Well-Treated Goats

If you’re nice enough,
You’re welcome,
It’s allowed.

If you don’t believe
In human universals
Across all cultures,

Consider that candidate—
It’s ok to take stuff,
If you’re nice enough.

Hunting societies
Address prey with respect,
Thanking them for the nourishment,

Using terms of kinship,
Father whale,
Grandmother deer.

Or you tap the trees
To let their spirits know
You wouldn’t plan without them.

Consultation and respect,
Gratitude and flattery—
If you’re nice enough,

You can take stuff
Without repercussions,
Without punishment,

And from where do you learn
Properly nice behaviors
Addressed to the mute world?

From the chattering world
Of conspecifics,
Your model fellow humans,

For whom what matters often is
If you’re nice enough,
Respectful and grateful,

Maybe obsequious.
However many kinds
Of etiquette exist,

There are no populations
Without manners,
Beliefs about manners,

And an instinct
To address the world,
When you want something from it

With good manners
That are your local manners—
If not polite to whales and deer,

Then grateful to God
For the gifts of whales and deer,
And if not polite to God,

Then to whatever entity
You see as a source of resources.
Surely you’ve overheard

People thanking tools that work,
Stop lights for changing,
Alarms for not going off

While they get what they want,
Knowing if they’re nice enough,
It’s ok to take stuff.

A Secret Joy in the Flame

Is there a third shadow possible,
Subtle, walking between the others
And disguised by their companionship?

Creation, work, one kind of shadow,
Thrown by fresh past that had to be made,
What’s next as novel you had to make,

Your say in how the story turns out
But your burden to keep it churning,
What just happened, what just happened next,

Or its partnered polar opposite,
Discovery of what was waiting,
What was written, you as the reader,

Ease of the shrugged shoulders, acceptance—
But if it’s not the tale you wanted,
You can’t remake it, not what happened next.

Is that a third shadow wedged in there,
Thrown by an unseen figure of speech,
Some other allegory of change

As storytelling? Not as writer
Of the worlds that will have been to come,
Not as reader of what was waiting,

But as . . . what? Neither the responder
Nor the responsible to story,
What would you be then? The burning page?

Needles Through the Tapestry of Dust

They flick across the sky mostly silently,
Forever metaphors for speed and surprise—
Meteoric. That’s the only word you need

For a sky-wide range of associations.
Anything fast and brilliant out of nowhere,
Gone before you know it—anything like that.

Collected and scrutinized by the thousands,
They are the most fragmentary of messages
By which to infer what’s actually out there,

And still the best reminders Earth’s not alone
But embedded in the tapestry of dust.