The Weaving of Themselves

A little spiel,
A little play,
The fairytale
Of the salesman,

Missionary,
Or sorceror,
Storytelling,
Trance inducing,

Hypnotic words,
Just words themselves
But, with people,
With characters,

Fictions in them,
Weirs in the air,
Alternative
Worlds, traps, snares, spells.

Unscreening Room

A day the world won’t let you in.
Check news. There’s news, but there isn’t.
Check post office. Check in-boxes.

Nothing doing. It’s the relief
That makes you anxious. You’re searching
For traction, but you can’t grasp it.

Can you not just relax and wait?
What is there to evaluate?
No one’s contacting you right now.

You don’t want to be contacted.
Why not celebrate? A finch sings.
You’re not hungry at the moment,

Not obligated. You’re at peace.
You’ve no need for entertainment.

Without Injections

Now the wheels are coming off.
There’s nothing for you to write
That you really want to write.

There’s nothing for you to read
That you really want to read.
There’s nothing for you to watch.

The world remains full of things
Just recently happening,
But to you unintriguing.

Pleasant and unpleasant things
Are still distinguishable,
But you don’t want to get lost

In the acts of doing things.
You’d rather stay half asleep.

Impossible Impossibility

The impossible used to be
Impossible, given belief,

Genuine, authentic belief,
In occasions when the sun stopped,

When bodies floated weightlessly,
When ghosts were only commonplace,

People and animals transformed
Into each other, and sometimes

People could sleep for centuries
Or return, alive, from the dead.

There was always a darker theme,
Singing how human life was grass,

And tides couldn’t be commanded,
But that only hummed undertone.

The truly impossible was
Truly impossible belief.

It may be impossible, still.
Someone’s still squaring the circle,

Dreaming of antigravity,
Planning on immortality,

As if nothing’s impossible
Except impossibility.

Coffee Shop to Go

If the person in the corner
Of the cafe has a notebook
And alternates between scribbling
And staring out of the window,

Are they journaling or trying
To compose lyrics? A poet?
What if that were exactly what
It takes to create an epic?

Not saying it is, but what if?
A real epic, gods and heroes
In some kind of regular verse,
Not just a cartoon universe—

A notebook and a window seat
For suburban future Homers,
And there’d be guaranteed content
Revered millenniums to come.

The person peers out the window,
Then scribbles another something.
You used to carry small notebooks.
You sat by windows and scribbled.

You’d be scared to find those notebooks.
No epics in yours, that’s for sure.
What a library could be made,
If all the notebooks of scribbles

Of all the world, but only those,
No printed books, no sacred scrolls,
Were gathered onto walls of shelves,
Tomb of introspective Babel.

Outside it starts to rain again.
You pick up your order and go.
Someday, there’ll be no more notebooks—
Deep thoughts, maybe, still. No windows.

Uncannily Anonymous Illusionists

Not everyone
From the once-called
Axial Age
Got their names saved

Or invented.
For each Buddha
And Confucius,
Every Plato,

There were poets
Of, for instance,
Ramayana,
The Book of Job,

No hint of self,
No crust of
Apocryphal—
Just the made things.

No Accounting for Nothing

Math for poets: empty, one, two, many,
The ten thousand things. Well, Chinese poets,
Composing in classical Mandarin—

Other numbers for other traditions.
Odd just how much poets like counting things,
Even in their freer situations—

Hejinian, once, aged thirty seven,
Made a book in thirty-seven sections,
Thirty-seven sentences per section.

Count the syllables, count the stresses, count
Turns and counter-turns, parallel phrases,
Count lines, alliterations, and refrains,

Count any way you can divide the things,
But don’t ever be so gauche as to claim
Poetry’s soul hides inside the counting.

Walls and Markets

The astronomer
Doesn’t watch starlight,
Doesn’t need to look.

Let the machines look.
They’re well-engineered,
Well-calibrated.

The last telescope
An astronomer made
Is useless these days.

The astronomer
Supported by walls
And markets works hard

In rooms full of screens
To parse the data,
Interpret the codes,

A city poet
Sifting through idylls,
Relaying visions

Of vast pasts aglow
With portents beyond
All markets and walls.