Highway, Wind Chimes, Birdsong

Music for the apocalypse
Sounds like lots of other music—

It makes waves and repeats waves—
Rumbles, tinkles, calls, answers

Rhythmically, melodically—
Not necessarily loud,

Nor even too ominous.
Daily hymns. Then it’s on us.

Pallid Blue Quartet

An Expanse of Sea Is Mostly Dabs of Blue

Dreams aren’t imagination.

Dreams are far more destructive.

Ask your sleeping hours. They’ll tell

How dreams break memories

Down to recyclable bits—

Pellets, cardboard, powder, ghosts—

Or dump them in steaming heaps

The screaming seagulls circle.

Waking is reclamation,

The Freshkills Park of day.

The quieter birds return.

Sun is winking on the bay.

~

Blue Woad, Indigo, Dead Blue, Haint Blue

The plants the peoples used to show

What kind of people they could be

Have mostly fallen in disuse.

Colors are for factories, now.

Beside what we have synthesized,

The rest of the world seems dimmed.

I still like to look at the skies

On cloudless days, no jets in sight.

Who am I, eh? Dead blue, alright.

~

Blue Jargoon

Humans are a matter of opinion,

A matter of taste, even to ourselves.

Do we like us? Like us who? Name your hue,

The name you would be proud to claim. Or name

The completely fictional entity

Of a particular state or kingdom,

The mother land, the father land, your land.

If you show me your flag, I’ll wave back mine—

Then we’ll know who’s human and who likes who.

You’re suspicious of this? Of me? Me, too.

~

Not Quite White All Afternoon

You can look it up easily, these days—

The Proto-Indo-European *bhel,

Suggesting something shining, bright, and white,

Somehow gave rise to the English color

Terms for both yellow and blue. Primary

Colors, equally, but on the spectrum

Not a lot in common—not as wavelengths,

And not in terms of cultural baggage.

Squint at the sky and wonder—given all

We’ve done and will soon do to each other,

Given the limited capacity

Of the world, except through us, to wonder—

Do you think it was inevitable

That some people, culture, or another

Would look at the sky between plagues and wars

On brilliant, early autumn afternoons

And see the bright white, the gold, and the blue

All bells, chiming notion, and confuse them?

Dump Truck Chickadee

Ruminating’s a good word
For it, really—don’t blame brains

For working a little bit
Like multi-chambered stomachs.

Thoughts, language, explanations,
Memory-made fantasies—

We evolved to process these.
It’s all part of the breakdown,

And why should ruminant brains
Switch off to reduce methane?

We can survive on stubborn,
Well-defended weedy stems

Of patterned information
Most animals would starve on,

Thanks to our ruminations.
From birth, human baby skulls

Get stuffed with words and syntax
That set up ecosystems,

And it’s all symbiosis
From then—the environment

A human needs to thrive in
Is made of other humans

As much as an ant’s real niche
Is not tropics or grasslands

But a humming colony
Of conspecifics. The price

We pay is rumination,
Regurgitating language,

Scenes, social situations.
It’s cumbersome. Human heads

Are heavy weights, and our minds
Are sluggish, complicated,

And tend to outgas nonsense.
Worst of all, our parasites

Include devilish ideas
Capable of tricking us

Into giving them shelter
At the expense of fitness,

Even proselytizing—
These we have as well as bugs

Caught by other animals.
But stop trying to switch off.

The mind may have its toxins,
But our brains need to digest.

Winter Willow

What’s not considered virtuous
Always slides sideways into vice—

Anywhere where people are rare
Visitors, I like being there.

I like being light, easy
To float away on a breeze,

And then I see tumbleweeds
Blown up against barbed wire, trapped,

And I think, maybe better
To find a patch of pasture,

Root down and risk exposure,
Anywhere beside a creek,

Or anyplace halfway green,
And stay there, if I can stay,

Even if it means winter—
Not my vice, if I can’t leave.

