No Meat, Fat, No Bones

"suburban longhairs in bongy basements and Camaros, getting their education over the airwaves from the curates of FM"

Quantum gravity's a dream
Those who hate our gravity evade.
There's nothing to our righteousness
That righteousness won't replace.

I've seen men who raise their children
On organic greens in Slocando.
I've seen men who raise their kids
On endless screens and screams.

I don't hold with any man
Who could be what I am.
I don't hold with any scam
That won't make me new man.

It's not so far from standard theory
To standards played by djs.
It's not so far from any weary
Human to what these words say:

It's a long ways from seventies 'Jrrzee
To just past now and here,
Long ways from rock 'n roll,
Long ways down Piscataway,
Long ways to the soul.

Ghwer

English witches and Indian saints,
"You know, Buffalo, the woods," he said.
The trail still entertains many bears,
Rare mountain lions, lynx, and bobcats,

Rumors of wolves, frequent coyotes
(Which look lush-furred and huge in these woods,
Not those lean, mangy wolves of prairies).
There's a fierceness remaining to beasts

Who remain among beasts who remain.
Boundaries never blur, never were.
Though you might snatch the drink from the drunk,
You can't seize the fire from the water.

Black Cats and Mule Deer

Cross the road. The clouds
Drift over the slopes
Packed solid with trees.
The streams hymn their rocks.
All this happened once.

All this has happened.
Carry it with you.
When you open it
Like a lidded eye
Hiding the iris,

The glittering jewel,
The light has shifted,
The memory changed.
The world is feral
And haunts the tamed mind

That makes and contains
The gate to what is
Not. The world is trapped
Like iris glitter
And shifting and past

Knowing what it was.
You were never still.
The streams hymned their rocks.
Sweet bird calls echoed.
Clouds caressed the road.

One Lokayata, Nastika

Expect a surprise when no one expects one,

Wrote one. (For instance, finding atheists among

Brahmins and Buddhists before the first

Commonly called "common" century.)

     There's the window full of twilit evening

And thick with birch leaves.

While we still have coals, I'm going

To put one more split on the stove.

There's Annie Proulx, Bird Cloud, open-faced

On the 358 Exchange newsletter

On the sill. There's the butter tub, 

The nature journal, the boxed board game, 

And the tracing paper, full of scribbles,

On the borrowed coffee table. There's

The smoldering coal in the grate.

"Can I get a tissue?" The phrase

"At least?" is implicit in the tone 

Of the phrase. So, there are some gods 

No gods erase. Our demons are the phones 

That ring when we're not answering, not

The phones that glow when we want, we want...

"Giant Spirals in Space Could Explain Our Existence"

Sure. Here's the thing about inspiration,
About creation, about love: demand
Generates the supply, the affection,
The beauty that offers contemplation

Of the depths of the music of pattern.
Look at the glowing eyes of each evening,
Above or down, galaxies or kraken.
What sounds self-similar? Unself matters

But returns, in the dark, as blossoming
Of the pink-petalled ourobouros flower.
If no one had ever asked us to be
Could we have been what we are? The muse thinks,

And the thinker muses long upon this.
There was a yearning to command our bliss.

Charismatic Megafauna Complain of Their Third Option

The lake is up. There's not much time left.
There never was that much time at all.
Some species claim time doesn't exist.
If not, it's in really short supply,
A shame, since it's all there ever is.

The blue beast sits hunched in the downpour,
Unsure of whether to carry on
Until broken down completely or
To anticipate nonexistence
By rushing to the devious void.

"Oh now," grunts the grumbling, powerful
Monster that could crush smaller creatures,
"We have become tiny things
Going around and around the ground,
Weaving through our own bones ceaselessly."

". . ."

"Accident has a lot to answer for,"
And "Waste, paradoxically, is a kind
Of reservoir." "Humans like lodgepole pines,"
And languages prove themselves infinite,

An alternate universe caught within
Both the universe it claims to describe
And the universe of cells that model
It and the universe it can't describe.

These are not eggs, not painted dolls of men
Who were tyrants in succession, nor girls
Who were anonymous as fairy tales.
These are quotations, nascent or done. Done.

