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Celan coaxed time from a nutshell,
Tried to teach it a thing or two.
Time promptly turned around and went
Back in its shell, so Celan quit.

You may have tried to quit yourself.
Whether you deserved to do so,
Others may waste time deciding,
Winnowing chaff from suffering

To glean biographical truth.
In truth it was nothing to do
With suffering or its virtues,
As anyone knows who’s tried it.

It was just that, being human,
You assumed any problem must
Be in need of a solution,
And time a problem you could fix.

But time gets tired of learning tricks,
Always longing to turn its back
And crawl inside its sleepy shell.
Time lets its teachers learn from hell.

Tilted

Don’t be Ptolemy. You’re not

Hanging out with Zeus to look

At the stars. Don’t be Amiel.

You don’t own the infinite.

Be small if you want. You are.

Everything’s small next to night,

But seeing that won’t make you

Any bigger than you are.

No one’s one with the night sky,

At least no more than quanta

On the bottom of your shoes

Are equally one with you.

The stars aren’t even themselves.

They just look like that to you.

Astronomers calculate

Madly to adjust their views.

Savor dark skies if you can.

Fine. Sprawl yourself on a hill

And feel philosophical.

Don’t think it makes you special.

Awe is understandable

After pollution and clouds.

A view can heal, a little—

In you, not to do with you.

Being in awe of the stars

Is reflex, not a virtue.

After the tent revival,

Reborn souls still tilt askew.

Slipping from the Grasp

The current understanding
Of gravity’s too static,
Geometric, not a force.

Gravity is dynamic,
However you depict it—
The nearly massless object

Falling from your hand, the way
The cookie crumbles—always
Bending, never simply bent.

Ants on a Hot Pan

The individual ants
Are doomed, but the colony
Almost always comes out fine.

This a broad principle,
A Fibonacci spiral
Or a Mandelbrot fractal,

Popping up across all scales—
Individual seedlings
On the shady forest floor,

Individual neurons
Pruned from developing brains,
Individual tickets

In national lotteries,
Individual soldiers
In a Pyrrhic victory,

Individual beings
Leading individual
Lives in the system of life.

We ourselves are not alive.
We can’t scramble from the pan,
Lucky words that can’t be ants.

Rimpling

Matter bumps in the fields,
Quanta aren’t glamorous,
Except to physicists

And imagination
That uses what you know
To rumple up the world

Of the metamind and think
Of things that can’t be known,
As if they were backyard

Phenomena for lives
That thrive in heaps of grass,
Small mounds measurements left.

More

Young or old, the days you’ve lived
Make up a fairytale beast
That can only, ever grow.

Every day you’re here, your days
Are more, a purring monster,
Your growing shadow. This rock

We’re all on and none have left
For long is watching its own
Beast of all its beasts grow large,

And each day you are, each night,
Your small life is witnessing
A bit of Earth’s growing up.

Intermission

Weird lunar twilight in the west,
Two hours before dawn, getting dark
For the brief, miniature night
Between moonset and desert day,
An interval of brightening

Stars in a sky twisting light both sides—
Make up your own constellations
As odd patterns emerge and fade.
They’re whatever you say they are.
Life’s whatever you’ve been so far.

Our Drift

Phantoms do not organize
As kingdoms or republics.
We do not require a state.

Nor do we mimic fungi,
Or slime molds, or murmuring
Stands of interlocking trees.

We’re not planned like circuit boards
Or microchip schematics.
We don’t bloom under lenses.

Close up, we’re a blurry mess.
Step back, and there’s a pattern,
But it’s not our own. It seems

To be something or someone
Other than us, some landscape
Or portrait as seen through us.