Riddled with Holes

Who could polish
One lyric stone
To an atom
No one could split?

Even Verlaine,
Gwendolyn Brooks,
Wallace Stevens,
And Tao Yuanming,

Name who you like,
Pass remembered
In fine fragments
Of best-loved bits.

Why attempt wholes?
You’re all Sapphos,
Maybe lucky
With a few quotes.

The Angle of Isolation

When the sun lights you alone,
You tiniest possible,
Almost, location, shining,

Thanks to the favorable
Inclination of the Earth
And a few tricks with the clouds,

And there you are, seen for once
As you imagine yourself,
Pinned, a genuine center

To all dimmer surroundings,
What can you do with yourself,
Except maybe strike a pose?

Lit up like that, you can’t move.
Any step you take, you’d lose.

Phantom’s Land

Too bad no one can really live
Where you’re not really yours
Or theirs. You can only visit,

Wondering at identity,
How you can’t not have one, have some
Even when unidentified—

Which is its own identity,
Often drawing more scrutiny
For being eerily nameless.

It would be fine to be able
To live a long life suspended,
Comfortably unnameable,

Not a problem for anyone
Else to solve, not wholly alone
If you never wanted to be,

A sustainable greyness,
Silvery, a hovering mist
That no one claimed or wished to lift.

Finish

The verb very nearly
Opposed to the noun form,
One implying the need

To get done, the other
Implying perfection,
Calm, fully completed—

The painter who rushes
To finish a canvas,
A hundred canvases

A day, the exquisite
Finish of the one piece
That took the woodworker

A year to tongue and groove
Invisibly smooth, linked
By the makers’ hungers

For some accomplishment,
Their accompanying
Anxiety no one

Else will see it that way—
Only a profligate
Hack and a waste of time.

A Poetry of Principle

It’s probably true your kindness remains
More often at odds with your principles
Than your principles will let you admit.

How many times have you cautioned yourself
With an eye to some vague, internal court
Of opinion, public or personal,

Of scriptures, ancestors, thinkers, elders,
Or neighbors, imaginary frowns for
Impulsive acts of generosity

In spirit, cash, or simple affection?
Where were your principles? Your principles
Are not your inventions. Your principles

Are not written in the mathematics
Of an exquisite cosmic perfection.
Your principles are in a tournament

Of their own, and you are a breathing part
Of the ecosystems selecting them.
Any principle that discloses this

Makes itself vulnerable, makes itself
More likely to vanish into thin air,
Exorcised from this tournament of ghosts.

If kindness conflicts with your principles
About when and who you should be kind to,
So much the worse for your kindness, for you.

Splash

A body wakes
To machine sounds
In the dark room
Of screaming dreams.

The wall ac
And mini-fridge
Grind out cycles,
And then they pause.

It’s just crickets
And tinnitus.
The body drifts
In the pulsing.

There’s nothing else,
Until a gust
Ripples the bells
Of a wind chime.

To Find Things Out

You have to start walking.
You pick the direction
And pretend you can walk.

The woods are never deep,
Just horizontally.
The biggest risk you take

Is that what you will find
Will be more of the same.
Correction. That’s not risk,

That’s a solemn promise.
The reward, possibly,
Is that you will become

Increasingly subtle
In the ways of sameness—
Of likeness, difference,

And how to recognize
Identical patches
As nonidentical

And changes as whispers
You’re going in circles.
Wandering that finds out

By assaying the woods
Without surveying them
Employs a discipline

That is foolish and fails
Often—could get you killed—
But still a discipline.