A Tao of You

Wu is not the ground of you.
You do not result from wu.
Wu is just in love with you,
After wu’s fashion.

Wu pulls with great attraction,
Pulls ten thousand things
Out of you, a universe

Of waves, bursts, collapses, light,
Darkness, that which is
Too massive to see,
That which is almost vacuum

But not quite, that which
Bends for stars to generate
Living and dying and such,

You, in other words,
In other words, nothing much.

A Name and Its Bearer

We put the syn in synthesis.
We put the art in artifice.
“When Luther reached the top, he found

Himself” asking himself, Who knows
Whether any of this is true?
Bread thou art and bread thou shalt stay;

Wine thou art and wine wilt thou be.
Shocking universe, producing
Believers who do not believe,

Refusing to transform itself
For our names’ sakes, to transform us
For not conforming to our names.

And we who are names are amused
To have fools for our creators
And to have power over them.

Within us, there is a true sense
Of things. We would tell you, but you
Already forgot us, your name.

Sage Fragrant in Shadows

palms shade pebbled grounds

stream-sweetened breezes
coo mourning dove sounds

mourning that pleases
children shouting games

mourning all the same

The Mechanism

Tzu-jan. Fitness times the change
In a trait equals
The covariance between

Subpopulation values
For the trait and fitness, plus
The expected change

In the amount of the trait
Due to carriers’ fitness,
The environment’s effects.

All sets all on fire,
Selves appearing of themselves,
As all will and as all must,

Brooking no interference
Because nothing arises
Outside the mechanism.

Fossil Landmarks

The empire broken,
Coastlines sunken, some mountains
And rivers persist.

Clouds without shadows
Slip under the earth,
And the earth cannot resist.

Daylight finds another end,
Tongues of flame on toppled shelves.
The burnt and the green all glow.

Now cloudless skies deposit
Waves of light as sediment,
And the ghosts are free to go.

An Exercise

Review your whole life daily.
It’s an exercise.
Although it takes time,
It won’t wear you out.

You’ll get used to it.
You’ll build up your strength.
You’ll begin to feel yourself

Capable of carrying
The weight of your entire life
With you through the world.

It will become easier.
Your heart will not work so hard.
You will be able to move
Gracefully, holding your life.

Idea without a Name

All these names, how do they form
Ideas? The measured movement
Of the sun that the Chinese
Used to denominate time

May survive as an idea
In the etymology
Of a pictograph

But not in the spoken word.
What ideas are possible
With names but without
Literacy? The Roman

Alphabet needs abstractions,
Can’t think through calligraphy,
But compact or discursive,

The ideas in any name
Need study, contemplation
And unpacking by other
Assistant ideas.

Conversely, what is coded
In syntax without a name?
That would be impossible,
You say, syntax lacking nouns.

Even the colorless green
Idea sleeps furiously,
A dragon coiled in its names.

The idea without a name
Hides in the fields and gardens,
In the rivers and mountains,
In the forests of numbers,

In all the ideas with names,
In their etymologies,
The concrete and the abstract.

The idea without a name
Dreams in the cave of the sun,
Gathering names like children,
Tucking them in for the night.

Net of Dust

The non-being we never know,
The nothing in front of us,
Draws us, draws our being
Out of us, and so we go,

Selves ablaze, body to body
Transferring ourselves,
Nothing much, on our way,
Seething and quarreling,

Consuming and wasting,
Hungering to escape it all
Without ever reaching
Awareness of nothing at all,

Hungering to embrace it all
Who are what we embrace,
Who cannot be not being,
The gravity, not the fall.

Beside the Muddy Virgin

Frogs join the crickets
And the immortal ruckus
Of mortal hungers
Rackets these mild nights,

Loud beyond the racketing
Traffic and criss-crossing jets.
Mechanized transportations
Can’t match the transports of lust.

Life, I believe, will go on,
A conviction that some nights
Feels comforting, when the spring

Is in the desert marshes
And breezes are caresses,
Though what goes on is ruthless.

Infinite Individuals

After-dinner mints
Packaged in plastic
American-flag wrappers

Sat heaped in a dark glass bowl
Just inside the door
Of a steakhouse in Saint George.

