Meanings Never Wholly Tethered

Some people never were,

Nor felt, as one writer

Wrote in one poem, lovely,

And infinite, and young,

But what is infinite

Anyway? Tractable

In math but otherwise

An impossible word,

One of many like it.

Imagine a language,

A poetry at least,

Made only of those words

That have no tangible,

Experienceable

Referents. Wonderful

Such words exist at all—

Eternity, afterlife,

Divinity, nothing,

Soul. Lovely, infinite

Terminology, loose,

Unmoored from the senses,

Who first invented them?

How is it anyone

Can find meaning in them?

Some people never feel

The divine as a wind,

The infinite as pools

Of clear ink to swim in,

Youth as a quality

Of firmness, lost by them.

At Home in the Wilderness

Sky-colored confetti,
Mountain bluebirds scatter
From the road to fence posts
When each car approaches,

And you grin in the shade.
Sitting by the wayside,
You like the visuals,
The light traffic, the birds—

Not quite country living
But country visiting,
And where have you ever
Not been a visitor?

Who’s more visitor here
On this scenic mountain,
Here in these latter days,
Anyways, the tourists

Who seem to own the place,
Or these birds they scatter?
Say you’re a regular.
You live near, come often.

You know all your choice spots
Overlooking the cliffs.
You’re not a trail hiker.
You couldn’t survive here.

You don’t own a bunker
Among those in the trees.
You can watch the tourists,
And the bluebirds settle

When the traffic’s absent,
And listen to the wind
Tune the branches hiding
Those empty, locked bunkers.

The only thing that stays
Wilderness is what’s next,
What can’t be prepared for,
The future no one sees.

Catch Anything?

Maybe words themselves were weirs
For trapping fishy meanings,
Or netting for fowling birds
Of ideation, feathers
Worth trading, or to gently
Snag batty notions without
Harming their delicate wings.

Point was, those structures of words,
Whether stiff or delicate,
None of them meant anything.
They were made for emptying
Of whatever nourishment
Became tangled up in them,
Then put back to catch more things.

Skull House

You begin to realize
It’s almost all a haunting—
Given two of the three kinds

Of being in your life are
Not themselves present humans—
Those being the nonhuman

Presences and the absence
Or, rather, ghostly presence
Of humans absent in flesh.

You can forget this, talking
To a friend at a table,
To your daughter in the car,

But even then, nearly half
Or more of conversations
Are about beings never

Met in person, and the rest,
Of course, about some humans
Alive but not present or

Whom you knew once, who’ve since died.
Who do you interact with
When there is no body there?

You can answer, memories,
Or the writers you admire,
Or the actors you’re watching

Who were recorded somewhere.
They’re all mixed up together,
Your hauntings, your varied ghosts,

And they’re the real ones, not sheets
Shivering in night’s corners,
Just a horde of personas

However you first knew them,
However faint, vaporous,
Fragmentary, the persons

Bound together by language,
Many no more than language,
That crowd the house of your skull.

Leveling Up

So, you’re doing your job
Among the rhopalia
Of world mind, helping mind

And its multiple spies,
All its dozens of eyes,
That brainless jellyfish,

Learn all about the world
It navigates, floating
And flexing in deep space.

Modular, scalable,
If you were examined,
You would reveal yourself

Not only a neuron
Of sorts for the world mind
But with many millions

Of your own, and so on,
But here you’re component
Of something emergent,

And this is your role, sense
And respond, a signal
Summed into the many

World mind learns to average
And back up or speed up
Accordingly. You quiet

Until the next input
Triggers you, no notion
How you help all mind move.

Meaningless Reasons

The light you can watch
Moving and the light
You can’t see tremble
Combine on the floor

Of the afternoon
Cafe in nowhere.
Everything’s solid,
Everyone’s bodied,

And music’s spooling
Out of the blonde air,
But no one’s speaking,
And no one’s signing,

And the hours are free
From needing reading,
From needing meaning,
Which is why you’re here.

Bring the Dictionary

It can’t be only for the great
Pile up of extraordinary

Words—stained glass can be breathtaking
When the sun’s behind it, but still,

Most people will prefer windows
They can see through and something worth

Seeing through to on the far side.
People like words like that, like frames

For a wonderful, priceless view,
Words even better than windows,

Words like screens, portable vitrines
Carrying other worlds with them.

Who wants to be stuck in the dark
Cathedral of fine poetry,

Surrounded by ancient stained glass
Vocabulary, not a clue

What’s on the other side, except
That it’s more or less dark or light?

The cathedral’s worth a visit
And minor, murmuring respect,

And if the weather outside’s raw
And ugly, maybe a comfort.