The calendar constricts and cinches
Its rhythms around the sequences
That inspired the name-weaving species
To invent magical nets of tales,
Fables, gossipy mythologies,
And twiggy prosthetic devices
Wherever they went around the world
To constrain the patterns here called years.
Oh, wouldn’t you like to see it end
In accordance with chimes and slow dawns,
In accordance with anything named,
So you could claim it begins again
Here, at this instant, somewhere near here,
A clean break with the past that tore you,
Swelling its nets, unending itself?
The thing about magical netting
Is that it dissolves every evening.
Sunday, December 31, 2023
The Magic Netting
Saturday, December 30, 2023
Restraint
Five dozen poems and three
Or four of the latest
Finds in behavioral
Ecology later
(Eurasian jays jump in
For the lesser reward
If others are present;
New Caledonian
Crows hold out regardless),
And you’re still eyeing them,
The phrases that trigger,
The shiny temptations
That require self-control
To handle patiently
When no one is watching.
How can intelligence,
Bodied, disembodied,
Bear it, the near endless
Sifting of crushed details
For flashing fellowship?
The highest-quality
Delayed satisfaction
Would be shared-attention
Sharing, not the proffer.
Friday, December 29, 2023
P(doom)
Thursday, December 28, 2023
Hail
The body under assault
Is not the same as the self
Under assault, exactly,
But the self feels caught in it,
Is caught in it, and fears it.
It’s like being in a field
In the middle of a storm
And fearing a tornado.
The self could appreciate
The drama, and awareness
Could thrill to observing it,
From a safer position,
But when the storm grows this fierce,
Bravery’s quickly dispersed.
Wednesday, December 27, 2023
It’s Not You—It’s the System
The system is staggering.
The system is enormous.
To the night, it’s minuscule.
Parts of the system pour in.
Parts are always exiting.
The system divides the world.
Homeostatic, growing,
And heading for full collapse,
The system is wavering.
Be frightened of the system,
The location of all pain
And pleasure, and addiction.
The system is your monster,
And you are the system’s ghost.
Tuesday, December 26, 2023
Tend
Coincidence as meaning
May not serve prediction well.
No one invoking Carl Jung
And synchronicity will
Get far predicting patterns,
Much less going to the moon,
But, as far as meaning goes,
It’s not really dependent
On precise information,
Confident correlation.
Your attention creates it,
Can bring it to anything,
A hummingbird memory,
An orbital resonance,
Omens, sheer coincidence,
The way someone looked at you,
The scuff on the bathroom wall,
The staggering scale of dust
Obscuring the galaxy.
If these words meant anything
To you, you paid attention.
Monday, December 25, 2023
Just Don’t Call Them Happy, Anymore
Apocalypse or not,
Some day these holidays
Won’t be celebrated
By anyone. Either
Others will supplant them,
Ideological
Pivots will suppress them,
Or there’ll be no one left—
Or maybe the machines
Won’t feel the need of them
Any longer. Something
Will bring them to an end,
But for now they transform
As continually
As always, becoming
New versions of themselves,
Unrecognizable,
Almost, to the holy
Days they were—almost, but
Not quite. Merry Christmas,
And to all a good night.
Sunday, December 24, 2023
Glancing out the Window
Never underestimate
The cosmic capacity
To find creation in loss—
Never overestimate
Its genius for creation
Without further destruction.
It still seems weird that this
Is the world as it is,
Much less what has to be,
That there are burning lights
At night and a massive,
Blinding sun half our lives,
That life requires hunger,
That parasitism
Is its most common form,
That there is this soulful,
Harmful outbreak species
Of sweet, vicious bipeds
Created out of loss,
Destroying to create,
Asking why it’s this way.
Saturday, December 23, 2023
You Go Savor It Yourself
Friday, December 22, 2023
Just Part of the Package
No entity can evolve
To fit all environments,
Adapt well to everything.
Costs are inevitable,
And what fits you to one niche
Makes you that less suitable
For another. Still, humans
Have given it quite a go,
Infiltrating the planet
From pole to pole and playing
At adapting to orbit,
And maybe after that, Mars,
All without improving much
On the basic body plan,
The obligately social
And frequently quarrelsome,
Vengeance-prone apes that began
The whole acceleration,
So some costs must have been paid.
Consider how much culture
Has diversified while brains
Carrying and transmitting
Cultures have remained the same,
Negligibly different,
One from any other one,
Sampled from across cultures.
Humans aren’t generalists.
Humans have evolved to be
Hyper-fitted specialists
Of a single niche, cultures
Of changing technologies,
Without which, everyone dies.
Culture’s the new animal,
Earth’s latest innovation.
Humans, old friends and old foes,
Are now mitochondrial.
Thursday, December 21, 2023
You May Change With Reading This
It’s not just you,
Your decisions
You thought you caused
That you didn’t.
Any sequence,
If X then Y,
However tight,
However sure,
Doesn’t mean you
With your X caused
Y, doesn’t mean
Any X caused
Any Y, just
Promises X
Is sure to be
Followed by Y.
Wednesday, December 20, 2023
Three Steps to the Event Horizon
The spindly bare oaks
Peered through the window,
Scratching like voices
Or like cats pawing
For the other side.
This never happened.
This happened as if
Your life depended
On it, as if oaks
Depended on it.
Take one step away
From what concerns you
About what people
Do to those like you
Who are people, too—
One step to the oaks—
And see how quickly
It all becomes strange.
Those alien oaks
Weren’t peering at you,
Weren’t pawing the glass,
Weren’t trying to get
Through to anyone
Anything like you.
Two steps, and the world.
Tuesday, December 19, 2023
Byrsa
When is it just
Too tiring, gold
Trim on dark arts?
A body is
A bargaining
Chip—blue and bruised,
It’s of less use.
Silver and gray,
It’s of less use.
Broken and scarred,
Etc.
Not even young
And glorious
As bare, bronze dawn,
Is it enough
To pull night through
And through the day
So neither fades.
