Linked Mountains over Orchid Terrace

this is not a real poem

Exterior symbols

Interior tokens

The cold forest woman

The small folk at midnight

The underground machines

That listen to the stars

this is for divination 

Ask for what you want

Never ask what will be

You have to stir the past

To turn up one you like

There’s no future to ask

A young man’s old mustache 

this home is living alone

So much of what we love

Is coincidental

Down to a memory

Of random happiness

One moment early on

Bliss on one empty day

this is fulminant on the face of it 

Recycling used lightning

Left over from wildfires

Awareness needs at least

A body to exist 

But emotions persist

In breathing and they burn

this one can go anywhere 

Written russet amber

Verses noted in gold

Why not and remember 

Manual typewriters

Ballpoint pens fountain pens

Were speed technologies 

this is a gesture of ecstasy for despair 

Conclusions to sermons

Sung in delirium

Weeping in angel tongues

Never end so it goes

Is it shallow to rise 

Near surface from the depths?

this is the wind when the earth shakes

The green dragon descends

In certain traditions

Scaly dragons erupt

Out of caves in others

Each line takes a long time

To circle back again

this became the frog

The frog became west witch

And beauty of the moon 

All the imagined things

That don’t happen at all

The unimagined things 

Happening constantly 

this is erased

Look what we have altered

Requesting specifics 

Requires changing the past 

Discarding forgetting

Outward losses must ease

What the inner achieves

this is standard Copenhagen 

It must be confusing

For such an orderly

Animal as the cat

To exist in this way

Never knowing whether

It is there or not there

this is disbelief 

What is real may not be

What is false may not be

Real or false may not be 

And false and real may be

Inhale this empty air

Neither real nor empty

this is relief

Elk drooling in the wind

There are days when eating

Peacefully is enough

Contentment is enough

The feeling of enough

The nature of enough

this is from a larger universe

No lives ever die here

Nothing ever suffers

Everything’s auspicious

And pointless local stars

Start no astronomy 

Everyone got lucky

this is a lesson on magic

All miraculously 

Warring fiction fashions

Verifiably false

Falsifiable truths

Reduce observation

To pure information 

this is pure information 

To give form to the mind

You must fully convey

A sequence of symbols

Completely entangled

Understand gravity

To understand nothing 

this is prayer

Full of deer and twilight

The inevitable

Infinitesimal 

God and the miracles

Come close to existing 

But never quite get there

this is a transpersonal field of mentation 

The thought some things are true

Thus others must be false

May itself be useful

More than necessary

All histories stories

As the French remind us

this presents itself to you as physicality

A mouse in a barrel

Silkworm in a cocoon

A glimmering distance

Bewildering the way

Good swimmer good reader

You don’t contain the lake

this attempts to discover

Things undiscovered yet

That lie inside a poem

That lie inside a truth

That lie around in truth

That lie that tells that truth

Experience belies

this is quicksilver 

Ambiguity feeds

The wonder of the chase 

Wonder too ravenous

To ever get fed up

With ambiguities 

Scampering beads of doubt 

this is the man of Mount Xi

Nothing called immortal 

Is actually alive

Ever actually lived

But duration is strange

Crossing linked mountains called

Dissimilarity 

this is an open question

Tell me about yourself

Imperative raven 

Rising from frosted grass

Fat rodent in your grasp

Once you know what poems are

Can you stop hunting them?

this is an element of surprise 

Human-made forest sprites 

Inhabit sentient walls

Speak from sentient boxes

Bellow from loudspeakers 

But do not inhabit

One word as an object

this is a small detail

Montaigne wrote long ago

No event and no shape

Perfectly resembles

Any other like it

No event and no shape

Ever wholly differ 

this is a change in confidence 

Show a sketch of a school

Of fish with one out front

Mother calls the leader

Show a sketch of a school

Of fish with one out front

Mother says has no friends

this is a mirror reflecting ghosts

Pity the poor monsters

God struggles to exist

But falls a little short

Like words struggling to live

Someday maybe the ghosts

Will be real to themselves 

this is for you Wang Sun

How long is your road back

If you’ve lost your way here?

What are they praying for

Forever in this place?

The drumming and piping

Of birdsong in these words 

this is lacking a partner

Every controversy

Of humans concerning

Time is inconclusive

Here I can only state

The answer is perhaps

The match is inexact 

this has meanings of its own

What do diviners know

That gives them confidence

That makes them think they see

What no one else can see?

