Can’t Learn from the Lost

Where are the poems of Censor Wang
That chilled the bones in snowy hills?
How did you write without suspense,
Without events, and leave flesh cold?

Was it enough to live near ice,
To build your door to face the Pole?
We’ll never know. They don’t survive,
Your lines that turned a poet cold.

Bu Ru Gui Qu

Better go home.
Some soul has left
Hope in your nest
Of nothing much,

A huge oval
Of fantasies
That now threaten
To roll the egg

Of your own child
Out of the straw
Through empty air.
Best get back there,

Roll out that hope
That’s not yet hatched.
Leave to get food.
Quickly come back.

Monstruo de Naturaleza

One bird sounds like a rusty wheel,
Shrieking every few rotations.

How does anything stand apart?
How does contrast shape resemblance?

To be monstrous is to achieve
Singularity of presence.

Louder, weirder, larger, sharper,
Somehow not like any other,

But never all unlike others.
The monster’s singular presence

Stays singular among a kind.
It is of its kind, there unique

To some absurd degree, to some
Extreme dimension—only that

Makes it monstrous. Draw a picture
Of monsters and feel yourself strive

To render each one uniquely.
A monster’s not monstrous painted

Among nothing but mere monsters
Unless monstrous, somehow, to them,

And then you notice how monsters
Achieve uniqueness resembling

Something that is not of their kind.
A monster’s likenesses are such

That they bridge away from one kind
By means of combined monstrous traits

To resemble some other kind
Or kinds, not less like but more like,

Confusing the categories
For a human observer’s mind,

Rickety tower of names for kinds,
Creator of monstrosities.

That bird sounds like a rusty wheel,
Shrieking every few rotations.

From the Inside—the Outside’s Another Story

You will never be a being
Unaware of living, dying.
A body with your name might be.
Your name without a body might
Continue, but not you as you.
You’re forever the living you,
No mere being aware of you.

Don’t Ask How This Happened

Carts don’t roll on water;
Boats don’t float on dry land.
But what is a story,

Wheeled cart or a keeled boat?
Story runs everywhere,
These days mostly on air,

Leaving the storyless arts
Useless as carts with oars,
Masts crowned with wagon wheels,

Trying to chase stories
That take off everywhere.
Get back in the water

With your oars and your sails,
If you know how to float.
Uselessness is the way

To get across the lake.
Let storytellers boast
Everywhere. Glide nowhere.

Weather Together

Gravity, nothing,
Dropped decorations
In tiny craters.

Water to water,
Rings to erase rings,
The rain found the pond.

Witness but Don’t Testify

To be a permanent witness,
That would be the thing, to out-wait
All the undecided tumult
Of today’s civilization

For the undecided tumult
Of whatever follows the end—
Even better, to hang around
Evolutionary ages

To see what follows extinctions,
All the undecided tumult
Of kinds of life you can’t guess yet—
To watch the change without changing

Without dissolving into it—
Godlike and highly entertained.
But it’s projection isn’t it?
The churn of civilizations

Is something you know from the past,
And the same for great extinctions.
If you earned immortality,
It would serve you right to be bored

By a billion years of same old,
Same old, or a billion or more
Of something so utterly new
You’re left permanently confused.

Well, and then you’re immortal now
Or might as well be, sitting here,
Watching the clouds, reading more news,
Alternately bored and confused.