This Holds More Than This Knows

You know, says Frank Stella

To the BBC News,

I’ve been sick for awhile,

The past six to to eight months.

It’s debilitating.

I won’t finish models

I’ve started. That’s a fact.

Being sick has made me

See the world a new way.

It’s not as interesting

As it sounds. I’m happy

To come here, to be here,

And we do what we can.

He laughs gently and shrugs.

The last shot of the clip,

Maybe taken by drone,

Pulls away from green fields,

Where three of his sculptures

Stand, appearing massive

At first, then receding

Into just grass and trees.

As a painterly young,

Abstract minimalist,

He’d sometimes notched the frames

Of canvases, as if

To suggest that they knew

The way the lines inside

Would approach their borders,

As if frames should echo

Surface geometries,

But outdoors refuses

To clearly acknowledge

It knows what it’s holding.

The Ones Released

Could be they’re all contented.
Could be, you know, they don’t care.
Could be they don’t mind lost lives,
Don’t need to haunt your lives’ air.

You care about how they lived,
About some of them, at least.
You living are the hungry
Ghosts at life’s yesterday feasts.

The hundred billion others
And earlier animal
Selves could be contented since
All have turned into angels.

Which is to say, they’re all free—
Don’t exist, don’t have to be.

Changing Perspective Won’t Help

Take your pick.
You’re small, and you’re vast.
They’re equally true.

You can be Walt Whitman,
If you want—you do contain
Whole millions of multitudes.

You can be a speck,
A lowly germ in the whoosh
Of your era’s thundering heart,

A mite on the surface
Of a tiny bead spinning
Around a small, dull star in the dark—

Either way, as you like it,
Alternating, or both at once,
Nothing much in balance.

The Sudden Awful

They’re the kind of nightmares almost
Guaranteed to shock you awake—
The ones in which an instant shift,

A step off a cliff, a crashing
Car through the guardrails, your body
Hurtling into the air, aware

That it’s exactly now too late,
It’s already too late, it’s done,
You can’t not die in this event—

And you’re wide awake in the dark
With a galloping heart—those
Nightmares of the sudden awful,

They make you wonder about birth
And an infant’s shock—too late now.

It’s Always the Before

It was the summer before the shattering
Event everyone memorializes,

So that no one who remembers remembers
It as anything but before the other,

With a tremor of nostalgia or wonder,
But of course it held none of that at the time.

Each summer holds the memory of the last
Autumn firmly in mind as summer’s ending,

So you might want to remember that summer
As rich with the memories of the future

It had, free of the memories that you’ve had
Now, used for dreaming up your own future past.

Yes, we’re speaking of a specific summer.
Yes, it could turn out this or any summer.

Console Yourself. You’re a Wonderful Life.

Everything that’s known alive
Lives to seek out what it likes,
And what it likes rewards it

Often enough with more life
For its own or offspring cells.
Well. What else is new, Sparky?

It’s dark outside. What you like
Is of dubious value,
True, but look at it this way,

If you like—you also look
Like just the thing other lives
Seek out to extract more life.

You’re a service—not only
To the ominous monsters
Macro and microscopic

Who would as soon devour you
As thrill to the smell of you,
But to all your symbiotes

And mutualists, maybe
Even your domesticates—
You! Wonderful life they like.

Why Not a Final Prophet

Someday, maybe, someone really
Will show up on time to complete
The teachings of all past prophets,

Sum them all up and compact them
While doing harm to none of them,
Every fine paradox intact,

Every contradiction resolved,
With none of their intricacies
Removed, a marvelous, folding

Tesseract of faith, opening
And closing the truth’s elytra
In symmetrical hyperspace,

So that everyone is in awe,
No proselytizing called for,
Instant understanding, at last,

At last, now all the prophecies
Make sense, none of them excluded,
All faiths correct, none deluded.

There’s wildfire smoke on Valhalla
This evening, and everyone’s left
The shoreline to pursue their lives,

And nothing’s quite right with humans,
While everything feels incomplete,
Waiting that prophet with such faith

As can encompass all of this
And bring belief to conclusion,
Complete relief, so all can cease.