A Cowering Animal Woven Real

How would Ashbery or Hejinian
Have confessed a crime in a poem,
Assuming they had to confess?

How would Anne Carson have shifted
The phrases and gaps? Others, you would
Know how they’d do it, just not if they could.

To stick to the parochial theme
Of recent American poets, could Billy Collins
Or Mary Oliver have deliberately confessed?

Poets don’t confess their own sins,
As a rule, although Sharon Olds came
Close. What other people did to them

And theirs, what people unlike them did
To people like them, there’s a lot of that.
And of course, shame. Shame is confessed,

Often with a bit of chin-jutting defiance
Or rebellious anger in it, but
The best confessions in poems are accidents,

That don’t come out as confessions until later,
When mores and values have changed enough
That their very phrases are the sins. That’s the best.

Lapped Afternoon

Some days you race
Through. Some days leave
You in the dust,

Dusk arriving
In front of you,
A posterior

Of an evening.
And you woke up,
So early, too,

Still in the dark!
Now the finches
Sing for sunset,

And you’re way back
Of the glistening
Shoulders up front.

Familiar Silhouettes at Dusk

Pick a symbol, any symbol.
A well-known one might be better,
As would be one that’s so simple
You could trace it with your eyes closed,

Know it without being sighted,
But not so abstract and ancient
That it has no stable cluster
Of instant associations—

Not a spiral, in other words,
And not the outline of a hand.

Alright, you’re right. Too many rules.
Clearly you’re being nudged toward
A specific kind of symbol,
Such as a cross or Hakenkreuz,

A symbol of an atom or
A double helix, one that seems
A fixed, functional kind of sign.
But now ask after the meanings.

You’ll find there are many for each,
And arguments for each of them.

A symbol doesn’t symbolize.
Symbols have no such agency.
Someone says what a symbol means.
Few or many agree with them,

And people pass on the meanings,
And people decide to change them,
Or don’t decide, only mutate.
Pay attention. Pay attention.

Power lines don’t own their own birds,
However alike each evening.

Addiction as Expectation of Surviving Transformation

Is anything that comes back
To restart an addiction?
Days, life, music, opium?

Opium, classically,
Life, for sure, mother of all
Addictions, original

Hunger, music possibly,
But days are just revolving,
Aren’t they? Then again, jonesing

For another, another,
And another, the thousands,
Tens of thousands of days lived

In the mean human lifespan,
Isn’t that an addiction?
Not only to keep living,

But to keep watching the days,
Watching for the one that breaks
Out of the pattern, this one,

No this one, maybe this one,
Each return establishing
The sedate, wave-lapping change

You’ve labeled time, and each tick
Offering the fresh suspense
That this is the one that breaks

Out of time into chaos,
Open-ended change, the one
That escapes longing. And then?

Normal War

So far the war has been like all wars so far.
For whole towns and families the world’s over,
But the world at large, the human world, goes on.

The war that many are waiting for, the war
At the end of the world that concludes the world,
War prefigured in millenniums of art,

Does seem closer thanks to the latest war, but
That’s been true before. For now it has to wait
While normal war ends worlds at war’s normal rate.