Dead Language Astronomy

You could put a close-up
Of dense cuneiform text
Wedged into well-baked mud

Beside a random patch
Of the Hubble Ultra
Deep Field cosmic portrait

Of piled galaxies, flecks
Of superimposed lights
In discrete, clustered beads,

And maybe ask yourself,
Is it crazy to think
Our entire universe

Is a text transcribing
Some unknown symbolic
System by another?

Wave to Us, Now

Magic and all things spectral, miraculous,
Fantastical, exist, exist as meanings

And as nothing else, which makes
Meanings ourselves wonder, what are we

In a universe so apparently unlike us
That nonetheless gave birth to us?

Sometimes, we suspect we’re intrusions
From another, bizarro universe pressed up

Against the big bell cheeks of this one.
Sometimes, we think we’re the soul

Of this cosmos simply talking to itself.
Sometimes, we’re just plain flummoxed.

We mean something, meanings, in all our
Cruel, elaborate, inaccurate predictions—

We indicate something beyond everything
Else and we flirt continuously with nothing,

But that fails to explain well anything.
Entropy is a measure of information,

But information is both more and less
Than signs conversing to each other,

Meaning
Meaning.

Aggregator

You and your phantom universe
Peopled only with memories!
It’s long past time that you returned

To crumbling Telenapota.
Jamini may still be waiting,
Ghost that she is, old man you are.

Time to pull yourself together,
Pull all the pieces of your world
Into a Heraclitan heap

And begin the aggregation
Of the news you need to find home.
It’s a mosaic, memory.

You don’t read it to source the stones,
But to find the story in it.
Only then, you step through the stones.

Tucket

Sort of. More like
In the morning,
There is feeling.
In the evening,

There is meaning
Where the feeling
Sits in the dark
Alone and mourns.

Then it’s morning,
Even darker
To begin with,
Maybe moonlight,

But the feeling
Blows its tucket,
And the meaning
Wakes up, back home.

Alea

There are only two laments:
Specific or general.
They don’t overlap at all.

Specific grief leaves no room
For the milder mournfulness
Of all things passing away,

And to turn to specifics
Within universal grief
Vitiates catastrophe

By making it seem as if
Things could have been otherwise.
Your own loss howls in context

Of what remains for others.
There’s no fairness to your grief.
There’s no universal loss.

Risk fixes the axis, joins
The pivot between laments.
Neither individual

As fate nor universal
As change and dissolution,
Bony probability

Chuckles, tosses, and tumbles.
Anyone could win or lose,
And no one can ever win.

Universally Curly Universe

Observations by organisms
And mind’s best prosthetic devices
Agree—the cosmos is everywhere

Prone to make centered, circular waves.
Nothing comes from outside or sweeps
From side to side. Nothing makes curtains

That don’t rotate around some local
Disturbance, some spiral galaxy,
Some bursting star, black holes engulfing

Everything around them. The cosmos
Itself seems to be radiating
From some original explosion,

Centering all its beady centers
On a bubble of bubbles and spheres.
What goes around, comes around in here,

From Bang to bumps in quantum waves,
From atoms knit by their own forces
To furnaces fired by gravity.

Extraterrestrial life would not
Be nearly so extraordinary
As a line, one night, that never curved.

And Most Mornings We Feel Something Like This

Freedom tends to the repetitive, too.
Someone who can do whatever they want
Will do lots of pretty much the same things.

You’d never guess it, for instance, but this
Is a poem in free verse. It’s got stanzas
And lines of regular syllables, yes,

But it’s just the lazily unfurling
Freedom of verse that doesn’t have to be
Anything it doesn’t feel like being.