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.

Late in the Calendar Year

What little you had may be going,
And you’re not sure how much you care,
How much you feel like rearranging,

Yet another time, the deck chairs.
You sit in the afternoon sun,
Your favorite part of living life,

And wonder about traditions
And habits—in dailiness, in art,
What counts as good or not.

Flocks of messages, gathered words,
Startle up from and resettle
On the cobbled square. You pretend

You’re there, pretend that you’re not there.
Was it better to state precisely
The doings within your awareness,

Or to focus on the skill of drawing
The scattered pigeons in air?
Would it have been better, then,

To train the pigeons, to learn them traits
By which you’d know your own flocks
Circling there, above the sinking square?

The waters are rising. The girl’s mother
Occasionally takes an interest in her
Daughter’s care. What little you had

You wasted contemplating waste
And the way it takes meanings to make,
And you’re not sure how much you care.

Inventory

If you could wander
As you imagined
As a teenager,

Stacking walls of books,
Hoping to find doors
Into the unknown—

Pretty funny hope,
Given all you knew
Was unknown to you,

And it was all doors
You were just too weak
To wrestle open—

You’d be out there now,
Proudly wandering
The inventory

Of whatever woods
The world’s minds furnished,
More pleased with being

Coddled in the dark
Than worried the dark
Would find you tempting.

The dark has found you
Tempting anyway,
With your fantasies

Of keeping records
Of what might be real
There, what might be true.

What Isn’t, Available As Is

If someone would be so kind
As to rotate silently,
Like a drill—but silently—

Right here where the shade lies warm,
To make a day of the ground
By drilling down through the world,

Past physics, the natural,
The material, the rules,
Past the supernatural,

However conceived so far,
All the way through to visions
Of what can’t be that still is,

The light that has no wavelength,
Eternity, it would be
Alright, as is, all of this.

So

It won’t be like this for long.
It won’t be like this later.
Shards of mind caught in the skull,

Get caught up in the debate.
Risk not finishing the work,
The chores that have to be done?

Or squander the little while
It’s like this——cool but brilliant,
Shade perfectly positioned

Just outside the house, the birds
About their avian chores
In the purple, green, and gold

Of Russian sage in autumn,
No one knocking on the door.
You don’t believe you’re choosing,

Between tasks that can be done
And life lived as you’d prefer,
But then again, you can’t say

And you don’t know how such choice
Occurs. Somehow you’ll end up
Doing something, and somehow

You’ll pay and reap, probably
Telling yourself at some point
How lucky you are to be

Dying in relative peace
While others suffer so much
And still others suffer more.

The quail nod their bobbled heads
And squeak like creaky doors while
The wrens whistle sweetly, so.

Dementia Three: What’s That Word?

Keep away.
That’s the game
Small talk plays

With your tongue.
You talk, talk
As you have

All your years.
Then you can’t
Say that one.

Dementia Two: The Woods Maker

She raises the same problem
Raised by every creative
Destroyer—somewhere between

Asking, How does she do that?
And, Where does she come from then,
If everything came from her?

You’re better at spotting her,
At dreaming that you see her,
Than anyone seems to be.

You’re not that especially
Attentive in life at large,
But you can spot her shoulders

Hunched over a patch of dirt
Anywhere unexpected
And know the woods are coming.

You won’t tell anyone which
Woods these next woods will blossom,
But in your thoughts you can see,

Already, the sinking seeds,
Looking like robot space probes
Compressed to the size of pills

Dropping into blackening
And vanishing away. Gone,
For now, they’ll eat your decay,

Reemerge as slender stems,
Here, out of the way, bolus,
Corm, beginning of the end,

The new forest, a denseness
Fire can’t swallow, blades can’t eat.
Night’s darkness returns as these.

Dementia One: Go Back to Whatever You Were Doing

It’s so swift. This seizes you,
Flash of loss—push a button,
Turn your head or turn the page,

There! Just then, something missing—
But that’s wrong, since you didn’t
Sense it at all a moment

Ago. So its missingness
Emerged in your awareness
With it, and now, if you don’t

Keep composing text for it,
This text, to keep it in mind,
It will go missing again.

No, that was it. It’s gone now,
If you can’t feel missing it.

