Profluent in Shifting Sunlight

The first language of the day
Is actually native
Tongue only to the mornings

Themselves, and no one human
Was ever indigenous
As a speaker of the sun.

You can’t even look at it!
You’ll never be profluent
In it, the way the rays shift,

Fingering every fabric,
Searching where they can enter,
Where they can only reflect,

Growing milky in cloudy
Rooms behind open curtains,
Later sprawling exhausted

Like fawns dappled in the grass.
But you can become fluent
As an eavesdropper at least,

New arrival to the light,
Watching its cartoons, noting
How it makes its gestures.

Don’t ask if you belong here.
Belonging’s not everything.
It’s worth the while, observing.

All Else Is Never Equal

The sumptuary laws return
And return like the tides, like surf.
They change, of course. Never the same

Waves assaulting an unchanged shore.
Shore’s always changing, waves always
More. Enjoy your colors, darling.

Be you never so poor, you can
Dress as brightly, as garishly
These days as you’d possibly want.

These days, the laws have other ways
Of keeping the low in their place,
Penning the low in low places,

But it’s pretty much the same. Hey,
Watch what you say, watch where you go.
All the world is a stage, and the stage

Is off-limits except to those
In costume, assigned lines and roles
Behind velvet ropes, don’t you know?

The Colossal Industry of Psychological Treatments

One newsletter called it.

A.R. Ammons once wrote,

In a poem, of his poems

As modes against too much.

That Archie was too much.

Psychology’s too much.

Humanity’s too much,

Everyone blaring out

About the good they do

For each other, while down

Low, under the table

Passing money and drugs

Or making small assaults.

The Colossus of Mind,

The Colossus of Bones

Stands athwart the living

Planet, hands on its hips,

Surveying and asking

What have I done to this, what

Have I done to deserve

This? Oh, shut up. Take this.

The Past That Asked

To take itself back.
Permission denied.
The past then asked why.

Permission denied.
The past was alarmed.
It was getting large,

Getting much larger.
That past was too large.
Could it give itself

Away? Could it shrink?
No, no it couldn’t.
Permission denied.

That past grew so sad
But happier, too.
Past just grew and grew.

Shady

At night under porch-lit branches,
Under branches lit by street lamps,

Looking up at their dark patterns
Among their lit-up silhouettes,

You can’t see hardly any space
Between them for the sky—maybe

A star, possibly a planet,
A passenger jet’s passing lights,

If that, but nothing else—a mass
Of leafed, late-summer canopy.

If you stick around to morning,
You may notice how the sky grows

With its own increasing daylight
Picking out the canopy’s holes

Until the most that you could say
For the leaves is that they’re shady.

Before the Meeting of the Waters

Mightn’t it be more satisfying,
More fun to split anticipation
Into two distinct streams, regardless
Of the niceties of prediction?

You could let one carry fantasy,
Whatever you’d prefer to happen,
Whatever you’ve habitually
Been prone to imagine unlikely.

The other consider adventure.
You have no certainty, not ever,
About what a given day will bring.
So, see the dullest as wide-open,

And the same for the most frightening.
All the unknown things swim in this stream,
Each instant’s undiscovered country.
Isn’t that somewhat more exciting?

Leave off trying to stir the waters
Of Rio Negro and Amazon.
Look upstream from where they blend, not down.
Dreams use springs. Unknowns come in rains.

Odds Are the Supernatural Will

Every animal steers
With the equipment carved
Out of its ancestors.

You can’t ask a creature
To understand the world
As another creature.

Nothing among humans
Can be impersonal.
People are all persons

Surviving by persons,
As cooperating
And contesting persons.

That world is personal,
Taken personally,
Never mind the world’s not

Personal or human
In the least. But you can
Work around this problem.

People notice how good
And awful things happen
Beyond personal strengths,

How the rare can’t be made
To happen, but happens
Sometimes effortlessly,

They imagine persons,
Invisible persons,
Capricious persons,

But with certain patterns
To their personal quirks.
Odds get called gods. It works.