A Professor of Evolution Places Small Faith in Retirement

No Point Can Be Found

Full moon over the left shoulder

Predawn twilight on the right

The body turns an anomalous compass

Spring-loaded points lacking any magnets

And finds it strange to be listening

To “The Lark Ascending” when it’s dark

From full moon then into silence or nearly

Real birds twittering through a whole dawn

Not many not ever many on this mesa and 

Fewer singing birds everywhere each year

Just one right now signaling monotonously

Toward the sun on a storm-downed juniper

Since the math is backed by the evidence

Let’s grant energy and mass remain

The same and maybe also total information 

But events can only keep on happening 

And no point can be found without more

Of them which is why I guess the birds 

Grow less given a happening has to reduce

Something to make room for new things

And balance information in that energy-mass

Ledger just as when every now and then

Among all my latest newest always younger

Students of human evolution appearing

In each introductory semester sometimes

Someone simply disappears and usually

As with these birds at dawn on the mesa

I’m not sure if something’s really diminished 

Or just moved on or I’m just imagining one

More empty seat and no more assignments 

Handed in—oh but then there are moments

When I’m compass-spun stunned to learn

A student gone missing has really vanished

And I’m asked do I know anything or even

Worse albeit more rarely as earlier this term

I was told the one who sat right in the front

Had died was dead just suddenly dead

Big cheerful fellow full of good questions

Always up for a few points extra credit

Keenly interested in Neanderthal remains

And now that’s all done yet another downed

Before yet another sunny commencement  

Valedictory 

Among the more charming naïvetés

Of American college students for decades 

Has been their near-complete cluelessness 

About how much stuff has been happening 

And for how long—no, they love to launch

Essays with a basic and reliable grandeur 

Using something like, “Throughout history,” 

Or, “Since the beginning of time,”

Whereupon they proceed to some chosen

Phenomenon involving a few centuries

Or several thousand years at best—

And who can blame them when parents

In half the country still think the wide world

Not much older than that and history

For us starts roughly with a recent Civil War

We’ve never wholly quit fighting over—-

So here’s an opening to take as you go—

Since the dawn of time and well before

History—before any belief now espoused—

Say, for three billion years give or take—

From the simplest functioning cell forms

To the billions of us high-falutin’ humans 

With our rocket ships, smartphones, AI

And lakes of toxic waste, only two rules—

You gotta suck up some more energy daily

You gotta clean the guts of your machine

All other necessities and profound events—

Everything else life’s been—fit in between

Midnight Robes

It’s hard to take this cosplay seriously

All these peculiar blackbirds and magpies

Garish flashings on our shoulders and wings

Shuffling through the mausoleum to view

Embalmed higher learning’s wax-faced beak

Dip while the mostly young and younger

Survivors of their winnowing toss their caps

At boredom’s and wits’ end to celebrate

Then what? More rounds of more of the same

The robes returned to the rental rotations

Hung in closets shucked in offices or boxed

As if birds could take off their shirts and return

To their regular lives as burrowing worms—

Tonight the robes will float up to reassemble 

As ghosts and souls reassemble in dreams

Reassuring each other with cloaked whispers

Of black cloth murmuring no no of course not

We are not living things we have never been wings