Carving

On the sunny way home,
The children in the back
Of the convertible

With the top down, of course,
And the sun everywhere,
As if there were nothing

Beyond the car itself,
Except for light and wind,
Certainly nothing else

In memory. They sprawled.
Why weren’t their seat belts on?
Also lost. One child’s head

In another child’s lap,
The second child amazed
By the whorls of an ear

As he stared into them,
How the shape fit itself
Like intricate carving,

A polished bannister
With small flecks of ear wax.
Memory would keep that.

Dig In

Scrub oaks, parked trucks,
Late light on both—
Roots clutch at what
Tires tear from slopes.

Fanciful

Meaning’s false information.
Say what something means. Either
You’ve parsed its information,

In which case, no more meaning
To it, nothing leftover,
Or you’ve misread the data,

Thus creating a meaning
The information doesn’t
Support. Anthropomorphic

Storm systems are meaningful.
Models predicting a storm
Are only informative.

Languages are meaningful.
Mathematicians attempt
To reign loose language use in,

But then you catch them dreaming
The universe is speaking
To them through sweet symmetries

Dripping with honeyed, hidden
Cosmological musings,
Each crypsis rich with meaning.

Tehom

One recent philosopher

Opined meaning’s what something

Is about, it’s aboutness,

But that seems wrong, since as soon

As you take a simple term,

Common word, some kind of name,

Even one—not a sentence,

A poem, an aphorism,

An elegant equation,

Not so much as a fragment,

Just one term, one word, one name—

And explain what it’s about,

You’ve both enlarged and blurred it,

Like someone writing over

A message written in steam.

When someone gets their message

Well-posed, composed exactly

To maximize its meaning,

Its potential for meanings

To attach themselves to it,

Hanging on to all at once,

It’s never about something,

Just a hard bump in dark waves,

The poem of one word, one term.

Kitting Out Writers

Here’s your creased receipt,
Your sliver of soap,
Your strip of bamboo,
Tanned hide, or birch bark.

Your hands and your voice,
Your gestures and songs,
Might shape more meanings
More eloquently,

But they’re too like you—
They may have happened
Forever and can’t
Ever unhappen,

But that happening’s
Soon over and gone.
You don’t need iron
Or carving in stone,

But symbols can hide,
Can shelter in place
On the walls of caves,
In palatial dust.

Symbols can be spies,
So minor, inert,
Literally small,
Small enough to fit

Through generations,
Through history’s mesh,
Through grinding changes,
Through filters of years.