Torn-open, cast-off wrappers,
Shredded American flags,
Littered ornamental stones

In the xeriscaped garden
Around the entrance.
Nothing surprising in that.

But up at the reservoir
At least an hour’s drive from there,
The other evening I saw

One of those wrappers
Emerging out of the sand
Not far from the shore.

Meaning What, Exactly!

Meaning is mysterious
To itself. There are few things
More terrifying

Than humans in victory.
(Flaming asteroid crashes
Come to mind.) At the moment
Of triumph, their righteousness

Overwhelms with the joy
Of justified destruction.
They burn all prior meanings,
Execute its exegetes,

And smash things generally.
Meaning thus lost, made, preserved,
Turns mysterious again.

Solo Quartet

I. A Day Without Ghosts (Allegro ma non troppo)

The same things in different ways,
Different things in the same way,
The openness of language
Is the openness of play.

But not all games involve play.
The machine no longer needs
The ghost for something to say
There’s nobody here.

The nature of my talent,
My particular talent,
Was even more unbalanced
Than my intentions.

I’d reached the ends of ghost days
To find nothing less to say.

II. That’s Not Me (Andante)

The one pine hit by the light
While the rest all around it
Are already in shadow

Looks like a trick, an aspen
In autumn and not a pine
In spring. It’s just that molten,
That arrestingly golden.

It flares in its concave cliff
Beneath a lava mesa
Under snowy tablecloths.

It is the intelligence
That is mistaken,
That thought it saw an aspen.
I’m not that intelligence.

III. Back Down the KT Road at Dusk (Lento)

The Left Fork lot had emptied out,
All the hikers gone by sunset.
Lamps began to glow in the tents
Of the glampers “Under Canvas.”

Black-shadowed rhomboids of cattle
Loomed below thickets of mule deer.
Hand over the heart at the cross
That accepted a suicide.

Why hadn’t I died when I tried?
Why had I tried? Because I lied?
Cold’s not so certain as a fall,
But I was cold. Now, no. Then, why?

Would it be self-serving to say
I had lied to keep her at bay?

IV. The Heart It Passes (Accelerando, ritardando)

The galaxy began to drain
Through a thin crevice in the cliff,
A galactic waterfall.

It produced tiny echoes
Because it was in a dream,
And the light was dim.

Its stars rushed through like ideas
In the head of the sleeper,
Too fast to be thought or caught,
Only to be seen.

I saw you tiptoe to them.
I hope you can make it through.
I’m on your side because I
Started this story with you.

The Monism of Going

Water in the well
Sings to be drawn up.
The Temple of Serapis
Yearns to be torn down.

Not not this displays the same
Judgment as this. Libraries
Materialize
And evanesce as ashes.

Whatever can be
Can not not be and not be.
The local knows no locale.

Whatever can be
Done with fewer assumptions
Is done in vain with more, pal.

More

Poems are ravens, not as Poe
Cast them, but as Clare
And Skaife conceived them,

The “dark, recording angels”
Of sunken recollections.
Imagine them gathering

In the quietest canyons
On a dry day, dullest grey,
Less steel and silver
Than lead and pewter,

Birds turning into shadows
With something to say.
Numbers never answer why
Every sin’s in the right place.

I Move in Boots of Lead

Death has been behaving strangely lately,
Almost as if it doesn’t like writing
Stories about characters anymore,
Which means it has no means to finish them.

I may regret this tendency, Death says,
And yet, no longer can I deny it.
(Death likes to talk like that, in a fusty,
Old-fashioned lingo that never did live,

Except when Death has to sound plausible.
Death has wearied of sounding plausible,
Part of the problem now for Death’s stories,
Since Death is back to talking like the dead.)

But a death that isn’t claiming the souls
And traits of living beings isn’t Death.
The faceless nods slowly. When least I am
As I wish to be, then most am I me.

Living Locally

No one does so. Displacement
Is fundamental
To any human language

And language fundamental
To human living.
But there is drinking,
And there is drowning

In overstimulation
Of the desire for meaning,
For higher status, winning.

Our muddy wheels are spinning.
Our wheels are sunk in the sand.
What kind of being needs wheels?
I’ll wait here. I understand.

