Simpler Green

In those days, those far off days,
The wind-pollinators will
Be doing well once again.

The bees will be gone, the bats,
And maybe most of the birds.
The humans swept them with them,

The godlike humans who strode
Across the earth on hind legs,
All prancing and accusing

Each other of various
Murders. Death will still be there,
In carpets of simpler green,

In warm years of algal booms
And seas of spreading duckweed,
Pines soughing in the ruins,

But the gods will be below
The soil, as happens with gods
Who get too complicated.

Small

Fairer to say your body
Is in the minute closeness
Of simple interactions

Than in all the constructions
You and everyone put on
Selves by the name of body.

When you get a lone moment
Leaning close to consider
A brilliant green patch of moss

Between two stones in a spot
Of sudden, low-angled sun,
No wider than your thumb’s long,

And you finger it, softly,
Not harming it, sensing it,
Then you are made of body.

Before the Dog

Mornings under the winter
Triangle before sunrise,
The whole, arcuate collage

From Sirius through Saiph
And up to Aldebaran,
Procyon notched and pulled back—

In one sense, the universe
Nothing to do with this Earth,
And in another, the fun

Of pure, projective naming
On display. Before the dog,
Procyon, for a bright star,

The same name used formally
For the distant relative
Of ring-tailed cats, loosely bears

As well, known from Algonquin
As a raccoon, one right now,
Trundling along this wayside

Under the dawn’s fading stars,
Having used its hands all night,
To remind humans humans

Aren’t the only clever ones
With nimble fingers, that name
Washes its hands of the rest.

The Writers’ Graveyard on the Strand

Who would stoop lower than Lowell

Who pilfered poor Hardwick’s letters

To furnish his own poetry,

After he had abandoned her

For Caroline Lockwood, of all

Women, who herself wrote with such

Disgust through her characters’ views

Of the world and such characters?

Whoever likes them all, that’s who,

Who writes excited, unsent mails

Comparing Lockwood’s graphic squick

In common matters to Doshi’s,

Who roots down in Hardwick’s reviews,

Who still laughs at Lowell’s Quakers

Reassuring themselves that God

Must be on their side as they drown,

Else we had drowned quick. You all drown

Quick, the lively and the bitter,

Despairing poet and victims

He picked for burning also bright

But more evenly than he could.

Then everyone else combs the beach,

And picks through wrack, and boasts good finds,

Until waves rising lower all.