Naill’s Finest

By late February, the first
Blossoms emerged from pollarded
Dogwoods in Toquerville, Utah.

Now you have to do it again,
Not just for the eyes or by ear,
For the chewiness to the thought

Of the dogwoods in Toquerville
Ahead of redbuds and cherries,
Ahead of the leaves and the heat.

Now you have to do it again.
Toquerville had a winery
In the early days of the Saints

That sold Naill’s Finest to miners,
Filling the coffers of the Church.
The vineyards are ranch houses now,

Not a whole lot to chew on there,
Other than lives lived inside them
That live life and live life again.

Weight Bearing

Manhattan has sunk a handspan
Into the underlying stone
Since when you first set foot on it.

Meanwhile sea levels have risen,
But none of this comes close to those
Changes on the island’s surface

In that same span. Since Lenape
Were swindled by the colonists
And displaced by force, Manhattan

Has sunk a depth equivalent
To the height of a Knicks center,
Not much compared to the stories

Of concrete stair-stepping on top.
Then again, the sinking won’t stop.

Mixed up with Yourself

any object, if you wait long enough, gets mixed up with itself

It’s eons against eternity

In the models of the physicists—

Inevitable thermalism,

Many-body localization,

Which one wins in the longest of runs?

Inhabiting one body yourself

(This isn’t precisely true, of course,

Since the bodies making a body

Are just roughly ennumerable,

But there’s a biological sense

Of you as one-body location,

So for now, let’s run with that fiction),

You’re not sure the answer matters much.

Neither eons nor eternity

Are in your forecast, notwithstanding

The hopeful fantasies that reared you

Before their own thermalization.

You’re already so mixed up yourself.

Fit

A virus has to fit the host,
To have the code that cracks the safe.

An organism fits its niche
To fill it as far as it can.

The traits of the host, of the niche
Shape the traits of what thrives in them.

Host traits will shift, niches vanish,
But what thrives fits them as they are.

Successful ideologies
Fit human beings as they are.

The Brook Parable

The water looked clear, but could have been toxic.
Water striders wandered under the cutbanks,
Their thin, black feet dimpling the surface without
Sinking in. Upstream, past the road’s overpass,
There was a small pond with a snapping turtle
And past that a remnant of a boggy marsh.
Downstream, the brook curled around scrub woods and fields
Before vanishing in more remnants of marsh.
The sides were muddy. The bottom was sandy.
Wading birds were never around stalking things,
And no one saw even the tiniest fish.