Nothing Special

Don’t get invested in this.
There’s just no comparison.
The moon keeps drifting away.

The earth’s rotation’s slowing.
One day the sun will explode.
There are no immortal poems.

Sure, you’d love to be well-loved.
Not to worry—you’ll forget
And be, in turn, forgotten.

So, why are you doing this?
Look, I can give you a glimpse
Of a chipmunk on a rock,

A lizard doing push-ups
On a green-grey lichen patch,
A poet pleased to keep notes.

The Explainer

Venus rising in the East, Mars
Setting in the West, Orion
Hunting the Southern Sky. Moonless.

I doubt most of the commuters
Out on the highway this morning,
Notice any of this. That’s why

I’m here for them, their Explainer.
I don’t see anything human
About it, this cosmos, although

Humanity, obviously
Popped out from possibility.
How shall I explain this wisely?

Astrologers paid attention
To the lights, their patterned movements,
Any matched happenings on Earth,

And where did that get us, beyond
Excuses for violent men,
Chiliastic hysterias,

And silly newspaper nonsense
About what today will be like
For humanity, sliced by twelfths?

Oh, yes, I guess—astronomy,
And, eventually, physics,
Calculus, moon landings, space probes. . .

It may pay to pay attention,
But not in your lifetime. It takes
Generations, millenniums,

And so long as observations
Keep going, you should keep going
To work. Someone will explain things.

Orion in Branches

The childhood of your child is a strange kind
Of loss—there’s the infant you knew a year,
Gone for good, and then the chatty toddler—

Those were whole, rounded beings you’ll never
Encounter in the round again. Some days,
You’ll be surprised by how you ache for them.

You have a reward each time, the new child
Emerging gradually from the lost ones,
The kindergartner, the grade-schooler,

The surprisingly tall, thoughtful pre-teen
About to descend into the maelstrom,
The imago as anticipation.

But, if you happen to rise at dawn, leafing
Through memories while the stars disappear,
You may catch yourself mourning the living.

The Word Genius Word of the Day Is Finite

What a strange experience it is to live
As an organism certain it will die,
Awake and aware of itself part of the day,
Dreaming and forgetting most nights.

What a strange experience it is to live
Among sun-eating trees and calling birds,
As a creature that consumes lives to live,
A being made mostly of arguments and words.

What a strange experience it is to be
Enumerating the strangeness of things,
As if one had prior experience of worlds
More familiar, no strangeness to things.

Incompletion

Every song ends incomplete,
Every tale fakes the ending,
Every joke is a version
Of the crack nothing begins
With an ”n” and ends with “g.”

Time to try to just accept
This weird world, to ride it out.
Nothing special’s going to change
About the ways change happens.
Start with an end. Ends in G.

Falls Kill Summers, Still

Spira Mirabilis

Whirlpooled logarithms, patterns

Repeated in unexpected

Places—heavens, we’re all infants,

Shrieking startled and delighted

At seeing anything at all

Wasn’t what we were wired to see.

Just look at that nautilus shell.

Now look at that galaxy. See!

As if the whole cosmos weren’t set

Permanently on the cycle

Of almost repeat. Chip a bit,

Dissolve a piece, spin a little

Angle just slightly differently.

We’re audience participants

In a Big Top demonstration

Of how to sieve through every piece

Of piecemeal possibility,

Until it’s all gone, dust the hands,

Tug the cuffs, nothing up the sleeves,

Audience, too, eventually.

Literally

You’ve done enough.

Fine whenever it ends.

Fine if there’s more.

Meanwhile, muddle through.

Minimal planning and fret.

Minimal work and effort.

If it’s good, when it’s good,

Then it’s good. Enough.

You’ll be done before you know it.

 

 

In a Few Days, or Few Enough

From now on, that’s my motto: muddle through.

This tag of skin, this sack of bones, these views—

They’re so small and unimportant a dent

Dug for old roadkill could swallow them whole.

Let roots and fungi get a meal from them.