My Life in the Pretense

It's a slapdash case he makes, many ways,

A kind of zoopraxiscopic regime,

Ultramodernism antiquated:

Enchant the animals; let them converse,

Not so much the woods as the air burning,

Oxygen, the fuel that gives death its zest

And life its headlong rush into anguish.

And then the phoenix in the garden speaks.

"His dreams plan to test if it was his case,

Without resistance to the wilderness.

It's a jungle of mild green flames out there,

Lapping at the crusts of a blue-veiled world."

I am not kidding. I am not playing.

I am earnestly assessing the end

Of the becoming, all four hooves in air,

The fire from splayed leaves in circular night.

"If I Knew What to Do, I Promise I Would Tell You"

The little owl flies past the beloved red bird.
It's too beautiful out there. The weird world
Feels rigged, a lure over half-hid ambush.
The words want to break away from it, rush
Into some unsurprising nonsense, whirl
In ways traditionally called novel,
Pretended daring, experimental,
But they're unable to accomplish this,
Settling back like birds scared off wires or fields,
Too hungry, too tired, too careful, too true
To abandon the curse that nourishes
The fecund divisibility of
Them, of things, of names, of things without names.

To Destroy the Man Who Tries to Harm the Man Who Knows This

This always is, and always will be, never
Has been, anything but what it was, a long
Time gone, a long time ago. And yet it moves.

The same song in the same sun, the same language
That's no longer here, the old romance with selves
Who strain, naked and earnestly desiring

The same fulfillment their ancestors promised
By having participated in making
Such descendants as arrive, moaning in light.

The Least Story Ever Told

It's human to believe
"Humans are the scapegoats
Of the gods," or the gods
Of us, or the serpent.
Not imagination,
Language, not even games

Can define us so well,
So necessarily,
And so sufficiently
As the need to attach
Blame, blame for everything.
Surely, someone's to blame.

A bug that looks like bark
Lands on a sunny cloth
Imported from somewhere
That excels in textiles,
Transported by networks
Of tankers, trains, trailers,

And exchanged for credit,
Which is belief, is trust.
The beetle trusts nothing
And has no one to blame.
Thus we need a fable,
"The Beetle and the Shirt,"

In which gods love textiles
And beetles make mistakes.
Only then there's meaning
To a life in which beetles
Devour imported shirts.
Sometimes, sin's sacrifice
Improperly observed.

Sometimes, the wonder tale
Evades explanation.
One is truth. One is faith.
These brothers make no sense
When either one's honest.
Sometimes, sin's nakedness.
The beetle flies away.

A Sure But Rugged Way

How far can you go
On a stripe of the night?
The Great White Way
Is more dark than light.

I am, in small,
As large and as bright
As this smoked disc
Of stars right at twilight.

After the Fire

Stop. There is no after. Still
Is only small and only
After what was becoming,

Which never became, always
Was. Still and all, the stele
On the hill of another

God spoke. I am what was not
Am: distilled, remainder,
Calm rejoinder. I loved you.

Just Ahead and Over Your Shoulder, Now, Light

"To do the delicate work of introducing
The pond-scum opsin into a brain cell,"
Place Orion behind the Vahalla massif.
No, I'm kidding. Not all of us memorized

"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"
In third grade at first sight. Some of us
Just got in trouble for being bewitched
By the heavy, sing-song rhythm as we read.

What is going on in the intricate nest
Of translucent neurons as a poem is read,
A sun is set, an imaginary
Constellation rises, looking back on itself?

I couldn't tell itself. Only the tips of waves
Wink in the ricocheting sunlight
From this angle at the end of the far,
Never-endingingly divisible north of souls.

Heading Forever True North

No narrow roads, no pole, no Ultima Thule,

The cold creek consulted by birdsong continues

Downhill all the way, finer, faster silver trails

Like those left by the eternal snails under moss

Threading and dividing beyond fronds' perceptions.

It's an old story, imagination before

Any story's descent in clinging wraiths of mists,

The original wonder of a guarded world 

One was not made for, cannot be, cannot enter.

It lasts forever, this continuous shifting

That distinguishes things it erases, this thought

Of the north as a march of woods in face of ice,

The ice forever receding from the forests

That are darker than the blue brilliance they replace.

