Finds

One way to love almost
Any poem, any kind
Of phrasing—on the page,

In your ear, in your mouth,
In your hands, in the air—
Is to bite down, hang on,

Live with it, just to keep
Reciting, reciting
It over and over,

No matter what it is—
Doggerel, rebellion,
Beaux arts, hymn, graffiti—

Since, in recitation,
You can search for more poems
In each one of those words.

No One Left and No One Came

The best haunting, the most haunting kind,

Is the human emptiness. Thomas

Caught it perfectly at Adlestrop,

But any wayside pause, suburban

Rural, urban, where people should be,

Where your memory expects people,

But there are no people anywhere,

Just a bare platform and grassy weeds,

Works. Once you’ve tasted it, even once,

That departure gate with no agents,

No passengers, just sun coming up

Over the tarmac at the airport,

The hotel lobby without a clerk,

Dust motes for an army of angels,

The gas station bus stop in the bush,

No bus for hours, no one to get on,

And even you aren’t waiting, just there,

For some reason, empty in your eyes,

Farther and farther, you can’t forget

That taste of being haunted, no one

Left, no one coming, coin on your tongue.

Son of the Jetsons

Happy Birthday, George Jetson? The internet thinks he was born on July 31, 2022    ~ headline

Reruns watched from hospital beds

Carried everything you hated

About the world. Laugh tracks, dumb jokes,

Inscrutable stupidity.

At home, TV was the boob tube,

Supposed to rot the moral mind

And kept off in favor of hymns

Wailed from Bible Belt radio.

But who could help the hospital?

What was there but broadcast TV

For a broken kid in traction?

Hated the Jetsons. Hated them,

But recalled the touchstones, later,

Especially the flying cars.

It was supposed to be your world,

Your family as it was then,

Technologies as would be yours.

At both ends now, opinions say

It rotted the expectations.

That the technology would change,

Dominant mores stay frozen—

Nuclear whiteness, flying cars,

Homemakers carefree with robots?

Did you really expect such rot?

You did not.

What Else Could a Cathedral Be

Monet’s Rouen facades,
Thirty blast furnaces
Pictured by the Bechers,

The first obsessively
Remaking the one scene
Somehow to evoke it

Or whatever it was
He felt there was to make,
Discovery being,

As it always has been,
Creation and capture,
The second just taking

Black and white impressions
Of thirty different scenes
Scattered in five countries

All of blast furnaces,
Any discoveries
As similarities

Neatly framed, side by side.
Even without color
Or the texture of oils,

The blast furnaces look
A bit like cathedrals,
Which makes Monet’s Rouens,

Assembled together
In reproductions, seem
A bit like prediction.

News of Wars

All the hurt and the harm
People do to people
Can stagger a body

Contemplating at peace.
You are glad for the peace.
It glides its wide river

Between you and that shore
Where smoke rises with screams.
You imagine yourself

As a body that’s torn,
But you know that bodies
Must be willing to tear,

And it’s so hard to think
How that willingness works,
How deliberate harm

Comes together with hurt,
At intimate as sex
And as aloof as porn,

Gnawing like starvation,
But if starvation were
Both to starve and to eat.

Cut It Out

When Wendell Berry

Wrote himself how to

Make a poem, he ruled

Out electric wires.

Stay away from screens.

But he said nothing

Against paper, pen,

Pencils, typewriters.

Silly Wendell. Text

Is text. If you want

To be a poet,

You don’t need any

Kind of instrument.

Compose in your head.

Some poets still do.

Stay away from sounds,

Ink technologies,

Dictionaries, words—

You only need one.

If you know the word

Poem, then you know one.

Inner Lives

They roar by on bikes,
Wander down the street,
Sit watching TV,

Gather at the beach,
All those maundering
Minds of inner lives.

You may know a few,
A bit about them
From conversations,

But the only ones
You’ve ever known well
You found in fictions.

It’s complete fiction
That you need to know
Someone’s inner mind

To understand them,
To believe in them,
Find them convincing.

Mostly you predict,
You anticipate
Familiar patterns.

You don’t often know
What’s in them, or what’s
Not in you in them.