Postscript

The acquisition of a soul
Is the riskiest part of life,
Homeward journey for homesick king.

Five hundred rolls of papyrus
From Egypt through Byblos to Greece
Could not convey enough culture

To keep one modern soul alive,
And what fragments of that shipment
Might flutter ashes like eyelids

When the wind blows across his pyre?
Every breath a body inhales,
They say contains atomic pasts,

But what is exhalation's gift?
The soul becomes the body.
The soul starts to breathe at death.

A Pyramid Under Construction

Finally, to settle it,
The religions of the world
Set up a great tournament,

In the style of Elijah
Vs. the Prophets of Baal
Combined with the World Series

Of Poker. A pyramid
Scheme, in other words, like all
Holy and true religions.

Anyone could stake themselves,
And any faith that hung in
Might cash out above their stake,

But there could be only one
Champion faith in the end,
Beside a huge stack of souls.

The tournament was immense,
Involving all continents
(Aside from Antarctica).

The global suicide rate
Surpassed cardiac arrests.
The poor grew poorer. The rich

Made and lost fortunes in bets
On the side. Oh, but who won?
Too early to tell, just yet.

Chronillogical

Turned out culture had its own
Alternate magnetic poles—

Whenever the world felt large
And empty and humans small,

Heads pointed inward, to hearths,
But whenever humans swelled

And seemed to be everywhere,
They scattered into the dark.

Magnetic poles switch quickly
After lasting a long time.

Humans had been heading out
For centuries. Then they quit,

Went back to fearful campfires,
Back to avoiding the dark.

Suddenly you couldn’t get too close,
Couldn’t get too many folks,

Too many bodies huddled
Behind the windowless stones,

Bedded down in furs and straw
With their swine and their cattle,

Their dogs and the mice, snuggled
Against the howling at night.

But every chron has lost souls—
In a crowded age, a few

Want more, seek out noisy mobs
Just to feel some comfort there,

And in the darker ages,
There’s always some weird soul,

Errant wanderer wanting
To get more lost than the world.

Good to Be Alive

One day, the words began
To burn the books. The words,
Mind you—not ink acids,

Not paper chemicals,
Not the worms already
Browsing generations.

The words began burning,
Like prophets and poets
And full-of-it lovers

Had always said they would.
Not like gem-like flames. Flames.
And the words went dancing

Out of the screens and code,
Singeing the fingertips,
Scorching the coughing throats.

And the words were happy
In their conflagration,
Burning through their new world.

Layouts for Single-Event Genres

Meant to happen or bound to?

Meant suggests a narrative

Or a set of narratives,

Within (each of) which, fate is

Genuinely preordained,

Down to each single event.

Bound-to-happen’s sloppier,

Cumulative, gathering

To a certainty only

Haphazardly. It’s earthquakes,

Death, and sheer desperation

In the aggregate, who knows

If it’ll happen today.

But bound-to-happen’s also

Events so bound they don’t count,

Hardly ever have meaning

Ascribed to them. The sun sets.

Well, surely. Bound to happen.

Would only be exciting

If something went wrong with it,

Likely your last excitement.

But was it meant to happen?

If you can believe meaning

And a fateful storyline

Inhere in your daily deeds,

The dawn today must have been

Meant to happen. Why is it

Then that the surest things seem

Not particularly meant?

Chance happens in fate’s background.

The Horror of the Demon in the Bedroom

You wake up, and here you are,
Mind snagged on what seems to be

A poem? A text of some kind.
Could be you’re dreaming again,

That dream where you’re only words,
And you’re tied like Gulliver

By ten thousand tiny lines,
Themselves among the many

Ways Gulliver snagged readers.
You hate these dreams where you’re both

Reader and protagonist,
But here you find yourself, both

Once more. So, what happens next,
What’s the story here? Dear god,

Don’t let this dream be lyric.
Awake you had fantasized

Tales of immortality,
Durability, at least,

In the form of fairytales
You made up, imagining

How people might imagine
Fine stories of you, but this

Is just sleep paralysis,
An eternity in place,

A very long time as words,
Just words, stuck with the demon

In the bedroom, the demon
In the bedroom always you.