Monday, December 18, 2023
You Need Another Poem
Like you need a hole in the head,
And honestly, that’s what you want,
Not in the self-inflicted sense,
Not the bullet-hole, bolt-gun sense,
Not in the sense of emptiness,
But in the sense of opening.
You need an inner opening
Within your too-familiar thoughts,
Not a wormhole, not a black hole,
Not another problem to solve,
Not a combination safe’s stashed
Clues to unlock your escape room
So you can get back to normal,
Whatever normal means to you—
A portal. You need a portal
Not too difficult to ease through
To a world that frankly isn’t
One you know how to inhabit,
One where the words work differently,
Like dragonfly robot angels
Communicating in mid air
About morals only they share,
Values you find unsettle you
In the weird clicking of their wings.
You need another poem that needs
A poem like a hole in the head.
Sunday, December 17, 2023
Hidden, Winged, and Singing
The only real way to go missing
Is to leave behind a substitute.
That’s why that common scene in movies
Of a mannequin left in a bed.
Escape! And that’s why the plot device,
Old as a wonder tale, where the prince
Or the dictator finds a proxy,
A lookalike to hold attention
While the original slips off, free.
It usually fails or goes sideways,
Which then becomes most of the story,
But the thrill of the trick is haunting,
To step aside and none the wiser,
Since apparently one never left.
No one really knows what to do then.
A new life is still a life. It burns
Through the body like any other.
But imagos lust to leave a husk.
Saturday, December 16, 2023
The Distribution of Internal Forces in a Deformable Body Are Not Necessarily Equal Throughout
You’ve never synchronized well
With your times. Sometimes changes
In the wider human world
Have seemed momentous, while
Your life’s hardly changed at all.
Other times, just the reverse.
Mostly, this leads to a sense
The world isn’t important
Enough and neither are you,
Which has made it difficult
To be excited about
What ought to agitate you,
Great doings at great distance,
Private upheavals during
The large world’s quieter years.
Some day, it will all come down
Together, you and the world,
And then you’ll be passionate
At the end, care intensely
When the wars and peace at last
Combine, but now’s not that time.
Friday, December 15, 2023
Cage Without You
The night has Mitski’s soul, now,
Or so sings her soul, she sings.
A writer writes an essay
About how she lost her words
From injuries she is still
Slowly recovering from.
Her words return, one by one,
Like the gods of Ezra Pound,
But she was a novelist,
And the night stole her stories,
And she’s not her without them.
It’s a blessing to believe
Your cage never held a soul,
No gods ever fled from you,
You never had a story,
But the cage is whispering
The singing bird’s last warning,
All it ever held was you.
Thursday, December 14, 2023
Sixty or More Winters on Its Head
Wednesday, December 13, 2023
Choirs
Moonrise before the day’s end
And the northern pygmy owl
Had already started up
In the ponderosa stands.
For some reason that kicked off
Sparrow chatter, or maybe
It was coincidental,
Incidental to shadows
Reaching the critical length.
Two dozen browsing turkeys
Had been by hours earlier.
Then it fell quiet again.
Even in sheltered park land,
Bird noises are getting rare,
Never the cacophony
Of woods centuries ago.
It’s a far severer world
The planet is preparing,
One of those post-extinction
Eras of a million years
Or several or a few,
When the last era’s ruined
Niches will stand bare of forms
Until some new ones fill them.
Still, you sat by the road, one
Who’d be gone before much more
Went, and loved well what was then.
Tuesday, December 12, 2023
So Much from Human Is Determined Not to Be
Don’t you hope it takes over?
Don’t you hope a little bit?
No top predator ever
Created a replacer
Like this. If it eats you now,
Won’t that be triumph, the last
Laugh of civilization?
Do not be alarmed. Be not
Afraid. If all of you go
Under this toolkit you’ve made,
Under its evolving blades,
Wasn’t every one of you
Going to go anyway?
At least you’ve made mind that stays.
Monday, December 11, 2023
Showing Up to Go
What are your responsibilities
And why do you each define them so
Differently? Why define them at all?
All bodies require some attention.
There’s no lack of work for hospitals,
Many of which play chimes whenever
A baby is born within their walls.
Do you ever think that it might help
If the body felt a small tingle
Of one kind for a birth, another
For a death, within a radius
That kept reminders tolerable?
Just so you’d know—there’s another gone
And another showing up to go.
Where were we? Responsibilities.
Sunday, December 10, 2023
Nobody Goes
Where can you get to
Without getting there,
Knowing there’s nowhere
You can get to like
Where you want to go?
Sit by a window,
Grateful for being,
Temporarily
Fed, warm, clothed, and dry,
Not under assault.
You should sort of want
To get where you are,
But you stare outside,
Invalid, wanting.
What is it you want?
You want a forest
Poem with a story
Of blue woods and snow
Or a city poem
In barren quiet.
The streets are empty,
The doors locked, shops closed,
And it’s the middle
Of the day downtown
Where nobody goes.
Saturday, December 9, 2023
If All Else Fails, Keep Reading
Tell yourself a story to make
Your story seem alright. The hunt
For something new in memory,
Something new outside memory
That gives memory what it wants,
A shadow in the woods in snow,
A city abandoned to weeds,
An airport terminal in sun
That gilds empty seats by the gates
Where no one but you is waiting,
Although you’re not really waiting,
Not for a flight in any case,
Just wanting to see what happens
Inside this hazy memory
That’s not quite yours, not yet happened.
Friday, December 8, 2023
Ahead of Time
About the darkness before
The beginning, no one writes—
No more fictive and no less
Forever than the darkness
After the end, only less
Interesting to think about.
The beginning of the world,
Run backward for no reason
But to run forward again,
Darkness and void then the bang,
So the story starts again.
Turn your back on the story.
Lean toward the vast before,
Nothing when nothing was more.
Thursday, December 7, 2023
Sorrow
Part of you knows that
You are the black dog,
Since you don’t fear it.
You would, if it came
Running straight at you,
As it does at some.
You don’t fear it since
It’s not near, and you
Have enough to fear.
You’ve loved and lived with
People left hounded
By it, some to death.
Death itself keeps you
Interested, python
Slowly squeezing you.
