Sinking Orion

The day’s awareness presses
Beds of needles into night.
Failure’s anniversary

Promises greater failure
Between now and tomorrow.
Strategy, think strategy

To wriggle through disaster.
Disaster—check out the stars,
Presumably good fortune

Nowadays, just to see them,
To live under clear dark skies.
To see something like brilliance,

How can that be disaster?
Belt your sarcastic laughter.

Small Town Fall

The vampire gnome, the gnomepyre,
Black felt cap, fake fangs, fake blood
Running down his grizzly beard,

Considered the rituals
Of costumes, food, and monsters,
All that made for festivals,

The playful overturning,
Misrule, overtures to death,
Loved by anthropologists,

So much culture to describe,
Group behaviors to explain,
And explanations there are

In plenty, but none of them
Really work, do they? Stories,
Something about transforming

Into story characters,
Out of the humdrum of life,
Something about preferring

Mythic, narrative endings,
No that’s not it. The gnomepyre
Wanted to participate,

Nothing too complicated,
Wanted to be sufficient,
Knowing explanation

Wouldn’t, couldn’t ever be,
Among children dressed for death
And elders busy dying.

Imperfections of Everywhere

Adolescents are excellent

Reminders that nowhere is great.

There’s always good reason to leave,

To escape, to find somewhere else.

The restlessness may be a phase,

But the sensors are accurate.

Nowhere is actually perfect.

There’s reason for embarrassment,

Possibly terror, everywhere.

It’s just the focus that’s tighter

In the emerging mind—the frame

Renders important what’s wrong here.

If age and experience shrug

And make a virtue of one place,

It’s thanks to distaste for others.

Long Drained Terminal Moraine

The landscape carries its marks
Of people coveting it
Or bits of it, or products

It could or once did provide.
Even those who only asked
For basics, food and water,

Who didn’t slash, rip, or mine,
Left their tracks and debitage.
So spare yourself delusions

That you’ve left the nets of dust
And ambition behind you,
Bivouacked by this barbed-wire.

Still, you’re not reminded here,
By handsome architecture
Or the finest museums,

How rich inequalities
And extractive cruelties
Gave rise to the loveliness

That now attracts the tourists.
Dry grass rustles at your knees.
You’re the next ghost on the breeze.

Talisman

Back in the nineties,

Charles Wright, already

Deep in his sixties,

With his most esteemed

Decades still in front

Of him, called his poems

Verbal amulets.

Poems as good luck charms,

As phylacteries,

Does feel right. It’s why

People quote the ones

That they’ve memorized,

At least those few lines,

Why they repost them

To social spaces.

They’re incantations,

Little spells to ward

Off the terrible,

But not quite nazars,

Icons, or crystals—

No one uses poems

To ward away real,

Material harm.

They’re for keeping ghosts

And mental demons

At bay, for feeling

Reassured when blue,

Frightened, heartbroken,

For staring down death.

Wright scoffed at his own,

Reminded himself

Whatever happens

Will, with or without

Verbal amulets,

But struck that brave pose

From inside a poem.