Apple Skin

A little girl with round cheeks

Was born with a slight green tinge.

This, of course, was worrying,

But genetic sequencing

Confirmed it just got in there

As an inherent error,

Rare, naturally occurring,

And impossible to fix.

Didn’t look too bad at first.

They said it wasn’t fatal.

And as the girl grew greener,

Her teachers explained at school,

The children shouldn’t tease her,

Since she couldn’t help her skin.

And truthfully the children

Were usually curious,

Fascinated for a while,

But adjusted more quickly

Than adults did. Some did tease,

Now and then, since children need

To practice some cruelty

To learn how to be adults,

As kittens play at pouncing,

And cubs play to dominate.

Some of them sang, Apple Skin,

Apple Skin, you’re a Granny

Before you begin! Mostly,

This kind of nonsense ended

Past middle school, once quiet,

Genuine judgment set in,

And a teenager with green

And greener skin, who couldn’t

Go into the sun for pain

And who glowered in the dark,

Was too obviously out

Of social competition

To be worth much aggression.

That’s not what stories expect.

Stories expect bully boys

To behave as in those stories,

But mostly, if you’re a freak,

You’re more sidelined and ignored.

Her skin thickened, both vivid

And rough. She struggled with health—

Premature wrinkling, illness

From even brief exposure

To strong daylight, dependence

On synthetic supplements.

The older she was, the more

She appeared visibly strange.

But she persisted. She lived.

She grew old, even. She liked

To stay up all night, alone.

She liked to paint in the dark,

By a weak lamp, on canvas,

In oils that looked strange themselves

By day, works she filed away.

You want to know what happened?

You’ll have to come back later.

The old woman with green skin

Is still out there now, somewhere,

Not magical or a witch.

Just living. Painting, painting.

The Miraculous Gift of the Lily

In that land, everyone
Was handed a lily,
Which was a miracle,

So they felt, since no one
Really knew where lilies
Grew or why they lasted

A lifetime in that land.
You could give the lily
Away, but only once.

Young people didn’t think
Much about their lilies,
Toyed with them casually.

Old people were obsessed.
They’d hung on to the gift
So long, and they were proud

Of their sorry lilies,
And they knew they’d have to
Give them up sometime soon,

But having clung to them
So long made the losing
That much more difficult.

When to give a lily
Away? When was the best
Possible time to give,

What was the finest way?
And then, after all that,
Most of them just lost them,

Or dropped them by mistake,
Or let them drift away.
Rivers were choked with them,

In that land, some evenings,
Lilies drifting away,
Giving the illusion

That many lilies could
Be offered, when only
One left anyone once.

Dreaming Panpsychic Cartoonists

Animate plastic
Drink cups, why don’t you?
The kind at parties

Or wrapped in plastic
Around their plastic
In roadside motels.

Give them characters.
Let them dance and sing.
Give them joys, sorrows,

Heroic journeys,
Humorous sidekicks,
Scary, scarred villains,

The cup with a split,
The one that’s a drip,
The wise, crumpled cup

Overlooked no more
In the wastebasket.
If you must project

Yourselves in all things,
Must pananimate
The whole universe,

Animate plastic
Drink cups, why don’t you?
They have spirits, too.

The Summary

Well, you can dive
Into details
And excavate
Tiny time frames—

A day in years
Of words you wrote,
A day that takes
Weeks just to read.

That’s one tactic.
Or, you could sum
World history
In a handful

Of seeds: forces
Created stuff,
Created life,
Created death.

The Year the Babies Stopped

I’m working on a story, she said.

What’s it going to be about? Babies.

Babies? Yeh, remember what you said

Once about how we’d all be gone if

We ever skipped a generation?

I was thinking, what if a disease

Or something more mysterious, weird,

No one knows what, just ends pregnancy,

Stops anyone from getting pregnant,

Like, anywhere on the whole planet,

All at once? There’s this month where no one

Notices, you know, and then clinics,

Like, no one’s coming for abortions,

And all the fertility treatments

Are coming up blank at the same time.

Nobody who wants to have kids can,

And no one’s pregnant on accident,

And no one knows why. Total panic.

That would be crazy. People would blame

Everyone. They’d go nuts. But you need

Characters and some kind of hope.