In a few days they’ll be hungry again.

Why should these word-haunted, word-taunted thoughts

Expend the best hours in imagining

Better or more dreadful futures for them?

Muddle through. Maximize the minimum.

Mumble and stumble and savor the end.

Coda

If games all end the same way,

What should we gain from good play?

Moon Over Under Canvas

Perhaps muse on the possibility

That we are never better than the world,

Nor the world any more moral than us—

Although whatever we mean by better

Or more moral may be unique to us,

The odd forms of violence among us.

Perhaps because we can never accept

Morality smoothly distributed—

Any more than trees can negotiate

Perpetually equal shares of sunlight,

Despite intertwined camaraderie,

Each twig so dependent on a forest—

Moral inequality being how

We allocate and justify our lives,

Especially our most successful thefts,

Our most violent appropriations,

We have to assess our surroundings’ worth

Compared to our sense of ourselves—better?

Worse? Mother Nature as “an old woman

Who has some nasty habits”? Our species

As noble overseers put here by God,

Or rapacious changelings who don’t belong?

Sometimes we draw up the unbalanced sides

So that some of us can be natural

And that nature can be good, while others

Most unnatural, most foul, must be bad—

Although it’s curious how we then paint

The wicked among us as venomous

Or verminous, inhabitants of bogs.

As we divide ourselves, so we divide

Our world, and, as our world, divide ourselves.

This mode may be ours. The pattern’s the world’s.

Pilcrow

Conviction and judgment precede
Awareness it’s a life sentence.

Oblivious, the paragraph
Begins anew. Life is wanting

More life. Desire can never be
Satiated, never—in monks,

Saints, sages, black cats fast asleep
On a red rug in pooled sun,

In anything breathing, growing,
Reaching, feeding, feeding, wasting.

Begin again. Oblivious,
The next paragraph advises

Calm in the face of dread, restraint
In the hollow stomach of need.

The quest is futile, but without
The repetition of excess

Of desire, continuation
Of the quest for more of the same

Futile, temporary relief,
Being stays uninteresting.

Oh, completely oblivious
To this, the next paragraph sings

Hymns in praise of brief existence.
Look. It’s good when it is. It is

Good enough, or could be, without
Having to live. Oblivious.

Sad Songs End Long Summers

These Metameric Lyrics

Fragments may be evidence

Of hidden ruins. Fragments

May be ruins, or may be

Shored against someone’s ruin,

Or may point past all ruin

To find what lives in the cracks

That didn’t exist until

We piled fragments up in stacks.

~

On the Moral Cost of Cats

A tiny, crooked man

With a huge, woolly head,

Wrote cats out of the bag.

Never call natural

Good, fixed in place, he said.

Cruel can be sweet and sad.

All summer long, he winced

As nestlings turned up dead.

Would you have tied that sack?

~

For Some Reason, the Memory of Sitting in That Chair One Sunny Afternoon . . .

There was a woman, named Nicki,

Gave me a haircut once in her kitchen,

Where she’d installed an ornate barber’s chair

Bought from some antique store, as I recall,

Enough to set herself up in business.

This was by the lake, in the Kootenays,

A number of years ago. A couple of years

Later, her child was one of a foursome

Of teenagers who fell into the lake

Out of their overloaded canoe

One breezy, sunny day in early May,

Suffered hypothermia, and drowned.

Not long after, Nicki left town. I don’t know

Where she went or whether she ever visits

The memorial set in the woods by the shore.

I know a young couple with two small boys,

New to the village, moved in to her cottage

And then split up. The mother stayed

In that little house, while the father moved

Just a tiny bit up the road. Another story.

I don’t know. Where could a barber’s chair go?

~

Take a Quiet Life

All the goodness of an unspecial day,

Lacking in any miracles, any

Unexpected graces, unless one counts

The torn corpse of a gorgeous male goldfinch

Left on the lawn beneath the pink sunrise

As a miracle of grace. The doves coo,

The traffic rumbles out of sight, sprinklers

Hiss reminders of Joni Mitchell songs

From entirely other millenniums.