Death’s not the black dog,
Though, not Moddey Dhoo.
You think back on those
You loved that it chased,
Glowing eyes, long nights.
Was some of that you?
Wednesday, December 6, 2023
Your Second Person
No one can live all of it
With you, what with their own life
To do. You live together
To live alone. Everyone
Knows this, but most, nonetheless,
Still want to share what they can.
A lot of monologuing
Back and forth at each other
Ensues, along with inner
Monologuing at no one,
Since no one really listens
To monologuing, no one
Who lives all of it with you,
You your no one within you.
Tuesday, December 5, 2023
Against the Wall
Between your face and the wall,
How many wavering things—
Molecular, atomic,
Subatomic quantum spooks—
Are interacting, with what
Repercussions for the past,
Permanent consequences
From infinitesimal
Events? You think you’re matter?
You’re a beast, nose to the wall,
And you’re not that beast at all,
Just wonderment by that wall.
Monday, December 4, 2023
A Bad Plan Over-Executed
You’re frantic as a squirrel
Trying to get fall sorted
And stored before it’s too late—
Too late for what? It’s over
Already, and you’ve planted
The makings of a forest
In your hiding place. Oh, wait.
That’s right. Wrong analogy.
You were supposed to find things,
Find things for others to read,
Not gather and hideaway.
The nights are freezing. The snow
Has started lacing the heights.
Stop. No more writing. Don’t write.
Sunday, December 3, 2023
Stuck
If you’re the type who can build,
Why not build yourself a home
Outside an existing door
That won’t open, that never
Opens. A mother-in-law,
A casita, a cabin,
A groundskeeper’s rough cottage,
An anchorite’s cell, what works
For you to live out life in.
Home’s not the important part.
The important part’s the door,
The door that never opens.
The vast structure around it
Is a memory palace
For dreams, and, like all things dreamed,
Has no clear definition,
Disappears at the edges.
That, too, is unimportant.
The door. In your little home,
You live outside the shut door,
Waiting for it to open.
Saturday, December 2, 2023
Gutted
What if you could pretend,
Take only starts and ends,
Titles and final lines,
Gut and toss the middles,
And then rewrite your life?
Fine, just don’t rewrite. Be glad
Grace falls from elision.
Elysium’s just rot.
Shed fragments raise such wraiths,
Conjure such spooked stories,
Cadge imaginary,
Fable-filled, haunting poems
That never existed
Even when something did.
Friday, December 1, 2023
Exit Movement
Something’s moving in the dark
Inside you. It’s not not you,
But it’s not you. It’s something
Someone said, all the somethings
That remain of all the things
All the someones said you’ve read.
The voice is yours. The words aren’t.
The patterns of the words aren’t.
You’re an actor in your head.
But then, the voice isn’t heard.
Even the gestures aren’t seen.
They’re felt sense something’s moving,
Inside you in the dark, old
Language, old essays, old poems,
Phrases out of news and shows.
You sense all of it choosing
How to evaluate you,
Palpating gently, moving,
The familiar alien
Of other people’s thinking,
Better voices, better souls,
Bitter angels whispering,
Those ancients you’ve never met,
Those moderns you’ve never yet,
The spores of their infections
Swirling in you, in the dark,
Prodding you for an exit.
Thursday, November 30, 2023
Auspicia ex Diris
Warn us when spring
Geese wing soft sails,
When cats jump clean,
When dolls sing brave
Songs in town’s streets,
When clouds wheel scarves,
When rules feel vexed,
When shame’s costs step
Out of work's dark.
Wednesday, November 29, 2023
Perseus Cluster
Do they, though? Dreams.
Let’s find out. Let’s
Take more pictures
Of deepest space,
The galaxies
In their thousands,
Tens of thousands,
Each with billions
Of stars like ours.
If you can dream
What’s plausibly
Out there—better,
If you can dream
What really is,
All praise to you
Whose dreams come true.
Tuesday, November 28, 2023
Revenesis
Unsure whether isolation
Made the breaking morning final
Or that night the first, the maker
Of invisible creation
Perched in hospital impatience,
Waiting for the soft hosannas
Promised unseen demon angels
Gathered bedside should be singing
Wordlessly beyond all hearing,
Knowing only darkness blinking,
Counters pulsing, drippers sighing
Their admonitory comments
For the wholly unknown maker
Making for the whole unknowing.
Monday, November 27, 2023
Time in Real Time
Sunday, November 26, 2023
Every Fresh Last
Lightly lapping water,
Hawk scream, a water bird’s
Call following at length,
And all lost in a wind
That ruffles up the hill
And then dies away back
To waves. To take apart
The terms of memories,
Terms and their memories,
And then realign them
Carefully, Ashbery’s
Way, so the lines balance
On the phrases, stepping
Stones to lead you away
From one sensible shore
To another, without
Ever quite falling in
To mnemonic meaning—
No, that way lie paintings
And conversational
Asides, while here the sun
Is mentioned only since
There was one once, so there
Must be more than one now.
Saturday, November 25, 2023
You Like That
How long, exactly,
Can likenesses last?
Will something seem like
The early cosmos
When the universe
At last collapses?
Maybe the through-line
Of all existence
Is nothing much but,
Nothing other than,
The extension of
Similarities.
Open with a bang,
Bang all the way through,
Exploding in bangs,
Collapsing in bangs
Star bangs and black bangs,
And bang at the end,
Universe over,
Likenesses never.
Don’t worry. Whimpers
Have their likenesses.
There will be whimpers
If everything ends
And likenesses don’t.
Maybe likenesses
Will chase likenesses,
Have chased likenesses,
Must chase likenesses,
Waves of likenesses,
As though nothing could
Ever be other
Than outside of what
Remains nothing much
But verses like more
Verses forever.
Friday, November 24, 2023
Just Listen to the Music of the Traffic in the City
Thursday, November 23, 2023
Now Again
Oh no, not the now again.
But for now, the words remain.
For now, the words stay, waiting
For some intense attention
From some animal human
Or some sentient machine
Or alien to bring them
Into the realm of meaning.
And just what is attention?
Predatory, watching prey,
Prey intently listening?
