Under Another Juniper Tree

"And no clear answers of course
To such an intractable
Problem," says the BBC
After interviewing three

Perfectly reasonable
Sounding people debating
Mutually exclusive
Perspectives on another
Horrific human bloodbath.

Parts of the brain, thoughtlessly,
Wordlessly direct the arm
And hand to complete the act,
Practiced to subconscious art,
Of flicking silent the car

Radio knob. Other parts
Of that brain become enmeshed
In two self-absorbing thoughts.
One knots up the probable
Truth that no particular
Conflict is intractable:
They all dissolve in true time;
In the end, only conflict
Itself is intractable,
Yelling, "I myself am Hell!"
Pump and piston of the heart,
Sad, enduring downward part.

Meanwhile, that topology,
Noodling skein of reasoning,
Has snagged on the tangential
Thought that bulletins may be
The closest non-poetic
Exemplars for gemlike flames
A foolish, gifted mystic,
Who thought fairytales were dreams,
Once identified as pure
Poetry. Here's why. That same
Newscast contained an update
On how many thousand lives,
Human lives, were feared deceased
In an expected but still
Startling, eye-storm, overkill

Disaster, followed by notes
On reports of quite rapid
Evolution on remote,
Grassed islands of páramos,

Plus progress of a rocket
With an Indian robot
On interplanetary
Business to discover life
(On Mars, of course, surprising),
And, actually surprising,

Fresh, digital evidence
Of a species thought to be
Extinct, in the wild, pictured
By remote sensors showing
An example, alive, caught
Browsing in the wild. One ought

Not to be so easily
Surprised by surprise, although,
Perhaps survival's secret
Remains vulnerability,
Which would explain one species'
(Our own, you saw that coming)
Perfecting perpetual
Wonder as a holiness,
Faith in surprise. I digress.

The jumble of these reports
Breaks up, interferes somehow
With the very same impulse
To perceive all happening
As cause-and-effect parade.
Pure poetry abandons
Causation altogether,
Leaving only metaphor
Or metaphorical shells,
Scattered along long beaches
Commingled with other shells,
Such as, say, "the sun rises,"
Or "she gave the breath of life."

"Let us be perfectly clear,"
Politicians like to say
Prefatory to launching
Any particularly
Obfuscatory remarks.
So let us be clear: the pure
Poetry of poetry
Has no causes. Things happen.
More precisely, things have just
Happened, rearranging pasts
In passage. We find the past

Always, here, now, rearranged,
No matter how fast we catch
At it, a weirdness we call
Our present, while our future
Remains a human habit
Of uncovering lost pasts
Of memory rearranged
Ways impossible to fit
To external arrangements
We call strangeness, dementia,

Thanks to prediction or, no,
Our imaginations.
Nothing causes anything,
And poetry is the one
Genre of culture that comes
Armed da cap-a-pe before
The moon that raises its sharp
Scimitar over red rock
(You do know the moon rises,
Unlike the sun that moves us?),
Over the approach to truth,
Confessing that approach true

Or approaching close to truth,
For which weird joust it gets called
Irrelevant, timeless, or
Dying. The news. Poetry.
Paramour of Páramos.