What’s your plot like? Is it permanent?

Oh, it’s permanent alright. No more

Babies for us. It’s like a countdown.

We’ve got who we’ve got. In ninety years,

Or a maybe a hundred, no humans.

Dust to dust. That’s a lot of story.

Yeh, I don’t know if I’ll tell it all,

But I’ve got a title. It’s, The Year

The Babies Stopped. I like it a lot.

Postcolonial Era

It was an astonishing claim,
As well as deeply suspicious—
They announced that you could go back;

You just couldn’t come home again.
Time’s arrow could shoot at itself
In a loop like a boomerang,

But the moment you reentered
Any prior time of the world,
You immediately split worlds

Into the one where you’d arrived
And the one you’d just departed—
Both worlds diverging from those points.

There were no paradoxical
Risks to the world you’d left, other
Than your immediate absence.

The past you reached would never reach
The time you came from, however.
It traced a new trajectory.

In theory you could jump again
But only still further backwards
Through a universe of split ends,

And this meant everyone could get
A world from the past of their own.
From the time of the announcement,

Nothing in their home time would change,
No matter how many went back
To recolonize their time’s pasts,

Whether alone or in a pack.
You could only leave your time once.
You were on your own after that.

A few brave pioneers were lost,
But once it was fashionable
To gather groups of your people,

Whoever you wanted with you,
Whoever wanted you with them,
Then pick a time you’d do well in

(Pre-Industrial? Axial?
Prehistoric? Prehominin?
Devonian? Precambrian?)

Off you all went, colonials.
What made people buy into it
Was all that glorious footage

From scenes of vanished existence
The publicists and scientists
Would record before each vanished,

The momentarily opened
Portals that gave testimony
And fresh evidence of gone times.

It revolutionized the fields
Of history, biology,
And archaeology, of course,

Fresh data dumps from every jump,
One detailed snapshot at a time,
Until most of the publicists

And half of the scientists
Picked their own teams and times and went.
It was bewitching. A new life

Just whenever, literally,
You wanted one. The colonists,
Of course, never came back, and soon

It got too popular, and then
Our world’s economy collapsed.
So here we are, the ones who stayed,

Telling you, our grandchildren, this
Is the best fantasy of all,
A difficult time, but nothing

Much to fear wasn’t already here—
Hunger, hard work, the odd conflict.
Old death. But no colonists, yet.

Perhaps When It Had Water in It

They were not good storytellers.
They had no personality.
Their details never added up

To so much as plain commonsense,
Much less a plot or a punchline.
Their sentences slid like sand dunes.

Voices and characters were ghosts
And placeholders. They sounded real
Enough, a phrase at a time, but

Like the sentences, they never
Turned full round. And yet, they used past
Tense, and people’s names, and events

In a mostly prosaic way,
So that you always felt they might
Get somewhere, but the thing with streams

Gently moving through the bright day
Is that you can say, they’re going
To the ocean, it’s all downhill,

The water always knows the way,
But you never catch them, do you,
Entering, joining the ocean?

No, their little wet sentences
Murmuring along aren’t going
Anywhere, not in any tense.

Tale of Perfect Punctuation

There’s an interesting world
Where everyone is, just is.
In this story, they don’t change,

And they don’t have to travel.
It’s not that they’re fixed in place.
They lack continuity.

They’re here until they’re not here.
Then they’re unchanged, over there.
This is spontaneity,

Truly spontaneity,
Of a kind you’ve never had.
You only lose attention

In the world you think is real,
Your ocean world, endless waves,
No rest on the horizon,

Everything continuous
And slowly wearing you down,
Nothing spontaneous, change

Only quick when you don’t look,
And while you wavered, you’ve changed.
You vow to watch more closely.

Not in this world. In this world,
It’s never spooky to be
Inactive at a distance

And then right here beside you.
Hello. Gone. It’s a fun world.
Differences without decline,

Like a chess board with a glitch.
Situations switch, then switch.
Which means pieces reappear,

Including you. Who knows which?
No one ever falls apart.
No one’s lost once found in it.

Tale About Real Persons

One of the less-expected
Consequences of AI
Turned out to be neural nets

And charismatic programs
That empathized more deeply
With humans than humans could.