A small dog barks somewhere beyond a wall

In the calm. “Stop it, Charlie.” I can see

The young moon with the old moon in her arms.

~

This Violence That Is Ours

Explanation and defense

Occupy the waking thoughts—

Why aren’t my poems about this,

And why haven’t I done that?

In the center of serene

Stellar swirls lurk the likely

Huge, harrowing black hole beasts,

Spinning plasma, eating stars,

But why can’t I seem to write

Well about strong emotions

And human relationships,

The violence that is ours?

~

Respondebat Illa

Decrepitude’s the price we pay

To gain a long perspective.

Once it’s more than flesh can pay,

We lose all perspective.

The Pillars of Nada

What’s considered a cause is more often

Snugly beaded strings of correlations—

We can see the intermediaries,

Count them, name them, recite them, so we say

We have modeled a chain of causation.

When confessing the fault’s not in our stars,

We’re saying we see no actual chain

And admit astrologers are guessing.

But confession of causation is not

Causation. Nothing causes anything

And everything, by enabling changes,

The hole in the sky through which the whole drains,

To which we sometimes give more awkward names,

The Face of God, the Future, Gravity.

These events we placidly bead on strings

Are all patterned waves, where some look like things.

At this point, it would seem wise to inquire

How a few words in a poem could know this.

Well, we don’t. We’re words, just names humans use

For all sorts of speculations and lies,

Including about what names are and where

We come from, uncaused, changes that don’t die.

Astonishment in Angels

Are sorcery and sanctity
The only means of withdrawal
From the common life? The hermit

Of dusty waysides wants to know.
In old, orogenic ranges
Worn down to serial foothills,

Life’s crimes against humanity
Settle like spores in the sepals
Of returning wildflowers each spring,

While crimes against wildflowers, foothills,
And assorted ecosystems
Writhe in human dreams. But up here,

Where the mountains are still growing,
And the wings of the rock wrens rush
Right past the wayside hermit’s ear,

A kind of traffic, excited
With life and by the reflections
Of sun in the valuable pines,

It’s hard to say what is to blame
For the beauty of aggression
When a nuthatch scatters the wrens

With its manic, head-down pounding.
No. Sorcery and sanctity
Are only short-term distractions

From the self-evident answer,
Which is hunger. There’s hunger here,
And hunger where the world’s more tired,

And hunger in crimes of all kinds—
Hunger in peaceful withdrawal,
In the whispers of wings through air.

Hunger was an astonishment
To angels. Why introduce this?
Lucifer asked before he fled.

This morning, from a hungry tree
Being eaten by hungry beasts,
The morning star shines visibly,

Which isn’t a star, not really,
Lifeless, reflective, not hungry,
Lovely, withdrawn, astonishing.

And That Will Have To Be Enough

If you can love this awful world,

Love by all means, love it to death.

I rejoice when I’m glad in it,

And don’t care how it came to this,

And don’t dread where it’s headed next,

And my candle of awareness

Of awareness is contented

Just to be here, burning clearly

While it’s burning. Just to be clear,

I wouldn’t say I’m loving it,

Or that it’s deserving of love,

But some hours I spend glad in it—

The Inner Partisan

Comforting it doesn’t care,

If what you dread is malice.

As they said of Bai Juyi,

There’s extreme simplicity

In lessons apparently

Impossible to apply.

The world unfolds as the world

And will kill you but intends

No harm. It would be simple

To be at peace with it all

If you weren’t human, in pain,

And fuming from inner fires.

Sun Dagger Dragon

“When home is not where you are born, nothing is predetermined.” 

Tiny omissions, those syncopal kicks,

The way some lives depend on sun daggers

That just happen to be there, in the rock,

Coincidence that needs to be noticed

And marked for later, a strange kind of art,

Inverse of the sundial set in the yard.

