Good Lessons Make for Bad Advice

In the glass box
The sun gets hot.
Outside, the wind
Is cold and sharp.

Day harries you.
Night harries day.
You had a line,
Such a good line

To bait and catch
Everything you
Really needed,
But you were too wise.

You caught your meal
And glibly tossed
The line away.
Glass box today.

Passing through Somehow

It gets still, and something attractive
Seeps into it that takes a short while
To notice. If disrupted, it’s gone,

And everything’s back to dailiness,
To busyness. But if it lingers,
It settles, a calm that’s not the calm

But the sense of other dailiness,
Mundanity of another kind.
The elements may be itemized—

The self-dried flowers of the rabbitbrush
Still on the stalks, the old snow seeping
Into fresh mud, the fields of blonde straw—

Or anthropomorphized, as the sun
Arranging its skirts in the meadows,
Rocks cracking their knuckles with the thaw—

But it can only be felt as what’s being,
Taking no notice of its being
Or being noticed, passing, somehow.

On the Manifest

Bear in mind the little gods
Of small opportunities—
Not every cataclysm

Can possibly happen
To you, who couldn’t survive
More than maybe one or two.

If angels existed, some
Would surely be devoted
To fudging the plausible—

Little more or little less—
So that, while not triumphing
Over your adversaries

Miraculously or
Suffering extremely rare
Calamity, small bad things,

Small good things, fortunate breaks,
Would get slid into your path,
Some small failures, some success.

Glossary at Sea

Every name’s a tiny anchor.
All of your words are grappling hooks.
Each memory’s a Gulliver,
A chalk outline in Lilliput.

Each episodic anecdote
Stays cinched by storytelling ropes,
And however much of your life
You recall hangs on hooks of quotes.

There’s more to being than talking,
If not more to life than desire.
But what you’ve kept of what you've lived
Lies tangled in language’s wires.

There’s Gotta Be Nourishment Somewhere

Small spider on ceiling recon,
There aren’t any flies in this room.
Somewhere in this empty boxland
You’ve got to be finding food.

See how well a human mind works?
It will observe and then deduce.
Doesn’t work as well as spiders,
But every life’s a living proof.

Earth’s surface is mouth parts, a tongue,
A roughed but sensitive sensor
Of papillae brushing through night
For any edible splendor.

Oops

Dear Reader, any reader,
Any old reader at all,
There are probably two ways

You burnish your confidence
In your sanity daily.
One, of course, is consensus.

The other is more like touch,
Fingertip feel, that the real
And the unreliable

Diverge in experience
In highly distinct textures,
Which works well enough, mostly.

What happens when the richer
Sensorium’s the wrong one?

Will Your Answer Matter?

A doe carcass,
A leather purse,
Emptied rawhide,
Flattened, all-but

Boneless looking,
Lies to one side,
And the dark blood
Smears the middle

Of the road. If
You said the deer
Had no idea
What smashed it, you

Would seem to think
An idea means
Some comfortless
Explanation.