Song of the Morning Star

Every fall is a coming together.
You drop things, stumble, and fall
Since the Earth’s curve calls you,

Since your mother planet is so large
Compared to you and all your concerns,
Which are so small. The stars

And galaxies coalesce from falls.
There was no creation before the fall.
It’s only the falling that started it all.

All

Cold snap, coyotes, two shooting stars,
No crickets. The corner restaurant truck
Unloads pallets of food for today’s tourists.

Wan crescent moonlight shadows
The courtyard. The word all is too little
Examined, being so small, meaning

Everything. If you hold to a faith in one
God, then all is that plus all creation.
The Greeks even played with naming

God All, the Great God All, but that was just
Pan as well, goat-footed randy piper
And not all at all. Pan, all. How many

Of the thousands of surviving languages
Use some small, monosyllabic, one
Phoneme name as their handy term

For everything? To be truly all, and not
Just all this or all that, all the little details
Of a given starry sweep seen from Earth,

As on a chilly early morning in autumn
In a small tourist town in the desert, all
Would have to include also nothing at all.

Like Some Kind of Smoke in a Bottle

That scratchy cloth against your skin,
That greasy, salty reek of chips,

That side-eyed silence, half a smile,
You saw in the silk-lined casket,

That breeze lifting off wet pavement,
Lavender mixed with petrichor

And the faint stench of something else
You can’t place, residue of dung?

We could go on. Those things you sensed,
As if we’d offered them to you,

Were conjured from your memories,
Even though your brain was guessing

That shade we said was thrax-egg blue.
You know those movies in which clones

Or androids have epiphanies
That their memories aren’t their own,

That their selves, their flesh, their beings
Were never the originals?

That’s how you make meanings in mind,
Raw, new ghosts swirling, every time.