Since Something Comes to Lick All Plates

Bronze Age canine coprolites
Reveal a grain-based diet.
Dogs lacked genes for amylase,
So they couldn’t digest starch,
But their gut microbes helped out.
Microbes might have done the same
For early types of humans.

There’s such a lovely teamwork
To how life devours itself,
Always evolving something
Refining what was wasted
Into fuel for something else,
Whose own waste in time becomes
A delicacy on high shelves.

Hunger is so exquisite,
And, given years, so is waste.
Whatever can be eaten
Is fuel for whatever eats.
Jack Sprat may eat no fat, and
His wife may eat no lean, but
Every platter ends up clean.

Of Things You Know Never Existed

You know less than you’d like to confess,
But you know you know this. Sometimes things
You didn’t know never existed

Did. That’s the scariest. You’ve known it
Since the first time you found out something
You never knew existed had been

Calmly existing right behind you,
In earshot, in plain view, your whole life,
While you thought on what you knew didn’t,

And you never knew. Sometimes you’ll spin,
Hoping to catch what you never knew
Existed but catching some fiction,

Something you know never existed,
And somehow you know all about that,
But still less than you’d care to confess.

How to Recognize a Rule

A rule is porous. A rule
Is a mock fact. A rule is
A pseudo fact. A rule has

Exceptions and may not hold.
A rule is as a sweat bee,
As a stick insect to sticks,

As a leaf insect to leaves.
As a bird dung crab spider
To bird dung flies is a rule.

A rule may be unobserved,
So well does it resemble
Certain facts. As certain facts—

Day’s end, daybreak, the phases
Of the moon—resemble rules
But are inflexible facts

That are facts, in fact, because
They lack exceptions, and aren’t
Just like rules--rules are like that.

Mammals, Birds, Snakes, Frogs, and Fishes

Outlasted what struck the dinosaurs,
So all Earth’s lovely biota are—
From blue whales to humans, ostriches

To hummingbirds to penguins, rattlers
To cobras to sea snakes, poison darts
To bullfrog choruses, great white sharks

To guppies and carp—consequences
Downstream from an extinction event
That took out three quarters of species

Of plants and animals, thereabouts.
Yes, this anthropocene is obscene,
Like all Earth’s hunger, fucking, and death.

Beauty will come of this, guaranteed—
Unimagined beauties from your mess.

Hurricanes, Typhoons, Cyclones

It’s like passionate love for a ghost,

Alice Notley wrote of pain in first

Person a half-century ago,

When she was near twenty-five years old.

But sometimes the passionate love is

Only the property of the ghost.

Love and passion aren’t properties

Of storms, for example, however

Humans like to figure them as storms,

Nor is pain. The chaos of a storm

Is regular by comparison,

At least averaging enough of them.

The big ones must form over water,

Where evaporative energies

Can build from warm waves, and must avoid

Any contact with the equator

Where the Coriolis effect dies.

Their different tracks remain similar,

And the ones that blow from Africa,

Once all mapped, one above the other,

Look like a cartographer’s painting

Of winds from a bell-cheeked, purse-lipped cloud

Drawn as if clouds had human faces.

But ghosts, conversely, such as the names

Given to those same cyclonic storms

Over different oceans, can’t agree

On anything. That’s passion for you,

Or love, or lust, or pain, or typhoon,

Or hurricane. Who knows what that is,

Or we are, or why so passionate?

Oh, give Alice Notley’s poem a rest.

She was so young when she wrote it, and

No doubt passionate, and we’re old ghosts.

Home Hole

Simple nightmares, simple pleasures,
Something scampering on the roof
In the middle of windy night
Seems delighted and seems distressed.

Look away from the Milky Way,
Away from the river, the ribbon
Of souls, into the emptiest
Part of the night. Listen. You’re whole.

The dragon hasn’t risen yet,
And the condor still flies away.
In principal and in folklore,
You recognize that a success

Doesn’t make someone wise, failures
Don’t make a person a fool, but
Success magnetically attracts
Lives to the lives of high-rank fools.

Go back inside, under the roof
That hides all your constellations,
You little troglophile. That thing
That you sensed scampering? That’s you.