From the Top

It’s not hard, anymore,
In the prosperous world,
To wander in somewhere

Where almost everyone
Is old—white hair, lined skin,
Odd shapes, difficult gaits.

One thing for your own life
To be past its middle,
But to sit in a room

At a service station,
A diner, a lobby,
Hospital, DMV,

And think, who among these
Will still be drawing breath
In ten years? You’re looking

At that weeping willow
You once watched turning brown
On a green lawn in town.

To Improve Stories

You search for causes
Of maladies and
Things that you don’t like.

You’re less curious
About the causes
Of things you do like.

This is, in itself
Rather curious,
So long as causes

Remain assumed real.
On the other hand,
If cause were fiction,

Then it might make sense
You only seek it
To improve stories.

A Fleeting Meaning

How do we say this? It’s like
A campfire for a nomad,
Not among other nomads

But alone, Cain with his mark,
Tamou in Berber bracelets
Fleeing the Spanish and French,

Rifle behind her saddle
And green tattoo on her chin.
You make it, and you break camp

Next morning, and you’re gone.
It’s not something that you find.
It’s something you have to make,

Your fleeting meaning, fleeting
Hearth you assemble and feed,
Just enough to serve your needs.

The Participatory Universe

Wheeler’s self-mirroring U,
It goes on while it goes on,
While you watch it going on.

So long as you watch, it is
The universe that made you,
The universe that exists.

Without you all bets are off.
A Steller’s jay fluffs and squawks
At wrens and red-winged blackbirds.

Roll up the window, roll up.
Black holes record all of this.
Let them be forced to exist.

The Great Year

Wind flips up the lids
Of recycling bins,
Flicks them down again.
The empty stomach
Pretends to be full,

Unpleasantly so.
Trucks roar up the hill.
Trucks roar down the hill.
Don’t keep coming back,
Pretending. Just go.

The Incompatible Miracle

You wake up alone an hour
Too soon, thinking in your old,
White skull that you realize

There was magic in romance
But not what you thought it was.
The wonder wasn’t the love

Or the lust that fired it up.
It was when you found yourself
Precariously aligned,

Thanks to all that chemistry,
With a stranger’s perspective
Outside kinship or friendship,

That made no obvious sense
To you, wasn’t yours, but was,
Just then, both of yours as well.

Dirt Legacy

Each inconvenient trace of the earth
Recedes to rejoin the soil. You hope.
The stink of waste has been building up

Since organisms evolved to flee
Their own. You can wish for enough space
And speed that it all returns to loam,

But just because you don’t want something,
Just because you can’t use it, or it
Is actually, to you, now toxic,

Doesn’t mean it won’t endure, doesn’t
Mean remains that you turn your face from
Won’t prove more durable than you do.