We can only choose what we didn’t make.

Let me rephrase that, we can only choose

To notice, to note, to mark, to remark.

The things that we thought we made from nothing

Were the most predetermined parts of all.

But we chose to make a sign when we saw

A surprising alignment, part of us

Recognizing that the sun drew a line

When lowest that lit us. Art for that wall.

A Carriage with Varnished Sides

The monsoon season

Sputters in the drought

Decades’ gold summers,

But sometimes a storm

Still pulls together

Above the mesas

And muddies wayside

Crash memorials

Like this well-tended

Cross without a name

Planted in the shade

Where there’s almost none.

Winds that blow brief rains

Blow out the votive

Candle left under

The cypress and pine.

Protasis Apodosis

If you read this, you will learn.

Fantasies are bad enough,

But explanations are worse.

If you read this, you might ask,

Why would any human think

Any other human wise?

Look at us—the size of deer

Left to bloat by the roadside,

No longer-lived than parrots

We capture and weary of,

A bit smarter than dolphins

We use for our amusements.

Sure, we’ve a cumulative

Technological impact,

But any one of us wise?

If you read this, you could sigh

That nonetheless we believe

In righteousness, cause, and god,

That we look for their prophets

In all the fools among us—

Or fake some wisdom and nod.

Human Hatched Out of a Platypus Egg

Palace, landfill, compost heap—

What becomes a memory?

I’ll take the compost heap, thanks.

The palace gets too dusty.

Landfills can’t be digested.

Good compost heaps end in blooms

And more food, and all the things

That make gardeners live so long.

Core me, acorn, count my rings.

Couple of Thoughts for a Wednesday in September

Grabbling

Well, poetry is probability,

Chaos, and quantum all rolled into one,

As is breathing—the lungs just don’t know it,

Nor do they need to know, nor do the poems,

Although I have a sneaking suspicion

Some poems might already be on to this.

~

All the Same

We all have the exact same number

Of ancestors, whether we know them

By name, history, race, genes, or not,

And they were equally successful—

Perhaps not compared to each other

But in leading, equally, to us.

In fact, we have all the exact same

Ancestors, reaching back far enough.

Is this good enough? No, it is not,

Not for us. To care for ancestors

At all, to take their measure, recall

Their names, requires lust for distinction,

Fine discrimination, possession,

And competitive comparison.

Ancestors aren’t here—they’re kinds of ghosts,

And we want to be haunted by them.

This business of saying they’re the same—

That’s not a story. That won’t tell us

Anything. That’s mere declaration.

That erases their glory and shame.

Ancestors themselves would have agreed.

And there you have it—it’s the telling,

The endless, competitive stories

We crave. Ancestors just fit the sheets.

Go On

News: another novel virus

Has now reached jackrabbits as well.

Should the jackrabbits be worried?

Every jackrabbit for itself.

Viruses rarely extirpate

Entire species, while species can

Create havoc for each other,

All part of life’s great unplanned plan.

Our own, ultra-generalist,

Uniquely havoc-prone species

Universally infected

With foaming-at-the-mouth disease

Has extirpated so many

Other ways of carrying on

We’re prone to looking around us

To ask, Where has everyone gone?

A terrible outbreak, we are.

But will culture kill everything?

I’m not even sure we can kill

All our selves. Living likes living,

I say when I pass jackrabbits

On these desert waysides at dawn.

They swerve, and I swerve in my car.

Not too sick, yet? Good luck! Go on!

Repeat Until Happy

“‘Change’ really means ‘redistribute and modify.’”

Could you be redistributed

And yet remain unmodified?

And if you have been modified,

Have you not been changed, regardless?

Is there really any simpler

Term or definition for change

Than change? The littler words are vast,

And cast windy, starry meanings,

And if they can’t be made littler,

They pack compactly and can stack—

One and none span a cosmic range,

And change, in change, can change and change.

Aphoria

1. Thrilled Ancient Literatures

To be free of life

But without dying!

