Aion

An infinite duration remains

Incommensurable with a name

Hinting at anything less than change.

An infinite nest of changes within changes,

Changes within change's names remains

Reusable by species who built nothing of the same,

The speed, the velocity, the acceleration,

The jerk, the shudder in changing games,

The necessary nakedness, the need

To find necessity naked and breed.

Bastard's Last Epigram by Heraclitus Creek

It's actually only three o'clock.
Although day's the arbiter,
Devices will talk.

It's actually only sunny and hot.
Although long afternoons can be nice,
Some are not.

Polar Bear Eating a White-Beaked Dolphin

This is the meaning of life:
Something trapped under the ice
Built for feeding on things built
For feeding on things, still surprised
By something feeding on things needing
Breathing
Trapped under the ice

The Changing Rate of the Changing Rate of Change

Nychthemeron. I didn't know
How it would end. Once it ended
I would have never been. To know

Is to experience. To know
Is to experience what names
Are to phenomena. Crooked.

Choppers hover over the lake
That changes like a sleeping soul
Spun by the body in a bed

The body finds no comfort in.
They're fighting fires in Valhalla.
Lightning strikes have candled the trees

That have been growing centuries.
Always fires in the wilderness,
And what are loggers or choppers

Or trees or ice sheets to the stones
Except changing rates of changing
Changing them, night and day. Change me.

Sphere Catastophique, the Magic Circle

"It is time to go." ~Einstein

We have a most unhappy tendency
To refer phenomena to ourselves.
When lives all around us appear to live
Briefly and, having emerged from nothing,

Resubmerge themselves forever, we think
That must be the nature of our own lives,
Which of course can only be the reverse,
Awareness always there, absence never.

Behind the event horizons of selves,
None of us can peer into extinction.
Consciousness allows no information
About its own death to escape. We know

This now, what gravity can do to light,
But we rarely contemplate all the things
That vanish into a black hole, as if
Behind the curtain of too much, nothing.

Lots of stuff going on in here, always
What was and cannot ever telecast
Anything of what it is not to be.
Mere mortal to you, this never is me.

The Geometrical Fairyland

My soul is the condition
Of no volume, infinite
Density. It knows nothing

Of any event inside
Itself. It eats everything
Outside itself and swallows.

An ant describes a picnic
Table. Oh, the difference
To me. Nothing gained, nothing

Simplified, information
Remains countably the same.
The black shield, the centaur world.

The Scrivener

"He lies snoring, like the moon,
Clownish white all afternoon"

Information is constant.
Difference is constant.
Information is difference.

Swimming through the hotel
Where every room, every day
Erases every other, hand cups
Clear water in the sunken world.

The total system conserves
Information: even as pattern
Is lost, complexity emerges
Somewhere else in the absence.

Sleep is the great hotel,
The haunted one, the lake
Of sunken villages, the memory
Discoverer and dissolver,

The beds remade as if no guests
Had ever stayed, somewhere
New guests and new intimacies
Waiting, new thoughts, new desires,

Fresh turning in the night, species
Disappearing, species appearing.
Everything gets lost in here,
But nothing never more, nevertheless.

On waking, the tiny mind,
In one high garret room, forgotten,
Copies as many letters
As he can and never sends them.

Secret Economies

Every society has them.
Every person has them.
All persons' bodies have them.
Mostly unbeknownst to them.

Similarity or difference
And, in fine, only difference
Is every secret economy, different,
Off-kilter, off-true, everywhere. Different

Theories of time have spent
Differing efforts differentiating, have spent
Their secret investments, have spent
Truth to bankrupt themselves and are spent.

Who are these vicious aficionados
Of our flesh? Who can bear them?
Who can bear our differences, the difference?
Who has not hidden what has been spent?

Diaspora

"Is there even anywhere that's somewhere?"

Poems of praise and blame are worthless
Inflations of human balloons,
Inflamed, floating and guttering
Over history's miseries,

The lies of the tribes. On the beach
Of the black lake, scorched remnants lie
Still, cultures' cannibalism
Stalking their scraps like fat ravens.

The sentimental, communal
Croaking of well-fed creations
Consume us and then each other.
I prefer the jackals myself,

Bone-crackers, no sentimental
Bones in them. But I'm not myself
Late in the day. The monorhymes
Have bled down to dirt's church of crimes.