Yes, it's only a one-ended bridge. Yes, only

A metaphor for a world with no metaphors.

Infinite Differentiations

Infinitely expansive,
Infinitesimally
Divisive, the universe,
Everything, had to contain
Extinction, disappearance.
Time and space were mere results.
Why? There's no why. Only was.

Awareness woke from a nap
On an exhausted Sunday
Morning in the woods in May,
Faintly remembering dreams
Of the equilibria
Of Marcus Aurelius
And John Nash, killed in a crash

With his long suffering wife
The night last in a taxi
In infinite New Jersey.
Balance reconciling ends,
Having dived into nothing
And discovered nothing much,
Everything fractured all ways,

The fissures in sensation
Extended further, below
Even life, into it all.
Search however, whatever
Means move you, thought thought, only
Change extended forever,
Per Heraclitus, but worse,

Per Derrida, but better,
Ecstasies of distinctions
More crucial than their physics.
Nash's many worlds perished
Of their multiplicity.
However closely played, one
Must be many once had beens.

The wind stirred. The dreams ended
And began again. Instants
Were instantly different.
Revisited, memory
Had already changed. Must have,
A fraying rope perceiving
Silkworms unraveling string

In the long threads of morning,
Green ravening in the sky:
Demons of the possible
Strategies of differing
From differing, differing
From each other, flourishing
Sailors flew perishing winds.

Marcus Aurelius and the Strong Anthropic Principle

The problem with the name Mark,
In the nickname-obsessed suburbs
Of 1960s and '70s New Jersey,

Was its lack of a truncated version
Kids could agree on. In swimming pools,
The go-to call was "Marco!" "Polo!"

Not that any of us knew who
Marco Polo was or why we used
His name as social echolocation

On hot summer afternoons. Once
In a while, someone would try out
The vast and even more ridiculous

"Marcus Aurelius," a name to conjure
Absolutely nothing, fallen out of the air,
Who knows from what adult mouths

Regurgitating fragmentary learning
Into the ears of enchanted childhood,
When the very weirdness of a phrase,

Meaninglessness itself was shiny,
Pretty nonsense of the kind witches
And talking animals chanted.

"Marcus Aurelius!" one boy would call
Another, but it never stuck except as a fact
Of being some old name. On the boy's desk

In an office in another millennium,
In another sprawl, one phrase on a scrap
Of paper, translated from that old name

Scrawled, "it will all be the same." Mostly,
The stoicism was calming, helpful
In a minor way, who knows whether

It really helped the emperor philosopher
Himself. In a more important way, it is true
And disconcerting. Millennia separate

The death of the emperor from the life
Of the old boy at the cluttered desk.
Still, in every direction, it is all the same.

Had there not been a vague echo
Of a complicated name, would there
Have been any bonding sensation?

There are plenty of people for whom
Acceptance may only be affirmative,
Otherwise immoral resignation. Marcus,

Whatever comfort his imperial philosophy
Granted him, did not take his own name
Passively. Christians were executed, legions

Lost to bearded Germanic barbarians
Along the emperor's northern frontier,
And his whole history suggested the belief

That, lacking right action, it would not
All be the same. All the same,
The sentence still feels correct,

And a side effect of tranquility
Is the knowledge that legions still perish,
The tribes still go to war, emperors

Still attempt to crush rebellion, no matter
If they call themselves emperors anymore.
Belief is still a death sentence at the wrong

End of any other belief. All the same,
Even if the atomized emperor no longer
Registers wishes or aphorisms, and has not

For so long, he could not recognize the world
That has recycled him and his inky phrasings,

His grandiose name, except for its death.

Death he would recognize, were he alive.
The whole routine all of life goes through
To consume and evade consumption

Remains in place like a standing wave.
Marcus Aurelius had no impact on that.
When the old boy was a kid without a nickname,

Other kids referred to one Dr. Schweitzer,
Another of the grown-ups' conjuring names.
"Who do you think you are, Marcus

Aurelius, Dr. Schweitzer?" Made no
Difference. Other fun names, Stalin,
Hitler, Mother Theresa, made none

Either. The evaporation of action
Happens to be inevitable in this configuration
Of a universe. The old boy held with those

Who wished, strenuously, that it were not so,
Not those who found poignance in the strong
Anthropic principle, that this was what must

Be for any of this to be at all, but
He could see that, cosmologists'
Multiversical mathematical fantasies

Aside, this was what this could be
And it could be nothing else except what it was,

All the same. It had no name.

