Node

Knots, lumps, aggregate clumps.
You’ve been thinking of those
Who love relationships

Among fellow humans,
Who find them endlessly
Interesting, who read

And write to probe their nodes,
To untangle the knots,
Diagnose the swelling

Lumps, dangerous or not,
To pick apart the clump,
To get to the center.

The center usually
Involves sex and gender,
And certainly hunger.

You wonder, are human
Relationships really
All that interesting?

The roles and the genders,
Maybe those are unique.
But isn’t it hunger

Generates them as well
As hunger generates
All living existence,

All the seething tangles
Of reproducing things?
And nodes form everywhere,

Any direction you look,
Any transect you carve
Of what burns on its own

As you understand it.
What’s uniquely human
To care about so much?

You think about this since
You live alone, famished,
In hungerless weather.

You and the World Understand Memory Differently

The chill starts in the forearms

For no obvious reason,

And then it spreads to the hands.

This is how it always is.

It starts, and you button up

Your sleeves, but what can you do

About your fingers? You need

Them free to finish your tasks,

Which will never be finished

So long as you have fingers.

Shiver. Mrs. White’s Nothing

Sounds, coincidentally,

No doubt, out from the shuffled

Playlist, a year to the day

It played while bonfires of brush

Guttered orange and smoky

In aspens in early snow.

Tonight’s sunset is crystal

And nothing like as moody.

Your fingers are getting cold.

Exactly a year ago.

Small Unknowable Worlds

Lyrics aren’t microscopy.
Microscopy sees to know.
Lyrics, unfortunately,

Literary lyrics, but
Ballads, doggerel, pop songs,
Work chants, and hymns included,

Are scratching an itch, the source
Of which the lyrics can’t see.
Look closely at the lyrics

Themselves with your microscope,
And you will spot the patterns
Of an art of frustration.

Lyrics want the itch to stop,
Whatever that itch might be.
Like any beastly scratching,

Lyrics alternate action,
Misery, hope, and relief,
Followed by more misery.

That’s What They Said

You can believe
In fictional
Characters made
Up in stories

Out of language
Since most people
You’ve ever known,
Including those

Of flesh and blood,
Were fictional
Most of the time.
Even if you

Only converse,
You absorb words
Transferred in air
From those not there.

What’s There

The difference between
A great deal and total
Is the gap in your thoughts

That accumulates dust,
Neglect, terror, moonlight,
That becomes your monster

Almost always sleeping
Until someone asks you
A specific question

On a topic you know
A great deal about, and
You suffer vertigo

As the dusty moonlight
Monster between what’s there
And what you knew wakes up.