Bookstore Fantasy Aisle

Grant them a material
Existence as conceptions
Created from memories
And language for solid things,

Then, in a sense, they’ve planted
That tree growing inside you,
You know the one, the knowledge
Of mind, which is only mind.

Other people watch people
For the people, the fusions
Of bodies with mind they are,
But you focus on the mind,

The way its branches hang out
Of their mouths, eyes, and ears, hands
Trailing twig tips like willows,
How they move like potted plants,

How they converse without roots,
Without mycelia, how
They tilt and sway their crowns,
How they’re many growing one,

How one is part of the mind,
One of the lies of the mind,
Which isn’t one, but legion,
How the wind coaxes the leaves.

Erasure’s Resistance

Job’s extraordinary urge
To obliterate himself,
To die, to not have been born,

To never have been conceived—
For the date that began him
To have never existed,

Swallowed by the calendar,
World that never had a Job
To know of, to contemplate—

This seems more than suffering,
More than only a death wish.
This is an angry protest.

That there could be such a world
That could suggest a fable
Of any Job’s existence

Is itself sheer wickedness—
Better no world at all than
A world this inconsistent.

The Deep Reader’s Groove

The problem with re-reading
Is that a single reader
Over time becomes more like
Any other committee,
Prone to return to the mean,
To sanded-down consensus.

There’s an assumption the depth
Of understanding deepens
As it wears into a groove,
And claims of finding new things
Through re-readings are frequent
And may be true, but a groove
Is also increasingly
Confining, narrowed, and smoothed.

Appropriate

Everything you take,
Every word borrowed

From someone human,
From someone’s language,

Amounts to, for you,
Appropriation,

No matter whether
Whatever you stole

You inherited
From your ancestors,

Found under a rock
Or spotted tramping

Through a tradition
Not remotely yours.

Heritage is all
Gifts, thefts, gifts of thefts,

And in the corners
Of the human world—

War zones, prisons, camps,
Reeking factories,

That windowless mill
In Pompeii’s ruins

Where someone enslaved
Tromped with a donkey

In a circling rut
Until both were dead

And quickly replaced—
What’s inherited

But theft, and what’s theft
But inherited,

And who can say where
Their phrases came from,

Who can know all their
Ancestors have done?

Whatever Happened to Cicero

Eloquence itself was just a beast
Who dithered and alternated sides,
Who wanted to conserve old systems,

Who popularized philosophy,
Made a career of prosecution
And defense of questionable men,

Who gloried in purchasing the home
Of the most fabulously wealthy
Man in all inequitable Rome,

Who fled and returned, fled and returned,
Playing the games of the powerful
Prone to turns murdering each other,

Accusing each other of murder,
Finally caught fleeing yet again
And eloquently baring its neck.