Supernumerary Rainbows Over New Jersey

The text explains that you need,
Along with the usual
Preconditions for rainbows,

Water droplets all nearly
The same size, typically
Less than a millimeter.

Then sun reflects from inside
The raindrops and interferes
Like ripples radiating

From a stone thrown in a pond.
The text stresses that, in fact,
These supernumerary

Rainbows cannot be explained
Except as patterns of waves,
Part of early arguments

For the wave nature of light.
Informative. Very nice,
But the part catching the eye

Lies in the straight-faced caption
For the accompanying
Illustration. New Jersey?

Could a rare phenomenon
Of nature really be linked
To that paved-over garden?

A supernumerary
Rainbow in that circumstance
Feels almost cautionary,

Covenantal reminder
Nature still lurks everywhere
And, also, next time the fire.

Grand Round

One poet suggests
There is more of time
And less than we know,

And another one
Answers in rebuke,
Who cares about time,

Existential puff
To sound grand about?
Then a third whispers

Where no one can hear
To note the tell-tale signs,
Time is more or less

What we know, since what
We know we pretend,
And time’s pretentious.

Receding Gambit

A chess player isn’t thinking
Ahead. A chess player’s thinking,

Given this board and what I know
Of all the patterns possible,

Which pattern would be best for me?
There’s no ahead. There’s just before

And what might change in what’s before.
Some change is inevitable.

Some change is hard to imagine,
Especially if it doesn’t

Closely resemble anything
That’s already happened before.

So the player scrutinizes
What’s on offer in the before,

But the before is vast, vaster
Than chess, and has no horizons

Except those that keep receding,
Receding being one way change

Renders unimaginable
All the patterns possible.

The Poet in the Papers

Let us live near each other,

Even though we’re far apart.

We live in a swirl of words,

So much more conversation,

For some of us, with language

Than with any other flesh,

So many people we know,

We only know, as language,

Streams and streams of sentences.

Every reading’s a seance,

In a sense, tuning voices

Coming from the great beyond.

Read the lines and imagine

The people and arguments

And laughter filling the head.

Today was a rash of think

Pieces about loneliness,

Widowhood, solitary

Living becoming common

Among the free, the confined

Living in solitary.

And so there are interviews,

And so we read the phrases

Of the people interviewed,

The disembodied language

We code as conversation.

So we live near each other.

No Thanks, Just Browsing

An eighty-something writes something
To the effect that the body
Lets you know, by eighty-something,

That it’s got no business being
Around and living at such age
And takes pains to remind itself.

Oh, to be an eighty-something
Possessed of perspicacity
And the gifts to write about it.

That would be success, wouldn’t it?
And yet you wouldn’t want to be
In that place immediately.

That’s the thing about sage old age
As accomplishment—admire it
All you want, you still don’t want it.

Aching Torso

There’s a passage
When night’s too old,
Morning’s too young,

And the sky’s black
Outside the lights,
And the heart’s sore—

Doesn’t matter
Literally
Or otherwise—

Through which it’s hard
To pass, without
Sorrow’s old doubts.

Bootstraps in the Void

This thing about deities
Creating ex nihilo,
Procreating with chaos,

Separating sky and land
Or stars and seas from some mess
That somehow had nested them—

Why, in so many cultures,
Have your imaginations
Attempted this tour de force?

Small children go straight to this,
With their why and what was there
First, and where did it come from?

Is it in the brain? Is it
Something to do with language?
It varies in its details,

Culture to culture, but still
There’s some yearning that haunts you
To create a creator

Before anything and tell
How that being or beings
Created world from nothing.

Confess it. It’s what you want,
What you wish you could do, what
You’re trying by telling it,

Isn’t it? It’s your struggle,
To force imagination
To make something from nothing.