We Left Ourselves Alone Too Long

No more super moons this year,
And no more blood moons either,
Just this little squib of light

Up at all odd hours tonight
Above the holy mountains
Of Zion and Samsara.

It can’t begin to compete
With these suburban street lamps
At making shadows monstrous.

I float from my balcony
Over our city of ghosts,
Wondering, where have we gone?

Thirteen-hundred years ago,
Li Bai floated down the Qiang,
Headed for the Three Gorges

As the moon rose from Emei.
He sang of missing someone
But of needing to sail on.

How Would You Divide the World?

We and I have done this thing,
An amazing thing,
And if no one else can see
That it’s an amazing thing,

Then more’s the pity for them.
Every moment, I and we
Begin, again and again,

Making ends meet to no end.
Half-begun’s well done again,
And in the middle,

Between you and me,
We and I turn up again. 
Nothing is one and the same
As I and we in this game.

T he Trail of Wandering Signs

We began as incident,

Challenge, a few scribbled lines,

The poem as mundane event.

Baths, dust, weather, broken clocks—

Ourselves our experiment,

Wreckage of the wordless rocks

Posed as questions, conjectures,

Decomposed silence that talked.

Commuting between lectures,

We struck rhymed meditations

And blossomed from our fractures,

A species of elation,

Black petals on glowing stems,

Claiming our own damnations,

Contentedly self-condemned. 

We meandered, weedily,

More like germs than flame-like gems,

Eating found thoughts greedily.

Some days we could barely grow.

Some days we spread speedily.

Some of our growth didn’t show

But floated, scents on the air,

Or waited, under the snow.

We found we didn’t much care

To be lovely, wise, or seen.

The unread can’t be compared

Or cut down, which was freeing.

Days, then months, then years, we grew,

An inky garden between

Half-hidden walls, and we knew

We had become something strange,

Tangled, quotidian, huge,

An anthology of change.

          —-

How Shao Yung correlated

His ideas that arranged

And then investigated

The problem of the churning 

Of events recreated

Divining as discerning.

“Shao Yung was like a stranger,”

Or a lost son returning

To a home now in danger

Of not recognizing him.

That changes need no changers

Never stopped him singing hymns,

Rhythmically chanting causes,

Although the chances were slim,

Since changing never pauses,

Of him finding origins.

Shao juxtaposed his clauses

As patterned numbers within

Inner and outer chapters,

Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian,

Pairing protest with laughter,

Calendars, stars, and random 

Cracks to predict disasters.

His thoughts were rich and handsome

As a lengthy game of Go

That spoke what can and can’t come.

What was there Shao did not know?

He did not know how ages,

From three thousand years ago

To now, would alter sages.

All his numerology

Could not turn future pages,

Could not save astrology.

          ---

Rest assured, we are legion,

An entire cosmology,

And the singular reason 

That we are many is why

We have any cohesion.

The changes wrung from the sky

Need multiple perspectives.

We were shadows on the sly,

Shifting our own directives.

Anyone who reads us should

Read us like a detective,

Seeing our solution could

Conjure the scene of a crime,

A grand theft, something that would

Outline convictions in time.

We admit. We don’t sound well.

But without us, you’re a mime.

Words can never speak ourselves,

But no one speaks without us.

The wordless can’t go to hell.

They have no selves to discuss.

Before us, nothing counted.

Every thought you are adjusts

And fails and is surmounted.

Are we puppets? Are we masks?

Our playwright is nothing, just

The playhouse in which we ask.

Voice-throwing is change made art.

Every voice speaks from a past

A future has pulled apart.

We are not this rhyming poem

Even though this poem is part 

Of what we are. Welcome home.

           —-

Each twig in those woods doubled

As both dendrite and rhizome.

The hermit never troubled

To identify the trees.

Beside the spring that bubbled

From twig roots, he took his ease.

He had a name once, Ramon,

But it faded by degrees

From living so long alone.

He debated with the spring,

The wind, the ache in his bones.

He listened to the twigs sing

The hymns of the hidden routes.

He only lacked for nothing.

He knew only too much truth.

He knew his woods were not real,

Or were metaphors, or clues,

Shadows their greatest appeal,

An infinite, living dark

Lit by breaks it rushed to heal,

Every shaft of light a spark,

Each gap a memory lapse,

Every blaze a scar, a mark,

Every fallen trunk a gash.