There’s a tiny spring here

That drives the wheel of things

this is what you do not do

You never finish this

You don’t pretend you can

You were never lazy 

Being born was enough

Being born was too much

You started doing stuff

this was saved by volcanic ash

Words have their secret lairs

All of this comes from there

If you name the cave bear

You drive the bear away

You drive the bear extinct

You get to keep the cave

this is happened happening 

Love that which seems to be

But is not what it seems

It is the clue you need

To be able to read

The face of a cosmos

Resembling dissembling

this is a small zibaldone

The pack rat keeps its notes

In a compact fashion

A species that does not 

Exist yet could read them

Reimagine a whole

Ecosystem from seeds

this has magical mathematical realism

One thing for another

Yields the sense of wonder

That what works for zero

And imaginary

Also predicts the stars

Dreams dizzy wizardry

this is a label

Pick any term you like

Invent terms on your own

Say your experience

Any phenomena 

Could be linked by those terms

What is the term for that?

this is a feckless genius

There are no other kinds

To point out the failings

Of inhabited flesh

While inhabiting flesh

Is wisdom in a word

Is irresponsible 

this is one of your more transcendent days 

I met Master Red Pine

Getting drunk with Boyu

In the Cinnabar Hills

And I accosted them

You are not immortal!

I love emptied heavens

this is when you close your eyes

Lovers of symmetry

Appear with their numbers

Their armillary spheres

Multiverse string theories 

Sator squares palindromes

Ambigram viruses 

this story is halting 

The recluse will be gone

Somewhere on the mountain

Where the clouds have settled

Into parallel lines

That go on forever

In a way that’s touching

this is a mystery

Answers raise more questions

Questions breed more answers

Create your mysteries 

If you want to solve some

You won’t solve them of course

But you might resolve some

this is impossible

Why the fascination 

With the mere writing down

Of the impossible?

Just to dare to denote

The meaningless gives it

Symbolic existence

this infant is anthropogenic

Humans made by humans

Define made by humans 

Something artificial

As something that is fake

It makes sense we produce 

Nonsense we reproduce

this is a little mischief with imagination

You want to mean something 

Want me to mean something

I want to mean nothing

A serious mischief

Not to break the image

But unimagine if

this is the bright-moon man

We’ve forgotten the stars

In the halls of our lights

The moon we can’t forget

It still gets in our way

Like a cat in our face

We can’t quite yet replace 

this is the raft

Here is the world complete

A home a bed a friend

Water and food in reach

A driftwood fire a tent

More than enough to read

Current past every bend

this is the roof

Before words ancestor

Animals were not meant

To be inhabited

Meaningfully at all

Heads accidentally 

Became living spaces

this is an ordinary buzzard

Condors are much larger

Therefore rarer to see

But even the common

Contains the infinite

Divisibly within

The grandeur is finite

this has no meanings of its own

The transcendental e

To the power of pi

And imaginary

Added to one is none

Mystic union to some

Shen means nothing to me

this shows ghosts have no noses

No one will light incense

At the mausoleum

Of the king who banished

The poets as traitors

But will the poets care?

Incense isn’t heaven

this was not what you meant by the future

All hills are hills no more

All mountains were sea floors

Or dunes or lava spills

Or something flat and low

Not pictured here beasts browse 

The cliffs of artifice

this is relentlessly cumulative 

An event is something

That happens once it does

It cannot unhappen 

Reversals require two

Events that have happened

Never fewer events

this only exists in translation 

A sensed experience

Has a different texture

Than an understanding 

Iron and oxygen

Brought us blood from the sun

But that’s rust on your thumb

this is a photo called how-could-I-not?

Humans will make humans

Making more human worlds 

After me after you 

And then life will live lives

After humans have gone

And after Earth’s lives stars

this is mirror glass 

Hope glows on its victims

Like the strangling angel

Laura glimpsed in a gown

Open to reflection

From cosmetic mirrors

Cloaking factory walls

this is a gesture without a name

Throw your hands to the side

To show champion size

Throw your hands to the sky

Champion wins the prize!

Bring your palms to your eyes

If your champion dies

this is a pawky fawn

Conserving energy

By having remained weak

Accruing advantage

Sitting still in the shade

Sly quiet wayside eyes

Hide why weakness escapes

this is a cat’s-paw 

Monkey sings to the cat

Quickness signifies skill

For a creative cat

Who can prove it can claw

Sustenance from embers

For a monkey to gnaw

this way frees you from the task

Great unreality

Is a sense of its own

But one you can’t count on

Already past the sixth

What’s real re the unreal?

It’s nothing you should ask

this is not applicable

In a village nothing

Much is never simple

What is learned is useful

Just not in the village

Knowledge is our villain

History our village

this is applied

Words by themselves can wait

In possibility 

Can wait thousands of years

And pure math can surprise

With its utility

Once its professors die 

this child is their causal ghost

Why the arrows of time

And the arrows of why

Should arrive in the mind

Simultaneously 

The mind is uncertain

They’re certainly fecund

this is change without imagination

The bear you extinguished

Disintegrates in dirt

Symbolizing nothing

With nothing much won’t work

The skull sleeps on its paws

Fullness emptied its thoughts

this is change without intervention

Returning the girl sings

I stole the elixir

Of immortality 

And fled I am guilty

But the moon welcomed me

We change eternally

this change

What’s past is not prologue

To what’s nonexistent

What’s past’s part prediction

Part loss part forgiveness

Past all divination

What changed is the question