Portent

And then they’re gone.
You watched all day,

Or, you looked up
Often, all day,

And thought about
How people think

Trying to think
What people think.

Clouds photobomb
So many scenes

And no one cares,
Except, sometimes,

The camera
Swings up at them

To indicate
Things are changing,

Storm’s a’coming,
Here’s a portent.

Dragging’s Not Playing Behind

The simplest term coined
For the most basic
Of dynamical

Systems names one thing,
One kind of return
On complexity,

But you never know
If repetition
In that rhythmic tense

Converges toward
A perfect cycle
Or bounces around

Chaotic patterns.
The secret may be
That its rules aren’t rules,

And the purest ring
Of return can’t stop
Those changes that shift

The algorithm,
As it were, itself.
It’s never the same

Period, the same
Orbit, the exact
Same of anything.

It’s not time marching
On and over you.
Time can’t stop drifting.

A Hank of Daffodils

Voiceless trumpets
A novelist
Itemizes
In a garden

A crowd a host
For a lonely
Cloud of poet
Two centuries

And a long belt
In his sister’s
Journal entry
For that day’s walk

A skein a coil
Is anything
Not a callback
From lost and found?

Worm Tracks

In Latin, not even
A little one, from not
And the diminutive

Of one, unique—any.
Some of the earliest
Clues to moving life forms

With soft bodies that don’t
Fossilize well are tracks,
Those little wiggle marks

In sediments that turned
To stone. New kinds of tracks
Debut new kinds of worms.

Etymologies track
The wiggles of new ghosts
Squirming to make meaning

Out of signifiers
That escaped, leaving them
Nullus, not any, none.

The Backdrop

From space, they’re in the foreground.
In ground photos, they’re backdrops.
You expect them to be there,

Although many desert days,
Or in the doldrums, even
Sometimes near coasts, not at all.

They used to be heavenly,
Ferrying gods and angels,
Hiding glories. Now you know

They’re thin, altogether thin,
All the layers of them. Watch.
It takes patience to watch long.

Important, unimportant,
The backdrop’s always moving.