Find and Uncover, Then Gather in Place

If you really wish to bring
In as much as possible
Of your world as you find it,

Then maybe don’t determine
In advance what you should be
Finding. Your experience

May be low on characters,
On adventures of its own.
Of course, feel liberated

By fiction, by any art,
To invent worlds for yourself,
But those aren’t as you found them.

What are you encountering?
It could well be stunningly
Rich in text and tedium.

You could be someone who’s lost
In an endless wilderness
Of fragmentary voices

And angelic abstractions.
Yes, as much as possible
Of the dumpster where you live

Might not appeal to others.
Can you dare to not appeal
To those whose admiration

Might be the only reason
What you found by diligence
Might be preserved beyond you?

Do your best to save your work
And plan its preservation.
But it won’t be up to you

Whether preservation works.
Leave us your experience
Of the world as you found it,

Even if it lacks appeal,
Character, faith, enchantment.
You’ve left a world, a new world—

Let others do what they will
With what you found, when and if
Anyone ever finds it.

From the Book of Obsolescence

The career of paid mourner,
That is, funeral cryer,
Has a longer tradition
In China than in the West
Where it’s never now practiced.
Nonetheless, the western name
For such a professional
Is etymologically
Quite a piece of packaging—

The root word, meros, was share,
Part, lot, as in, one’s fair share,
One’s portion, one’s allotment.
Adjacent to that, moros,
One’s share in the sense of fate,
One’s lot in life. Typical
Figurative extension,
From human social contracts
To the way the cosmos works—

Gods and saints like prayers and praise
And insist on gratitude,
Since humans of high standing
Like and insist on those things.
Apportioning resources
Is what societies do,
So surely somewhere someone
Doles out resources to you
From the cosmic warehouse, too.

By classical Greek we have Moira
As name of one of the fates.
Meanwhile, from their word for speech
And discourse, logos, the Greeks
Coined the all-purpose suffix,
-Logy, useful everywhere
For the study or knowledge
Of whatever’s so suffixed.
Technically, moirology

Ought to mean the field of fate.
Somehow, however, it popped
In the nineteenth century
As formal nomenclature
For a funeral cryer.
Doesn’t the term remind you
Of one of those packages
Containing what you ordered
In some strange set of boxes?

What a service that would be,
What a person that would be
To hire for your funeral—
A scientist of your fate,
Personal moirologist,
Explaining your cosmic share,
The dimensions of your lot,
And then rending their garments
Over you, loudly weeping.

Danez Pulls the Trigger

Sometimes familiar phrases,

Applied in surprise contexts,

Can make those contexts explode.

Feel your mental furnishings

Suddenly slide to starboard,

For instance, when Danez Smith

Refers to a perfect perm,

The shade of the master’s face,

And means Michelle and Barack.

This isn’t just irony.

This is how expectations

Can build force like tectonics—

Were it Nancy and Ronnie,

Even Hillary and Bill,

How typical—the hairstyles

Of the tightly wound spouses

Of our plantation’s rulers,

Colonial, alien—

But the depth charge in the poem

Comes from Michelle’s perfection

And Barack’s firm mastery.

You could say it’s in service

To irony—My president was Black

Who exercised gross powers

Of war and hegemony

While we danced in happiness—

And, in this case, that’s for sure,

But it has other uses.

There is no expectation

About what kind of context

A word or phrase belongs in

That doesn’t store potential

Energy. Polysemy

Is infinite at the start,

And binding terms to contexts

Begins their definition

By constraining possible

Meanings—notice constraining

But not eliminating.

Every word’s under pressure

From conventional uses.

That pressure has energy.

That energy can be used.