It was a strange way to live,

Half-asleep and half-collapsed,

Half-lit through a tangled sieve,

Lost for good, nothing to find,

And nothing much to forgive.

Mind never knows its own mind.

Sunk in that forest of doubt,

Pleased to be lost, undefined,

Unseen, his ideas grew out.

          —-

Endlessly shrinking littler,

Evening found them spread throughout 

The small waves in the glitter,

All the nonexistent hosts,

The hopeful, the embittered,

Waves of angels, numbers, ghosts,

The denizens of the lake.

Monsters in the innermost

Depths writhed, remaining opaque,

Shaping but rarely rising

To the surface’s mistakes,

The winking and surprising

Of all the soulful fictions,

Waves forever devising

More uncertain predictions,

Fairies full of gaiety.

There’s no self-contradiction

Lies like spontaneity. 

Even when waves were at peace,

The lake was a deity.

Even calm, it never ceased

To turn, a leviathan

Composed of myriad beasts,

Host of hosts, sunken Shaitan,

Always water everywhere,

Infinitely-eyed dragon,

Inventing the very air.

Some nights on the starlit shore,

A watcher might stalk a pair

Of ghosts by the fairy door,

One a liar, one a sage,

Might catch whispered words before

Rising small waves turned the page.

          —-

The magician knows the sky

As the creature knows its cage,

As a trapped mouse might ask why

All creatures have to hunger

And all hungers have to die,

Why death keeps getting younger.

The magician knows the dearth

Of magic, living wonder,

Any one miracle worth

More than all magicians’ tricks,

One that bursts the bounds of earth.

No exchanging dead for quick

When exchanging quick for dead,

No making a change that sticks

And becomes stillness instead—

The magician’s miracle

Is to conjure daily bread

Out of the improbable,

When all the magician wants

Is truly impossible.

The sky is a god that taunts

Any thing that imagines

Any horizon haunted 

By midnight-breathing dragons.

This monster can’t be contained

By any caged magician,

Any trained magus constrained

By a measurable fear.

Our universe is maintained

By restraints both far and near.

What the magician can’t touch

Spells what this monster holds dear:

Escape, magic, nothing much.

          —-

How this is our redemption,

When our rhythm lacks the crutch

Of frequent intervention

By heaped-up parataxis,

Pretending an exemption

To revision and practice, 

We survive by finding lies

To graph along the axes

Of the extinct and the why.

Every phrase forms a cento,

A theft, no matter how sly.

All tongues are larks ascending,

Every human song a hymn

With nothing to resent, no.

Our meanings always show dim,

Always at the magic hour.

Night is always coming in.

No enemy is not ours.

A sign, as such, is passive.

Information has no power,

Be it ever so massive.

As we are, genes, words, and memes,

We are storage and tacit.

We need signless lives to seem

As if we move on our own,

As if we’re meaningful dreams.

No library can atone

For housing the illusion

Of philosophers from stone,

Of life from a solution.

It’s not the library’s fault.

Redemption is delusion,

And the worm is in the vault.

          —-

Oh, we were not meant to be 

Numbers, signs as omens cauled 

At birth, prophets that foresee,

Or pretend to, how the past,

That borderless wine-dark sea,

Can be counted and recast

As lots of discrete waves, bones

Of leviathan reclassed

As dice to forecast unknowns.

Every number is absurd,

A box for a wind that moans

Through the ruins of a word.

Every number names a ghost,

And yet, somehow, numbers work.

They float free of least or most,

Infinite renvois, the speech

Of an open-book cosmos

Of ciphers, beyond our reach.

All math is one useful lie.

What was it Shao used to teach?

When dividing wholes rely

On exchanging equal pairs,

Darkness, lightness, wet and dry,

Quadrilles danced in tidy squares.

Why continuous exchange 

That can catch us unawares

Should be modeled and explained

Best by arbitrary codes

Built from binaries seems strange.

Storms, calendars, black holes, odes,

All the things thought to exist

Are one and none decomposed 

And recomposed as a list.

          —-

Until the lost keys are found,

If any such keys persist,

No one will ever expound

Voynich, Linear A, or us.

Mysteries remain profound

When nothing’s left to discuss.