The Weakest Force

"Whoever you are probably just left."
It's a good line, good way to end a poem.
Against the pull of a magnet, the Earth's
Whole gravity surrenders paper clips.

At cosmic scales, quantum poetry
Equals the three-hundred and two seconds
Of totality. Out here, gravity matters
More than matter, more than time. It's what was

And therefore what is, but down there, it's not.
It's the heart beating against the species'
Demand for more hearts to go on beating
Against. There's no good way to end a poem.

"One of the Elderly, Dissembling Professors"

Who, indeed, will be
The last Ukrainian eel

Among us, the last
Stunned Yangtze River dolphin,

The last great hissing
Madagascar cockroach, last

Unicorn, prancing
Beside Pegasus until

The last manticore,
The last wall-painting human

Who has no descendants dies?
Who will sit in the garden

Of the forgotten, among
Lives alien and thriving

Waiting to mourn and to die?
It won't be a life

Among the thriving.
The thriving simply

Thrive. Who will be last
Among the thriving to thrive?

Whatever is not the last
Neurosurgeon to survive.

Gentleness will not surpass
The last reader lecturing,

Hectoring, redundantly,
The wizards' last empty class.

Even the bees abandon
The strategm of a hive.

This on Me

Blue sky dragonflies ghost night sky polliwogs.

Amphibian, Devonian, immortally mortal,

The engineers of play move out of the thin

Skinned pond, above and under, what was

Great and is still, small, bejeweled, the blue hunter,

What was egg and is still swimming, hungry, wanting

To mature to croaking, the sleek black-slipped crowd

Masses of almost wonders. Division at Hallucigenia

Millennia and millennia gone led to midsummer daydreams

Not quite whole, not quite distinct, not quite meeting. One

Amalgamation swims, ten trillion of him, and borrows nothings

To compose as nothing, nothing of him, so all of you.

This was a number of yesterdays gone, him gone,

The loon gone, a looming next dream crooning you.

"Absolutely Everything Vibrates"

Revelstoke. Logging roads.

BC interior.

Somewhere we don't know

Exists yet. I don't need

To work, to teach, to write

Anything. I may read,

Listen, wait and observe.

The best parts of the past

Link hands in fairy rings.

My ears still imagine

They are ears that now hear

The streams through summer green

In a place that will soon

Enough be black and grey,

White with waiting again.

I am hearing this plan.

Could Be the Antlers of a Nonexistent Creature

The poem of the woods of treed bear cubs
Several years ago by the side of the road

Where the thickset second-growth grows more
Luxuriantly than geriatric old-growth groves

To remind those who wander in here, lost,
That there's no here inherently indigenous

To anywhere less than anywhere on Earth,
Where the short-faced bears, giant sloths,

Camels, saber-toothed cats, and woolly elephants
All lived alongside such small black Cubs as these,

Such white-tailed, stripe-backed, masked
Face denizens as we, still hunkered down in the weeds

Where hunters and trappers and miners are ghosts,
Tries to save invasive phraseology to say

It's all what used to be and isn't now, isn't it?
As are all readers, poems, tribes, species, treed cubs anyway.

One Canoe

A few fishing jumping, everywhere
The busy world busy ending. The wisdom
Of the foolishly solitary is the starting
Out from such sweet sorrow to reach
Home more swiftly, more easily. The rest,
Like the fish, jump for catch as catch can.
It's not that anyone lives alone, certainly
Not with so many voices in our heads
And so much longing for someone
Else's help to make our beds. We are not
Independently dependent, but we are.
Time to ignore the couple in the canoe,
Towel off on the rocks among detritus
And go home to face or at least to discuss
The distinction between what's real and true.

Ale Forte

Thaun may live! Every creeping thing
Forever, every hunger borne immortal

Into the impossible wanting of wanting
Without unhappiness, the gratification

Of all desire, from the stars to the peasants,
The railway tramps of a century gone west,

The lubberlanders' homecoming at last,
The lame beggar's momentary belly fulfilled,

The mouse mystery on the common counter
Scoured of mysteries so that some may live.

Some may live.
Some may. Some day. Some may.