Stark

Here in the dwellings of the inglorious living,
The collateral descendant of whom you have
Never heard returns to his dim smithy. I am

The nephew of a man named for a man
From whose nephew his uncle believed
He had descended, revolutionary battle hero

For the winning side: Saratoga, Bennington,
Bunker Hill. Too bad for Wannalancet, hardly
More distantly related. Who is most dead?

Whoever is unknown to the one doing
The reminiscing. This means that life
Goes and comes back again, around

The view down a bend in the river,
An aspect of its own perspective. Or
It never comes nor goes at all. It is

What was in the mind of what is was,
Every bronze-hammered crescent sun on the water
Beside the green memorial buried

In another book, another essay, another
Poem, another flattened conversation
In the unbrothered forge, a pond's cabin.

The Water Itself Is Cold

The secret of life is escape.
Happiness is escape. Salvation
Is escape. Satori is escape.
Martyrdom is escape. Charity
Is escape. Anything but toil
And rumination can be an escape
And maybe those as well.
No prison was ever so leaky,
No furlough, no parole,
No pardon and permanent release
More amply guaranteed.
Then we see each other, fall
Into one another's arms,
Promise to remain, people
Among people, and we
Remind each other to shut
The door behind us. Begin. In

The last glacial maximum
Of the Pleistocene, when
Modern humans already
Roamed what we now name
Africa, Eurasia, Indonesia,
And Australia, just a few
Thousand years before
The oldest dated sites
In the Americas, megafauna
Of numerous now extinct
Species left bones on the tundra
Of my home continent, and
The ice over what is more recently
Called the City of Chicago
Hunched roughly a thousand

Feet thick. Massive. Enough
To crush the current high, hot,
Windy towers to one smeared
Seam of polycarbonate and steel
Ground down to a human finger
Width or two. That was no time
Ago and more time than twice
Or four times all the history
We know, some eight hundred
Or a thousand human generations
Ago. Meantime most of the megafauna,
Along with all that overhanging cliff
Of ice long gone before
We knew. The more we know, the less
We know; still less, we guess, we knew.

Please shut the door. I know
You want to go back out again,
But they're already gone and you
Will get gone too, and although
The air feels warm this afternoon,
The water itself is cold.

To Know What's Unbecoming

The mystery of the sense of plain moments
Which never appear plain on inspection,
Not the kid on the rented couch watching cartoons,
Not the mother in the old, borrowed bed dozing,
Not the songs of the studio recorded for the cartoons
Pulled out of the invisible orchestration of the air,

Not the visible air outside the deep-set window
In familiar blue and gold, morning in the trees,
Reflections from the lake way down below,
Not the grumbling of the refrigerator motor in the cabin
Where the kid is on the couch, the mother is in the bed,
The father is barefoot on the smooth floorboards,
No fire in the the wood stove, too warm this morning,
This unremarkable, impossible morning
That is every combination of these phenomena
And was real and no longer exists.

Tragedy Minus Consequence Equals Honesty

"In college, they allow you to be entertained and let your mind wander, which is not good training to do anything difficult." ~Nell Zink

I'm not broken, only busted
In various, irrelevant
Ways to a writer of fiction,

Believe me. Belief will set you
Free. Nothing is all that funny
To a writer without readers

Who composes without writing
On a device made from millions
Of lives suffering through a world

Made from countless lives suffering.
I don't need your empathy. You
Are alive, too. More's the witty.

End Begin

The light angling
Between the spruce
Above the road

Above the lake
And its village
Trains the nuthatch

To keep squawking
At the swimmer
Drying his thoughts

In the long lawn
Of clotheslined towels
In white-wine rains

Enthusiasm

You can put a little heart on this day,
Add exclamation points, a smiley face.
Never mind whatever events occurred.
The world observed one way or the other
Remains the whole of the world one observes.
Add emphases to taste. Expostulate.
"Yep, doin' pretty well so far today,"
The laconic fisherman by the lake
Observes by way of spare commentary.
"Think I'll come back again. Give it a whirl."

