Same Difference

Which worries you more,
If either worries

You at all—that you
Will wake up one day

And realize you
Are now someone else,

Or that you’ll never
Wake as someone else?

Oh well, you suppose,
Technically, you

Wake up every day
Slightly someone else,

But that’s not the same,
Is it, as feeling

One morning you’re not,
Anymore, the same?

Underwoods

Cuffed forests, cut-over
Woods, coppiced, second-growth,

Pretty much the only
Kind of forest you’ve known.

You’ve visited a few
Stands of uncut old growth,

Maples in Newfoundland,
White pines in Idaho,

Magnolias in Georgia,
Sequoias in Cali,

And so forth, plus the odd
Original giant

Like Tane Mahuta,
Surrounded by young woods.

Postage-stamp sized patches,
The primeval, mostly.

You like a wooly copse,
Bosky, brushwood thicket,

The feral scruffiness
Of trees that keep trying

And trying to come back.
Weirdly, you also like

Monotonous tree farms,
Uniform rows and rows

Of some single species,
Usually conifer,

The bare alleys between
The trunks. But it’s copses

You grew up with, copses
And scrub woods where the trees

Aren’t established enough
To lord it over brush.

If humans leave any
Trees after humans leave,

The forests will grow grand
Again, but for right now

Every copse reminds you
Of those furtive mammals

Waiting for dinosaurs
To die off and make room.

They’re eyeing you, those trees,
Those spindly-trunked halfweeds.

There’s a Lot You Haven’t Solved

The days are still here,
And sometimes sunset
Still carries the time,

Reminds you it will
Be difficult soon
To coordinate

What you have to do
With the arrangements
Of remaining hours.

There’s an old terror,
Faint now, but still there,
Of being caught out

After sunset, after
Dark, when day creatures
Like you lose eyesight

And confidence and
The ability
To anticipate

What’s in front of you,
In front of your face.
The sun’s going down.

Dams, Humans

Obligations and liberties intertwine.
Only humans would think to categorize
And collect them in separately labeled bins.

At liberty to take a detour during
A round of chores fulfilling obligations,
You took a scenic route around the desert,

Passing a recreational reservoir,
Boaters and paddle-boarders floating around
Behind the great sweep of the dam’s leaning wall.

Dams in other places have been in the news
A lot recently, for failing in floods, or
Being useless in droughts, or blown up in war.

Dams, like civilization, are both ancient
History and young among the behaviors
Of humanity. Small dams were being built

Well before the oldest evidence of them,
Most likely, and several thousand years ago,
Kings in the Fertile Crescent were already

Raising large ones, not only for agriculture,
But as forms of aggression, ways to divert
Upstream water from the irrigated fields

Of downstream rivals and enemies. Right now,
Thousands of years later, Egypt is angry
About dams being built upstream on the Nile.

A couple of months ago, a new hobby
Of scouring the drought-exposed bed of Lake Mead
For cars and human remains was all the rage,

And photographs were emerging of canyons
Drowned in Lake Powell for decades, bared by drought.
Last week, Derna was flattened by two failed dams

That gave way after being inundated
By extraordinary rains. This list goes on—
Dams exploded, dams made useless, dams collapsed,

Dams decommissioned so that they won’t collapse,
So that the salmon can run upstream again.
Clearly, dams are enormous obligations,

And, as clearly, people have taken many
Liberties with them. You probably haven’t
Heard the last with regard to either or dams.

Movement

There’s no poetic essence,
No more than there’s an essence,
A core indivisible,

To any given person,
But there are certain moments
When a giveaway movement

Makes you laugh. Well, isn’t that
Just poetry! For instance,
Chapman’s actual Homer

Turned Magellan’s fictional
Wild surmise in Darien—
Keats’s real experience

Of vast imagination
Expressed as an imagined
Experience of vast fact.

Chicken

You know the storm is coming,
But you don’t know what to do.

First, who is it coming for?
Many? Everyone? Just you?

Well, most likely just for you,
Meaning there’s nothing to do.

Second, how long will it take
To finally arrive here?

After all, it’s been coming
All your life, and not here yet.

It’s hard to sense urgency
Continually, decades.

But still. The storm is coming,
And you don’t know what to do.

Credo No Credit

Debtors and failures
To thrive in this world,
Addicts and losers
Who fell through the veils,

You had your chances,
You gambled them all.
You’re falling apart.
You can’t save yourselves.

You’re full of wisdom.
Advice you can’t sell.
You know things they don’t,
But who wants to know?