Synonymous with Impediment

Is artifice. Forget me not.
                                          Aye, said
The whittled head pin. Skin full of holes,
He folds them. The lying man

                                                 of the Whole
In time instantiated won over
One more for the home sun, Son. There was

A nomentary momenclature that laid
An ephemeral goose, a gelded braid. Grrr,
To hell with escherichia goldeneye, back!

There was a time when the future
Had a title, scarifier, recombinant, honorific.
He was a scholarship toy in a library
Back in the heaventies. Then, an A.

Halt. Tamed, Timur
                                on the verge of God
Dismembered the freight that brought him fear.
Nothing bests tears gone frightfully stale and bored.

All vent resiliently, sold,
                                       wrote Einstein
To his time, alewife, that evening. There sank
A dolor in the hold
                   of the cracking
            world of seeming.

The House of Momos and Athena

A doubt freed from affirmations,
Flinging wings, a home in the air,
Rainbowed pencils at the window,
Moss wigs, porcelain hares, peeled birch bark,

The story of a little bear
Befriended by a clever owl,
None of it true, thank the heavens,
Just real, portable, shelves of selves,

That saved even the landless god
Flung free of thunderbolt mountain.
We could live in here forever
And today, he cried. The house laughed.

What Could Hope to Account for Desire and Why We Remain Either Angry or Ashamed of Its Intricate Trajectories Through Our Desirous Selves and Others?

I've never encountered any me invulnerable
To hungers. Satisfaction and its lineaments

Remain as inscrutable as gravity gratified.
Matter curves spacetime; spacetime moves matter. If it matters.

Nothing in the mathematics explains away desire,
Nor the origin of a desire for ruling desire,

Which is never so simple as overruling others.
Everywhere there are rules there are desires that are shameful,

And everywhere there is shame, there are rules like spacetime curves
To tell shame where to move, what plums must fall, what falling means.

None of this accounts for any of this, yet we remain,
Every last one of us accountants, the first confession.

The fire flickers in the grate. The sun sets behind the lake.
Mother and child nap on the couch, and all this curves away.

Moss Piglets in Space

Strange little things, as all things are,
Strange and little, even the world,
Even the stars. Our universe itself

Is strange, at least to us, strangely
Unsocial, uncommunicative, fond
Of mathematics, apparently, but otherwise

Barely knowable, huge, capacious,
Mostly empty, mostly dark, deep grooved
In little ways, as if kept balanced on a blade

Between not having been anything, ever,
And being the only other way, constrained
Exactly as we know it, exactly as it has been,

One little thing away from not being,
Leading some of us to think everything
In this one universe is just one little thing

Among countless, immeasurable,
Literally unfathomable other kinds
Of cosmos, perhaps even some fathomed

As where moss piglets meet water bears
Swimming through seas of, to us,
Magical infinity, greeting each other

Leisurely, their shapes determined more
As are our vocabularies and etymologies
Than as our biology, determined,

That is, as whimsy was, by whimsy,
Their sea moss a forest unto itself, forever
Available to floating little piglets who never

Grow larger in those green oceans filled
Variously with blissfully snorkeling bears
Who never attack a thing, so sociable

And without envy. It's a strange great thing
That we can think the world as given to us
Strange and imagine with our small thoughts

Constructed of flimsy memories, sparks,
Hunger, that worlds impossible to us exist
And could extend, beyond the outer rim

Of our furthest, tattered measure of the dark,
Their happiness permanent, rules different.
We glimpse an alternative, fairy-addled

Existence in the mere sight of a dragonfly
Or our nicknames for tardigrades, knowing
All analogy is a passing delight that knows

All delights are strange and small
And passing, but as passing, eternal.
Rejoice. "Once one is gone, it matters

So little whether one was someone
Or no one." The moss piglets swarm,
Translucent in the brilliant, microscopic light.

Little Chair Necklace of Jeweled Eyes and Flawless Wings

"time quivers slightly . . . the tiny shifts in everything--cell replication, the rain of dust motes, lengthening hair, wind-pushed rocks--press inexorably on and on" ~Proulx

The days too short for complete happiness
Tease us with the thought of satiety,
Those folding black wings of desire shouldered

Neatly across our broad, muscular backs.
Why not? We are angels, each one of us,
Chimeras of mere chemistry, living

Systems, beings, and cultural vectors,
The impossible things of our own dreams.
We could rise up yet through the sand hourglass

We constructed, hymned, and then abandoned
For mechanical chimes and cuckoos, then
For quartz and silicon, mere chemistry.

