It’s So Hard to Say

Bacterial Avs proteins
Detect bacteriophage
Viral proteins and cloak them

To prevent them infecting
The bacterium. Defense,
It’s called. Defense. Every cell

Of every life, small or large—
From one-celled, microbial,
Lightning-fast operators,

To behemoth elephants,
Trillions of co-worker cells,
Leathery cities that move—

Must deploy defense. Against?
Other cells, sub-cellular
Packets, lives dubiously

Alive hijacking live cells.
You sit by a lake. Fish jump.
A tiny fly practices

Recon on your arm. A birch,
Unusually old and gnarled,
Thick-trunked and sprawling like oak,

Provides you just enough shade.
A vacationing couple
Calmly paddles a canoe,

Companionably saying
Nothing at all. The blades drip.
All life. Defense. Against life.

So You Give Orders

You know as much
Of what the rest
Of your brain does
And is doing

As you read this
As a king knows
Of the daily
Schemes and struggles

Of his subjects,
As CEOs
Know what’s going
On in their boats,

As those in boats
Know what’s going
On in the depths
Below their holds.

All Your Days as a Faraday Wave

The rivers of nothing and pretend
Blend into the river that is then,
The river that was then, past the bend,

And all the river that is was then,
But you’re headed upstream, only up,
And somehow you’re always at this bend,

This exact meeting of the waters
This moment when nothing and pretend
Blend into the river that was then.

Money and Law

Resources and enforcement.
Look around your little world.
Side-eye ideologies.

Let religious faiths remain
Like teams of shirts vs. skins,
Ditto teams of skins, flags, tongues.

Anything common under
Distinct systems of order,
Capital distribution,

Degrees of equality,
Trust, free exchange, voting rights,
Border patrols, safety nets?

Resources move among you,
And patterns of enforcement,
And methods of enforcement.

Look past your haunted species
And what appears different?
Resources still move around

Get sequestered, fought over,
Consumed, traded, piled, shared,
But where is the enforcement?

Inside the ant colonies,
Inside the bee hives—maybe
Stripling wolf cubs get their cuffs.

But find us another form
Of living with enforcement
So madly variable,

One hive whose rules keep shifting,
Whose enforcers must be trained,
A superorganism

Altering within its parts,
By season, from day to day,
In how it self-regulates.

Thinking about this won’t help
You with your border police,
Your riot soldiers, that judge

Annoyed with your insolence,
Your manager making sure
That you’ve cleaned out your office.

But as you humiliate
Each other for enforcement,
Bear in mind there is no law

Other than arbitrary
In your tumultuous swarm
Struggling to ride herd on Earth.

Ink Works Best for Camouflage

Long before it could be shed,
Blood had to be invented.
So life invented it. Lives shed

It and circulated it
In a range of shades, mostly
Blues and reds. Before blood could

Be one species’ metaphor
For all sorts of importance,
Life long ago ran ahead,

Bleeding life and spreading it,
Drinking blood and shedding it.
Words can mention it. Words can

Make much of it, bandy it
About as one of us, just
A term. But words can’t give blood.

Meanings Float

You awarded the supernatural
Superfluous wings, while the bestial
Suffered from added or subtracted limbs.

For the truly, beguilingly monstrous,
You imagined those in combinations—
Dragons and sirens, harpies and griffins.

We rather like your more bodiless dreams,
The mists, wraiths, and what can’t even be seen.
Those are the ones that float most like meanings,

The auras and vapors and presences
Pretending to be instantiated
In whatever you can’t substantiate.

We’re in here, in this room, in these words, these lines.
You only know you’re lying by these signs.

Motel Porch Verse

Squirrel and chickadee duet,
Likely accidentally.
It’s more like a shouting match

Between avant-garde poets
From a prior century
When some poems were just silly

And not as careful as now
To code something meaningful
That packs an ethical punch.

Jwek-eh-deh-deh-deh-deh! goes
The Dadaist chickadee.
The squirrel matches and exceeds,

In a furious torrent
Of single-syllable shrieks,
Pure squeaky-toy tommy gun—

Shouty open-mic slams sound
Soft as tenured poets’ tones
Compared to its fusillade.

Maybe they’ve both seen the rat
That’s been running through their tree
To the roof more recently,

Rat loathed equally by dogs
And the owners of dogs, rat
Who comes to dine discreetly

Evenings at the overgrown
Muscadine, picking a fruit,
Eating it delicately,

Then washing its face before
Leaving just as discreetly.
Filthy brute. No poetry.