Late Afternoon, Lower Mesa

Green plants and cars
Have life to themselves,
Almost. The mule deer
Must be wandering
Out of sight, ditto

Any late hikers.
No birds singing, though,
No shrilling chipmunks
On the defensive.
Not one raven clocks.

Out of sight, the cars,
RVs, and pickups
Blow along the road.
Winds blow down canyon.
But no bees, no flies.

The sun’s warm enough.
At this altitude,
The recent snow’s gone,
Not even a patch.
So much remains green—

Prickly pear, scrub brush
Of a dozen kinds,
Pines and junipers,
Even half-dead ones
Wearing green holly.

Those Fabulous Dragon’s Teeth

May chance to spring up armed men
From their letters, baneful signs,
Semata lugra, taken

From the dragon’s pried mouth, from
The violent intentions
Of plausible denial,

From the warrior goddess’s
Instructions, which seem mostly
Meant for her own amusement.

A subtle allegorist,
Milton understood this well—
That alphabet of Cadmus

Held the dragon’s teeth itself.
But where is the dragon now?

Break Its View

To do it, to pull it off,
The artist’s things echo
Other, unartistic things,

Make them strange, so the viewer
Inhabits in one moment
The shock of feeling estranged

From the ordinary and
Vertiginous dizziness
Of confused recognition.

All art, that is, is surreal
When it works, a meta-merge
Of both reason and madness,

Whether made to do just this
Or intending something else
Or not to be art at all.

The disembodied wings fly
Over what were battlefields
Where the subdivisions rise.

Blue Gums Stay Evergreen

The red and gold show
When the green retracts.
It’s an illusion,

In a sense—the red
And gold were always
There, carotenoids,

And the green doesn’t
Go—the valuable
Chlorophyll gets stored.

Neither is a blood
Red leaf a lintel,
John. There are more ways

To illude than words
Can ever capture,
But that’s a mistake

About words, the way
Saying that the green
Itself changes shade

Is inaccurate.
There’s no capturing.
Words draw back their teeth,

Valuable teeth,
To reveal what was
Already glowing.

Can’t Quite Picture It

A lot of people, in fact, never exist.
Start with everyone everyone imagines,
Including your projections of future selves
You never became. There are all the fictions

Crowding the shelves and swelling the files, heroes,
Role models, villains, gods, and demons. Sort of
People as well. The mistakes, the misfiled names,
The clerical errors, the blips in machines,

Statistical people who never exist.
And then there may be real, potential people,
Depending on how physics actually works,
The vast cloud of people who can’t quite exist.

Jot

What would be the smallest
Worthwhile contribution
We could make to your life?

Say you had gone looking
For a few words to keep
Making sense of being

Whoever you now are,
Not an affirmation,
A small comprehension.

You have not yet begun
To dream the important
Part of all your dreaming.

Sham

Society’s a bed and

You will always need your sleep.

You can switch beds now and then,

But the ground is hard and cold,

Ask anyone who’s outcast,

Unhoused, from society.

Everyone compromises

A little bit for that bed,

And dislikes themselves for it,

A bit, and shoves the others

Aside to snatch at blankets,

Or tries to, a little bit.

And sometimes you can forget

All the heads on your pillow.