Can Evolution Stick the Landing?

On the final approach, there’s no human
Eyes, no human element deciding.
The mechanism must land on its own.

All those millions of years of toolmaking,
Thousands of years of written instructions,
Centuries of engines pushing themselves,

And now culture, the infant colossus,
L’enfant terrible, is leaving the nest,
Or is restless, or has already left.

Human eyes scrutinize, half-terrified,
Their fine-tuned, shambolic mechanism
As it gradually gets away from them,

Away from controlled communications.
On the final approach, there’s no human
Eyes, no human element deciding.

In the Lyric

You may lose yourself in a lyric
Lifted from a radio sermon.

You may lose yourself in the decades
You live from first hearing that lyric

To the day you sit watching large clouds
Outside the window of a cafe

Where you wait to pick up your order
You can’t afford, bought for daughter

You couldn’t have imagined back when
You first lost yourself in that lyric

That is streaming now from the speakers
Of a world you never imagined,

Changed utterly, as Yeats liked to say,
Same as it ever was, the lyric.

Myths of Possession

Latinate or Mandarin,
The semantics of fortune,
Fú, entangle luck with wealth

In clouds of connotations
And echoing behaviors
Invoking prosperity.

There are other forms of luck,
Of course, other misfortunes
Than the blight of poverty,

But fortune as wealth, like wealth,
Is fungible as a coin,
As a credit on account,

Credit being another
Term that conjures a sweeping
Range of possibilities.

Actual wealth, actual
Fortunes are only access
To stashes of resources,

And stashes can only be
Held together by credit,
Fortunes in league with fortunes—

Believe me, I believe you,
And your tokens of belief.
Trust is magical thinking.

Worth is magical thinking.
Small wonder people invoke
Magical symbols of wealth

To try to lure good fortune,
Even as they ruthlessly
Work to exploit each other,

Since fú and fortune are both
Material possessions
And dark myths of possession.

It’s Done, It’s Not a Threat

Sometimes, if you don’t
Know what’s happened yet,
But you know the odds,

You’ll rethink backwards
Or simply forget
That it has happened,

Whatever it was,
As if you can bet,
Still, on the outcome

Or still affect it
By what you’ll do yet,
Although even gods

Can’t reset the past
By taking back threats.

Moon Over the Valley of Aijalon

You can’t keep living without
Racking up days. If you’re here,
However barely you’re here,

Earth’s taken another turn,
And there’s a dim part of you
That would be willing to age

If the spin would only stop.
It makes no sense to want this,
To crumble in a still world,

But you’re crumbling anyway,
And if the planet held still
Maybe you could savor it.

The essence of miracle
Is to change one fact alone.