How Zeus Homeschooled Athena

See anything here
As the traffic glides
Through hourly changes?

Begging blank spaces
Stand on street corners
Waving empty signs,

The most pathetic
Fallacies there are,
Or ever have been,

And yet the authors
Of all ever known—
Nothing giving birth

To anything’s not
Nothing at all.

Leaving Charon to Bail the Boat

The last line scrabbles up the slope,
As if the thoughts had changed their mind

And were trying to lift the whole
In a sudden elevation,

But it’s so weighty and altered
In tone from the rest of the text

That its burden sways the vessel
With its rifle butt to be blessed,

Throat, eye, and knucklebone. Boy’s hair.
Look at the moon, bowl yet to fill

But still too good to use. Shadows
Are bodiless shapes, yet they have

A song, for now they all belong
To time. There is nothing to get

The answers you can’t write—the love
Of endings is a love of form.

Another Note in the Woods

Journey. You know it’s not.

It’s not a battlefield,

Not a drawn-out conflict.

It contains all those things,

But it’s defined by none

Of them—the mind is one,

Albeit broken, or

Scattered, distributed,

Running in parallel

Across millions of skulls,

A forest, a lab, a

Wilderness of mirrors

Signing to each other.

You may journey through it,

You may battle for it,

But the same may be said

For any vast landscape,

And the mind involves more

Than the vastest landscape,

The most extensive woods—

Maybe more than any

Ecosystem. You perch

In your corner, vendor,

Craftsperson, laborer

In a trading depot

Of one entrepôt—

Functional as a shelf,

As a switchboard—also

Goods temporarily

Housed on that shelf, also

A flickering signal

And a part of the mind

That signals to itself,

That, even in conflicts,

Can neither disengage

Nor emerge from its woods.

The Evening Forecast

Someday, you’ll be weather, just
Weather itself that can’t be
Disappointed, can’t be faith

In what it’s supposed to be,
Or doubt in its own nature,
Weather. Moving air, moisture,

The molecular remains
Of people after seizures.
You, my friend, my old friend, will

Someday become the weather,
And nobody will find you,
Digging down through the wrong clues.

The Parallels, Not the Connections, Confine You

There’s a sort of pontoon boat,
A blue, rudderless dinghy,
Floating down a flooded street,

Pulled by young men in life vests
And bright bicycling helmets,
Up to their hips in brown mess.

The pontoon’s crammed with people
Looking scared, casually dressed,
Mostly clutching each other,

Behind them, a row of shops
And undistinguished buildings,
Probably rental housing,

Squats in the dirty water,
Facades linked by sagging lines
Tangling up telephone poles,

And that’s that—a flooded street
Of escaping residents
In an ordinary town.

Kathmandu. You used to dream
Of living in Kathmandu.
Guggenheim almost let you.

Typical westerner dreaming
Of an exotic escape
To a more intriguing world,

Typical youngster trying
To make life an adventure
For sheer love of daydreaming,

Despite a fragile body,
Raised in the kind of place full
Of boring rental housing,

Streets crisscrossed by power lines
And folks in casual clothes.
To dwell among great mountains!

To write poems under those eaves
That shade the roof of the world!
To become someone made new

Who dines out on anecdotes
Of that year in Kathmandu!
But the grant didn’t come through.

Forty years later, you stare
At this photo of a street,
Ordinary as any

Except for this year’s monsoon,
Just one click from a photo
Of another flooded street

In a Florida suburb,
More shops and rental housing,
Where people in shorts and tees

Are wading through the brown mess
A hurricane left their world
That parallels Kathmandu.

Fear Me Now

Why do you fear forgetting
Like it’s a rare occasion,
Unexpected accident,
When it’s as common as death?

Well, you fear death even more,
On average, so common
Seems, if anything, a prod
And stimulant to fearing,

If you pause to think on it.
You sit in conversation
On a sunny afternoon
With a friend who shares your fears,

Taking turns reassuring
Each other the missing words
Are not such a certain sign
That all of you’s leaving you.

Could be medication’s fault.
Time to take your medicine.

And Thoughts Glow

But you’ll be careful before bed,
Right? It’s dangerous to be brave
Once the mind runs free in your head.

