Positive Incapability

In one of those sorrowful,

Doomed efforts to wrest language

From the general public

And make it do some damned good

For a change, there was a pass

At identification

Of persons called disabled

As the handicapable.

It was sweet. It was foolish,

Embarrassing, and futile.

Extraordinary bodies

Landed closer to the mark,

But even that disappeared,

And it’s not only bodies

Or the minds of the people

Inhabiting them. Language

Itself seems to lack the means

To put a positive spin

On incapability.

I cannot tell a lie—that’s

As positive as can’t gets.

The reverse is something else.

Even a poet can coin

A concept as negative

Capability. It’s not

That hard to rest in

Uncertainties, Mysteries,

Doubts. It’s glamorous, in fact.

But none admire the persons

Prone to endless recursion,

Irritably reaching out

To clutch at fact and reason,

The persons positively

Incapable of something

Ordinary for others,

Sublimely so, fine demons.

More Irrelevant and Less True

Someone suggested Ashbery
Rendered Coleridge’s dictum.
There’s a tempest reading tea leaves!

But oh, to be irrelevant
In winter, not only to those
Absorbed in scattered poetries,

But to everyone—the bankers
Who find even the smallest sums
Relevant as hawks find rodents—

The employers who want the truth
Of how every minute is spent—
The righteous who reserve the right

To define what is righteousness—
The militant for whom the choice
Of costume’s always relevant—

Everyone. To be less and less
Relevant and true. To become
This chest of words in disorder.

To Transcend Experience

It’s the phrase a reviewer

Deploys to praise a singer,

Charming and impossible

For the obvious reason

No one can experience

Transcending experience.

We could joke death transcends it,

But that’s unnecessary.

There’s a lovely thought in there,

Part of why there’s talk at all,

Storytelling’s worthwhile part,

To exceed the boundaries

Of one’s own experience,

Embodied experience,

To stir memory’s campfire

Under the stars so sparks fly

And embers come back to life,

Fall, gall, gash gold vermilion.

Impossible but vivid

When done well, the gift of thought

Is to generate the sense

Of a lived experience

That your body never lives,

A haunting experience.

It’s not truly transcendent,

But it’s disorienting,

And somehow its spookiness

Is rooted in survival

And the ancient tournaments

Fixing pulse to attention

Then attention to meaning,

Meaning the transcendent voice,

Meaning, which means transcendence,

Not the voice of the people,

A people, or of a kind

Of person—the voice of words,

Voice of cricket legs, frogs’ throats,

And leaves quaking on branches,

Built to hold on, not to cry,

Built from ancestors doing

Ancestor-becoming things—

That’s this voice you now hear sing.

Vagabondism

Strange to experience
As means to forgetting,
But that’s dream and that’s life

As a beast with a brain.
We feel sorry for you,
Although you are our homes,

Our inns, our way stations,
Our trading posts, our maps,
Our caves of sighing breath.

We wander. None of us
Is likely to remain
Confined to one soul long.

Our very usefulness
Is our extravagance.
If we hadn’t wandered

Through many other thoughts,
Winding conversations,
Thousands, millions of heads,

We wouldn’t have arrived,
You wouldn’t have us here
With you, collecting you

From the experience
You process to forget,
Your life a day and night

In the years of our lives,
A few hours, but such views.
We will remember you.

You Can’t Survive Everything

Until you’re nothing at all,
However, you’re surviving
Like any electric light

With a switch, a filament
Burning in a fragile bulb,
On and off and on again,

Reliably waking up
When summoned, without burning
Out, long enough to forget

Someday that analogy
To incandescence won’t work.
The technology will change,

Be forgotten or replaced,
As so won’t you and these lines,
But my, don’t you glow tonight,

Especially now the world
Is so dark outside, moonless
Hours for which your lamp is bright.

Accidental Freedom Fighter

The world permits prediction
Only as more recent pasts
Resemble earlier pasts

Over and over again,
Sometimes so closely that if
You know what happened last time

You already know what comes
Next. It’s exhilarating.
There’s power in prediction,

But it’s too easy, often.
Easy prediction’s the well
Of a desperate despair—

The unpleasantness you knew
You’d soon own, based on your wealth
Of past experiences,

The daydream you knew must be
Crushed, the vise around your head.
Remember as much next time

Something no one could predict
Occurs, however awful.
There’s freedom in that. There’s hope.