Wild Rock Song

Smith’s scry stone—
Striped brown rock,
Palm-sized egg—

Could gloss lost
Strong God tales
Small palms held,

But your stone
Sings odd math
Its null splits.

Travel Journal

The blank seduces desire.
You know you want to do it,
Discover that emptiness

The emptiness is hiding.
Over there, a car crushes
An oncoming bicycle.

The cyclist tries to leap clean,
But his legs are caught
By the car’s tires and destroyed.

One moment you’re on a trek,
A true solo adventure
Traversing long continents,

Having already pedaled
Eight-thousand kilometers,
And the next moment you’re flat

On your back in the desert,
Screaming since the body screams.
It’s never the injury

Itself that’s astonishing.
It’s the before and after.
New world you can never leave,

Never, encapsulating
A world now gone forever.
You’ve discovered emptiness,

You’ve entered the work of art
You wish you hadn’t entered.
Yet somehow you’re still longing

For that blank space of paper.
You’re longing for what isn’t
To make what can’t be better.

And This, That You Did Accomplish, You Don’t Know Either

Would it be, would it really be better?
Is how the interrogation begins.
You try to turn around inside your skull.

It’s easy to read out the benefits
Of sheer good fortune and hard-earned success.
They’re enumerable, for the most part.

The costs are much trickier to assess,
Since they go beyond any accounting.
A cost can be hidden inside a gain,

Dependent on the gain to be a loss.
When people puzzle over happiness
Among the powerful, rich, and famous,

They’re seeking out the costs peculiar
To such success. And there are other costs,
Albeit hypothetical at best.

Ask yourself of anything you hope for,
From the most selfish to the most selfless,
Ask yourself carefully and bring to bear

All you can of your imagination,
Would that world really be a better world
Than whatever you happen to live in?

You know you can’t say. You can’t be certain.
You can’t say, and yet you can’t stop thinking
About altering this to your liking.

Haste

There’s a title you keep withdrawing,

As haunted by change as anyone.

You start off determined to finish,

But what you manage isn’t nearly

A match for its intended flourish.

There’s a woman in front of a truck

On the sunny side of the highway

On a pleasant autumn afternoon,

And as you’re driven by where she stands,

You wonder how her life seems to her.

Is the breeze that stirs her bangs too hot?

Is she at all content with her day?

You want this poem to be titled Waste,

But that title would be such a waste.

Kerfuffle in Mind

You were told you were in complete
Remission, and six weeks later
You were told the cancer was back,

Bad, and raring to take over.
What’s unnerving in retrospect
Isn’t so much the way you learned—

Life in the air, life libre, life
Snatched away—but how little changed
In your daydreaming cavalcade.

You were hardly at all upset.
First, you considered cautiously
The hopeful, possible futures,

Then you told yourself you could think
About years and decades freely,
Which you tried. Then the curtain fell,

Or you were promised that it would,
Which kicked daydreaming to the curb.
What a miniature turmoil,

Permissible thoughts in your skull
Fizzing a bit while you waited
For further announcements from those

Same confident folks said you’d die,
Said you might in fact live, said you
Were likely to live a while, said

You were guaranteed soon to die.
A tiny kerfuffle in mind,
That hardly bothered you at all.

Epistolary Wake of the Mind

Scholars gather and edit
The letters of famed writers
And political leaders,

Collected volumes of which
Get reviewed in magazines
Appealing to the learnèd.

Invariably, letters
Reveal a more human side,
That is, a more personal,

Individual writer,
Than the famous writings showed.
Letter writers waffle more,

Permit themselves often to be
Childish, petulant, greedy,
Compared to their published selves.

In the reviews, the volumes
Provide a higher gossip
And more interior life

For reviewers and readers
To discover and ponder.
There, one grows aware of mind

As an elegant stranger,
A soul almost alien
Wandering from skull to skull,

While what the skulls keep anchored
Is only part mind, wholly
Animal. A long visit

From the creative mind
Yields the peculiar ideas
That made the skull linked to them

Famous, or remarkable,
And mind plus higher gossip
Entice the letter readers,

And that’s fine, although the mind
Has decamped to other skulls
Carrying its elegance.

A full history of thought
Would mostly involve the mind,
That traveler, that sophist,

In all its variations,
Visiting the many skulls
Left to gossip in its wake.

On the Threshold

This exists. The roadrunner,

Length of a grown man’s forearm,

Wiry and spiky-feathered,

Waits just outside the window

To be granted existence

As well. Poems do that to lives,

Change their stakes—for the poets,

At least, if not the readers.

What the poem declares exists

Exists. But you want to write

Something more. Strange persistence,

Like war, to its existence.

The roadrunner’s still waiting,

Sharp spike of its tail twitching.