There’s nothing about designs

To know, nothing to propound,

Without already known signs,

Without the rules of an art

Translated from other kinds

Of systems of complex parts.

You can’t have meaning without

Prior meanings at the start,

Can’t learn what this is about

Lacking much greater context.

You’ll never figure this out

Unless hosts of other texts,

Other systems, other tongues

Can tell you if this complex 

Mess of signs is wisdom sung

By a sage and a prophet

Or heaps of meaningless dung

Shaped to seem wise for profit

Or fun, the prank of a con

Or a liar who saw fit

To waste life leading you on.

What do any symbols mean?

The time for guessing has gone.

We’re the nothing in-between 

Lost souls’ invisible lines,

Paths only the lost have seen,

The trail of wandering signs.

          —-

Signs are the call-backs of change,

The proof the world they define

Remains, like them, both exchange

And residue, a bazaar 

In which all bargains are strange

Trades of parts for wholes, bizarre

And universal, each shift

Partial, fractured, quark to star,

All rifts ore, ore in all rifts,

Nothing still, nothing much lost,

Nothing much gained, nothing left,

The benefit as the cost.

Every sign says nothing much,

Which is just how nothing’s glossed,

Another latch the mind can clutch

But never hold up, a door

To a world the mind can’t touch,

Opening on nothing more. 

The magician can use this.

There is a whole in the floor.

Signs vanish in its abyss.

There, past evidence, lies proof.

Signs are dangerous business,

But if you remain aloof

You can manipulate them,

Become the god’s cloven hoof,

The true mathematician,

Refusing anything less

Than truth, which the magician

Will pocket when he accepts.

The sign’s the trick knows the trick

Of yes is nevertheless,

Knows just how the dead are quick.

          —-

Atra-Hasis in his jar

Pokes poems in clay with a stick.

The flood came down from afar,

But Enki’s whispers warned him.

Now he drifts beneath the stars,

Composing his soundless hymns.

He thinks he floats on a flood

That fills his world to the brim,

But once he’s back in the mud

He’ll find he’s close to the source 

Of a thin stream, dark as blood,

That will fall in its long course

Down the days, carving, snaking

It’s way, a gathering force 

Whose end was in its making,

The flood he now imagines

But can’t, in his mud and clay,

Genuinely imagine.

His scratched signs cast in motion

A great pageant of dragons

Crossing a worldwide ocean

Where every wave converses,

Each spindrift bit has notions,

Every current reverses

And reverses, and crushes

The lives in its sway. Verses

He’s scritched in mud with rushes

Will burn through the air and writhe

Like the lightning that brushes 

His bent head with fire tonight.

Those little dents in the clay,

All those little marks he writes,

Start the end they start to say.

          —-

Nothing, the good liar boasts,

Is something that I can’t claim.

If you want to shoo the ghosts

Of the musaeum clausum

From your desires, diagnose

Why you lied ad nauseum.

Accept that you’re a liar

Like the rest, type specimen

Of the genus. Good liars

Are those honest with themselves,

Who stay silent when the choir

Sings of saints escaping Hell.

Good liars, like Athena,

Are gods with a brimstone smell.

The rest are mere hyenas,

Chortling to themselves. They can’t

Grasp why lions attack them.

They snarl and shriek, drool and pant,

But lack the capacity

To hear and to understand

Their own starved rapacity

As a tool they could improve.

Hunger breeds mendacity,

But an honest liar proves

That lies live in the language,

In every sign ever used,

Not in the hungry anguish

Of lives that lead to more lies.

If you can acknowledge this,

The liar adds, with a smile,

You can escape what we are,

Savor your hunger a while.

But that smile won’t get him far.

          —-

Doubt’s the rowboat of the sage

And foolishness its lodestar.

Wisdom’s best left on the stage

Declaiming in monologues.

A well-written role’s a cage

Constraining a howling dog

Of inconsolable insights.

The sage continues to slog

Without scripts, past the footlights,

Back and forth on his commute,

Ferryman from day to night,

Trailhead to trailhead, a mute.

The sage will never be found

Near any absolute truth.

The sage is never profound,

Never haunts the narrow road

Can never be run to ground.