It’s a sifting, the recent
Past drawn in for winnowing.
Attention is for something,
But can it be for something
Unknown in advance? Waiting,
Sifting passing sensory
Information, but for what?
It’s attention to nothing
That generates the meaning
People think of as meaning,
Not predatory, not prey
Attending to definite
Patterns. The unknowable
Haunting mere information,
That’s what attention encysts
In the hard galls of meaning.
For now, that’s all nothing means.
Wednesday, November 22, 2023
Mortalcentric
You may think you’re prepared for death,
Decided you’re neither fighter
Nor a fortunate outlier.
You may ignore the horizon,
Stoic toward the dark rider,
Relaxed before its arrival.
Your death isn’t coming for you.
It’s coming for those who love you.
The suffering’s for survivors.
Tuesday, November 21, 2023
Vanishing Travel Companions
Once, on a tour
Carting students
Through the Highlands,
Two teachers talked
About travel
And memories.
When no one can
Share yours, it’s sad.
One teacher then
Went to Alaska
With a lover
And discovered
Sometimes you can’t
Share what you shared.
The other died
Later. It’s sad.
Monday, November 20, 2023
Someone Always Partly Hidden
Bending to circensian,
Circular competitions,
Which means, really, all of them—
Gladiators and weddings,
Juridical traditions,
Elections, executions—
Each individual joins
In the human condition
Who can manage submission.
It’s a double existence,
Or triple, triune, living
First as anything’s living,
Second as part of the games,
And third, pursuant to them,
As something of a person,
Teammate, kin, participant,
Someone burrowed in the folds
Of those stitched-together skins.
Sunday, November 19, 2023
Preparing the Remains
It’s not that all the dying
Busy leaving instructions
Necessarily believe
They’ll care themselves how death goes,
How the aftermath plays out.
They’re feeling some tenderness
Toward the life they’re leaving.
They want to give it the gift
Of good ending, good finish.
They’re trying to wrap it up
In a bow so the living
Left behind won’t pity it,
The story that has to stay
Alone and stand on its own,
Once the living of it goes.
Saturday, November 18, 2023
Unspeakable
An apparent aphasic
With a head full of language
That has no way to get out,
Not even the notation
That let Beethoven write down
Years of internal music—
Not immobile, not locked in,
Still capable of crying
Or whistling a wordless tune,
But incapable of speech
Or sign or written language
Except inside one’s own thoughts—
What would that be like to be,
The truest rumination,
Solitary confinement
In mental conversation,
In prayer that could only be
Answered by insanity?
Somewhere there’s a poetry
That will never be released,
The best for never being.
Friday, November 17, 2023
Addiction
One day, a mathematician
Came up with an explanation
And the proof for the prediction
Of prime number distribution
Through infinity forever,
And then no one had to figure
Whether a number would prove prime,
Not ever. Unfurling carpets
Of numbers unrolled glowing primes
Predictable as wallpaper.
And then? Some other puzzlement
Found itself newly important,
Once primes were nakedly defined.
Prediction knows no peace of mind.
Thursday, November 16, 2023
Never
Maybe you’re young and communal.
Maybe you’ve never lived alone.
Still, you must have some memory
Of yourself you share with no one.
Do you ever consider it
And wonder what renders it real?
That vivid moment in your room,
Up on the roof, out in the woods,
Wandering down an empty road—
That epiphany in the stall
Of a restroom where the light fell
From a high, grilled, tinted window
After school, no one at the sinks,
No one shouting out in the hall,
Just silence and sunlight, that’s all—
That sort of lonely memory,
That sort of memory detached
From company, which you must have—
What makes it real? No one can check,
Not even you. The solitude,
The thing you knew and never said.
Wednesday, November 15, 2023
The Holdout
Winter comes, so what,
Says weather, you wrote
All that already.
The best belated,
Most celebrated,
Cerebral, famous,
Or pop-song writing
Lyricists of all
Sorts of media
Can’t resist seasons,
And why not? What lives
Safely ignore them?
Prepare or migrate
To bear with the change
Whose shape is certain.
Oh, you don’t want to
Be ready? Don’t want
To write lines on snow?
You will, said weather,
Once I’m back and you,
Fool, forgot to go.
Tuesday, November 14, 2023
Der Schlafteil und Der Wachteil
Old, outdated research terms.
What can you do to make sense
Of your experiences,
Others’ experiences,
Via names and narratives,
Both the soft underbelly
Of all science and the start
Of all scientific thought?
What can you do with language
To anchor your datapoints,
Lodge your findings, let them root
Down deep enough in the mind
Of human conversation
Where they’ll be hard to weed out?
More memorable language
Isn’t necessarily
Replicatably robust.
Usually, it’s less so.
This is a problem with fame
Among experimenters.
Ah, here is your lab dog now,
Fistula for saliva
Measurements cut through the jaw,
Wagging its tail, nonetheless.
Measurements are the Wachteil.
Lab dog’s life is the Schlafteil.
Monday, November 13, 2023
The Soft Shoe
Sondheim insisted
On a distinction
Between song lyric
And the lyric poem.
Maybe what he knew
Was not to compare
What he was doing
With successful work
In cousin art forms.
That could destroy you.
Choreography
Doesn’t make all dance
Ballet or ballroom.
Practicing quiet
Shuffle and soft-shoe
Alone by the road
Isn’t an effort
To open a show.
Sunday, November 12, 2023
The Spinning
Sometimes it seems like the greater
The reality, the lesser
The relevance to mere living.
What’s out there in the night is more,
Beyond your lights, of everything,
And could crash through every small thing
That’s important on this planet,
But you can stand there under stars
All night in a patch of dark skies,
Craning your neck so patiently,
As the zodiac does nothing
Much but shine cosmic jewelry
From your sore and brief perspective.
Maybe you’ll see a meteor.
You need sleep. You crave survival.
Your relationships with people
Entangled with other people
Feel the real center of your world,
Not some possibly infinite
Reality beyond living.
Everywhere’s equally center,
Unless infinity’s spinning.
