Evening Survivor

The dove’s insistent, as doves are,
As all vocalizing creatures
Are, now you come to think of it

With a slight jolt of surprise—how
Maniacally repetitive
They are, all the calls of the wild.

Mostly drowned out now by machines,
Voices, recorded songs and beats,
And much thinned out by extinctions,

The beasts and birds sound nostalgic,
Pretty, even a bit cringey
In that useless romantic way

Of hymns to nature and the moon,
But the survivors on repeat
Remain, if anything, louder

And more stubbornly insistent
Than ever—why they’re survivors.
Wooh-hoo-hoo-hoo, uwhoo-hoo-hoo.

Not So Much Dark as Constricted

It strikes you how medieval

You are. Like Europeans

And Chinese, et alia,

Of that era, you’re bounded

Within a known world’s borders,

Aware of worlds beyond it,

In a fuzzy way, no way

Of traveling to those worlds.

You can only ponder stars.

And, like medieval peoples,

You face a set of problems

For which no well-organized

Vocabulary exists,

And so you make art. This art,

Such as it is. A stop-gap

Cramming the maw of the times

With a system you’ve devised

To think and to feel your way

Through inarticulable

And intractable notions,

As Eleanor Johnson wrote

Those medieval thinkers did,

Although you’re less successful

And certainly less inspired

By the supernatural.

Carry on. What’s happening

Now in the most recent past

Won’t likely be digested

By hermits, saints, or monsters

Of your age until they’re faint

Figures receding as myths

In the next medieval phase

That dreams of Apocalypse.

Everyone Is Here for a Reason, Which Happens to Be the Same

Possibly, change is a grant
Granted you by being here.
You participate in change,

The magic nothing opens
In the side of everything
So that it begins to drain,

Curves and waves emerge and surge,
And suddenly there’s cosmos,
Racing toward entropy.

You’re granted a dip in it,
Awareness and attention
Making meaning in the change

Before you’re flushed out of it,
Maybe, unchanging again.

Or Any of These Loaded Words

The phenomenon
Was irrelevant
So long as no one
Paid close attention,

But, from the moment
Someone attended
Closely, well enough
To interpret it,

The phenomenon
Became a nugget,
An indication
Linking a cluster

Of other nuggets,
Indicating they
Were also open
To being given

Interpretations,
Which made them concepts,
Worth more attention
Than information

Devoid of any
Interpretation.
The phenomenon
Itself holds no more

Information than
At the beginning,
But can you see how
Now it means something?

Until When

What are you waiting for? It’s rare
Enough that you have time to spare
Enough to notice that you are,
In fact, waiting, in some bizarre
Way always, alertly, one ear
Tilted, even as you appear
So busy it wouldn’t occur
To you you’re actually unsure,
While you wait for time to expire,
How much patience time might require.

Hail in Parterre

You are, like Hannah Gould’s King

Papilio, one of those

Indolent lovers of change,

Keeping the body at ease,

Giving fancy permission

To range. Nothing seems awful

In a vast transformation

That doesn’t touch you at all.

It’s not until the bees’ wings

Grow so large they veil the skies,

And you wake to real thunder

And downpour and pelting hail,

That you know no change is kind

To indolence when you’re frail.

An Address to a Person or Personified Object Not Present

Early in an afternoon
In a world still overfull
Of backed-up information

In all sorts of media,
From languages linking skulls
To waves inscribed on thin air,

Listening to doves, finches,
Wind stirring the grass, traffic
Stirring wind in the distance,

The random vicissitudes
Of future preservation
Drift into mind. Once most books

Have burned, most digital files
Rotted, and all this year’s skulls
Long since settled as fossils,

The fragmentary remains
Of piled-up millenniums
Of jabber and argument,

Data and conversation,
The news of what this world was,
Will be probabilistic,

Summed over all, peculiar
In exact particulars—
A receipt, a child’s diary,

A pun on a coffee mug.
It won’t matter what text’s left,
Only whether entities

Interested in language
And those who heaped it happen
To be in the neighborhood.

The Lyric Theater of Caution

Onyx the cat is an actor
Good at staying in character,

For whom all the world’s rehearsal,
And no moment isn’t on stage.

Watch him cross his apartment floor
Like a stranger in a strange land,

Scary adventure, without fail,
The pale jade disks of his eyes wide,

His posture signifying angst,
Every step a hesitation,

His head turning, whiskers twitching,
Pose of pure evaluation,

The picture of musing, manqué,
Thought disguising nothing to say.

Portal Fantasy as Allegory for Quotidian

If there’s always another portal,
But you can never go back through one,
And if there’s nothing that magical

On the far side of each door, only
Always something never exactly
What had been expected, and if doors

Can’t be avoided, must be opened,
And if that’s the whole deal until death,
Just on the other side of a door,

Either as a surprise or not much,
Then you’ve got a portal fantasy
That’s an allegory and also

Plain literary realism,
And who wants to buy a tale like that?