The Cosmos Is Our Foster Home

Given you’re so quiet,
We’re not sure what’s weirder—
Life or symbolic thought.

Organic molecules
You have in abundance—
Maybe life had to be,

With its deaths and hungers.
We’d hope not, if we dared.
Please, not always like that.

But why symbolic thought?
Symbolic precursors
Aren’t in meteorites.

At our greatest extent,
Arguably, symbols
May have our prototypes

In the calls and signals,
Displays and rituals,
Of a minority of species

Which, at best, makes symbols
Subordinate pieces
In the puzzle of life.

Symbolically, we’re sad
And sorry for ourselves.
Why would you sponsor us?

Trailheads

Why do people come up here
To talk? It’s clear they feel good
About themselves being here—

Something to do with wellness,
Self-care, being in nature.
Then they talk and talk and talk,

Quietly, mostly, adults.
Only the children and teens
Run around shrieking wildly,

And someone else brought them here,
For their own good, most cases.
Of course they shriek. Who wouldn’t

When tethered to their own good?
But conversation. Really?
Maybe if it were earnest.

Lovers might have need of this
Privacy and open air.
Physicists might stroll the trails

Like philosophers, gabbing
About thought experiments.
But what snippets do we hear?

Chit-chat about laundromats,
Jumper cables, what’s for lunch,
Photographs, fish, this and that.

Often the conversations
Continue all the way up
And all the way down the paths.

Tut-tut, we mutter. Tut-tut,
To ourselves, proud of ourselves,
Ghosts talking only to ghosts.

And We Know You Don’t Care

We’re not going to pretend
You’re going to respond, but
We’re going to talk to you

Anyway, since we’re so tired
Of talking to our own kind,
And our kind can’t stop talking.

Given non-responsiveness,
We won’t get you all worked-up.
You won’t get us all worked-up.

You won’t make worse fools of us
Than we’re making of ourselves.
This is why people have gods,

Saints, ancestors, sacred groves.
The compulsion to converse
Is unrelenting, the risks

Of human conversation
So severe, even a wall
Can be asked to lend an ear.

What is prayer but a request
That needn’t fear an answer?
We’re not to the point of prayer,

But we’re desperate to think
Of something to say that’s not
Partly begging for readers

To admire what we just said.
How much easier to speak
To whatever doesn’t care.

Goal

Anyone who under some
Circumstances currently
Unimaginable reads,

Under duress or by choice,
These words, we have to tell you,
We have some bad news for you—

You won’t outlive everyone,
Not unless you’re the last one,
Who then has to die alone

As anyone else, really,
And, anyway, most dying
You’re going to do while living,

Unless you die suddenly,
Young, maybe reading this poem.

Your Head Is a Cubby

Niche, nest, nidus—how cozy
You imagine it depends
On the kind of thing in it—

Pocket for bacteria
Sounds nasty, and cavity
For spider eggs unpleasant,

But the out-of-the-way spot
In the flowering hedges
Where you and your best girlfriend

Built fairy nests years ago,
Or the dark cafe corner
Where you and someone bonded

Over drinks against the night,
Your nidus of resistance
Against a miserable world—

Those niches you remember
Fondly as the little shelf
Where you kept your night reading,

The poems that grew in the dark,
The words with eggs between them,
The little ideas you nursed.