When that alien’s in your skull,
Whether it got there from school books
Or shows, it’s difficult to tell

What notions are really your own
And which ideas are ancient spoor,
Seeding bones before you were born.

The mind has survived many lives.
It’s swift at leaping between them,
Especially when darkness lies

In canyons cliffs use for their shows
When the light looks ready to go.

After Something

You can’t find it. Honestly,
That’s all you’re really doing,
Each journey back to the blank—

Neither of the sculptor’s tacks,
Neither adding slabs of clay
Nor carving and subtracting

To get at that form inside—
You’re just looking, no idea,
Hoping to find the hard thing

That won’t erode easily,
Or, no, hoping just to find
Whatever it possibly

Could turn out to be, pattern,
Enduring or vanishing,
A magic wave either way,

The dry wave, the standing wave,
The seiche hidden in the lake.
And every time you go back,

Tossing the words around you,
You’re only looking, only
Pawing through phenomena,

The furnishings of the mind,
Knick-knacks and ephemera,
Dreaming of discovery

Reaching whatever it is.
So you make another mess,
Lean back and look it over.

Not what you were searching for,
Although maybe, this time, close?
You’ll try again tomorrow.

The World Isn’t Waiting on You

Some moments, you wake up
In the middle of life,
Startled to remember

Not much is expected
From the rest of your life—
A book reviewer notes,

Of children as readers,
That soon they will grow up
Enough to feel the weight

Of what the world needs done
To prevent disaster
Freight their narrow shoulders

With decades of choices
Bearing down on their spines,
And suddenly you feel

Weightless. What, after all,
Are you planning to do
In the assorted months

You’ve been told are left you?
You can be a good soul,
Maybe, do some good things

In the name of living
In the face of dying,
But unless you’re filthy,

Stinking rich and gifted
With great liquidity,
There are few last-minute

Gestures available
To terminally ill,
Frail individuals.

You roll outside to think
This through on the porch
In the still autumn air

While territorial
Wasps of some small species
Harass you in the dusk,

Offering you their hint
That the best you can do,
In their view, is to go.

Aubergine Beautiful

Thumbnail in sunlight
On the steel handle
Of water-spotted

Refrigerator
Door, a glow. Just there,
A hand, a thumbnail,

Probably not yours,
Lit up in late sun,
Compelling your pause—

What moral value
To a believer
In divinity

Or activism
Could a meager flash
In a drab kitchen

In a gouged desert
Just before sunset
Offer? Honesty,

Maybe? More prayers in
Praise of dappled things?
The humility

Of the hardworking,
Who rent small places
Where nail polish wears

Away to scruffed-up
Color shreds before
The next coat of paint?

Beauty is never
There for its own sake.
Beauty has no sake.

You may think you take
It in yourself, but
You’re what beauty takes.

Comforted

Roughly retirement

Age and already

Pronounced as dying

By oncologist

And by subsequent

Proper paperwork,

You find you can still

Feel like a big boy,

Edge of adulthood

Today, knowing you

Just caught a poet—

Living, not well-known,

Strange to your liking,

And all on your own.

Isn’t that the way

It’s supposed to go

For true connoisseurs?

Bookshop afternoon,

Hours sifting the shelves

For rare surprises

That are surprising

For having been shelved

With the well-known dull

And embarrassing?

Then, discovery—

Name you didn’t know,

Someone to carry

Away the old way,

Printed, glued, and bound.

All your poet now—

Yes, I discovered

These in those shadows

That you wouldn’t know.

One Way to Be Wise

The HVAC repairer lifts

His ladder under one arm,

Bright sweat beading his forehead,

And says, It’s a such a cool world,

This moment we’re living in.

His sentiment delights you.

What? No tirade? Wonderful.

Full of wonder, wonderful.

A lizard scoots on the stones

Xeriscaping the circle

That completes your neighborhood.

Possibly, That lizard’s genes

Have already been sequenced,

Muses the repairer as

The repaired unit kicks on.

He’s someone who loves new worlds

Folded into ancient ones.

He says he wants to study

Classical mythology.

He’s taking an online class

On motorcycle repair.

You can’t resist asking him

If anyone’s named Pirsig

Among family members.

No. He asks you why you ask.

You tell him about the book,

Which you only remember

For persuading you, briefly,

That you’d learned a deep secret

About the ways to be wise.