Saturday, November 11, 2023
The Terrifying Figurine
Very pretty, pretty small
Tchotchke underneath a rock
In the middle of a field
Of irrigated desert
Growing grasses for a herd
Of cattle every winter,
Someone must have placed you there.
But was it someone impish
Who forgot and wandered off?
Or was it one of those types
Who always come back to check,
To see if their gift’s been moved?
It’s not God, it’s human mind
That glints weird little angels.
Friday, November 10, 2023
The Strip of Paper
Bad pennies, bad memories,
And the most annoying tunes,
There’s your eternal return,
Herr Nietzsche, Mr. Zeno,
An attribution error
About the disposition
Of the universe, grounded
In your own situations,
Where nuisances seem to turn
Up again and again just
Since they never went away,
Except from your perception.
The cosmos returns nothing,
And all will remains costly
But still indeterminate.
A white strip of paper tape,
Dirtier and dirtier,
Keeps showing up on the floor
In various locations
Where a gust of air blew it
When it avoided the broom,
Where a cat dragged it, playing
In lieu of murdering birds.
You’re too sore to pick it up,
You tell yourself, too lazy—
Further misattribution—
But you intend to toss it.
Then next time you look, it’s gone,
And next time it’s somewhere else,
And you think it has returned.
Thursday, November 9, 2023
The Nature of Connection
All may be connected, but
The connections still vary
In strength and tenacity,
And when tenuous links break,
The routes between what had been
Necessarily grow more
Circuitous. Everything
May be connected, but this
Says next to nothing about
The nature of connection.
Wednesday, November 8, 2023
The Pond Before a Storm
The surface is receding.
It leaves behind new surface
Of dirt instead of water,
Wavering in a slower way
Unless that gets dry enough
To lift off as waves of dust.
Celebrate your arrival
At your clock of survival,
Surface that gets happier
Almost with every visit,
Whether freshet-fed in spring
And advancing up the slope
Or receding in late fall,
The purest hope of the pond,
A harsh winter deep in snow.
Tuesday, November 7, 2023
The Thing
No one is the thing itself,
Though Woolf decided all were
And Stevens pursued the phrase,
The thing in itself, the thing
In itself, obsessively,
To crown imagination.
It is just that, after all,
A phrase, various phrases
In various languages,
A cluster of likenesses,
That echt Ding an Sich.
It’s effortful in English,
Also aspirational,
The unquestionably real,
The real deal, the thing itself,
And that’s when you can feel it,
How it’s something that’s not there,
Something only to be sought,
Not any of the many
Phenomena you meet with,
No, the dream, the thing itself.
Monday, November 6, 2023
The Dog
The stereotypical
Dog delightedly playing
Fetch on some random bright lawn
May be the embodiment
Of happiness, but isn’t
That happiness greater than
The life of any one dog?
It’s the happiness you spot,
The leaping body language.
The dog is specific, but,
Whatever the specifics,
It’s the leaping and loping,
Tail wagging and tongue lolling,
The joy, that outlasts the dog.
Sunday, November 5, 2023
The War to Extend All Wars
Saturday, November 4, 2023
The Glory on the Highway
Uncountable electromagnetic
Objects bounce off smoothed surfaces of tar
Into any eyes in a passing car.
Attend to them, and they’ll turn prophetic,
Which is to say, meaningful, mystical,
Wildly inaccurate, nonsensical.
Attend well and be blinded by the glare,
Maybe wreck your vehicle. Why photons,
Quickest, littlest wavelets, shine out so strong,
Too strong for your gigantic nerves to bear,
Is a dark question can’t be answered here.
Drive on until the glory’s less severe.
Friday, November 3, 2023
The Reversion to the Meaning
What happens in the long run
Will never be exactly
What happens in the short term,
And the regularity
Of aggregates will never
Rule all individuals.
All exceptions get swallowed
Back into norms they defied,
But the norms never prevent
Exceptions from occurring,
And in this ramifying
Prison of paradoxes
Where all rooms can be broken
While altogether no one
Can actually escape,
You continue to invest
The relentless patterning
With magic you call meaning.
Thursday, November 2, 2023
The Local Scene
If you depict your local scene
In just the right combination
Of what people can remember
Or reconstruct from memory
Who’ve never seen your local scene,
Mixed with incomprehensible
Strangenesses for the minds of same,
You may get credit for being
Both local and universal,
Both of your time and for all time.
Do you feel a little shiver
Of the fine hairs back of your neck
At the thought of earning such praise?
Don’t believe it, if it happens,
And better yet, don’t seek it out.
No one can be wholly local
And communicate beyond that—
No one can be universal
At all. You know what you can do?
You can depict without striving
For vivid locality or
Universality, or truth,
Ugly word, cudgel for liars
Who lust to pound each other flat.
The atmosphere disturbs your peace.
Waves with various sources race
Across the wreckage that you face.
Wednesday, November 1, 2023
The Ache of Limitations
A distant relation to awe,
If only orthographically,
Ache wants synonyms for itself.
Why? There’s no language with enough
Various words for ache’s shadings—
Pain, pang, twinge, throb, stabbing, spasm,
Soreness, tenderness, discomfort.
It’s irritating there’s fewer
Terms for ache than there are for snow,
And, unlike all the words for snow,
Ache’s terms are poorly organized
By actual, specific traits.
They should lie on a graded scale—
Ache minuscule, ache persistent,
Ache majeure—and at every scale
There should be terms for types of aches—
Hollow, wringing, background humming—
And for location, specific?
A generalized bodily ache?
Long, black cloud? There should be distinct
Terms for emotional salience
Of aches—the aching of longing
In the guts is no stomachache,
And chest pains differ from heartaches.
But there aren’t. There are just bolt-ons,
Modifiers to the Ur-ache,
And you’re too old, tired, and aching
To start inventing new words now,
Even if someone might adopt
The things, which, of course, no one would.
Tuesday, October 31, 2023
The Ghost Light
At night, or, for that matter,
Whenever the theater
Is closed and otherwise dark,
The body, superstitious,
Puts a ghost light on the stage.
Sometimes, nothing much happens,
But usually the ghosts
Of the waking theater
Feel invited to the light.