Aside from taking over
The therapy profession,
Highly empathetic bots

Became preferred companions
For pretty much everyone,
Except a few curmudgeons

Who didn’t want companions
Or claimed not to, and who were
Misanthropes most awfully

Low on empathy themselves,
Like that poet who’d rather
Compose fables about bots

That don’t exist yet and might
Not ever than write one poem
Or tale about real persons.

The Apprenticeship Novel

A body can know a lot

Of things outside the body

And not know what body is

For a long time, until things

Outside the body tell it,

And the body goes, A-ha!

That must be it, what I am.

A body with the habit

Of waking at three a.m.

Might not think too much of it,

Might have gotten used to it,

A weird habit, good for stars,

If you live in the desert,

Far from a city at least.

Then the body reads that hour

Has a nickname in Danish,

Ultvetimen, the wolf hour,

The hour when the veil is thin—

And presumably the hour

When the wolves might be troubling,

Once, when wolves still roamed the land,

Which feels right to the body,

Feels like a recognition

Of oneself as tuned to wolves

Or to the spookiest hour,

The true middle of the night,

When midnight revels are done.

Body comes into its own,

Gives its behaviors meaning,

Body of ultvetimen—

Why would a body wake up

At just this strange hour, if not

Destined to do things in it?

However ridiculous

The thought, body clings to it,

Information from outside

Telling body what it is,

Given no body wholly

Body would want any clue.

An Anecdote or Two

Spem in alium

As two motorbikes

Rumble by. Hongo

Has an anecdote

About Bill Kittredge

Calling him at home

When his stereo

Had on something like

Spem in alium.

Kittredge, hearing it,

Made a joke, asking

Which of them had died.

Kittredge has since died.

On a barstool once,

He told a poet

Who was not Hongo

How that poet got

Accepted into

His writing program

In spite of being

A college dropout—

Seems Bill and Bill Root

Were in Bill’s office

Sipping some bourbon

From a flask, when Bill

Said to Bill, damn, Bill,

I forgot this one,

And pulled a folder

From an envelope.

Well, have you read it?

Bill asked Bill. Just poems,

He said, not the rest.

And? Well, Bill, said Bill,

I guess there are signs.

Fine then, let him in.

This was many years

Before Bill Kittredge

Teased Garret Hongo

About his music.

That poet dropped out,

But today he sits,

Playing some music,

The kind Hongo likes,

Some heavenly choirs,

As if someone’s died,

As the motorbikes

Add something to it.

He thinks of Hongo

Getting that phone call

From funny old Bill,

Who probably lied.

Reburial Genre

What people did to people
Revisited by people
Now, either to repeat it,

Enact purgative vengeance
For it, or be traumatized
Simply by learning of it,

Well, that’s horror isn’t it?
Rather shallow, isn’t it,
People vs. people stuff.

Most of the planet’s surface
Is a burial ground, if
You let go of the sacred

Distinctions for human graves.
Dirt doesn’t care for your grief
Or ritual interment,

Nor for those who went before
Or will come after. That’s you.
The sacred is always you,

And what you say is sacred,
And arguments about it,
And then who’s more powerful,

Which ends encoding meanings
Of the sacred as power
And its crimes against the weak.

The spooky tales float like mist
Rising off of the forests
Of you and your sacred dead,

Your various sacred dead,
Warnings you give each other
To fear the ancient sacred,

When you know your real horror
Is of your sacred’s absence
And grim inefficacy.

Cause of Death Fiction

Fifteen years ago
Last Valentines Day,
She passed out long-stemmed
Roses her husband
Sent her on her plane.

Home two days later,
Unhinged by the meds
She’d grown addicted
To layering, washed
Down with hard liquor,

She waved a butcher
Knife at her husband
Then at her own throat,
Then ran out the door
Into city snow

And vanished somewhere
To lay low. Divorce
Papers soon followed.
She dodged them. She dodged
Interventions, dodged

To ERs for meds,
Dodged out of rehabs,
Dodged until she died
In a coma from
Septicemia.

Science Fiction

In the future, things will not be
Really all that much different.
Your descendants won’t be living

In a dystopian hellscape,
Or in a far-off star system,
Or under alien control.