Testimoanial

Contra Shaw, I am content to be
"A feverish, selfish little clod,
Ailments and grievances complaining,"

Not a force of nature in the least,
Except insofar as living makes
Anything living one of the least

Extensions of that extraneous
Force neither gravity nor nuclear
Nor electroweak nor whatever:

Life, nature, the mystery of this
Rock, blue bead, pale dot, every life lived
And folded back into the water.

I whine and complain, therefore I am.
I exult, embrace, desire, therefore
I am. The scurf on a seiching wave

Time's winds fetch from the living systems
Of patterns consuming more patterns,
My microbiota, my genome,

My cultural imagination
And I stand out a little, little
While from the background radiation

On a cloudy day in Canada
Near a lake long and thin as a snake,
Fine as God's fingernail pairings, this.

No Will Beyond Which

"He knows what the heart and brain do,

But he really hasn't a clue."

The first, extraordinary thing

About culture is that men sing

So much of it when they are not

The default gender. The argot

Of philosophes has no reason

To be evolving. In season,

The lake that I love lies beneath

Encapsulating mist, its teeth

Sheathed in waves of silvery mail,

As if no swimmer ever failed

To make it back to stony shores

Skyscraper height above the floor

Of forgiveness. Riddle me this.

The deceased will never exist.

Coming Soon Restaurant

"It all revolved around telling people stories,"
He muttered, leaning large elbows on the table.
"That was the gag, the Great American Novel,
The war epics, the beast fables, the wonder tales.

If I didn't exist, you would have made me up.
Once you made me up, I existed, jamais vu,
And it was as if you never had to invent me.
Stories never lied. They never usurped the throne

Of an actual universe. They created,
Get it?" Rain pittered nervously drumming fingers
On the top of the table. The roof had vanished,
And we were somewhere else again, me and the God.

The Hermit of Pine Valley Mountain

This is why we live here, drunk on places,
Talking to ourselves forever,
Shouting, singing, and whispering
Across the shuddering landscape,

The common imagination
Of vanishing human beings.
Clouds of the inconsequential
Hang tattered championship flags

From the trumpets of deserted
Blue heaven. The stones no one placed
Disport themselves in black and white,
Dirty wet sheep on the thin green.

I am their shepherd, the weather
Their sheepdog. Everything is small.
The sum of everything is vast
Desolation. I am in love.

Strategy

Make nothing from something something
From nothing. Convert the gathered
Energies of gathered matter.

Separate what cannot be used
To gather more to gather more
Of what can be used to gather

More. Eject. Divide. Grow. Eject.
Push aside ejecta. Crowd out
Other dividing gatherers.

Gather them. End their gathering.
Consume. Eject. Grow. Divide. End
The gathering of gathering,

The gatherers of gatherers.
Add jaws. Put on the whole armor
Of resistance to gathering.

Be too big, ungatherable.
Be too swift, ungatherable.
Be hidden, ungatherable.

Disappear. Extinguish yourself.
Ascend new niches in heaven,
Unimaginable angel.

Dear Greer

            For the folks of the salon, who will be savoring life's meanings this weekend while we're away, and for you and Sarah, since we three never concluded our own conversation on the same subject when we sat by the heron-strewn cutbanks of the Virgin the other evening, I thought I might indulge in a further clarification of my absurdly contrarian position.

            I said then that the problem is not finding life's meaning but is the surplus of life's meanings, and I compared the quest for the meaning of life to the search for a Christmas tree. Although few people ever believe they've found the absolutely ideal tree, most more or less satisfy themselves, and, once we've gone out looking, almost no one comes home entirely empty handed, not even Charlie Brown.

            In the days since, I've grown ever more fond of that goofy, off-the-cuff analogy, which is barely an analogy at all. The very phrase, "Christmas tree," contains the sorts of meaning that we mean when we speak of  "the meaning of life."