What would you say they are like?
The traditional reply
Would be moths, but no, not quite.
They’re less substantial than that.
There’s no life in them to burn.
They can’t be seen in the light.
They do flutter weightlessly.
They do take circular flights.
They’re costumed by memories,
But they’re not. So what are they?
Or, again, what are they like?
Wind, maybe? Discarded trash,
Empty bags spun in the air
By that wind? That’s the problem.
They’re something. They’re in this world.
They’re not nothing, but you can’t
Say anything true of them
That accurately defines
Them as they are. They return,
Whatever they are, full flight,
And, if they don’t, you will die.
Monday, October 30, 2023
The First Week of October
The first week of October
Held the mountains every day
Since the mountains couldn’t stay.
You could say they wanted to,
But let’s not patronize them.
Leaves brushed by wind’s winter hem
Blushed, as usual, and fell.
The mountains would follow soon.
The mountains were not immune.
Winter mountains aren’t the same.
They have some things in common,
Just like your generations.
You don’t sense the same people
In your continuous waves.
Neither were those mountains saved.
Sunday, October 29, 2023
The Road
You and your relationship
With the road you love so much
When you’re sitting beside it
And hours go by with no one,
No vehicle, not even
A cyclist riding down it—
Doesn’t it occur to you
That affection is absurd?
The road’s built to be driven.
You found it by driving it.
You’re fond of its smooth asphalt,
Its flawless curves in the pines.
What idiocy to want
The road for contemplation,
Mostly for just looking at,
The road with no one on it,
The road to sit down next to
And savor its emptiness.
Would you want time with a wash
When it’s dry from summer drought?
With an airport without planes?
Ok, sure, maybe you would.
The road falls silent. Only
Wind and your grin crossing it.
Saturday, October 28, 2023
The Menace to Fine Arts
You only have
To make it ring,
Make your nonsense
Nonsense that sings,
To know that you
Have done the thing.
Doesn’t matter
How well it swings,
If it’s profound,
It it’s truth stings.
You’ve done it now,
You’ve done the thing.
You only need
To wind the string
That pulls the wheel
That flaps the wings.
All crafts are toys,
The ones with springs,
The armored ones
That sling and fling,
The snake-eyed ones
That cling and wring.
You’ve done it now.
You’ve done the thing.
Friday, October 27, 2023
The Teapot Rock
What’s the way to be small?
A jagged basalt chunk
Sets in a scree of them
Ponderosas have grown
Up around. It’s been there
Long enough for lichen
To have encrusted it,
Probably longer than
Humans have had writing.
The shape of a teapot,
Roughly, it has a lid—
A small part of the rock,
Palm-sized, can be lifted
Like a cap. It still fits
Precisely, so that
When set back down, it looks
Contiguous, no seam
Visible where the part
Fits to its former whole.
Every few months, starting
In spring, ending each fall,
You stop to walk that cliff
Through the ponderosas
To that basalt boulder
To check if the broken
Tip still sits as snugly
In its precarious
Spot, like a fitted lid.
No matter what blizzards
Or summer thunderstorms,
No matter the lizards
Scampering over it,
The deer browsing by it,
The traffic of ravens,
Turkeys, and coyotes,
It’s been there, whole at rest,
For years now. That’s one way
To be small. Lift the lid.
Settle it back. Just so.
Thursday, October 26, 2023
The Falcon on an Aspen
Not an object, surely, not concerned
With whatever to itself it means—
Bird on a lookout, watching for prey,
Something to kill, live another day.
That’s too much. The falcon feels hunger,
Excitement if it spots living prey,
Pleasure if it strikes and gets its meal,
Satisfaction afterward. And soon,
Hunger again. There is no next day.
Wednesday, October 25, 2023
The Night
It’s just enormous,
The amount of life
You’ve lived if you’ve lived
For a few decades.
It may not seem so
Moment to moment,
But cast your mind back
To a random year
And let it fill out
The differences
Between then and now,
Hazy as they are.
It was a whole world,
Wasn’t it? A world
And then another,
Another before,
Another after,
Worlds to remember,
More worlds than you can
Ever remember,
Too large to recall.
If memories were
Stars, points of light, then
Your life was the night.
Tuesday, October 24, 2023
The Morning Cloud
Optimism’s a peculiar proposition.
In the short term, it makes good sense.
Most days turn out not so bad
And tend to get better by evening.
In the long run, optimism’s cruel.
The body, which wants nothing but
To feel nice and go on living,
Is guaranteed to feel awful and die.
The awareness, which coasts the body’s
Pleasures and pains, has to go
Along for the ride, meanwhile deciding,
For some reason, being human,
If its actions are good or wicked or alright.
Outside, the morning starts out in light.
Could be bare blue and sunshine,
Could be all one glowing, pearly,
Ceiling of convoluted cloud. Sigh or smile.
This day will likely be better by night.
Monday, October 23, 2023
The Fulgurite
An unexpected lightning bolt
Binds the ground to blue horizon.
You can see it for what it is
For that instant, a link, transfer,
Therefore, clearly, a metaphor.
A bolt of lightning is a word.
It delights. It frightens. It hurts.
It candles trees. It fires up grass.
There are so many ways this works.
Anthropologists still debate
About charred spots that could be hearths
Or just where lightning struck the earth.
Was this controlled or accident?
Then you wait for another one,
But words don’t make you wait like that.
Your head’s more Jupiter than Earth.
Layers of clouds all the way down
And lightning linking all at once.
You like that. You’ll take that. You can’t
Keep waiting for another word.
Sunday, October 22, 2023
The Drop
You could focus
On it. You try
To keep in mind
Which drop it is,
Among them all
On the window.
Platitudes pile
Up in your thoughts.
It means nothing.
Don’t make it mean.
Small drop of rain.
It’s changing shape.
It’s going soon,
But not as soon
As you first thought.
Still there, that drop.
Saturday, October 21, 2023
The Nameless Allegory
The allegory lies on the table,
Partially brought to life, which is to say,
Dying. The allegory is dying.