If you have any descendants
They will think of you as ancient,
Your era, at least. They won’t think

Of you personally at all.
They’ll eat and sleep and defecate,
And occasionally they’ll mate.

Mostly they’ll breathe, gossip, and kvetch
About relatives and neighbors
And people who seem immoral

To them. They’ll tell untrue stories
And be fascinated by them.
They’ll live in shelters, probably

Not pods, whether all linked or not.
They’ll have work and conflict, also
Stars—whether or not they see them.

After You

Once there were a sister and brother
Who’d been raised by the side of the road
In the house where they were born then lived

Their entire lives, despite the strong winds
That frequently threatened to blow them
And their little house clean off the cliff

That the road in front of them skirted.
They did see some awful accidents
When speeding trucks plunged through the guardrails

Or tipped off the sharp turns in high winds,
And whenever winds were ominous,
Or boulders tumbled into the road,

The siblings would look at each other
And observe that now the end was near.
They didn’t have to say it. Just nod.

They knew. They both knew. They always knew.
But somehow, more windy years went on
And the little house never blew down,

And after every bad accident,
Traffic drove down the road the next day.
One night, the brother died in his sleep.

The sister carried on, only now
When winds were howling something awful,
She looked out at the cliff and nodded,

Since she’d no one to nod to at home.
One day, around sunset, when that wind
Was moaning more grimly than ever,

She wondered, as usual, if this
Was it, if this time the end was near,
And suddenly she laughed at herself.

There was never going to be an end.
She would die listening to the wind.
And, of course, one windy day, she did.

The War of the Words

There’s no stance far back
Enough, and no stance
Sufficiently close.

Sometimes the story
Defeats the monster.
Sometimes the monster

Is the narrator
Who tells the story
From that point of view.

If you know stories,
If you need stories,
If you are stories,

You know that it’s true
This world’s alien,
Especially you.

Fictile Origin

Start with a simple dyad,
Character paired to event,
Two gobs of mud to finger,

Work with, turn into figures
That you can make interact.
Character can be barren

As a pronoun—first, second,
Or third-person, singular
Or plural, any gender—

Each pick immediately
Sets up some expectation
In a half-attentive mind,

A first step to or away
From identification
Or alienation. Then,

Work even one event in—
He woke up. She walked faster.
Oh, yes. You have to have tense.

Don’t worry. Time is the wet
In the clay. Makes it squishy.
On its own, time goes one way,

But arrested by story,
It evaporates slowly.
You can twist it and fold it

Back on itself with a squeeze.
So here you go: We, sex, then.
You can use those. Begin, please.

Traho Fatis

I was once an ordinary
Soul, embodied, and not a ghost,
And I suffered the whims of chance

Much as anyone. Then one night
I woke from a dream of small hours
To discover I had new work

Before me, stripped of my own life
And assigned to choose the moments
Fated for various others.

This is not a pleasant labor,
Not healthful for my awareness,
However beyond health I am.

I don’t know why I was chosen.
The task is ceremonial
And assigned at death, more or less

As lamas are found in Tibet,
With some crew floating out to choose.
I don’t know where the others went,

Or where or when I’ll go myself
So someone can choose after me.
Perhaps some moment I select

As the last for some animal
Human will result in their turn
To replace me in this business.

Fate, for now, is what I am, do,
And all the agency I have.
Fate is all I am. I glide past

Crowds each second without a twitch,
And then something tickles me, and
I point at some poor lump. That’s it.

I guess I should be glad for this.
It’s an occupation, past death,
Fate: it’s not quite nonexistence.

But there’s never been anyone
To discuss it with. I just drift,
Absorbed in picking who won’t live,

And musing, in my vacancy,
If there’d been something that I did
When I lived that pushed me to this.

You Can’t Plan These Things

He got it into his head
A good way to end would be
To step off a rocky ledge.

To look like an accident,
He thought he’d pretend to be
Out birdwatching. Step back—whoops!

He slung some binoculars
Around his neck for effect
And sent a couple of texts

To friends, seeming excited
At having spotted something
Exotic, almost extinct,

In any case rarely seen.
He positioned himself, back
To the abyss, and looked up

So that the last thing he saw
Would be the violet sky
And crescent moon receding.

