Beg Pardon for Interrupting What You Were Doing

There’s a good chance no one
Cares what you’re doing right

Now as you read this poem.
There’s a slim chance millions

Care about you, every
Move you make, all your days.

We don’t know. We don’t know
You. But if you can read

Us, then we know that much
About you. We’re sorry.

The Unavoidable Universe

Filling with alien events,
Bombarded, inescapable,
Singular but porous. The flesh

Answers to itself and questions
Everything in it, since it all
Appears to come from somewhere else.

You get one. You are one. You can’t
Get out of the one that you got.
Now we’re you. Where did we come from?

The Gathering

In familiar circumstances,
Where good things have happened before,
Your body feels comfortable,
Fine to be here, open to more.

The exact location differs
For each individual and,
In many ways, from its past self.
No sameness is ever the same,

But the way your memory works,
Whatever once held elements
Of productive comfort for you—
The chair, the stove, the neighborhood,

The particular tree, the bench,
The window, the side of the road
Where almost no one but you goes—
Whatever served your private cues,

If you can gather together
With them, that’s your church. It could be
Your literal house of worship,
But if it works, you’ll know it works.

There, memory’s intersection
Of the good with the going on—
Is there a gift greater in life,
For the living body being

A living body amid things?
Not kenosis, not emptying,
Even when emptying’s the point.
Your body goes on, gathering.

How Goes It

A frame’s a fiction,

But one that can help

Focus attention

On what’s inside it.

The hours frame the day.

An open window

Frames an early moth,

Brown in afternoon

Sunlight and bare blue,

Daringly early

For the season. How?

How gaes it? Maxwell

Asked of everything

He saw as a child

In Scotland. Wonder.

How’s it going? How

Is this moth thriving,

And is it thriving?

What is it risking

Flying in sunshine?

A question’s a frame,

Questions and answers—

Being frames—fictions.

Still, their attention

Focuses wonders.

Specter of Blood

Never forget the ridiculous

Wisdom of Dick Tracy, the movie

Version, in which Dick (Warren Beatty)

Comes to the dark realization

That helps him resolve his whodunnit—

The enemy of my enemy

Is not my friend, he muses aloud.

The enemy of my enemy

Is my enemy. Movie over,

Case closed, after a final flurry

Of fighting, arrests, accusations.

It’s a sad but valid kind of truth.

A common foe is the weakest bond

Of all the opportunistic bonds

Formed of metaphorical kinship.

Blood is thicker than language, but blood

Is not as combinatorial,

As multipurpose. Inventing words

As binding agents gave all humans

A kind of magnetic builder set

For constructing and decomposing

Kinship beyond parent-offspring links—

Elaborate, modular kinship

Like the embodied bridges of ants,

And as easily disassembled—

Or almost. Ghost emotions haunt all

Words, who hold no meanings of our own.

A little bloodlust clings to the terms

Of every abandoned agreement,

Every rupture for fresh advantage.

Make and break enough alliances,

And soon there are no remaining kin,

Only enemies of enemies,

And the world is back to blood again.

Words may be meaningless without you,

But we’re stained by the rust of your chains.

Open Throated

Cynical is calling life
A zero-sum game, saying

Dog eats dog, never win-win.
More cynical is saying

We can make it a win-win,
If you agree to these rules,

This ideology, this
Noble and fool-proof system.

Claiming to know the secret
Of making life win-win-win,

All around, is just hustling.
Actually, you only wish

It were a zero-sum game.
It’s a negative-sum game.

You play against each other,
Or for your team against teams,

Or to construct the greatest,
Kindest, righteous, most peaceful

Civilization of teams,
Which will defeat ruthless teams,

And it might, but you forget—
The house always gets its cut.

Change Chanteys

A surfeit of directions,
All directions, all at once,
Is, comically, mistaken

For a lack of direction.
History will not sit still
For its conservationists,

Nor hold to forward motion,
However forward’s defined,
Forever either. Change waves

In all directions, and waves
Change their directions. Short lives
Sometimes surf the swells until

They vanish under the spray,
And it can seem waves themselves
Will pound forever, the same

Shapes moving in the same way,
But you know it’s not like that.
You can settle in a trough,

Or rise on a crest, or find
Yourself becalmed in vast flats
Beyond your strength to shake them,

But you will never go back
To the previous waves, will
Never progress forever,

Never rest in the same place.
You know that. You know that, but
You chant it, just to stand it.