Old Car

Recently, the clearest view
Has been from the driver’s side
Door window. For some reason,
Every time you turn your head,
The world looks better that way,

In fact so much more handsome,
You feel that you should feel awed
By the tiered cliffs, peaks, and clouds,

A better world to the left
You’re passing by now, gorgeous
Compared to the streaks and cracks,
The creaking windshield wipers
Occupying dead ahead.

Found on Rocks

There are bigger words for this,
Latinate reconstructions
Suffixed to sound rather twee,

But stick with Stuff Found On Rocks.
Even calling it Rock Art
Is both anachronistic

And suggests that it could be
Commodified. The impulse
To mess around and leave marks

Preceded writing systems
By forty thousand years,
Pretty conservatively.

You don’t know where that came from,
Do you? But it’s still in you.

No One You’d Expect

What does it mean to write after death?

Probably whoever asked

Was asking about grieving,

Weirdly popular genre

Recently, and not about

Writing after one’s own death.

But let’s imagine you’re dead

And know whatever you write

Can’t find any audience.

The dead exist in silos,

Writing only for themselves.

Now, what does it mean to write

After death and for no one?

You’d say you write for yourself,

And mostly you do, and yet

There’s still someone you expect.

Written by the Sticky

Kepler thought surely the moon

Must gain some warmth from the Earth.

Mass so large and bright cannot

Help but keep it warm. Also,

He thought the moon’s attraction

Dragged the oceans into tides,

Though Galileo mocked him

For such an occult belief.

That’s the way the culture learns.

Someone’s right about one thing

But wrong about another.

If selection can ratchet,

It sieves. Sometimes, it’s tricky.

There’s a lot of beheading

And torture by defenders

Of the way things ought to be.

Learning moves unevenly,

Favoring the testable

And effective weaponry.

Some debates never settle,

And does it matter, really?

As long as everyone craves

Some kind of a victory,

Culture’s stuck with history.

The Tell-Tale Text

They’re almost all silent,

The voices in your head

Like these—only writing.

But some are insistent,

Silently hammering,

Insisting you must write

In ways acceptable

To them. But you can’t tell

What is acceptable

To them, or what would be,

So you keep composing

Like any composer

With severe tinnitus,

With everything you’ve read

Hammering in your head.