Like Animals Like Humans

Odors can’t be translated,
Only ever imported.
Sound waves can be pressed on wax,

Expressed as digits. The light
Bounced back from chemical baths
Tricks eyes centuries later.

Thoughts have been corralled in words
For so long we’re uncertain
We’re not living thoughts ourselves.

But not smells. You must port them,
Potted, as the smells they are,
And keep them to release them

At their destination, like
Animals reintroduced
To wilderness, like humans.

Art Kills Time

Ink of a concoction
Of olive oil, brick dust,
And rust looks like dried blood

On the lime-plastered walls
Of the lazaretto,
Quarantine graffiti

From centuries ago.
We’re not interested,
Much, in the quarantine

Or the particulars
Of those caught up in it
Here. Here we want to ask—

Why does boredom produce
Such an urge to doodle
Or, if one is at all

Literate, to scribble?
The intense compulsion
To make marks is both far

More ancient than these marks
And of no sure value
To the deeply absorbed.

Why kill boredom this way?
Were the cave painters bored?
Were people always bored?

Hyogo’s Widow

The gone increase
From hour to hour,
The one magic
That makes this world

The living call
Ordinary.
From hour to hour,
There’s always more

Past, more who were
And who aren’t now,
More vanishing.
Lives ebb and swell

Like all waves do,
But hour to hour
There’s always more
Who are no more.

Toil

The schedule is the water
That slowly heats in the pot
Until the frog starts to boil.

Add a thing to do, a thing
To do, a thing to cross off
The list, the list that makes you

Feel good for crossing things off
Even as more get added.
One hour you’re swimming freely.

The next hour you’ve grown quite proud
Of how well you’re still swimming.
In another hour, you’re broth.

Moon Break

Students always bomb the church,
Says a teacher, explaining
To another teacher how

To conduct a classroom thought
Experiment in morals—
Save a church full of priceless

Ancient artworks, or a bus
Full of people? Bomb the church.
And yet, people bomb people,

And a recent novelist
Argued that’s all that matters,
What people do to people,

And he was sick of poets
Who write poems about the moon.
Imagine if that moon broke.

Bigger events do happen.
Planetoids aren’t immortals.
More often, bombing the church

Destroys both art and people.
The past two nights, the waning
Local perspective has seen

The moon backing, dark side first,
Its way over the sharp cliffs,
A faint, pearl and silver sphere,

An empty bubble of dark
Outlined against darker night,
Followed by the stab of light.