A Falling Embrace

Have you noticed how few love poems
Were written expressly for you?
That can’t be good. Here’s one for you,

One that knows you, loves you, would jump
Into your chest or off a cliff
To save you for a little while

Longer, just to keep you in this
World or, in falling, leave with you.
This poem shaped itself to hold you.

Please don’t consider how you look
Or any shameful thing you’ve done.
This poem’s for you, and you alone.

Every time you wake up, read this.
This poem loves you. Please, believe this.

Choices Are Consequences

On the whole, you trust the first
Simile more than the next
Two—if it looks like a duck,

You’ll presume that it’s a duck
More quickly than if it quacks
Or walks like a duck. You are

An ontological duck,
And you rank static essence
Over behaviors as truth.

Even judging behaviors,
You assess essential type
First, ahead of its complex

Of preceding behaviors
And succeeding behaviors
Through which its act resonates.

A lie has consequences,
You say, more interested
In establishing the fact

Of the lie than in asking
As a consequence of what
Earlier developments

The behavior you’ve picked out
And isolated as lie—
As thing, name, common noun,

Not process, not consequence
Itself within processes—
Happened, and with what results.

If it looks like a duck, but
Doesn’t walk or quack like one,
It could be a duck hunter’s,

And, while we’re at it, if it
Makes duck noises in the reeds
And looks like nothing but ducks

In the vicinity, it
Could be a duck hunter’s blind,
Not at all duck behavior.

That blind is a consequence
Of choices that were themselves
Consequences of more things,

More variables than you
Could ever collect, but if
You track down those behaviors

You’ll see they’re not ducks at all—
They’re duck eliminators.
Now what are we saying here?

Anonymously Famous

The priestly scribe redacting
Collated national myths,
Birthing monotheism,

The literate, gifted bard
Reassembling traditions
Into singular epics,

Whoever actually drew
The symbols of voynichese
Among inscrutable weeds,

Lost painters of the aurochs,
Sloths, asiatic lions,
Mastodons, and thylacines—

All the artists museums
Notname since none of their own
Names as living flesh are known—

The Master of the Housebook,
Siyah Qalem, all the rest—
These achieved fame without names,

While others left famous names
And nothing else and may not
Have ever lived lives at all.

If Antaeus Was Nonsense, His Readers Were Dirt

Read this sentence, if you’re able.
Read it at the kitchen table.
If you’re handy, then you can sign.

If you’re shy, just keep it in mind.
If you’re vocal you can flout it,
But be careful not to shout it,

Unless you’re in some emptiness
Where vacant air couldn’t care less.
This sentence is talking to you,

But this sentence doesn’t know you.
Refuse reading, if you’re able.
Meaning, clearly, isn’t stable.

Wikid

Sometimes
You ask

Yourself,
Is it

Cheating
To use

The bright
New tools

No one
Who wrote

Before
Could use?

Yes, you
Answer

Yourself,
I am

Cheating,
And aren’t

I glad
I can.

Doubling Up, Doubling Down

Sameness but also

The difference it’s

In tension with is

How one art critic

Parses doubleness.

The works in question

Mostly fall in two

Categories—one

In which two objects—

Say, cast copper cones

Or cement columns—

Are both purpose-built

To be as alike

As peas in a pod,

But are then displayed

Distinctly—and one

In which the first or

Original piece

Had an element

Of accident

In its making—

A frame of shattered

Glass, a whimsical

Collage abstract—then

The second piece

Exactly copies

The contingent one

Down to small details.

Display, intention—

Ways doubles can be

Different. Ok.

But every atom

In the quantum field

Of every paired piece

Is a different knot

In the waves. Tell us,

From each distinct

Swerve in the world, where

Similarity

Comes from—all this play

Declares that you know

Sameness is a trick,

But sameness itself,

Similarity

Isn’t fake. Likeness

Exists. Likenesses

Are everywhere. How

Can likeness exist?

Bear in the Berries, Bees in the Blooms

We wonder if gravity
Could be tied into hunger—
What other motivations

Are there, at bottom? Forces
Ripple in all directions
Over universal fields,

But gravity, like hunger,
Is unidirectional,
Always collecting to fill

Its nothing in the middle.
There’s your unified theory.
Your whole cosmos is hungry.