Notes to Field Researchers

If you really want to study
Humans in the wild, watch
The ones in cars assuming

No one’s really watching them.
Study the ones on couches
Thinking they’re doing the watching.

Watch the human field researchers
Researching just about anything.
Humans are most human when

They’re alert but bored and
Daydreaming. What’s that? Yes.
We caught you watching.

That the Whole Universe Is Specific

Not sure how one claims to be
Holistic and denigrates
Those fond of universals.

Not sure how it’s specific
To muse upon one’s own life,
One’s people’s experience,

As if no other subject,
Macro or microscopic,
Insufficiently one’s own,

Could drip with such specifics.
One can preach sacred topics,
But topics don’t redeem much.

The Toughness of the Always Wary

Jackrabbit twitches
And turns in the road,
Disappears into

A hedge. An escape.
Not even likely
The first of the day.

Think of frightened prey.
You imagine them
Terrified. No one

More sanguine. Danger
Threatens all moments,
So one learns to live

In wariness. Zen.
Calm. Ataraxy.
Practiced jackrabbit

Must die, but never
Trembles. Jackrabbit
Turns and vanishes.

The Marvelous Endurance of Loneliness

We are used to so many
People always everywhere
In our world, it’s hard for us

To reshape our memories
Far enough to imagine
How lonely speech used to be.

We project known loneliness
Of solitary lives spent
In cities, towns, and suburbs,

Which is real, which is aching,
To imagine loneliness
As an ache of emptiness

In a world of few people—
Few anywhere, few beyond
Our circle, our anxious fire,

Horizons without people
At all, just the spectacle
Of the night skies’ gleaming eyes.

It’s impossible. We can’t
More than fumble at the hem
Of such an experience.

Still, it’s weirdly marvelous,
In our over-peopled world,
How well we know loneliness.

The Constellation in Your Room

In the small hours
Of a motel,
The curtains drawn,
The star gazer

Wakes up alone,
Three points of light
From three vampire
Devices—stove,

Wall TV, and
Power strip.
Outside, the moon
Is reflecting.

The Perseids
Burn but are hid.
How can you chart
A ship like this?

You Should Write Fierce Little Poems about Waves and Weather

Ocean overruns the globe,

Wrote Melville, not intending

To be prophetic. Byatt

Quoted him, meaning to be

Probably more ominous,

Given her tale concluded

With sempiternal nurdles.

Can we make ourselves fiercer?

Can we rescue our weather?

Across the lake, late sun glows.

Everything’s a wave, every

Wave requires both crest and lull,

However fierce, however

Small, but, summed, it’s all so much.

Ocean overruns the globe.

Fighting Mistaken Necrophoresis

Irreversibly nonfunctional
Is a fairly high standard for death.
An ant has only to smell like death

To be carted, flailing, from the nest.
And yet, it’s a low standard as well.
Past behaviors, as everyone learns,

Remain in past’s irreversible
World, nonfunctional as corpses now.
Grief evolved as a strategic hedge

Against those rare cases when functions
End, or seem to, but begin again,
And there are many functions in life

That have irreversibly ended
While others carry on, and even
To this day uncertainty lingers

Over which exact part of the end
Is definitely genuine end.
You needn’t be Edgar Allan Poe

To give yourself a little shudder
Thinking of waking in your coffin—
Imagine a crematorium.

Of all the functions that cease and can’t
Restart, which is every one of them
Eventually, the one that matters

Most is the ability to pay
Attention. Not often mistaken
For death, it’s the core death nonetheless.

Attention gives everything meaning,
And there’s no meaning from a human
Irreversibly inattentive.

The secret of spiritualism
Wasn’t the seance’s trickery.
The secret was that, without a pulse,

A brainwave, any body at all,
What gave fresh life to grief was response,
The wraith of functioning attention.