The Good Part of the Dream

You sit in sunlit morning
And borrowed hovel, thinking,
Those colors are vivid, grand,

Thrown by the sun through plastics,
Leaves, stained glass, and paint, the art
Of happenstance. The wealthy

Are in the news by name, next
To pictures of suffering
Among anonymous poor,

Who actually do have names,
But who cares? You don’t. You do
Have a name unknown as theirs,

But right now nothing much hurts.
You’re relaxed. You’ve fed. You watch
The sun light the window dust,

Thinking, this is the good part
Of the dream. If you wake up
This moment, you’ll wake up pleased.

Outboard, the Running of the Souls

Maybe you only note
Our surface, this boring
Talk, these chattering waves.

What in the depths is more
Significant than that?
Is it since you’re a lake,

In a sense, a glitter
Facing the atmosphere,
A slow churn in the dark?

Given you hold drowned towns,
Suicides, sunken boats
You know you can’t cough up

Until you’re dredged and drained
And disappear, you think
What’s eerie about you

Is you, and depth is soul.
Depth isn’t soul. It’s dark.
These surface waves run souls.

Indivisible

Zero, zifra, sunya, not
Really a number is it?
More like a concept you need

To make the numbers manage
To fit math to the cosmos
They fit so spookily well.

Zero is the spookiness,
The set with nothing in it,
Without which nothing happens,

The fulcrum, the no math’s land,
Inside of which no functions,
No operations proceed,

Outside of which all functions
Depend on its existence,
Knowledge of nonexistence,

Silence nonnegotiable,
Indivisible, concept
Nothing countable enters,

Returning only error,
The impossible, the real
You hold in your skull, is not.

Ten Thousand Horses Standing Mute

Still send a message.
If living, they breathe.
If golem horses,
They can still charge.
If clay, they’re still signs.

A lively pony,
A wild whinnying
Colt in the grasslands,
Would be something else,
Better, more charming.

But down in the tomb
Sealed against light,
Ten thousand horses
Standing mute contain
All the ghosts you’ll need

To break out meanings—
Meanings stored in them,
Meanings that you bring
To them like rare grass
Reanimating

The past that brought them
Down into this tomb.
They’re deeply human
Brutes, these ten thousand
Horses, standing mute.

Stalker Roach

Compose yourself.
The fearsome bug
That follows you,
Climbs in your mouth,

Invades your cells,
Chews on your thoughts,
May be as small
As an angel,

Large as a moth,
Ambassador
Of life keeping
Itself from death.

This is kinship
Crawling your sheets,
Loathsome monster
In your wonder.

Saturn Scratching

Our crabby gods
Reflect our souls,
The souls of names
Attached to sores

Rubbed raw by names
That tore and tear
Skin from context
To discontent.

Names aren’t the whole
Of it. Hunger
Preceded words
Three billion years.

But hungry words
Made ghostly gods
Ill-tempered, prone
To tear and curse.

Most Change Is More or Less the Same

It’s just so muddy, mingled,
So middling, such a mish-mash
Of movement over movement,

Up and down and back and forth,
Amounting to mere muddle,
Pretty patterns at the most,

But mostly a wash. Not bad,
Entirely, which is the point.
Not even the whole of life

On Earth has one direction.
It spins out complexities
And collapses. There’ll be more.