find out about the past.

Not Here You Don’t

Audible, invisible,
The elk with their bird-like calls
Are out there, beyond the oaks.

You want to see them, don’t you?
Maybe you’d like to shoot one?
Fond of a handsome trophy?

Tired of eating free-range beef
From the mesas down below?
Well, nope. Elk birds here are words.

Corpsing

A chaos of graves in the rain

Caroline Blackwood might call this,

The snowmelt running streaky tears

Down the muddy shore to the waves,

The aspens standing awkwardly,

Half-dressed teenagers at a wake.

The wind is on stage, flamboyant,

Defiant, aging, but still fierce,

Though the two men angling have left,

Leaving no audience but ducks,

And these words, and the waves the wind

Harangues and creates with its false

Eulogies. God, who wrote this wind

With its cold, dramatic gestures,

For what? We’re all waves here, the wind,

Aspens, ducks, and words included.

Amnesia or stage fright seizes

The scene. The wind falls still as death.

The Continuous Blues

What if the apocalypse
Proved just another new world
And not even all that new,

Another variation
On humans being human,
More mind blooming from more skulls

And assorted cognitive
Prosthetic accoutrements
Burning up fresh fuel sources?

How dull not to end at all.

Specific Densities

Lemurs sing rhythmically,
With beats, as humans do,
And the distance between

These species, filled with songs
And vocalizations
Lacking regular beats

Among intervening
Species, convinces those
Who collect the data,

Rhythmic singing evolved
Independently. Now,
If only one could ask

The lemurs how they feel
About moons and seasons,
Dawns and dusk, then compare

To how, perhaps, gibbons
Or mountain gorillas
Think about those same things,

Maybe they’d grant a sense
Of what rhythmic singing
Does to a body’s mind.

But really, it wouldn’t
Help much. Singing humans
All answer differently,

And every answer comes
Coded in shifting and
Specific densities.