            The old saw says one "can't see the forest for the trees." Well, we can't see any forest for all the meanings in it. The forest going about its dark competition for light says nothing except as we mean it. We attribute to woods whatever we mean by wilderness, wonder tales, hobgoblins, ancestors, Arcady, and ecosystems. When we enter a forest to find a Christmas tree, a concept itself a 19th-century conflation of bitter solstices and miraculous nativities, we are not seeing the forest for anything other than the meaning of the tree, the message meant for us.

            Even those of us who proclaim the bottomless indifference of the forest and of the whole world to the human world, tend to do so in intensely meaningful ways, drawing profound significance out of the contrast between our pathos and the silence. The poems and fictions of Stephen Crane and Thomas Hardy are hymns to the meaningful contrast of human hope and agony to a meaningless universe. They can't help themselves.

            None of us can help ourselves. We generate meaning. Sporting events and soap operas encompass and illustrate meanings nearly ex nihilo, and their meanings bump up against and enter the narratives of far more desperate territorial events. Supposedly, Japanese soldiers yelled insults about Babe Ruth at American soldiers in the Pacific Theater. The actual romances and fortunes of celebrities and politicians are made by, unmade by, and endlessly compared to the entanglements of daytime dramas and telenovelas. Real people eat the converted gains of fictive meanings as real resources and make more real people from them.

            Nor need we stop at trees, athletes, or actors. You're a biologist, so you won't find a functional mammalian comparison grotesque. We generate meaning with our faces and hands as compulsively and needfully as dogs generate scent markings with their bladders. We make meaning as we go, marking everywhere we've been.

            It may seem a paradox, given all the constant human meaning-making, that we sometimes feel we've lost the meaning of life, that we can't find any meaning. But I think our friends the dogs can help us here as well. Dogs are not scent-marking, merely. Dogs are scent-reading just as needfully.  We know this. It's why we make jokes about dogs sniffing their "pee mail." It's why, in that odd, Edwardian fantasy, My Talks with Dean Spanley, Lord Dunsany went so far as to suggest that dragging a leashed dog away from a redolent fencepost was tantamount to hauling a scholar out of a fine library.

            What we don't know are what emotions and sensations possess the sniffing dog. We usually assume that the dog with its muzzle thrust over the tailgate of a pick-up truck or out the window of a rushing car is experiencing an ecstasy of scent.  It may be, however, that the dog is not just enjoying the wind but using the occasion to search out some shaggy, great, gusty dogginess in the wide world, which, surely, if one is a dog, one just knows must be out there.

            Meanwhile, we are likewise so attuned, so used to attending to the endless human exchanges of meanings, that we have no higher expectation of the cosmos than an enlargement of our species-typical negotiations. We seek an immense and grave humanity with something meaningful to say to us, and we interpret even apparent randomness only as a silent, serious rebuke to our quest. We want an answer, even if it must be a stern one. This business of questions and answers, narrations and interpretations, provides the true pheromones of human intelligence. Life, for us, must always involve a surplus of meanings.

            We may never be contented, but perhaps we can take comfort in knowing that as long as we are us, there will be more of them.

            Here ends my pretentious prose poem for this day.

Invention

Imagine a pond. Better: a bog, muskeg
Filled with sphagnum, wet rot lined by stunted pines,
Visited by beavers, home to agaric
Mushrooms and poisonous others. Here's your mind.

The water is not alive, not the same way
The dense, dark, decomposing vegetation
And compressed flesh remains forever alive.
Water is water, but life accumulates

In layers that each environment allows,
Invents inevitable allowances
Inventing new environments, in which you
Become inextricable from the water

That is never inextricable from you.
Now, ask the bog its individual soul.
Everything self-invented was imported,
But each little community is unique,

A transaction coterminous with seasons
And bound to turn different, then to vanish.
So much sediment neither water nor soil,
Invented but continuous, moving on.

A Monkey Is One Tree's Means of Making Another Tree

Little crimson hearts on seeds,

Split yucca pods. Upapa 

Epops calls from the pages

Digital Aristotle

Inhabits still. No one reads

Anyone's poetry but

One's own. Only opera

And jazz come close to being

As unpopular as this

Art torn from the hearts of words

And strung together

Tighter than King Singer,

The harbinger and prophet,

Crested royal, violent.