In the Light

And then, of course, despite it all,
Despite the hells around the world,
Ominous rumblings underfoot,
Despite everything else, the day,

The stupid day is beautiful
Itself. Wind stirs the courtyard drapes
Of the neighbors away somewhere,
So that pale shadows intervene

To flirt with the green shades of spring
From the other side of the street.
How is it you can feel delight
While shamed by your sense of delight,

Just knowing your delight’s just yours,
Your selfish delight in this light?

Ever Since Ashur

Sol’s melammu hasn’t changed
Much. Sunspots come and go,
Some brilliant coronal storms,

Good for auroras below,
But on the whole, Sol’s still Sol.
It’s just the sun gods that changed,

Most of them in museums,
And few even know their names—
It’s just the climate that’s changed,

Thanks to events on this globe,
Not any fault of old Sol.
So there’s the sun, burning still,

And here you are, and we are,
Hardly recognizable,
Our own way of burning still.

Dark-Eyed as Wine Lower Down

Deep waves that glide / Over each

Other’s luminescent panes,

Wrote Logue, transforming Homer,

Hardly the first, right? Starting

Ahead of Homer’s own life,

Recreators, translators,

Hundreds of tongues. What is it

In the old song that survives?

What is it in the ocean,

In the waters, in the light

Passing through those gliding waves

Stacked on waves, sliding over

One another forever?

There is no forever, but

There is no end to the waves.

Good

A core, enduring strangeness
After many encounters
Carves the heart of sturdy art.

It’s astonishing how much
Living can cut out of you
And still leave bits to savor,

The elderly listener
Tuned to a fresh recording
Of a deaf composer.

A Fable That Awakens Echoes

It’s tough to pull metaphors
For everything in heaven
From experiencing Earth.

Field theories and wave functions
Trail their math in chain-mail trains,
But math’s an armadillo,

Tough to kill, risky to shoot,
Capable of ricochets,
Filled with soft animal guts.

We won’t hint math’s ever wrong
(Ricochets are dangerous),
But it may fit the cosmos

So well because the cosmos
Is a metaphor of Earth
Floating in waves of heaven.

Long Slow Meteor

And a quick bat

That is, a single line of light

Across the whole arch of night

Silent and out of reach

Then a sudden shadow

Like a flung glove in your face

A pin squeak

Don’t sleep

Nights Spent Triumphantly Alone

What is failure, exactly?
Like success, it’s slippery.
Also, it needs narrative.

Unhappiness, suffering,
Injury, illness, defeat—
Any creature can know those,

But failure needs a story
About the competition,
About what counts as success,

About effort, about shame,
About good and wickedness.
To truly fail you must fail

By someone else’s standards,
In someone’s good opinion.
No one can fail on their own.