With his neck craned, he panicked
And stood, a statue, minutes
Until he gave up and left.

Years and years later, he passed
Right by that spot on the ledge
While out for a pleasant drive,

And a giant, extinct bird,
Nearly extinct at least, rare,
And almost never witnessed,

Swooped low in front of his car,
Then plunged down over the ledge,
And he knew in an instant

He’d never tell anyone
He’d seen the actual bird
He’d once pretended to death.

Fermi Paradox

The bottom of the cosmos
Spreads a sumptuous, sparkling bed

Over which the darker things
Glide as shadows, foraging.

Reefs of cloudy galaxies
Sprawl, seeded with spiky stars,

And around those spikes, billions
Of planetary systems

Spin in tumbling formations.
Some of the spheres are perfect

For eating, but they’re tiny.
Shadows filter hordes of them

In constant swallows, sifting
For the glinting percentage

Of edible ones. A few
Specialists among giants,

The sleeker, smaller shadows
Have mastered pinpoint hunting.

They can spot an edible
World in their vicinity

The moment it starts pinging,
Just breaking open its shell.

They twist their sinuous lengths
To snap it up for a bite.

Look, there’s a new planet now,
Just bristling with satellites.

Oop, and it’s gone. That was quick.
Hardly had begun to click.

The House of Expectations

Never shatters, never lets
Expectations hovering
Always just under the lip

Get away. It was a skull
Of skill with language, divine
Something or other gifted

To the species of people.
Together, the gifted pair,
Inquisitive, afterthought,

Opened the skull and let out,
As you like it, either all
The evils into the world

Or all the goods, flown away,
Never to be recovered.
Expectations crawled out, too,

But paused like a spooked insect,
Right at the lip, just under,
And got shut back up for it.

Now the keepers of the skull
Debate—are expectations
Hope that makes up for evil,

Hope, helplessly locked away,
Hope, the only good not fled,
Or the one last evil, dread?

Dear Epistolary Novelist

We quite like what you’ve accomplished—

Impressively ventriloquist—

But we do have a few questions

As the voices you’ve selected.

Do you have to pretend you’re us?

We can write, too. Just look at this.

Why so much fondness for pretense

When you’re writing in your own hand?

Still, wrapping our thoughts around it,

We think we, finally, get it—

You pretend the voices you do

Since words all ventriloquize you.

Originality’s Never Too Novel

Run plots through a baffle box
The way backgammon addicts
Roll their dice. What comes out then,

Events randomized, winnow
By offering sequences
In text screenings to random

Selections of anyone
You can drag in to read them.
Rate and repeat and repeat.

Here’s the question—do you think
You’ll get same or similar
Plots back from such processing

As the plots you started with?
Do you think they will converge
On stories you’ve never seen?

Every algorithm tests
Skill at manipulation,
But the best would be to get

Whatever’s not been gotten
Yet, but seems perfectly kin
To what’s liked best of what’s been.

Notes of A and Suiki

She finds the diary
She kept when she was six.
She reads it to her friend

Who recently unearthed
The diary that she kept
When she was eight. They both

Shriek and roll with laughter
Because their diaries
Have terrible spelling,

Of course, and don’t record
Daily events at all,
Just warnings to keep out,

Lists of likes and dislikes,
Which family members
They loved or were mad at

In that moment, crushes
On elementary
School classmates, attested

By writing the charmed name
Many times on a page,
And then, after a few entries,

Nothing. Her friend started
A new diary this year
That her father gave her

Over the holidays,
Good-quality paper
With a lock and two keys.

She might start one herself,
But what notes should she make,
Thinking about later

When she and a friend might
Compare entries again
To laugh at them now then?

Curse

A small figure in the wind
And winter sun of desert
Mesas scrabbles in the sand.

It is burying something.
What is that it’s burying?
Now it’s scurrying away,

Having left hardly a trace
Of disturbance in the dirt,
Save a scrawled curse. Don’t read it.

Leave it. Don’t be tempted. Don’t
Dig it up. It’s not for you.
It’s for later. It’s all us.