On the Need to Stay Uncertain

What would certainty
Obviate? A doubt,
Any need for faith.

Can you imagine?
You can’t. You are not
Anymore evolved

For life without doubt,
Faith, or mystery.
Leave it alone.

Even a shadow--
Eliminated
By a firm scholar

From the scenery--
Could make you quaver
With uncertainty—

You need it. You might
Perish without it,
Your uncertainty.

In the Waves

You’re so far gone, not only
Do you catch yourself dozing
While in the act of reading,

You catch yourself translating
From English into English,
Though what’s in your head isn’t

Really English, really words
In any language, is it?
There’s a rush of proto-speech

You’re more or less aware of,
And then you pull out of it
Before you break in the waves.

Joy

Waste time. You won’t find, can’t find,
Joy, unless you can waste time.

But wait! Weren’t these poems a source
For advocacy of time’s

Absolute nonexistence?
Yes! Maybe! So celebrate,

If you wake up confused,
Losing what no one has had.

It’s a challenge, isn’t it?
To feel no anxiety

That you’ve completely
Lost an hour. A day. You won’t

Care later, likely. But right now,
The thought that you simply slipped

And forgot your life, dropped it,
Lost the plan . . . Your visitors?

The podcast conversation?
A beetle wanders the floor.

Nope. No beetle was ever
Wandering here. But you are,

Determined to embrace this
Loss, this lost loss of nothing.

Yet Another World to Go

And there it is again,
A screen this time, a jolt
And a panic something

Has gone missing. But look
What you’ve gained—a roadrunner
Big as you’ve ever seen

Has wandered to the door
You left open, and looks in.
All this mystery while

You dozed off, phone in hand.
A few flicks of rhythm,
And it’s another world.

A Person on Business

Scare yourself. If you’re dying

As quickly as doctors said,

You’ve got a lot to get through,

And it will hurt, and will burn,

And be terrifying, so

Start practicing daily now.

The cancer, the opiates,

The nights your sleep’s demolished—

They all distort how you think,

Creating a world by turns

Confused, disoriented—

Which is what dying will do.

Might as well get used to it.

If poetry, per Ada

Limón, is the true language

Of mystery . . . the unknown,

Might as well try unknowing

On for size. In blazing sun,

Someone knocks at the west door,

Casting a shadow. Answer,

Even if they’re from Porlock.

Poetry Adjacent

For some reason, right now,
Every poem you compose
Doesn’t feel like a poem,

Feels like the middle of a poem
As pastry, a kind of treat or filling,
Or it feels less anxious, less

Like the effort at capture that it is
And more like the composition
Of an empty form for readers to fill.

Or they feel like stacked, cardboard boxes.
Or like leftovers of real poems. Whatever.
Well. Well, welcome to this one.

Attention Is All

Builders xeriscaped this subdivision
With swaths of stone in various sizes
So that water would be trapped under rocks
To pool, then to be absorbed more slowly.
By and large, the design performs poorly,

And, as a consequence, sort of a wash
Has evolved along the margins of stone—
Dry and sandy most of the time, faintly
Damp after the odd shower, and rarely,
Rarely but alarmingly, a flash flood

Of brown gook that could snatch your ankles,
Club you with tumbling fist-sized and skull-sized
Loose rock. Today, the bare stripe is fine sand,
And, as a teenager, you don’t notice it,
Except when your attention’s called to it.