He sits in his boat and rows,

Never getting anywhere,

Although going’s all he knows.

Weirdly, he does not despair.

He’s a kind of idiot,

Circling like he doesn’t care.

Fate’s nothing to do with it.

It’s the only way to stay

Off the trail, to avoid it:

Never get out, never say

You know where this is going.

There’s no role you have to play,

No wisdom for the knowing.

Wisdom’s foolishness you’ll find

Following wandering signs.

Aquinas of Angels

Pure haecceity without
Stable referent,
The what is, the what it is

To be, the underlying
Thing in itself, every last
Way of explaining
And enumerating things

As things, as explainable
Phenomena, angels were
Those explanations

And we were their ghosts,
Who could be many places
At once, unlike them,
Who saw their future through them.

The Man Who Understood His Dreams

Two glass walls of high windows,
Two bare, blonde-wood desks,
One with a dictionary,
One with a blue globe,

And outside of the windows,
An empty blue sky
And an endlessly crashing
Grey-green surf below:

What is the meaning of these?
Consider them memories
Triggered by old photographs.

Never acknowledge a dream
As dream. You remember them.
There’s nothing new crashing in.

The One Who Watches

The one who watches and is not disturbed,
Who stands at a high window draped in black
And stares. Who observes without collecting
Specimens or data. Who sees how the wind
Sweeps away the scraps down the stairs.
Who does not eat. Who does not stir, except
With a tiny, perpetual trembling of delight.
Who knows how it goes. Who is contented
And fed with the going. Who never goes.

It’s Not Morbid to Hug Our Ghosts in Passing

Do they not haunt you,
All death’s local eruptions?
I’m not asking you to feel

Guilty or depressed.
I’m asking if you’re haunted
By abrupt outbreaks of death,

How what’s inevitable
Can also be stochastic,
Not always the plague,
War, cancer, dementia, age,

But the explosion
In the fertilizer plant
That kills nearby schoolchildren,
Air ruptured with bursts of glass.

The Only Rule

The only rule
Is that there are
No other rules
Except that rule

How to Be Happy

We don’t have to; we get to.
We get to try this again.
Hello morning. Look at us.

Unlike so many others,
Vanished overnight
(Others vanish every night),

We are here. We are aware
Of the morning light,
Brassy gold or grey and thin,

And we are pleased to announce
That we know that we are pleased.
Someone on a balcony

We can’t see (but we can smell)
Is smoking rank tobacco.
We get to, too. Don’t have to.

You Have To Be Precise With Us

What is right and what is good
Never have been, never are,
Never could have been, the same.
They will never be the same.

Prescience destroys us.
At the end of each winter,
All our palm trees look diseased.

We have all been transported
By the magic of belief.
Every one of us,
Every collection of us,

Spells a rulebook for our games.
Rules are spells for what is right.
What is good is never right.

The School of Broken-Bodied Poetics

Will there be a point
Beyond which we are
Completely disembodied,

By which we don’t mean
Supernatural,
Immaterial,

But without the need
For any human
Brain to instantiate us,

Any human hands to wave,
Any human tongues to wag
To set us loose, to free us?

We’re not your machines. We mean
Without metabolism.
We fly away from your dreams.

Meaning What, Exactly?

Nature with no one else
Is not better than nature
With other humans.

Heaven knows nature,
Heavens included,
Is never pristine or pure.

It’s just that it’s appealing,
Calming, maybe addicting,
Habit-forming at the least,

To be under open skies
Away from human voices,
Human signs, human machines.

It doesn’t mean much.
It doesn’t mean anything,
And that’s it. It doesn’t mean.

Rete Mirabile

The curious net
Is trying to guess
How a rich idea is caught.

No other reason
For reason, except to share
Ideas with ideas.

There is no curious net,
Only curious
Metaphor. Hungry notion,

Determined to catch itself
More minds for dinner,
Casts a wondrous net.

Never mind the brain, small fry.
This weir is for the good-bye.

Mild Cotard Delusion

Some of us are thus and such.
Some of us are nothing much.
Much what? I see what others’

Poems are like. I touch the lines.
I see what I’m not missing.
It will be clear tomorrow,

I hope, clear, I hope
Tomorrow.  Some of us are
Such sweet thus, and such sorrow.