When We Talk of Showers of Fishes

From undoubted examples
Underfoot, the running stream
Is cool and full of pebbles.

You long for others and then
Again loathe them come the end
Of autumn. No one argues

Against the wind in winter,
When the undersides of grass
Hold frost into afternoons,

Even when there’s no great snow.
There’s no owl in the plum tree.
Live for sun in the window.

Everything freezes again,
And among the pines, the winds
Are whispering their own things.

Why would you want spring back soon?
You know how harsh summers are
In this desert’s years of drought.

You’re afraid you won’t see it?
Spring reveals all gleaming bones,
But aren’t snow clouds beautiful,

Dragging dreams of nonaction?
Alright, alright. Dreams want spring,
Gushers of thundershowers

Raining lizards and fishes.
But words live opposite spring,
Even as we describe it,

As we describe anything,
Lush or spare, all the seasons.
When we chant prayers, we mean them.

From undoubted examples
Underfoot, the running stream
Is cool and full of pebbles.

Membraneless Microdroplets

Gas bubbles within
A heated rock core
Have been shown to be
Conducive to life—
Early life, that is—

By experiments
With coacervates
That have no membranes.
It’s another step
For the gastropod

That is life on Earth,
Army that moves on
Its stomach and curls
In its shell to dwell
On its sense of self.

Sooner or later,
The ability
To make compartments
In which to evolve
Will allow for us

To repeat what life
Managed first in rocks
But symbolically,
By which we mean us,
Literal symbols.

Cloud Anchor

You and you. You take two.

You watch a cloud shaped like

A ship’s anchor float past

The car’s opened sunroof

And think of you, and that

Becomes you, ghost anchor.

You were so graceful then,

Already half-addict,

Half-tragic, too slender

To be any anchor,

And now you weigh nothing,

Have been nothing but ash

And memory for years,

For more than a decade.

You lost all your daughters.

True, you chose to lose them,

But if people can say,

Piously, little ones

Are better in heaven,

Then why can’t they accept

You knew they would be, too,

And, in the end, you would

Be, too, as you are now,

Floating on, less than cloud.

You never lived to know,

But as ghost you anchored

Your memory and ash

And sentiment, yes, and

All of your losses, too.

Sometimes you still miss you,

But any ghost you know

Can only be a part

Of you reminding you,

To say “you” to a lost

thing in a poem is to

acknowledge the thing, to

keep it around for as

long as it needs to be

around, and to bid it

goodbye when you’re ready—

whether it has ever

existed at all. You.

The Well No More

The past is terribly long
For a prologue. Could it be
It’s just the whole collection,

More like an episodic
Series, periodical,
Than like a single drama?

You wait to find out what’s new,
Once it’s already finished
And available to you.

Then, for a while, nothing much
Seems to happen but rumors,
And you get tired of waiting,

And keen anticipation
Lapses to inattention,
Until something new comes out

Everyone’s talking about,
And the past gets interesting
Again. Climb back into that?

No. Sound like old news? Sometimes.
That past is a wishing well.
Everything you want’s down there

And nothing you want at all,
And it’s deep, and it’s dark, and
You keep hauling water out,

Bucketful by bucketful,
And you keep drawing stories,
Pulling out what you can’t help

And coming back for some more,
But that deep well’s always full.
How is there always some more?

Whose body is in the well?
Who wished? Who pushed? Keep watching.
Skies keep dropping episodes.

Freudian Swipe

Holes, like shapes,
Have different
Dimensions.

If you go
Left thinking
Right, then what

Hole have you
Placed to shape
Your phase space?

Agere

The leaves have lost their agency,
But for now they’ll have to do,
Since butterflies have lost their lives,

And only the wind blows through.
The old poems have lost their beauty.
They swirl in papery heaps,

Half-rotted, dank, and skeletal,
But when the wind’s strong, they creep.
The old ideas prove helpless now

To prevent what they thought sin,
But strange as they sound, and ugly,
They fly ahead of the wind.

Birds Need Deeper Keels to Anchor Wings

What you know about,
You can probably
Come to understand,
And what you don’t know,
You can’t understand,

But what you pretend
To know about but
Never understand—
Claim, on principle,
Can’t be understood—

What you like to call
The great mystery,
The eternal God,
Or profoundest good,
Probably never

Existed at all
Except among us
Who curate your dreams
And beliefs for you,
As we have to do.

Do you know why you
Dream more than any
Other ape? Language
Unbalances you.
Dreams can anchor you.