Like Rain Falling on a Tree

Here’s a game rarely, if ever, played—

Take the back half of a simile,

One you’ve stolen or one you’ve just made,

And take turns turning out the front half.

You know, his anger was refreshing . . .

Their interference proved valuable . . .

And so on. You may choose to allow

Negatives as well as positives.

The quality of mercy is not . . .

You may vote for winners head-to-head

Or come up with your own point system,

Separate categories for surprise,

Aptness, absurdity, gorgeousness,

Or the most convoluted response—

Pulsing maternal arterial

Blood is squirted over the villi

In these spaces rather . . . Anyone

Can sing the tenor part, once you have

Fired up the vehicle; anything

Will serve as a target, provided

The source. There’s an ancient qasīdah

In which a wretched hunter is like

His camel-mare is like a sage grouse

Hunted by a falcon, and that grouse

Hides itself in the reeds of a marsh

Like a calf hiding itself against

Its mother’s side. Think you could walk back

From that? From, like a calf pressed against

Its mother’s flank, to grouse->camel->man?

Every notion that comes to mind is . . .

The Faithful Equinox

When does the line between night

And day become vertical?

Today. Sunlight seems to square

A straight axis on its way

To tilt back the other way,

And you give this pass a name,

Which fixes it, more or less,

The way names and measurements

Fix any motion as event,

Any wave as quantum bump—

Slow this part of the film strip

While letting go of the rest.

We occupy the pockets

Of such symbolic techniques,

Meanings seeming motionless.

No Es la Luna

La luna de las noches

No es la luna que

Vio el primer Adán,

Observed Borges, correctly,

Although he adduced the wrong

Reasons for this moon transformed,

Chalking it up to human

Looking, to mere centuries,

Mere tears. The moon’s been drifting

Away and shifting its face,

All on its lonesome, so long

Before humans looked at it

And practiced their invention

Of a symbolic species,

The production of those tears.

The Parietal Self

Ensconced behind the pia mater,
The complex of negotiations,
Between what can come in and what is

Already here and likely to stay,
Carries on, creating its wall art
On the inside of the caves of bone.

We’re in here with you, meanings being
Even smaller than the molecules
The pia permits to infiltrate.

Here, our world is you, the ongoing
Filtered, sheltered in a local niche.
Funny humans, how your ancestors

Had an instinct for representing
The situation in each of them,
Each of you to this day, being drawn

To the back walls of lightless caverns,
To bring abstracted notions with them,
Paint us, carve us, then leave us for good.

A Many, Whole, Yet You’re Here

All many, always many, always whole
And never one. Any day you wake up,

Everything is moving, every which way.
All coming into being disappears,

Even pain, even pain you’re feeling. All
Are many and all at once all going.

Any hour you come to, consider. Worlds
Just ended, yours will, too, and yet you’re here.

Your Body

Is you and is not you and is not yours,
Is not one, no separate entity,

Is extensive and proprioceptive,
An ecosystem of many little

Lives you never feel and never notice
Except when their body is in crisis,

And it is theirs, not yours or your culture’s,
Those other bodies with designs on it.

Give it a rest, if you can. A body
Needs a rest, needs you to leave it alone,

Let it be what it does with all its lives,
Its seething, while you’re sleeping, while you’re gone.

Tongue Stones in the House of Dust

We’re susceptible to forgetting,
Not our own, but yours. If you forget

What we mean, what we meant once, it’s death
For us, or would be if we’d had lives.

After that you have to work your way—
At least, some of your descendants do—

By means of other notions, still stuck
To tongues of living conversations,

Every meaning a kind of handhold,
Sticky grip on a protruding lip,

Until you can reimagine us
Into the sticks and stones left of us,

And those stones can come to speaking life.
You’ve no idea how many of us

Once swarmed around mysterious scripts
You can’t decipher, can’t reason back

To meaning, scripts faded in desert
Heat and mountain light, dust headed west.