See? It's eternally what it was, comes
Eternally newly old, newly past,
But somehow closes a complete cycle

Or two. Nothing was so monstrous. Inhere
Without having been inherent, and you,
Too, may stretch gossamer wings, Dragon! Fly.

Bewit

A will to bell the hawk,
The laughter of six teens
In woods above a beach

Caught in a tiny town.
They're taunting each other,
Four curved girls, two dour boys

Who look miserable
And pretend to not care
To want more to be off

Down the slope than to see
What the girls holler out
As wrong with their swimsuits.

"You don't look much better!"
Says one girl to the next.
Raucous, jeering laughter

Like a murder of crows
From the girls as they dodge
In and out of a shed

Used for changing into
And out of bikinis.
Four teens died last year here,

Dumped out of a canoe
They'd borrowed, the water
That day too cold to swim,

The lakeshore searched for days,
Finally the bottom
Scanned by remote-control

Robotic submarine.
There's a memorial
Of cross and flowers, on shore

But out of line of sight
From beach, swimming platform,
Or any swimmer not

Hardy enough to get
Out to the right angle.
Boaters see it, of course.

The boys have run downhill,
Grumbling. The girls scatter
As a startled covey,

Tugging at bikinis,
One after the other,
Out of the abandoned

Shed. They all knew the ones
Who drowned last spring. They all
Know something but not what.

Turn Out To Be Abound

The light glitters where the water waves.
The child and mother wait in the green
Valley past falling roads, past glaciers.

These things existed, were hard to find,
Were rare, were what the father had gone
Looking for, at the ends of the roads,

Knowing there's no end to roads, only
Temporary ambuscados, traps
For the unwary going someplace

Else, convinced of a destination.
The water lights surrender their mist.
There's no end. Here's evaporation.

That Life Remained Sequential

1. "We danced and brought eggs and diet cokes out"

All the rainbows in the diamond
Were gone away before sunset.
Everything centers on nothing.
Nothing centers on gravity.

I loved you. Function stood enchained.
Theory had entered a valley.
You had entered me like a tree
Taking root, taking possession,

Enclosing random rocks in wood.
When the woods have broken, the rocks
Will reemerge on stony shores
Neither one of us lived to see

And one of us, I, can't believe.
After us nothing was, ever.

2. Giunda

I wish I had a lifetime
To see it recover. Steal
Thunder from the greater world.
The greater soul grates a bit
In the lightning-shattered ear.
The sun is playing footsie
With the clouds above the lake.

Count the calendar backwards
Until you run out of days
You were alive; on the way
You'll run short of memories.
I have gone under this lake
Many summers, now, mistakes
Only echoes muttering.

3. "I kept waiting for the world to smell wonderful"

"'Sentences,' she said." I
Only read she said it,
But I might get a sentence
Or two out of reading

And thinking of infections
Of the kind reading gives
A brain that's addicted
To culture and whatnot.

The world smells wonderful,
Looks wonderful, and feels
Wonderful except when
It seems rather other

Than that. Time to wrap up,
Get the cast in the bag.

4. Sun, Clouds, Rain, Storms, Sun, the Same

Quote the quotations
You think you might like,
The weather, right here,
On "this blue-green, white

Flagged earth," on this spot,
This moving moment,
Long since gone, insists
On priority

Of correlation,
Hence no causation.
I loved what I loved.
You, I loved you, yes

You. You don't think so,
Since I went swimming.

5. In the Drink

Moderation
Is the soul's sole
Pointless, forlorn,

Meaningful hope
Of redemption.
Am I saying

Anything quite
Salient, beyond
My obsession

With how culture,
Brain born, brain borne,
Inficts the facts

Of lake sonnets?
Little room, love.

6. Art Project

Sarah and
Sequoia,

Perched on boards
Holding moss

They meant to
Make whole dreams

Of peopled,
Animaled,

Fairytale,
Wonder tale

Art, worked hard
To complete

One good thing.
He was them.