An Opal Apron

A writer describes the sky
Somewhere in the South of France.

That’s fine. Another writer
Falls asleep in a bright room.

The children of these writers
Worry about their parents

And the ways that they’re dying
By varying consumptions,

The opal apron writer
Losing memory at speed,

The sunny sleeper losing
Vital organs to pirates

Rampaging the inland sea.
The writers are connected

By their lust for fine writing,
Which means, from their points of view,

That the writer in more pain
But not losing language yet

Would seem the more fortunate.
Opal apron, though. That’s good.

Sometimes being stuck with less
To work with means better work—

But was the phrase meant to be
Oval apron and opal

Only popped up by mistake
When the writer lost oval

And substituted opal,
A fortunate improvement

Of weird hue for a bland shape?
You could ask, but they’re asleep.

Wild Rock Song

Smith’s scry stone—
Striped brown rock,
Palm-sized egg—

Could gloss lost
Strong God tales
Small palms held,

But your stone
Sings odd math
Its null splits.

Travel Journal

The blank seduces desire.
You know you want to do it,
Discover that emptiness

The emptiness is hiding.
Over there, a car crushes
An oncoming bicycle.

The cyclist tries to leap clean,
But his legs are caught
By the car’s tires and destroyed.

One moment you’re on a trek,
A true solo adventure
Traversing long continents,

Having already pedaled
Eight-thousand kilometers,
And the next moment you’re flat

On your back in the desert,
Screaming since the body screams.
It’s never the injury

Itself that’s astonishing.
It’s the before and after.
New world you can never leave,

Never, encapsulating
A world now gone forever.
You’ve discovered emptiness,

You’ve entered the work of art
You wish you hadn’t entered.
Yet somehow you’re still longing

For that blank space of paper.
You’re longing for what isn’t
To make what can’t be better.

And This, That You Did Accomplish, You Don’t Know Either

Would it be, would it really be better?
Is how the interrogation begins.
You try to turn around inside your skull.

It’s easy to read out the benefits
Of sheer good fortune and hard-earned success.
They’re enumerable, for the most part.

The costs are much trickier to assess,
Since they go beyond any accounting.
A cost can be hidden inside a gain,

Dependent on the gain to be a loss.
When people puzzle over happiness
Among the powerful, rich, and famous,

They’re seeking out the costs peculiar
To such success. And there are other costs,
Albeit hypothetical at best.

Ask yourself of anything you hope for,
From the most selfish to the most selfless,
Ask yourself carefully and bring to bear

All you can of your imagination,
Would that world really be a better world
Than whatever you happen to live in?

You know you can’t say. You can’t be certain.
You can’t say, and yet you can’t stop thinking
About altering this to your liking.

Haste

There’s a title you keep withdrawing,

As haunted by change as anyone.

You start off determined to finish,

But what you manage isn’t nearly

A match for its intended flourish.

There’s a woman in front of a truck

On the sunny side of the highway

On a pleasant autumn afternoon,

And as you’re driven by where she stands,

You wonder how her life seems to her.

Is the breeze that stirs her bangs too hot?

Is she at all content with her day?

You want this poem to be titled Waste,

But that title would be such a waste.

Kerfuffle in Mind

You were told you were in complete
Remission, and six weeks later
You were told the cancer was back,

Bad, and raring to take over.
What’s unnerving in retrospect
Isn’t so much the way you learned—

Life in the air, life libre, life
Snatched away—but how little changed
In your daydreaming cavalcade.

You were hardly at all upset.
First, you considered cautiously
The hopeful, possible futures,

Then you told yourself you could think
About years and decades freely,
Which you tried. Then the curtain fell,

Or you were promised that it would,
Which kicked daydreaming to the curb.
What a miniature turmoil,

Permissible thoughts in your skull
Fizzing a bit while you waited
For further announcements from those

Same confident folks said you’d die,
Said you might in fact live, said you
Were likely to live a while, said

You were guaranteed soon to die.
A tiny kerfuffle in mind,
That hardly bothered you at all.

Epistolary Wake of the Mind

Scholars gather and edit
The letters of famed writers
And political leaders,

Collected volumes of which
Get reviewed in magazines
Appealing to the learnèd.

