Riverbeds

The water happens by here.
It’s water. It’s a liquid.
It builds up and spills downhill.

Some of it evaporates.
Or thaws. Or returns as rain.
It’s water. You come to us

With your faiths and your proverbs,
Your philosophical verse,
And here we are, water-scoured

And channeling more water,
But you only want to sing
About the river. As if

Rivers were paradoxes,
Things that exist as themselves,
Stable ropes of mystery.

But the beds define the space.
When do you hymn riverbeds?
No, it’s always the water.

You’re mostly water yourselves,
Fish four-hundred-million years
Removed from water, but still,

Mostly water. No wonder
You think the river’s the thing.
It’s the bed that talks and sings.

On Past Dying

White lichen spotting the rocks
In the dry wash makes basalt
Boulders look like monuments
Speckled in pigeon droppings,

But there are no pigeons here,
Only the community
Of birds that need piñon nuts—
Scrub jays, titmice, solitaires.

It’s not the prettiest place
In the grand national park,
But it’s not ugly either.
It’s a reminder—sandstone,

Basalt, odd pieces of quartz,
In all sizes, from sand grains
Sifting wavelet dunes to stones
The size of bedrooms tumbled

Down from their homes on the cliff—
This is a living surface,
Down to every speck of dirt,
And even if the lichen

Really were dung, that would be
Living, too, churning with lives
More numerous than humans
Churning in your city blocks.

Creatures, it’s not life you need
To worry about on Earth.
Life’s thriving. But look how all
You lives yourselves—you lizard,

With a pine nut in your mouth
Bigger than your head, you patch
Of emerald moss still clinging
To one rock’s shade, you dry grass

Recovering from the last
Flash flood to rip this channel—
All, all of you—fight so hard
To push life past your dying.

Beyond Found

There are two other worlds,
Neither necessary—
Given your attention

Would seem to have enough
Plagues, hunger, storms, and wars
To stay fully engaged.

One world’s always monstrous,
Horrible, and the source
Of horrible monsters,

While the other’s perfect—
Or lushly appointed
As you can imagine,

Lovely weather, good health,
Plenty of food, long lives
Or immortality,

Peace. Your compass needle
Swings wildly as to where
These worlds are located,

North, south, up, down, east, west,
Past the seas, up mountains,
Far beyond the desert,

Or cities, or tundra.
All directions take turns
As the source of angels

Then alien demons,
Fear or serenity.
Why this two-world habit

In so many cultures
With enough going on,
As it is, just to live?

We don’t know. We’re the worlds
You make of us. We know
Just that they’re both monstrous,

Since we are, since words are,
And when shaggy tales claim
Otherwise, they’re still us.

Dandelion Tree Wish

The woody-stemmed, giant dandelions
Of the chain of Juan Fernández Islands

Don’t much resemble their backyard cousins,
Which is unfortunate, since it’s pleasant

To imagine a day spent wandering
Wonderstruck, a sudden Lilliputian

Among a forest of dandelions,
Their enormous yellow or puffball heads

Nodding at the height of basketball hoops,
Seeds sailing umbrella-sized parachutes.

Too bad that, outside of fractal patterns,
Life can rarely scale its morphologies,

Thanks largely to things like surface tension,
Surface-to-volume growth asymmetry,

And the bottomless needs of gravity.
If a Jomon spider could grow as large

As a gorilla but keep its figure,
Or if humans could shrink without further

Distorting already huge, lolling heads,
Life could be like fairytale CGI.

Instead, island biogeography
Reforms its forms. Oh, well. Nice trees. Don’t sneeze.

Whatever’s Left of the Sunrise

It’s beyond everything accessible,
Beyond everything you’ve ever pictured.
Wherever it is, there’s a lot of it,

But you’re never going to visit it,
Except by trying to imagine it,
And sadly imagination’s all built

From the timbers of memory’s shipwrecks.
There is a Black Forest, blacker than night,
Black as the light-eating holes of the night,

And you know it, know it’s there, know you can’t
Know it, since if you go you’re gone with it.
And yet, and yet, in yet some other sense,

You’re not only already deep in it,
You’ve always been in it, and you are it.
If you go beyond the periphery

Of the barren worlds that you can visit,
You will find yourself back inside yourself,
And past the blank ice that never breaks up.

The woods return, innocent of stories,
Neither lifeless nor full of lives, black trunks
Of dark needles, through which we’re whispering.

Beyond the Poles

Pale peg of imagination,

Never one moment visible,

Touchable—scentless and soundless—

The point to which all others point

Before they peak and then vanish—

That’s your pole, inevitable.

When you sought Ultima Thule,

When you fantasized the north woods,

Or when you sailed south through the ice—

All those romances, all those deaths

And disasters—you succeeded

In reaching and mapping the poles,

But then what? Then where could you go?

It was always more in than out,

More the place you could never go

Than the mystery you hadn’t

Yet accessed—every achievement

Had to be anticlimactic,

As you don’t really want to go

Anywhere in or near this world,

Not even to Mars, not that much.

When you wrote the woods, when you said

The north, terra incognita,

The moon, beyond the pale, you meant

You wanted to cross the threshold

Where the outside would let you in,

But the outside won’t let you in.

A Letter from These Letters to Whatever Flesh May Find Us

We don’t know where you are,
When you are, when you meet
Us, if you meet us, but

If you can understand
This language, we would guess
You’ve been cold, and you’ve been

Too hot, since you’re flesh, and
It’s a constant struggle
To keep life living, if

There’s any life at all,
Even when life’s easy
For a minute, even

If your life’s easiest.
How much of existence
Have you spent imbalanced

Trying to get your life
Back to contentment? Ask
Yourself that. Please write back.