Triplay

1. Aloft

All energy comes in clumps;
Matter comes in waves.
This grasshopper sounds
Like a sputtering

Sopwith Camel as it weaves
Between the aspens
In the dry, late-summer grass.
It staggers, gunning its wings,

But it makes it. It makes it
To wherever its hunger,
Its pilot, takes it.

Another grasshopper lifts
Off, and then another, waves
Tossed aloft from clumps of grass.


2. Alone with My Thoughts

What if immortality,
The reversal of aging,
Youth, were a disease

We could spread only by touch,
Only by clutching
One another, beginning

From the elderly,
And the terminal,
Whoever’s susceptible,

Ruthless, until everyone
In the world was the same age,
Young adults, forever young?

What then, eh? Fortunately,
The dying don’t get much touched.


3. Humans Are Facts That Are Fictions

I think it would be nicer,
After all, to talk with gods
Or spirits, real ones

With distinct voices
Everyone could hear
And understand perfectly,

Rather than with my fellow
Human tragedies,
The ones who often mutter

About what divinity
Has vouchsafed them in secret
Or by old authorities.

It would be nicer to chat
With a fiction that was fact.