Killer

Patriotism,
Conquest, Bragging Rights—
Those macho muses
Strap on swords and guns,
Rap rat-a-tat-tat,

Fight amongst themselves,
Give themselves fresh scars,
Fresh ink, new weapons.
Poetry knows them,
Always has. Bore them,

Nursed them, taught them how
To improve their boasts,
Be warriors, plant flags.
Don’t think it hasn’t.
Flyting and jousting,

Praising murderers,
Singing of battles
Won, peoples slaughtered—
Poetry has had
Bloody hands always,

Always. Poetry
At its most ancient
Loves power as truth.
Don’t let it fool you.
It’s full of itself.

The Mountain and the Hare

Once you’re old enough, you begin
To question the landscape. How long

Will this particular pine last?
How long before your favorite

Patch of forest is burnt to ash?
Is that a new rockslide? What views

Will be carved away or caved in
Or simply slip before you do?

Most cliffs you sit on will outlast
You by eons, your species, too,

Millenniums at very least.
But some scenes will go before you,

And some you’ll be tempted to mourn
Like friends. You’re old enough. You know.

Coy

Up on the grey margins
Of the tiny, man-made
Reservoir, past mid-spring,

A single-engine plane
Droning, with some tourists,
No doubt, toward the cliffs,

The lake’s little fey waves
Let breezes play with them,
As if being a wavelet

Were just a playful thing,
A run around the pond
In the spring sort of thing,

Rather than the business
And shape of everything,
Shoreline grackle blatting,

Two geese circling to splash,
A fishing boat, a pipe
Carrying snowmelt down

From the dry winter’s last
White banks in grey mountains,
Horizontal as clouds,

A motorbike revving,
The breezes themselves, which
Have to move on, stirring

The next cloud and the next,
Swirling all the way round
The whole world, wavering.

Bowing Out

A good death would be one that wasn’t
The worst day of your life. And why not?
A good day with a quick, quiet end.

Why not consult not-quite suicides
And those who’ve survived near-death escapes?
Interview enough of them. Find out

Which ones felt pretty good to the end,
The end that didn’t quite come for them.
Could you duplicate those conditions?

Pass every day in those conditions?
Probably not. But you’d get a sense
Of what a not-worst last day might be,

Sort of a Shakespearean sonnet,
One last pirouette in the couplet.

Without This Boat No One Goes

As it would have been for many
Peoples with a focus on rites
Performed exactly, perfectly,

As the key to keeping the world
Aligned with anxious human wish,
Ancestors propitiated,

Gods satisfied with sacrifice,
Spirits in the trees consulted,
All the things you do when you can

Do nothing to control outcomes
By any direct connection,
Every mumbled prayer, knock on wood,

The right undergarments, the right
Number of times around the shrine,
The lucky lottery numbers,

So it was with Virgil’s lost souls,
Anxious to get in Charon’s boat,
To make it across the river

But confined to the horrid shore
With the vast crowd of each other,
Why? Because their bones weren’t buried.

Any hope of sweet afterlife
Depended on those still living
To observe the burial rites.

Why would Charon care if the ghosts
That mobbed his shore to cross over
Had left buried or exposed bones?

That’s not the question. The question
Is whether you performed the rites
Well enough so the magic worked.

More than a thousand years later,
The burden of good behavior
Had shifted to the souls themselves.

In Dante, it’s not what was done
With your body once you left it,
But what you, living, did with it,

A double burden, as you end
Not only in an awful state,
But you can’t go back to fix it.

Now you not only have to live
Rightly and perform rituals
To keep the dead from coming back,

But you have to prepare your trip
To the afterlife in advance,
Make sure you have your documents.

Spare a thought for the ferryman,
That fierce, old sedentary man,
Who doesn’t decide either way.

He shuttles his boat endlessly,
Collecting fees he never spends,
No matter what gods rule the shores.

Each soul is a word, all words souls
That follow a line to the end
And then back again. Then again.

Something You Haven’t Seen

Before isn’t enough.
Any encounter needs
To be, at least briefly,

Estranging, pleasantly
Or unpleasantly, whoosh,
A wave of transient

Amnesia, a fugue state,
A moment in the light
In which the furnishings

Of mundane perception
Were surreptitiously
Rearranged. Confusion.

Is this art? Is this real?
Is this unnatural?
It passes. It will pass.

The train leaves the station.
The nude leaves the staircase.
Five minutes of silence.

Humanish

There’s nothing to read
That will answer you,
That will speak to you
As you want to hear,
Not just some stories—

Intriguing people,
Rich information
From background research
Or a real life lived—
You wanted something

That would remove you
From wholly human
But still address you
In the assumption
You’re only human,

Even if it’s not—
A translation, then,
To you, human, from
An inhuman world.
That’s why holy books

Remain appealing,
Humans pretending
To speak for the world
Greater than human,
In humanish words.