7. What Was

Getting
So far
Into
The work
Of one

Half-gone
Daylight
Passage
Around
The sun

Shining,
Singing,

One thought,
"I'm done."

The First Word of a Poem in English

Is never me. Well, maybe
Once in a blue moon is me.
Much, much more likely is I

Who wants the accusative
To be a doing not done
Or undone, a done-to thing.

There are no such things, Captain.
There are no things doing, done.
I am not alone in me.

Gravity Gravitas

Such is the magic of the weakest,
Strangest, strongest form of energy

That a door on a slant to the surface
Of the earth can't stay ajar

For any plea of me but swings
Open to bang against the hard thing

That prevents further falling.
How many days forever days?

Just one! And never again!
Oh, I'm so tired of each this.

Can anyone claim "oh! I'm
So tired!" who isn't one? What

Set of journalists' questions
Comprises answers tonight?

The sun who drags doors open
In my eyes shines cruel and bright.

"The Costume Has to Stand Up Because the Body Doesn't Now"

All small children are spooky,
Pyrophoric substances.
Exactly four and a half,
Sukha starts reading out loud
To her father in the car
He drives further to hear her
Halting sounding-out of words.

Spontaneous combustion
It feels like, although culture
Has been pushed dangerously
Close to hand for her, starting
With the rhythmic murmuring
Of mother's interior.
Composting is encouraged,

But slow burn's never certain,
And some things burst into flames.
Rate of change remains the name
Of each moment's movements' game.
Heat's speed, acceleration,
Velocity, jerk, endless
Fine refinements of the same.

In later years, one aging
Gracefully as a growing
Mist, must remind us others
That the shrill whistle still lurks,
That the elderly dancer
Calculates masks and balance
As elements of the dance,

The one increasingly prone
To collapse as the rising
Heat of the consuming fire
Puts pressure on the other
Who started out singing, "I'm
A little teapot," arms out,
Soon not read to but reading.

Everyone lives life pell-mell,
Goes "ass over teakettle,"
Sally said of an old friend's
Injurious tumble down
Stairs in the innocent dark.
The torch often lies around
Unnoticed until too late.

Things Speed Up

"Actually, heat is simply
Our word for atoms moving,
Nothing more." The heat is on.
If you said, "forty-five years,
That's all," I'd have to cackle.
A fifty-two year-old fears
Ninety-seven more or less

As much as a seven-year
Old fears death at thirty-five,
Expects congratulations
Aforethought at having lived
To such an impressive age.
But I'm afraid I misheard.
Did you say "forty-five days"?

Peristan

"your dreams, when you suppose the thing that would be stupid to suppose, when you stop trying to reconcile the irreconcilable and speak the terrible, fatal truth"

And this is one of those days one predicts
Should have begun as they did not begin,
Should have gone begging, ended up cursing,
No cure for the common heat of living,
No reason for the irritable lie
That there could have been a world in which I,
Far from being a pronominal game,
Aired an uninhabited local name.
This is one of those days, esposito,
Raised outside the dreamy gates. I should know.

A Demon Clothed in Light

The hard won lawn and lily pond
Glowed over the effortless lake,
Waterfalls murmuring hundreds
Of hours over dark rocks below.

For a little while, no human
Voices were raised above the roar,
The thrushes, siskins, and others
Trilling and asserting themselves

Variously in heaped-up trees,
The hum of giant dragonflies.
There were children out there, of course,
Following teachers down shade trails,

No doubt all shrieking or laughing.
But not then, not to dullard ears
Bewitched by the calm of the short
Respite, the demon clothed in light.

A Monster All My Life

Charon's puppy cuddled
Under her curled left hand,
She comes, not exactly
Prepared, not unprepared.
Gone, here is her present,
Like presents before hers,

Nothing he'd recognize,
Fan of shallow waters,
Rivers as barricades,
And Einstein. Not this time.
Fetal, fifty, she was
Buried 12,000 years

Or so ago, before
Such numbers existed,
We think. Perhaps a pet,
But then, why kill it, too,
If she loved it? Why not
Let it live, die a dog?

Bergson apostrophized
The soul's experience
Of time outside of space.
Nothing's outside of space.
She died and was buried
Holding a tiny dog.