Campsite 2

You hear the bugling, and you wonder,
Elk this time, or hopeful elk hunter?
Down in the valley where people live,

There’s yet another active shooter,
One shot fired so far, highway cordoned
In both directions, but that’s not news

Up here, yet. Up here, it’s fall colors
And no shots fired, yet. Better stay
At campsite 2 and hope for the best.

But who can stay away from people?
People will find people, hunt them down.
Gunpowder couldn’t stay in China.

Actions Have Inconsequences

This is not to be contrary,
But piety’s inaccurate
In only pointing to results.

Your conspecifics want a lot
From you, and you depend on them,
And want all your good things from them,

So everyone raises children
To attend to consequences,
As if actions guaranteed them.

Sometimes, the butterfly twitches
Its wings and later storms descend,
But that has to mean erasure

Of some more promising action.
Consequently, it can only
Mean the continued existence

Of actions without consequence
That things ever get out of hand.
Remember that in your demands.

A Human Poem

If you are a hearing person,
What you notice about quiet
Are the numerous minor sounds.

If you’re lucky enough to find
Yourself listening out of doors,
Which is a privilege, unearned,

In the nature of privilege,
The combination of a creek
And a breeze shivering aspens,

A few wrens in their own cosmos,
Will remind you that it’s quiet,
The way stars signify darkness.

You’re such a bizarre awareness
That can’t sense its senses unless
It’s not paying close attention,

Doesn’t need to pay attention
To anything you need to live.
Or maybe that’s how everything

That doesn’t need mind to survive
Survives, not bizarre in the least,
The ordinary world that was

Before we called your attention
To it, pointless world, meaningless
Since meaning begins in pointing,

As we just pointed out rock wrens,
That creek, and bright aspens, useless
Waves coming from a human poem.

Alle Menschen Müssen Sterben

The exquisite chorale,

“All Mankind must die,” ends

This album on a note

Of reassurance and

Comfort. Whoever wrote

That liner note deserves

Affection—ironic

Unintentionally,

Or a real wiseacre,

Doesn’t really matter.

In fact, there is comfort

And some reassurance

In knowing all must die.

It’s the sole certainty

Life offers awareness—

Without it, there’d be none.

Also, to a species

Enraged by unfairness,

The death of all’s soothing,

Life’s only equity.

Most comforting of all,

The chorale reassures

The long tormented mind—

This ends. It must end sometime.

Anathema to Dignity

The body is. All bodies are.
Yet somehow bodies invented,
Long since, a sense of dignity,

A body with social value,
A body that cannot be broached
By other bodies without shame

And dignity’s diminution.
Dignity requires apartness,
The body that can hold a pose,

The pose that can command respect,
The respect that is social wealth.
One can be poor and dignified,

Although it’s difficult. One can
Even be owned or disabled
And dignified, on occasion,

But only by holding apart,
Somehow, the body from other
Bodies. It’s a kind of crypsis,

Survival by concealment, flesh
That holds still in the foliage
And does not tremble, that holds still

Since to move would betray itself
As compromised, undignified.
Undignified is undisguised.

DIY Humanity

Consider Orion head and torso
Of a giant condor or albatross,
Wings tipped by Sirius and Aldebaran,

Consider Cassiopeia the mouth
Of a great serpent, triangular,
Open to the left, plowing through stars,

Pretend they are friends and partners,
Hunting through the night together.
Make up new names and stories

For their gossipy adventures. Do that
And you will be human, humanly,
And they’ll still be whatever they are.

Last Night, in Your Stead

No one’s who they are
In dreams. In dreams, no
One’s who you really
Know. They’re someone strange
Resembling, weirdly,

Vaguely, famous or
Real persons from life,
Often dead. They’re not,
Ever completely
Right. You label them,

Sort of, as you go,
Yourself a witness,
Half outsider in
Your own head, but you
Feel they’re never quite

Right. It wasn’t you,
Your child, your parent,
Your coworker, your
Childhood crush you dreamed
Of half the night. It

Was some alien
Bore strange resemblance,
Weird relationship
Sort of like, but wrong.
Who are these people?

The Prediction Historian

Anticipating repetitive
Patterns, anticipating their change—
This is part and parcel of living

For even the tiniest life forms,
Ever since when. There’s nothing human
Specific to craving prediction.

It’s our fault. Once you could sign, converse,
Whenever it was you first told tales,
Prediction developed its new twist,

An external, shared storage organ.
Prediction has always meant storage.
The tree remembers to shed its leaves,

The bear’s flesh knows when to hibernate,
The tern’s knows when it’s time to migrate.
Anticipation requires storage,

In whatever form works, brains being
Only one storage option. Learning
Between brains, between generations

Is rarer; still the same principle.
But to store the memories needed
For good-enough anticipation

In a symbolic system, and then
In narration, that was invention.
So here we are. No one’s lived without

A net of language bearing them up,
Their own but mostly others’, so long
Now your brains are themselves built for us.

And that’s not enough. Prediction shared
Is prediction made competitive,
A limiting resource, dangerous.

Knowledge isn’t power, not itself.
The ability to use knowledge
To predict better than someone else,

That’s fire at your burning fingertips,
That’s Prometheus, that’s the magic
That singes priests’ and kings’ eyebrows off.

You know it. It’s in your history.
It’s what history is. History
Was begun to better prediction,

And anything you can predict well
Becomes important for that reason.
You hardly needed or need the stars,

Still less narrative constellations.
But how sure it was they'd be called gods,
Once someone saw you could predict them.