The Pond at Evening

The sleet whips in
So small waves race
In startled flocks,

And your wipers
Squeak like crying,
Far-off seagulls.

No one’s up here
But transparent
Old eyeball you,

Wraith to yourself.
Will a body,
Bloated, surface?

Possibly, but
One hopes not. You
Were not, one hour.

This sleet will turn
To snow soon. Good
Then it didn’t.

If by Yourself You’re Still Yourself

Is life outside
Society
A sorrow or
Impossible?

Possibly both
And neither. Who
Can live alone
Like that? Damned few.

But don’t forget—
Society
Doesn’t care, if
You don’t exist

To it. You can
Live off of its
Indifference.
Sorrow’s your own.

Elaborate

In many groups, the answer
Seems to be supernotions,
Stretches of belief that lock

Many ideas together
In a singular unit
Of all-or-nothing belief.

Traits in a wide range of groups
Might be driven by notions
Working as a single faith,

Which would also explain why
Some communities produce
Imbalanced contradictions

That can’t be disentangled.
This keeps ideas from getting
Jumbled in the wash of thoughts.

It keeps the pattern pristine
And keeps the group distinctive,
Which can be quite adaptive.

Since they rarely recombine
With outside thoughts, however,
Any harmful variants

They’ve acquired tend to stay there.
Only minds compartmented
In balanced lethal systems

Can sequester dysfunction
From the value of belief.
Once in a while, toxins swap.

When they do, one of two things
Tends to happen—the pattern
Dissolves, or there’s new pattern.

The Civil Ape

Pugnaciously fugacious,
Your species, remarkable
For how the pugnacity

Endures at the group level
While the individuals,
Fading quickly, are often

More sweet than pugilistic,
Rarely quick to fight at first,
Eager to cooperate

In most cases, quarrelsome
And petty mostly within
Longer-term relationships,

But entirely capable
Of kindness or politeness
To complete strangers, cordial

Now and then to enemies.
It’s as if your great quarrels,
Your organized violence,

Must fight its own agenda
Across your generations
While your private lives flicker

In and out of existence,
More like other animals,
More calmly, if anything.

Three in the Morning Alone

Gets so quiet,
It’s loud with it.
Any pulsing—
Blood, insects,

Wind in a tree—
Moves all your bones,
The skeleton
Pulsing with it.

That’s dance. That dance
Is dancing you,
And you can feel
Yourself from it,

The way the shore
Collects the shells
From waves that make
The shore itself.

Prediction Isn’t Comprehension

Maybe you just don’t know gravity
As well as you thought you did. Haloes
Of dark matter might not be out there.

Gravity might have wrinkles in it,
Secrets it prefers to keep well hid.
Consistency’s so consistently

Correctly predicted, it’s tricky,
Not to say foolish, to theorize
Gravities with inconsistent twists.

But the galaxies seem so misty,
And all rushing away too quickly,
And after all, what is gravity

But the most successful prediction
Since the first correctly called eclipse?

A Broken Compact

like the Doppler reading suddenly shifted into the blue

Galaxy only a skeleton

Of terribly dim, elderly stars,

Distant, red-shifted blur of garnet

Like a diffuse ghost photobombing

Deep sky portraits, a smear at the back

Of the cavernous room of all rooms,

Wait! What are you doing? What is that?

How are you suddenly shifting blue?

You’ve thrown our world into a tizzy.

We look up from our famines and wars,

Our hypocritical politics,

All the politics we have at all.

Confounding all known cosmologies,

Receding Deep Time has reversed course.

There’s an ancient, early galaxy

Charging contrary to the cosmos,

Incredibly far away from us,

Still, but now coming for us, closing.

Ten billion years, the newscasters laugh,

A little too hysterically,

Ten billion years until it hits us.

But here’s the thing—yesterday it was

Headed away from us, then it turned.

What’s to say more distant wraiths won’t turn,

And then closer ghosts, too? What’s to say

The universe won’t reverse, shift blue,

Contract itself, compact all of you?