Abandoned Mines and Leaking Wells and Middens Massed Like Mountains

Look on this waste, you walled bricks
Of Gilgamesh, and despair.
Nothing has ever moved Earth
As much as this one species,
Not even all ants combined.
Look on this accomplishment
And weep. Weeping apes did this.

Weeping apes did this and wept
At their own accomplishment.
Not even all ants combined
Moved dirt like this one species.
Still the Earth moves as it did
Before the first lists of kings.
It spins and eats its own skin.

The Back of Light

Light goes, like anything else.
If there’s not more on the way,
The last of it passes you,

And then you’re all out. The back
Of light fleeing the other
Way from you, isn’t that light?

The Great Goose

The great goose is migrating
Across the southern sky, left
To right, slowly, left to right.

Poems fall like leaves fall
In the dark in the fall, like
Everything falls to something

Else, since something else
Gathers everything to itself.
Something wants to collect us all.

You Don’t Need to Pay Attention

A coyote starts up
A yip in the canyon
Until others join in.

Someone is unloading
A delivery truck
With rattling and clunking.

The crickets pause, restart,
And pause again. Somewhere
Someone is listening,

Not that it means a thing
To delivery trucks,
Coyotes, or crickets.

A Moment

A small moth comes
To comfort you.
Of course not—moths
Come to make moths,

To eat. They flit
About their way,
Which isn’t yours.
They don’t despair.

You’d hope they don’t.
If this one, small,
Silver and soft
On moonlit skin,

Does not despair,
Goes on its way,
Remains a moth,
It comforts you.

Only Your Self When Not a Self

The night at different hours can be
A wholly different beast. In this,
Night is nothing at all like death,
Notorious for not changing.

At midnight, when the air was mild,
The full harvest moon high, washing
Out almost all the stars, you could
Believe a kind of enchantment.

At four, when light slanted sideways
And the cold crickets slowed, your thoughts
Flowed with old and sluggish language.
To be human is inhuman.