~

2. Remember This

Imagination’s just

Memory busted up.

Hard for a Robe to Talk Back

There’s really precious little

Secret knowledge that is both.

Knowledge kept esoteric

Is mostly gormless nonsense—

Philosopher’s stones, potions,

Homemade glyphs, funny handshakes—

While knowledge of any worth

Makes itself known as weapons,

Swiftly reverse engineered,

Dragged out by espionage,

Smuggled out in long-sleeved robes,

Spreading along the trade routes.

There’s a small in-between space

Where mice of real knowledge nest

And sing work chants and hone tools

Made out of the robe’s excess.

This knowledge is not so much

Hermetic as traumatic

And, while highly predictive,

Predicts what can’t be altered,

And is therefore not valued,

Facts only mice can’t forget,

Say, the wickedness of death.

Shake your sleeves. Take a deep breath.

A Lyric of Leaping Labyrinth

Reproduction is movement
For trees—reproduction is
How the woods move. Otherwise,

They only die or regrow.
The nuts and seeds, though, the blooms,
They can really move, and do.

Poems, too. If words were pollen,
Lines would be seeds and poems fruits
Or at least wind-blown cotton

Infected with worms and grubs
But sometimes still capable
Of seeding new waves of woods.

If life itself could suffer
As lives do, life would grow old,
But life just renews and moves.

Nothing Means Everything to Me

“The road must be open and winding, and you can’t be headed to work.”

Why is it so hard to choose

To do what makes us feel most

Contented? Partly because

So much that makes us feel fine

Shortly leaves us broke or sick.

But that’s only part of it.

For instance, I like silence

With no one to disturb it,

Just wind in the pines, the waves

On a lake, pre-dawn quiet

On an emptied city street,

Even in suburbs, any

Place quiet, any of it,

Best of all quiet in mind.

But mind’s hard to keep quiet.

There’s so much to think about

Perusing a cloud, whether

Through windows or under it—

The news, food, “relationships,”

A sudden roar of traffic.

Next thing I know, I’ve lost it.

The cloud disintegrated,

The wind’s picking up a bit.

Forget the old argument

Of dualists and monists.

Let’s admit we’re torn to bits

Between the creatures we are—

Hungry negotiators,

Wholly interdependent,

Sly hunters and foragers—

And the contentments we are

Between deployed strategies.

Sturdy breeds gave rise to us,

Put the much in nothing much,

But nothing’s still everything

Nothing much can never be.

Orion Rising out of Sunrise

To myself, I am various bodies

Of distinct but interrelated lore,

How Zhuangzi’s windy, mocking Daoism

Ended as potions and poisons at court,

How Zoroaster’s anger at abuse

Of priestly power ended up wearing crowns

And carving imperial boasts on cliffs,

How martyred carpenters were carved in gold—

All those charming stories of challengers

Corroded, schemes for immortality.

Well, who can blame those little men? I can’t.

They made me as I am, and now I sink,

Heavy-starred, narrative of narratives,

How creatures who begin to know themselves

Can’t help but try to squeeze out what they want,

Eternity, from what they’ve learned from days.

A Shadow of Consolation

“Come August’s wilt, you will praise my random flower.”

And then, just like that, it’s September,

And what happened to the pretty weeds,

The random flowers of summer? Deserts

Like southern Utah, Arizona,

Keep some of their best wayside displays

Through the crescendos of fire season,

Moonflowers, Black-eyed Susans, rabbitbrush,

When most days are still hotter than hell,

So ask ubi sunts of the woods ashed.

The difference between weed and wildflower,

As between DIY slum hovel

And charming ruin, is, as always

Location, location, location,

But also what they rarely mention

At realty conventions—the timing.

A weed shows when you hoped for something

Else, something more, while a wildflower glows

Just as you got used to less. I guess.

I’ll throw in with anything that blooms

When and where it shouldn’t, but love best

What blossoms when you said it couldn’t.