You Can Have What You Can’t Keep

In a room in which we rest
To modify suffering,
Quiet the body’s dull roar,

Never mind the ultimate
Good of imagination,
The small reasons for belief,

We are searching for relief.

In the room before the first
Lamp of evening, when the sky
Glows serenely no matter

What the body is groaning,
We may feel under the pause
For the latch that springs the thought

That the light cannot be bought.

Killing Horizons Are Watching You, Charon

If observation
Decoheres the waves,
And if the black hole

Horizon watches,
Turning the state of
Superposition

Into well-defined
Reality, does
It make waves less real?

Is nothing a wave
Unless unobserved?
Ridiculous. Waves

Are everywhere. Waves
Don’t disappear. What
Observes disappears.

Isolation Pilot Plant

The closure rate of the drifts
Requires synchronization
With the arrival of waste.

When all goes well, Hell is filled
And sealed for eternity,
One vast hollow at a time.

Nothing collapses, nothing
Leaks out. If by some chance
Damnation’s imagineers

Guessed correctly concerning
Perpetuity, and God
Had no choice but to cast out

Unforgiven post-mortem
Into eternal darkness,
Then lost souls must be to God

Something like nuclear waste—
Unspeakably dangerous,
Untouchable forever,

Toxic to the innocent,
Irreparably ruined,
Carefully stored and shut up.

Looking Forward Only Looks Back

The future seduces you
When past seems to include it,
When something planned or foretold

Shows in the rearview mirror.
So, it was real after all!
But it wasn’t. Shades take shape

Out of past experience.
Through them, you anticipate
Something similar again,

Something compounded of them,
Which shows wisdom, since the past
Echoes itself constantly,

And, when it echoes again,
You think, aha, I saw it
Coming. And then you believe

It must have existed first
And you were aware of it.
But it didn’t. Scrutinize

Any novelty closely.
It’s never quite what you thought
Would be, sometimes not at all.

The Trees Are Singing

You aren’t out of the woods, yet,
Nor will you ever leave them.
You’ll leave by burning with them.

You are your woods. You are them,
But you’re not the whole of them,
Just one self-conscious system

Woven through the twigs of them
From whatever words blew in,
As if birds were fungal spores

And leaves infected by them,
Singing wings on every stem,
Singing a fused existence.