Invariably, letters
Reveal a more human side,
That is, a more personal,

Individual writer,
Than the famous writings showed.
Letter writers waffle more,

Permit themselves often to be
Childish, petulant, greedy,
Compared to their published selves.

In the reviews, the volumes
Provide a higher gossip
And more interior life

For reviewers and readers
To discover and ponder.
There, one grows aware of mind

As an elegant stranger,
A soul almost alien
Wandering from skull to skull,

While what the skulls keep anchored
Is only part mind, wholly
Animal. A long visit

From the creative mind
Yields the peculiar ideas
That made the skull linked to them

Famous, or remarkable,
And mind plus higher gossip
Entice the letter readers,

And that’s fine, although the mind
Has decamped to other skulls
Carrying its elegance.

A full history of thought
Would mostly involve the mind,
That traveler, that sophist,

In all its variations,
Visiting the many skulls
Left to gossip in its wake.

On the Threshold

This exists. The roadrunner,

Length of a grown man’s forearm,

Wiry and spiky-feathered,

Waits just outside the window

To be granted existence

As well. Poems do that to lives,

Change their stakes—for the poets,

At least, if not the readers.

What the poem declares exists

Exists. But you want to write

Something more. Strange persistence,

Like war, to its existence.

The roadrunner’s still waiting,

Sharp spike of its tail twitching.

Fell Out Hard

The small turn
Of least worth
Wants to leap

From this place
To that one
Where it fits

Too well not
To speak out
Of floored sun

A Stab at a Guess-Worthy God

The future brightness of a comet
Is terribly tricky to predict.
This might become a beam in the night

Or disappear into a faint smear
Detectable only with lenses
Ground well enough to discern

The famously fickle face of God—
Omniscient, omnipotent, but shy
As any of the small creations.

The point is that the comet remains
More or less the same slushed assemblage
Of dirty ice, whether dim or not,

And what can you say there is to learn
About God and constancy from this?

Sketch Well

The thing about Long Day’s Journey

Is that it’s the day that’s long.

There’s no adjective for the night.

You wriggle your rump into place,

Ready with your anticipation

For something nothing for dreading.

There’s still more day, more journeying

Into a night that will only play days

Somewhere where you aren’t there

To notice anything and complain.

For now, you have no shows to watch,

No new books to make you car-sick,

Only a sketchbook and a seven-hour drive

Or more with your crumbling-down father,

Driving long day’s journey into night.

And We'll Love You Until It Turns Out True

You’re drawn to fortune cookies,
Runes, and prognostications,
If they make firm predictions

Impossible to deny.
Why? There’s a courageousness
To blatantly declaring

You know what you don’t and can’t
And aren’t remotely likely
To ever guess correctly.

Tell us we’ll get rich this week,
That the war’s about to end
(Or the world, either one’s fine),

Tell us anything for sure
That no one could know for sure.

World No Thing

Three words wide,
The stream lets
One or two

Thoughts slip through.
There’s no change
That’s so great

The world ends,
Nor so small
No thing ends.

What Way Will All This Go?

How long would you have to live
For the scenery outside
This American motel

Planted in beige rolling fields
And sere ranch lands extracting
Primarily calories

In the form of potatoes
And various kinds of meat
Products packaged for stomachs

Around a hungry planet
Bound like Gulliver, supply-
Chained by you Lilliputians

To become wholly other
Scenery? No young mother
With two children, watching out

While crossing the parking lot.
No bare choreography
Of fossil-fueled vehicles

Elaborating that lot.
No lot not well overgrown
With weeds disguising pavement.

How much time until all this
Would look alien to you
Waking like Rip Van Winkle?

So much longer than you have
If you dream of having time.
But that’s not a dream you need.

This motel, this scenery,
Was unimaginable
At one point. No one had time

To watch time changing in ways
No one could have imagined.
You'll roll back from the window.

The Sifter

Fire, flood, fashion,
Wildlife rescue,
Pictures chosen

To represent
A week by scenes,
A week now boxed,

Another tranche
Of history
Filed in the books.

Somewhere, someone
Grows wearier
Of collecting

What just happened.
Forgetfulness
Exists for this,

To assist. Pics
Still pile in drifts.
Let dreaming sift.