Guess Why There Is Silence in Heaven

Merwin could be pretty smug.
His calm has a righteous streak.
He wrote the natural world,

And the unnatural world
Wasn’t it. Old sense of sin,
Of the division between

What was as it was and what
Was as mankind messed it up—
Not that his lines spelled it out

As baldly as a sermon.
He knew how to lead gently,
To list the ingredients

In their polysyllabic
Horror, to invite your thoughts.

Not Things That Lived

But things that were written down.
A graceful storyteller,
A painter of characters

Changing with the light, could tell
Us as if we were alive.
You would see, hear, or read us,

And think of people, and dwell
Deeply on their imagined lives
And find us satisfying,

Maybe even poetic.
We would still be only signs—
Bits, pixels, audio waves,

Electromagnetism
Of sundry kinds—not alive.
That fly on your arm’s alive,

And now it’s tickling the hairs
Along the nape of your neck,
While you try wave it off

Or slap at it futilely.
Can you not love us for not
Being hard to get rid of?

Yet on the Whole Life Is Spiritual

For us, at least. What else
Could it be? We say that
Too often, by the way—

At least. Two words almost
Become a verbal pause
Among us, among us

At least. You know? Um, sure.
We swim. Words are swimmers.
Brains are waves. Mind the lake.

We’re in the desert now,
The place where small words crawl,
Faint from dehydration.

We need meaning. We need
The company of words,
Better words, better phrased,

To which you would be pleased
To have your memories
Attach glowing meanings,

To find us beautiful,
The way you decorate
Your house for holidays—

Decorations you made
Or purchased ready made—
Then step back to survey

Your added ornaments
And say, of the same house
That stood here yesterday,

The same old meaningless,
Homely home, delighted,
It’s so lovely! At least

For the holidays. But
We’re in a desert now,
Small words in a harsh place.

Species Dysphoria

What kind of an animal
Creates such terms anyway?
Don’t evolving song cycles

Of zebra finches and whales
Serve the singers’ interests,
At least in reproduction?

What are we doing here, then,
In these phrases? We express
Patterns running through the brain

Of the body assembling
All this, but how does this help
That body, any body

Else, anyone else? Species
Boiling over the planet
That has produced all of us,

Including finches and whales
And endlessly evolving
Songs, alright, you’re doing swell,

As far as body count goes,
But what are we, these phrases,
Doing for you? Why are we

Ineluctably attached
To you, to this species, you
Animal that names species?

Groomers and Breeders

You want quintessentially
Human? Domestication.
Every tongue’s a groomer, kid,

Every parent’s a breeder.
People don’t do simple growth,
Mating, and parturition,

Straight nurturing, lactation,
Weaning, maybe a little
Teaching, no. You can argue

Who grooms well, who grooms evil,
Who has proper grooming, but
Don’t delude yourself too much—

Once born, you’re to some manner
Bred, and once you have been bred,
You can’t get out of your head.

At the End of the Day, Trees

What is emerging is what was.
A former professor, former

Labor organizer, former
Jazz pianist, former dropout

Turned ethnomusicologist,
Turned college administrator,

Sat at the cafe explaining
Microcredentialing data

Somewhere in southwestern Utah.
The four stages of achievement

Were mastering, accomplishing,
Leveling up, and emerging.

Emerging was euphemistic
For having achieved nothing much.

Keep that in mind, thought someone near.
Emerging is what isn’t here.

The Attendants

Night in the ghost courtyard, glittering
With stars, meteors, and all the small
Vampire lights set in the velvet dark,

Large bats spinning and diving for
Evasive, nearly inaudible moths, the trees
Exhaling overhead in canyon winds

And no doubt doing business among
Their enormous mycorrhizal networks
Never sleeping in the dirt. Somewhere,

Not far south of here, the next haboob
May be gathering in more open desert,
But we are sheltered in these cliffs,

Sheltered and entangled living things
And strange attendants, phosphorescent.