The cliff spills all its worlds
Down one side, from sand grains
To mansion-sized boulders,
From wisps of grass to trunks
Of grand, uprooted pines.
Where did you mean to go
When you first saw the cliff,
And thought, maybe a poem?
Daughter’s getting ready
To spend the afternoon
At the bookstore, meaning
She intends to look good.
Decades have wandered by
Since the last time you browsed
Shelves meaning to look good.
You’ll settle for pain-free,
Your daughter’s company,
New books to browse or read.
You check the time, glance up
At the enormous cliff.
There’s no rush to finish
This or any other thought—
From the base of the cliff
You can witness the mind
Advancing on the world
As clearly as you can
See it crawl through bookshelves.
Content
Tuesday, October 29, 2024
Book Cliff
Monday, October 28, 2024
Going Great
Officially dying, there’s still
A wide variance in your days,
Ranging from those when you wake up
Feeling death is, for sure, too close,
To days when you feel all is well—
Days when you feel life’s turned out well,
Which you shouldn’t, since you’re dying.
But those days (and hours and minutes)
Are in there, where you catch yourself
Pleased with your life in general,
And why not? It’s not as if those
Who aren’t officially dying
Won’t ever die. It gets summed up
Sooner or later. You’ve done well!
Sunday, October 27, 2024
Simultaneity
Is that the problem?
Watch the memory.
A second ago
You had an idea
You can still half-feel,
A shape in your brain,
What you were about
To compose—and here
You are, trying hard
To out-race the loss
By typing faster,
Only losing more
By making errors
That require pauses
To stop and fix, but
Better to have fixed
What you have so far
Than to finished it.
Is it? You’re trying
To compose and revise
At once, which becomes
Your subject, given
The first—wait, what first?
Did you mean verse? No,
You meant the first thought
You had to write about
For this—is long gone.
Saturday, October 26, 2024
Although You Do
Friday, October 25, 2024
A Hunch
Thursday, October 24, 2024
Maybe Meaning
You love how life, as a word,
Can unfold so many lives
And then let them drift and sink,
So many paper blossoms,
Soggy within memory,
Getting dimmer in its depths,
None of them alive themselves
For all the definitions
Of themselves they carry on
Into the dark, this is life,
No, this is what life is, no,
Life’s meaning, not a being,
But no one’s sure what meaning
Is, either, maybe living.
Wednesday, October 23, 2024
Empty Day Almost Spent
There’s another moment
When you imagine it,
Whatever it might be,
That a moment ago
You thought you had, slipping,
This next moment, away—
And something in you cries
Out to the rest of you—
Waste! Whatever thing good
Or indifferent you have
Been doing distracted
You from what you have been
Losing while doing it.
And what you had’s going,
Your surplus dissolving,
Its dissolution waste.
You won’t regret it long.
You regret so little
That’s gone, once it’s long gone,
But right now it seems like
Something’s going to waste—
Free day, free afternoon,
What disappears without
Being consciously spent.
So that’s another form
Of it, isn’t it, waste?
But still you don’t know
What the word’s all about
How it functions, connects
To feeling it as waste.
The emptier the hour
Promised to be, the more
You hungered to feel it,
All the way through it all.
The closer to nothing
Nothing much feels, the less
You will jolt to the loss
Of near nothing at all
To near nothing at all.