Bloom

There’s a depth to surface
You give your attention,
No? Earth’s just a surface,

The shell that you know well.
Every sphere surfaces
Itself. Topology

Is not some simple wave,
In any case. The curves
That turn into themselves

Are like words, are like you,
Puzzles worn inside out.
The whole’s not what’s enclosed

Alone, but also how
It shows open as well.

Find It Moving

Language isn’t terribly
Mysterious, but meaning
Beyond pure information—

Numinous, significant,
The thing moving in language,
Meaning as you make it—is.

You can say there is a glow
That lights the sky, and so what?
You can say there is a god

That lights the sky, and so what,
Although now you’re getting strange.
You can say that some people

Are suffering while others
Involved in their suffering
Ignore them, and that’s a fact.

But then you ask, then you ask
Why should there be suffering,
Why would anyone crave gods,

Why ask any such questions?
And you can feel it moving,
In you, a thing that you bring.

Looking Back

The whole globe words crawl around
Hangs humble as your mother
Humble as a button on

That shroud, and it is splendid,
The shroud at least, all those lights,
Swirls, waves, clusters, and spirals

Bursting and sailing the night.
The globe, however, is not
As splendid. Rather pretty—

Blue marble, green bead, white clouds,
All that—but the awe you feel
Every time you sense it whole

Stems from your shock at how small,
How fragile, etc.,
Your spaceship, your home, your ark.

That’s just about how we feel
Every time we’re well out past
The atmosphere of your skull.

Off the Market

You’ll admit you keep your house
A bit too cool for most folks—
Actually, anyone else.

It cuts down the visitors.
Also, you don’t cook. Nothing
Passes for homey in here,

Although you’ve kept it tidy
And spare, lacking huge messes,
Loud arguments, or passion

Of any kind. You’ve cut down
On your cold baths and long swims
Grey afternoons in the lake,

And you do alternate lights,
Take out the trash, and so forth.
You’re not ice. You’re half-hearted.

Your place needs dusting, sweeping,
Vacuuming, scrubbing. It’s neat,
But it gathers sediments,

Which makes it seems like no one
Lives here, where you live, no one
Has lived here, and no one would.

Words Lie in Praise of Their Upstanding Maker

Sit with, stand with, withstand, withstood.
Understood? We couldn’t stand it,
But somehow you could. We would lie

Under the pressure of standing
Against anything, everything,
The relentless mass of it all,

But you stood up and started
Counting, stood up to be counted—
What an upstanding metaphor.

Except you weren’t a metaphor.
You were the real deal, animal,
Bipedal, while we were the lies

You dealt out and left behind you,
Your layers, your stratigraphy,
Your lines and lines and lines of signs.

Containerized Economies

It’s not so recent, despite
How overwhelming it’s been
Recently, what with plastics

And shipping calculations
For making packages stack.
In a sense, every pit house

Was a scooped-out container,
While various entrails, gourds,
Hides, and skulls served for pouches,

But that’s only cultural.
It’s fair to say life itself
Began as a container

Or soon needed containment
To shelter its reversals
Of entropy locally

And separate resources
From waste. It just that, maybe,
You’re the greatest since corals

Or even stromatolites
At creating containers
Themselves as principal waste.

Already bacteria
And photic-zone sea creatures
Are colonizing the heaps

You don’t know what to do with,
And plastics keep turning up
In the guts of lightless deeps.

There’ll be new economies.
Pray they depend on humans
To generate containers.

Rereading the Night Gardener

What are you looking for, exactly,
Out on someone’s deck that you rent?
There’s late spring sun flooding their garden,

And their giant ornamental plum
Is all in bloom and dropping catkins,
And you can hear the birds and the stream

Building toward inevitable
Freshet as the snow melts down at last,
But you’re thinking about a land war

Over in Europe—Europe, again!
And what a terrible thing it is
To covet somebody else’s land,

To murder and destroy to claim land,
As you sit on someone else’s land,
Ever-transient, short-term renter.

What are you thinking for, exactly,
Having put your books away for now,
Since none of them were compelling you?

Did any of this ever happen?
Were you ever actually reading
On a deck in beautiful sunlight?

It’s midnight. You weren’t dreaming. You weren’t
Ever here, feeling any of this,
Until now. Now you are. What’s your war?