Scrub Pine and Oak

Every relationship you have
With each other seems to tear you

Down until only loneliness
Unites you, and then it’s too late.

Maybe that’s what the hermits want.
Only the solitary love

Other humans wholly; only
Solitude loves humanity.

Of course not. You need company.
You ache for company. You die

For company. You have nothing
In common with company, but

You pretend, pretend heartily,
Tearing yourselves down to the studs,

At which point you all look the same,
Unrenovated and lonely.

Are Any Beings This Anxious on Any Other Planets?

The usual, single-use
Plastic bags litter the grass
Along the side of the road.

No, wait. Not plastic, that’s snow,
Scraps of snow that fell last week,
Just patches now, blinding white

As store bags in the damp grass,
Not grey like old snow in town.
The sun shines down, serenely,

It would seem, on them, refreshed.
Well, that’s alright then. It’s snow.
It’s not unnatural, no.

Ex Hale

Alright, let them out now,
Let them all run back home.
Look at them go! Billions,

A hundred billion, more
Than that maybe. A cloud
Of them, molecular,

Vaporous memories
Racing around the globe
Like high volcanic ash,

And the living ones think
They feel a little bit
Haunted. Oh, you think so?

Data Hunger

Dark expanses split the crowded planes.
There’s yet another war going on
It’s hard to witness inside of you.

Testify. Information is not
Quite the same thing as life, and hunger
Does not care for data in the least.

There’s a kind of contest difficult
To observe with the usual tools,
Since all the signs themselves are involved.

The best you can do involves likeness,
Metaphor, analogy—you know
How lichens involve combinations

Between at least two kingdoms of life?
That itself is already just likeness,
But consider hunger and data

As more fundamental than kingdoms
While equally entangled in lives.
Now consider ideas, jumping genes,

BovB, libraries, conspiracies,
Retroviral germline infections—
Genes, viruses, notions—quasi lives,

Close to entirely information,
Lacking their own metabolism,
Lacking any real hunger, and yet

They spread, hitching rides on hungry lives.
And then consider hungry lives, cells,
Pumps, local entropy reversals.

These are even more mysterious.
They depend on hereditary
Information but no specific

Set or means of getting it. Hunger
Generates data that surfs on it,
As if lichen’s fungal component

Generated the algae that broke
Off to end up in other lichens.
You see? To explain any of this

In language is to take data’s side,
Viral facts, crowded planes of ideas
The dark expanses mutely divide.

Cast a Cold Lie

Take no word said on death as valid.
No one has died who said or wrote words.
As urgent as it is to pretend,

To try to talk it, story it through,
From imaginary beginning
Clean past the bitter end, it isn’t

Ever ended with words left in it—
Gold obols, last wills and testaments,
Tombstones—someone never dead said them.

The Same

It updates continually,

If somewhat jerkily. That’s why

It reminds you of journeying,

Until you recall journeying

Is a literal part of it,

This scale-invariant fractal

That contains your experience.

You keep searching for perspective,

But the basic shape stays the same

At all scales. You divide yourself.

One part of you tries to be still,

As still as possible, at least,

To figure out exactly what

Is changing while staying the same.

The other part of you sets off

On the sequel to Down by Law,

Taking any path through the swamp,

Never mind what state you end in.