Lost Your Place

Out on the porch, you dive
Into the mind, pure mind
In the sense it’s all text,

It’s all language, ideas
Writhing around in words.
A black desert beetle,

Dusty, waddling, thicker
Than most human fingers,
Wanders by, disrupting

The purity of mind.
A dusty black house-cat
Stalks behind the beetle,

Practicing at hunting.
The shadows get shorter
Around beetle and cat,

And you realize why mind
Cares about skulls and texts.
It seems to run the world,

But it folds like a tent,
That mind, until almost
No mind’s left, the moment

When what’s not mind wanders
Into the arrangements
Of text. Purity, heh.

What’s Left Next

There we go.
Here we are.
Two dozen

Terse verses
Of nineteenth-
Century

Poetry
Swallowed down,
Now go read.

Lot of Fish in It

Someone drops the word

Pelagic into

Her composition

And publishes it.

Later, her text gets

Enthusiastic

Approbation, placed

At the very top

Of a list of texts

Deserving of praise.

Marine, maritime,

And oceanic

Could have been deployed

By the text instead,

But you must admit,

Pelagic rewebs

Some tattered canvas

Open to meanings

Its synonyms don’t

Attach. Pelagic.

There’s a sweep to it.

Those meanings themselves

That you make with it?

They’re waves. Pelagic.

There’s a Lot of Better or Worse Between Failure and Solution

When you face a fairly
Abstract dilemma, feel
Your hands. Feel whatever

Your hands are doing—this
Will solve nothing at all,
But it will alert you

To the world in between
Thinking of what to do
And simply doing things.

Whatever works as well
Whether death’s in an hour
Or past the horizon

Seems reasonably good
Advice for the living.

From Tent Trees, Shaded Below

Once you’re lost in these mountains,
You can’t tell the world still goes—
You know it does, it’s got to,
But you can’t tell, you can’t feel,
It’s going—and you might be
Gone yourself, for all you know,
Under silver skies, under
These hammer blows. The anvil
Wavers, about to shatter
With the pounding doubt, about
To topple from frightened blows.
The mountains rise thickly treed,
Absorbing news of the world.
It won’t reach you anymore.

Even Though It’s Not

Math homework (roots and radicals).
History project (interview
A parent re an ancestor).

Film studies (write, shoot, and edit
A story about a murder,
Where the killer’s a rubber duck).

Life science (recapitulate
The life cycle of a slime mold
As evolved cooperation).

Art classroom (ultra-realist
Drawing of a still-life in chalk,
As ultra as you can manage).

Language arts (interpret a poem
Written as an allegory).

True Crime Cast

The subtle ways life kills you, kill you.
The brutal ways life kills you, kill you.
Let’s not blame life, since mostly

Humans kill you. Wait, is that true?
To listen to people, you’d think
Bad diet and bad habits

And sometimes murderers kill you.
People don’t talk that much, frankly,
About what, specifically, kills you,

Except those really unlikely weapons
Found in crime and war stories,
Where any weird tool will do.

Oh, why not? Go ahead and blame life.
Not art. Poetry barely bores you.