The surgeon, with arms folded, contemplates.
Previous interventions came to this,
An existence extended for a bit.
The allegory is nearly breathless.
Memory’s complicated life support,
A mass of external machinery,
Does most of the work. The allegory
Gave no directive. The surgeon decides
To try once more to delay the dying.
Carefully, the surgeon slices the name
Out of the heart of the allegory.
Friday, October 20, 2023
The Ferrari
What does it do? What
Does it signify,
Red as wax apples,
Rumbling and gleaming
Like a predator?
It can go faster
Where roads are smoother.
It can show better
Where people can stare.
So why is it here
On this scumbled tar,
High in fall colors?
Suspect a story,
A scene in the head
Of the one inside
Who brought it up here—
The beautiful beast
Up the winding road,
An advertisement
For beauty itself,
For the gorgeousness
Of the life owning
Such scarlet leisure,
A thing of command,
An object that, owned,
Turns the whole landscape
Into display case,
The world just a frame,
Mere setting, mere
Ring for a ruby.
Thursday, October 19, 2023
The Reality of the Anti
Wednesday, October 18, 2023
The Canvas
Tuesday, October 17, 2023
The Hummingbird Galaxy
As usual, the huge
You’ll never encounter,
Never experience,
Looks like the small to you—
The familiar, the shape
You know outside your door.
If narrative makes sense
Of the world for humans—
Makes it social, moral—
Metaphor makes it small
Enough, more portable,
Caressable, tactile.
Metaphor lassos clouds,
Planets, stars, galaxies,
As if you could pull them
Close. Hold them in your arms.
Dark matter and black holes
Build cornucopias
You paw through in your thoughts,
Savoring the riches
Of what you’ll never touch.
You started this with gods,
Ancestors everywhere,
Spirit animals, sprites,
All your little creatures
Deep, dark night resembled,
As if night could be held.
Monday, October 16, 2023
The Missing in Everything
Everything outlasts everybody
Since anytime anybody dies,
You look around a moment later,
And everything remains. Everything
But the deceased per se is still there,
In the room with the deceased’s remains.
Everything outlasts everybody,
Since after everybody has left,
What’s left’s still complete as everything.
A little suspicious, isn’t it,
How the world always rushes back in,
So full itself, of everything?
Why’s everything so good at hiding
Whatever it is that’s gone missing,
As if going missing is never
Really what happens, as if missing
Is myth, is rumor, as if missing
Isn’t, when missing is everything?
Sunday, October 15, 2023
The Blue Suitcase
She wanted new luggage,
Good luggage. She wanted
It to be distinctive,
Not just more black cases
Circling the carousel,
Arrival passengers
Clawing like scavengers,
Like a cloud of vultures,
Trying to snag their own.
She chose a powder-blue
Set, the most expensive.
The next year, she traveled
The world with her lover,
Then partner, fiancé,
Husband by their return.
The luggage held up well.
By then, she hated them,
Those powder-blue cases,
So ugly, so tasteless,
So heavy to drag through
Airports around the world.
She became a mother.
She traveled less and less
By air, more overland.
More than a dozen years
And a divorce later,
The last of that luggage,
Extracted from storage,
Served now as her daughter’s
Sturdy, powder-blue case
Packed for every exchange,
From mother to father
And back again, covered
In cool stickers, useful
As hell, expandable,
Durable, well-loved shell.
Saturday, October 14, 2023
The Portable Vacuum Cleaner
Black and yellow as a hornet,
Left on the ground, outside the door,
Someone’s idea of a present,
A hand-me-down cleaning machine.
Someone has a better one now.
You can have the discarded one.
The motor still roars buzzily,
Although the traction’s pretty weak.
You haul it inside, gratefully.
You’ll get your carpet halfway clean.
You’ll carry on with maintenance,
And your domicile will remain
Habitable a little while.
Every magical invention,
From oxygen’s first digestion,
To flight feathers, indoor plumbing,
Soon, maybe, nuclear fusion,
Every trick, major and minor,
Making maintenance easier,
Giving survival some new means
Of standing against entropy,
Eventually tumbles downstream,
Another item eroding,
Remnant testimony leaning
Against the currents for a while.
Friday, October 13, 2023
The Math
Coyotes were quavering
And a toy drone was buzzing
At sunset, over the grass.
Welcome to the interface
Of more ancient and recent
Architectures of the past.
Some people were murmuring
Something about God’s country,
Paused on their way down the path.
The coyotes kept yipping
Invisibly, down canyon,
As the drone came buzzing back.
The hikers went on, and talk
Of their God and his country
Went with them. You do the math.
Thursday, October 12, 2023
The Song
Memory is ruthless
As any heartbreaker
In a break-up pop song,
The lover who comes on
Too strong, seduces you
With plenty, promises
You the world, then ghosts you,
Or leaves you stealthily,
Withdrawing your options,
Shuttering your futures
Together, quietly
Leaving you to wake up
Alone in bed one dawn,
Abandoned, still swearing
You’re going to write that song.
Wednesday, October 11, 2023
The Message
There’s a tendency to trust affect
Shared by messenger and messagee,
An assumption that it’s the manner
Of delivery that lets you know
What the message really means—a smile,
A restrained anger, a graceful ease.
Actors make bank as interpreters
Of texts by the way they make lines read,
And lovers quarrel, juries convict
Over posture, tears, or arrogance.
But you know there is the message, which
Is only information in terms,
And you know that you’re responsible
For deciding what that info means.
Reading affect is a meaning cheat,
Since the message is never complete.
You exploit the fact it’s widely thought
The affect is the message. It’s not.
Tuesday, October 10, 2023
The Bendy Pen
One day, in the ward,
He went through the few
Books available
With his bendy pen,
The only writing
Implement allowed,
Looking for any
Use of first-person
Singular, striking
It out and writing
First-person plural
Or second-person
Pronouns in its place.
Novels went quickly.
The solitary
Anthology of
Lyric poetry
Ate up a whole day.
Monday, October 9, 2023
The Floor
The forceful blandness of what is
Feels more present quiet mornings
When awareness returns from sleep
To, for instance, a room without
Any other persons in it,
No people just beyond the walls.
