Through Towers on Towers of Half-Done Rooms

Inner centuries

Of outer landscapes,

More than we want and

Less than we hope for,

Wrote poor Pessoa

In his disquiet,

Young man in Lisbon,

Long century gone.

All around the world

Live makers like him,

The mason who bricks

A raw cathedral

From barrels and scraps,

Adding wings and naves,

Never finishing,

The custodian

Whose spiral journals

Sprawl hand-drawn epics

All undone at death—

Hallucinating,

Addled orb weavers

Of chaotic webs,

Convinced their chaos

Can come nearer bliss

Like that, or like this.

Coding Instructions

In one language family,

To spread out and put in piles.

For others, to set apart,

Arranging things, reducing

Local entropy, but not

Just archiving, tidying.

Do not raise a heavy eye.

Imperative tidying.

Guidelines for enzymes. The should.

The must. The and/or, if and

Only if, if then. To code

Is to devise the channels

To irrigate fields in drought,

To spell out when to do things,

Raise, lower, open and shut.

The code is not the enzyme,

The muscle, the enforcer,

The force that through the green fuse,

The rushing, the space-time curve.

Children learn to code in school.

Instructions are meant to code

The children. Little channels,

Capillaries for freshets,

Come next spring. About that curve.

Day Heading Upstream

You glance away
From a clear sky.
When you look back,
Small blue clouds there,

And you look down
At something else,
Your busy life,
Your racing world.

When you look up,
The clouds are roe.
Then you look up,
And clouds have gone.

This is nothing—
Clouds being clouds,
Trivial. This
Is everything.

Nothing’s Too Clever

Keynes once joked of frequentist 

Statistics, In the long run,

We’re all dead. Now he and all

His generation are dead,

All long dead. The way things are

In the long view is witty,

Beautiful to contemplate,

But it isn’t comforting.

You try to get used to it,

When you’re not ignoring it,

Which just means you generate

A bit more wit and beauty

And a lot more discomfort,

Which doesn’t seem productive

In the long run, now, does it?

The short run is comforting,

Sometimes, a meal and a bed,

A soft bed, nothing clever.

Wallflowers and the Beast

Small objects on a dusty
Wooden windowsill behave
The same when you look away

As when you look back at them.
They’re not lives to notice you,
Won’t live if you notice them,

Which makes watching them pleasant,
Dull, boring, pointless, and dense.
Never mind spider or ant.

Try to ignore that trapped fly.
Just look at these few objects
Someone collected and left.

Behavior’s of the essence.
The less something interacts
With pressing environment,

The more it’s behaviorless,
Don’t you think the stranger that
Something gets? The chip of glass,

The beach stone, the painted dish,
The lighter for the wood stove

Will never get up and dance.

Bikers Passing Each Other

Highway motorcyclists
Remind one a little
Of monastic orders—

Their reputation hints
At independent types,
Laconic introverts,

But they travel in pairs
Or large groups, and signal
Down low to each other,

Wearing similar clothes
Tagged with matching badges.
They rarely appear

To find ways to leave off
Routes favored by their peers.
Scarves and leathers are rare

In more remote corners
Where no one gives a sole
Hermit a wave, down low.

Composing Still Drifting Off

One more poem, a midnight poem,
A night poem might be good. So,
Marilyn Monroe, Norma

Jeane Mortenson Baker, died
That day, early in the month
Of August, one lifetime gone,

Who knows what is still to go,
Who knows what’s still and what is?
Nothing’s still. Nothing much is.

There should be a special term,
Reward for a ghost, a ghost
Of a name that’s past the point

Of having lived as a ghost
Longer than with that living
Host. Take your age when you die.

If anyone can recall
Your name, any name you host
Or have hosted—Marilyn,

Norma Jeane—still on that day
When as many days have passed
As you, host to the name, lived,

Your ghost name graduates
To whatever that term is.
With how good record keeping

Has gotten, and how often
Later generations live
Longer than their parents did,

Should be lots of candidates,
But not many like Monroe,
Dead at thirty-six and still,

Sixty years later, a name
On many actual lips.
Now it’s midnight, in August,

Year probably long gone, if
And when anyone reads this,
Ghosts by then anonymous.