Not Painting Pictures

Not one car, not one deer,
Not one cow, not one hare.
It’s gotten awfully

Quiet here. Not one fly,
Not one bee. The eagle
Disappeared hours ago.

Rocks, grass, and cottonwoods
On a dark afternoon,
A few dead leaves shaking

From one cottonwood branch.
What are we doing here
That’s meaningful pattern?

All these simple features,
What are we doing here
If not painting pictures?

Mission Statement

You’ve lived a world
Unique to you.
You can’t share it,
Only live it.

You can’t keep it,
Only live it.
We’re messengers
From nearby worlds,

One ghost circus
Among many
Passing through you,
Unique to you.

Us you can share,
If not keep. That’s
What we’re here for.
That’s what we do.

And Another One

Take a sprawl of basalt cobbles
Tumbling down a sandstone cliff-wall,
Some of them as big as cabins—

How is this one different from that?
Every one’s a polyhedron
Cleaved from the same cooling lava

That oozed out and over the land
Like a single thing, one stone wave,
Until it cooled enough to break,

Thousands of years ago. Now, brush
And junipers anchor themselves
On these lichen-speckled cobbles.

How does change breed so much sameness?
How is one stone different from this?

The Silent Branches

If you are in a state
And in no way aware
Of being in that state,

Insofar as the state
Itself is in question,
Your lack of awareness

Of it strongly suggests
It’s not a conscious state.
Sometimes, watching mule deer

Run ahead of black cows
Rumbling through a meadow,
The bird on the bare branch

May quit singing, and you
May suddenly become
Aware that the bird was

Singing there for some time.
That was your subconscious
You recall but can’t be.

Goldbarth’s Bird Rose

The brain’s a surveyor.
You can’t keep it focused
On anything too long.

It needs to make models
And continually
Update bits and corners.

Meanwhile, the shadows move.
To you, they seem to jump.
The world is a songbird

Foraging in the skull
Of a horse. It will fly
And surprise the poet—

A bird from a horse skull!
Later, he will use it
As an image for joy

At a tough day’s closure,
Compare it to the brain.
But the brain’s not the bird,

Not even the cupped skull.
The brain is what’s startled
When the world informs it

It needs to change its mind,
Its model of a world
Without birds within skulls.

Emission Statement

In this infinite messiness
Of finite messes, the ocean,
That is, of big and little waves,

The lives of the bodies in mind
And the mind in all its bodies
Pile up into rollers sometimes,

And it’s true that a drowned coast’s surf
Carving away at concave cliffs
Differs from the Sargasso Sea

Napping through brutal, long doldrums,
But both extremes are persistent,
Persistently self-similar,

The life of mind in a body,
The life of the body in mind.
They chew at each other—waves, waves—

And if the body, as it seeps,
Seems messier, invasive mind
Keeps more rot in when it stagnates.

Sometimes you’re battered by desire,
Sometimes you float for lack of it,
Slowly, wishing weather would change—

The hedonists in the breakers
And the monks on bare, parched decks—all
Small pulsings of more or less mess.

The Need for Magic

What’s responsible for this?
This species doesn’t just wish
For the things each needs to thrive,

Doesn’t just plan and create
And coordinate at scale.
Your being holds a longing

For existence to not be
As existence always is,
A common, persistent wish

For the patterns you count on,
The rules on which you rely
To be ruptured, to vanish.

Some are just superstitious,
Including some atheists.
Some are downright malicious,

Both accusing and hoping
Witchery and sorcery
Seethe everywhere in the dark.

Some dream of doors in the air,
Of escape routes through their dreams.
Some just pray and pray and pray

Something not merely something,
Something beyond everything,
Will help them rearrange things.

Sufficiently consistent
To suggest it’s a feature,
Adaptive trait, not a bug,

But eccentrically varied
Enough to seem byproduct
Of something more important,

The human need for magic
Persists, though your existence
Couldn’t exist if it did.