A Star of Eight Points

Sitting at the long table
Under paper lantern lights
While the home-made cake’s brought out,

And the guitarist pauses
For the Happy Birthday song,
You may happen to look up

At the star-eyed summer night
And for no particular
Reason think, Sumeria.

The first symbol that you learned
Looked to you just like a star,
But not like a star you’d see,

More like the diffraction spikes
Created by nearby stars
In Webb’s deep, galactic views,

And you wonder how people
From Sumerians to kids
Drawing at kitchen tables

Could have known about that view,
Or intuited that view
Of such depth that local stars.

Never spiky to mere eyes,
Would shine long, distorted points
When the future probed the past.

Aren’t You Special?

Cancer’s a multiply selfish disease,
From the rapacious pirate cells themselves

To the manner in which you turn inward
To consider the extraordinary

Sense of being singled out, even though
Nothing much is commoner than cancer.

It’s sort of an inverse apocalypse
Or extremely modular pandemic—

Rather than a panoramic collapse,
Millions of invisible assassins

Cull the population, one at a time,
And everyone knows someone, but just

Bespoke disaster in a single frame
Each time, so each can claim, Death’s mine, all mine.

Lie Like an Old Tear

Sexton’s worms and elves that tend
Dickinson’s palpitating
(Palpitating!) vineyards sing

So pale, so frail, counting bees
Under Clive James’ maple tree.
This art’s phraseology

Fore and aft of everything
Else that poetry can be—
Any astonishing knot

Of words that alter reading
The way an unseen vortex
Captures rafters as they float

And spins their boat in its whirl
Before letting them go.
The phrase may be fixed in verse

Or exist as a sudden,
Passing change in register
In a steady flow of prose,

But it’s the phrase you’ll recall
After the rest of the text
Has dwindled to an address

You keep so you can find it
Again, that remarkable
Twist in the language, that phrase.

Every Day As if It Was Your Past

There’s no need to make your dying
Into another competition,

No necessity to worry
About how you spend this time—

Whether you seize the day,
Whether you make each moment count,

Whether you’re a font
Of forgiveness, wisdom, and meaning—

Heavens, people. If you know
You’re going soon, if you’re lucky

Enough to be given a preview
Of which exit door gets to be yours,

Why spoil that grace with determination
To waste none of it? For the irony?

Leave all the tomes on dying well
For the living still trying too hard

To make their lives into a fine story
Others can admire, others can

Seek to emulate, others can
Believe in, only so that they themselves

Can feel duly unashamed of the end
Of themselves. For yourself,

You don’t need to die just right
To avoid dying wrong.

You want to indulge in dull
Extensions of your same old quotidian?

You want to watch bad television
And scratch yourself in bed?

You feel like daydreaming in sunlight?
You go ahead. You’re alright.