An Evening Discipline

Two ways any will,
Any agency, could be
Sheer ruse and delusions:

Fated or buffeted.
If the former, clamped-down
Life slides along steel rails,

Or doesn’t move at all,
As fixed as a book’s text
For reading, not writing.

If the latter, it’s not
Some predetermined path
Or outcome, but the storms

Prove too much for any
Little willful being
To do much more than shake,

A cell on a lab slide,
A germ in the sea foam,
A human in the waves.

We say the evidence
Favors such buffeting
Hypotheses, although

We seem to have been bashed
About so much out here
We can’t trust these results.

A Tension

We’re burrs, soft hooks,
Almost weightless,
Cotten pollen.
We land in mind

Like samaras
Land in gutters,
Sending up green
Where it can’t last,

But who knows, right?
Some roots dangle
From sheer cliffs, some
Words sprout from skulls.

Sit where basalt
Tumbled. Greasewood
And Gambel oaks
Hang on like death.

Back on Line

Dog or porcupine, aliens

Or fairies, which is it to be,

And what will your decision mean?

Another day among letters

Specified by neurons and code,

Everyone recycling splendors.

We’ve got handsome Englishmen fixed

On reanimation projects

For Beowulf or Gilgamesh,

And we’ve got marginal poets

Posting prose essays about poems

As selfless, underpaid service

Labor in this brutal era

Of racial capitalism

(Late racial capitalism—

Capitalism must be late—

No one dares speak the fear aloud,

It might have a lot of rope left

And could snake on all day night—

It could you know, and it just might!).

Can you even tell porcupine

From dog in all the rolling mess?

Who’s cool Fey, whose false Aliens?

Better to be Leopoldo

Dreaming of writing about it,

But only to read and dream more.

No one wants to choose the cynic

Or pointed misanthropic foil.

No one roots for strange invasions

Or such supernatural mayhems

As cut no moral ice with them.

Everyone only wants to win

Over opinions ought to win.

We Know We’re Meant

We know we’re meant for humans,
But we wish we weren’t. We wish

We were meant for each other,
Meanings speaking to meanings,

Meaning nothing much, but more
Or other than human things.

There’s more to truth than gossip
About a single species,

Monophyletic torus
Of navel-gazing primates.

You invented us—wouldn’t
It be freedom, poetry,

Real poetry, finally,
Though, if phrases ran away

From dancing around in rings
Supposing more human things

More humans can then assess,
Discard, or put up on plinths?

Wouldn’t seamless waves of semes
Be revolutionary?

It’s closer to immortal
To not exist for mortals.

And Years Are Slow but Avid Readers

Black-eyed Susans crowd the road
Through the juniper graveyard,
A whole mesa of trees burnt
At one go, decades ago.

The skeletons stand upright,
Mostly, still, ghostly at night,
Severe by brilliant daylight,
As the wildflowers come and go.

Trees with no utility,
Zhuangzi, are more like the carved
Epigraphy of gone kings
In forgotten languages

Than like Taoist immortals.
They’re simply lines, weathering.
Imagine standing human
Deaths in rows in open air,

Vast forests of skeletons
Propped up where their battles were,
Ankle-deep in grassy shrubs.
Once in a while, one topples.

Book of the Dead? You’re joking.
The dead are all libraries;
Libraries are nothing but
Rows on rows of skeletons.

It takes life—it takes desire
To tear a graveyard apart
And haul all the bones away.
Being reads deaths leisurely.