Don’t Worry About the Data, Only What You Made It Mean

How do you write a poem when
You can’t remember your name?
Like a vanishing version

Of an old, familiar scene,
Like angels slipping away
From themselves for no reason

Like whatever the world wrote
Into libraries of lost
Information about leaves,

DNA, shivering sheets
Of family history,
Information’s vanishing,

Being replaced by meaning
As it had to be, since leaves
Are the awful immortals,

Those only wonders truly
Bound to come and go, data
Fooling you along the road—

The data hiding somewhere,
In the permanence
Of information, along with

Black holes, every secret file,
Each scrap of information
Rescued from the burning pile,

The conservation of force,
The memory of the face,
Of the best-beloved god,

Who can’t recall the meaning
That went along with the name
The information you thought

You could lose, proved resilient
As information will do,
As force and matter will, too.

The Discovery

Phone I’m just trying to call,
As if if were there that easy,
As if poetry were owls,

As if baby poems were owls,
Tasked with their own egg-laying.
Sunny day in December,

Likely as not to produce
Something hideous, the task
Carefully summarized so,

Instead of monstrosity,
That the species of owl eggs
Tend to generate over

And over again in books
And images, we may make
For ourselves the kinds of grace

We would be happy to find,
Simple words in woods at night,
Or in the shade at evening

And recite, I found a small
Poem last night and not be wrong
About the discovery.

Phone I’m just trying to call,
As if if were there that easy,
As if poetry were owls,

As if baby poems were owls,
Tasked with their own egg-laying.
Sunny day in December,

Likely as not to produce
Something hideous, the task
Carefully summarized so,

Instead of monstrosity,
That the species of owl eggs
Tend to generate over

And over again in books
And images, we may make
For ourselves the kinds of grace

We would be happy to find,
Simple words in woods at night,
Or in the shade at evening,

And recite, I found a small
Poem last night and not be wrong
About the discovery.

The Discovery

Phone I’m just trying to call,
As if if were there that easy,
As if poetry were owls,

As if baby poems were owls,
Tasked with their own egg-laying.
Sunny day in December,

Likely as not to produce
Something hideous, the task
Carefully summarized so,

Instead of monstrosity,
That the species of owl eggs
Tend to generate over

And over again in books
And images, we may make
For ourselves the kinds of grace

We would be happy to find,
Simple words in woods at night,
Or in the shade at evening

And recite, I found a small
Poem last night and not be wrong
About the discovery.

A Kind of Something

And then there’s the urge
To make a kind of something
Out of the nothing much
That flings itself your way.

If you could be maximally
Quiet along the way. Why
You would expect dying
To other than living, who knows?

Thirty Years Ago You Were Also Alive

Soon, the holograph
Will be the last
Resort of the facts

And the pen in the hand
The last ghostly jasmine
As a light breeze

Ruffles the air you recall
Driving home from a prison
You visited to teach a class.

The Soft Lives

The shadows are so long
They have lives of their own
And the life that was led

Seems tangled in the life
Its shadows are leaving,
As if tangled in the branches

And the language has grown
Simpler, simpler, the shadows velvet
The dark shadows comfort

On the Rim

There’s a small pile
You can arrange
Of dust while you wait death,

And making small islands
You’re never excavating
While clouds concentrate on the rim

Rim of the sky you rim and
There are sad coats out there
And columns of shadows,

Through lawns at evening,
The sun at last shining,
We can stay until we have to go.
Until we we have to go we can stay.