Becoming Entities

Personhood blurs for persons
To the horizons in all
Directions—pet animals,

Corporate institutions,
Insects, hovering beings—
A radiant nimbus shifts

Its halo like a pot lid,
A dome of clouds, auroras,
Between nations and peoples.

Numbers of indigenous
Cultures and colonizers’
Own ancestors held persons

Or personlike entities
Inhered in all living things
And/or in the stones, as well.

Today’s nations are jealous
Of their personhoods, since rights
Have been invented. In some

Countries, legal disputes burn
In smoldering wildfire lines
Over what is a person.

Americans recently
Surveyed anthropomorphized
Commercial corporations—

How very American—
But only to the level
They anthropomorphized ants.

Want to know what people are?
Ask the talkers what they fear
Becoming. That’s what they are.

Recommencement Speech

In a world where every point
Is some kind of turning point
And no point is a real end,

What is the wave that rides out
Never to return, always
To begin again? The day

Dawns cloudy with news of clouds.
The amount of things going
Down is too many to count,

Including all the counting
Going down. People will throw
Their caps in the air, somewhere.

Today is the turning point,
The point that never returns.

Molecules with the Means to Replicate

All you need. From there,

Boom, complexity—

Hosts and parasites,

Cooperation,

Evolution, almost

An ecosystem.

Lab tests chalk one up

For RNA world.

The temperature

Of human bodies

Or hot summer days

Will do nicely. Add

A few droplets each

Day of fresh systems

Of translations. See

What happens. The first

Interesting split—

The first—is between

Hosts using their own

Replicase to split

And parasite lines

That crib from those hosts.

We incline to link

Metabolism

To the core of life

Ourselves, who lack it,

But how intriguing—

Could the first step of

Metabolism

Simply be stealing?

Why Can’t We Have Nothing Now?

By the way, why the endless
Patterning, cosmos? Couldn’t
You leave a genuine blank,

A patternless splotch,
Somewhere? Entropic heat death
Is just a far-off promise

We won’t be around to see,
Since no one will be. For now,
Entropy’s a direction,

Never a destination.
Why not just a simple blank,
A real gap, not zero-point,

Not omnivorous black holes,
Those antonyms of real blanks—
Why not a nothing, somewhere?

We suspect you’re hiding it,
That it gives your entropy
The direction we’ve noted,

That you’ve placed nothing nowhere
In nonexistent future,
Where its very nothingness,

Its absence of existence
And it’s exact nowhereness
Gives all of us our movements.

Intimations of nothing
Are all we get while we are,
But why it’s so, we don’t know.

Gaia’s Closet

That the planet’s history,
Meaning what’s preserved in stone,
Should bear a weird resemblance

To ways that people store things,
Especially the hoarders
Who’ve had to move too often,

Is odd. Earth’s rocks back things up
Like the attic or office
Of someone who’s been adding

And, on occasion, partly
Purging over a lifetime.
For a person, this pattern

Makes sense—each cycle,
Some things are too valuable,
Personal, sentimental

To throw away, but in time,
Repetition grows ruthless
And eccentric. Surviving

Items from early in life
Form a more and more cryptic,
Questionable residue,

The middle years show logic
But with occasional tears
And gaps as relationships

And one-time aspirations
Are ripped clean from the record.
The recent stuff’s whatever,

Nothing re-examined yet.
Geology looks the same,
As if the Earth had regrets,

Second guesses, bad break-ups,
And, in the end, just bizarre
Nostalgia and affection

For things saved so many times,
Merely by not being lost
They’ve become ugly precious--

One might suspect the planet
Of editing in the hope
Life looked good from what got saved.

Bēi Lín

In mandarin characters,
The northern woods resemble
Trees or crutches—or maybe

Trees on crutches. Over here,
Far east of China, one tree
Smiles, leaning on its crutches.

Sometimes it’s hard to fall down
In the center of the woods,
The northern woods, where other,

Sturdier pines crowd so close,
Nights of roaring songs in wind,
There’s no such too much muchness.

There’s No World without Reflection

Floating, floating, what do we resemble?
Human emotions serve as expressions
Concealed within a planet’s cloudy eyes

Except, now, at night. At night, your eyes shine
With all the gifts and agonies of one
Of the stormiest species ever made

Under those clouds. You’d think that the sunlight
Somehow manages to find out the moss,
But it’s always the moss that’s self-aligned
And waiting for the light to fall again.