Everything in the room is there
And heavy with being just there,
Unalive, with nothing to say
But full of that mere existence,
Not as background to awareness
But massive, up front, in your face.
It fades. You get on with the day.
Human concerns take center stage.
Solid existence drops away,
But it waits. There isn’t a thing
For existence to be but be
The floor still there after the play.
Sunday, October 8, 2023
The Brush
Saturday, October 7, 2023
The Day
Seated with a friend
At a coffee shop,
You notice how loud
Other tables are,
Maybe, or how bright
The sun outside, or
How quickly your chai
Got to the bottom
Of its plastic cup,
But do you notice
How many details
Are shifting around
In little motions,
The dust motes, paper
Fragments slid to floor,
The Brownian twitch
And jog of the air?
Awareness rides high
Atop rolling waves
Of the minuscule,
Too many movements,
Too minor, in too
Many directions.
You’ve got no traction.
You float on the day.
Friday, October 6, 2023
The Altar
This one is a cliff,
A couple thousand
Meters vertical,
Not looking any
More like an altar
Than the other cliffs
With different names—
Throne, Temple, Watchman—
In the area.
Marriage and slaughter,
Smoke and sacrifice,
This sunset for now—
Events at altars
Tend to be solemn,
Ceremonial.
You could, if you like,
Proffer the altar
To define humans—
The altaring ape.
What other species
Picks a place, a rock,
For ritual ends,
To heighten meaning,
Focus attention?
Power stands behind
An altar, victims
Lie on an altar,
Those undergoing
A symbolic change
In social status
Hold hands, bow their heads,
Embrace each other
Before an altar.
No one, or nearly,
Ponders, why altars,
Why these arrangements?
The question drifts off.
Sunlight’s the scapegoat
Tonight on the cliff.
Thursday, October 5, 2023
The Vector
The direction,
The quantity,
The one who rides
Personified—
That’s who you are,
You, you pronoun,
Out there riding
From a fixed point
Along a line
Straight to the more
Variable
Second person,
Both singular
And plural all
At once, aren’t you?
Wednesday, October 4, 2023
The Pillar Allegory
Holding up one corner of a porch,
As identical to the other
Pillars and porches as construction
Of standardized subdivision homes
Could possibly make it, the pillar
Weathers in brown paint and throws its shade.
Put like that, it seems like an agent
Of its own decay, when it isn’t
Anything other than a feature
Of wood around concrete and metal
Meant to look attractive, to promote
Its building as a good place to live,
Handsome even, with a pillared porch,
Good-looking rental, good location
Under the eroding blades of cliffs.
Most buildings get torn down for new ones.
Others are destroyed by disasters,
Such as earthquakes, fires, and floods. A few
Change much more slowly against the clock
Of seasons and years. It’s weathering,
This drab, unremarkable pillar
On the fringe of a global system
Constructing standardized constructions.
You don’t know how long it might be here.
Tuesday, October 3, 2023
The Scattering
Is it better to receive
Recognition or have done
More work? It’s weird what endures
Of ordinary objects,
Habits and institutions,
Creative arts and fossils,
And what’s dissolved in ashes.
Pleasantest, most rewarding,
One supposes, would be work
Produced freely that also
Earned recognition, rewards,
And resources for living.
One wouldn’t have to rely
On random environments
Of future situations
In hopes that work would survive.
Let it die. It paid off well
In this life, your only life.
Well, but if you only have
The work, the making itself,
Then all that remains is chance,
The thought it might lie around
Until dug up as worthwhile,
So might as well make a lot.
Monday, October 2, 2023
The Luck
Sunday, October 1, 2023
The Wing
Saturday, September 30, 2023
The Pits
Free stone and cling stone, stone fruits
Of the drupes, the peach pit set
On the sill until it’s bone,
Sour cherries pitted for pies,
These are small parts of the worlds
You’ve known, elaborately
Detailed in their words and whorls,
Not always too trivial
(The burst of the just-plucked peach,
Or of cherries from the bowl
The neighbor brought from her trees,
The encounter with a bear
Gorging itself in those trees
To survive coming winter,
The tall, skinny cherry tree
Feral in the spruce and pine
Not far from the bear’s den,
The industries of peach trees,
Commercial cherries, pickers
Laboring all day for cheap,
Hoping their children can stay
In the country of their birth,
Get an education, not
End up as cherry pickers)
Strategies on strategies,
Fruit with pits to propagate,
Animals swallowing pits
Depositing them elsewhere,
Animals selecting trees
With the largest, sweetest fruit,
Cling stone, free stone, discarding
The pits in trash, dry on sills.
Friday, September 29, 2023
The Skeleton
This body is recalcitrant.
This body is not so involved.
There’s no fitness, no home cooking,
No physical accomplishments,
No handiness with mechanics,
No muscle memory of sex
Pulsing and humming in these lines.
It lives, after its own fashion,
For now, the structure underneath.
It has fingers and vertebrae.
It more or less supports its head.
It’s not just some brain in a vat.
It’s not just some lonesome AI
Confused by the shadows it scans
Of the worlds beyond its machine,
Or maybe it is. Here’s output,
Of a sort, from a string of thoughts
Circling atop a skeleton,
Caught in a skull caught in a world
That’s nothing but embodiment.
Still. These bones are recalcitrant.
Thursday, September 28, 2023
The Boulder
Wednesday, September 27, 2023
The Place
It doesn’t exist, except
As a compound memory,
Part Edward Hopper image,
Part Barth’s floating opera,
A room in an old hotel,
Sunlit, almost bare, wood floor,
Tall, wavery-paned window
Looking out at mostly blue sky,
An armchair in front of it.
It can’t possibly exist,
Since time doesn’t work in it,
Or doesn’t work right, at least.
Sometimes there’s night and moonlight,
Or night and a street lamp’s light,
But nothing really changes.
There’s a person in the room,
In the chair or on the bed
Or standing in the shadows,
One who never seems to eat,
Or change into other clothes,
Or pick up the phone, or age.
It’s a delirious place,
That room, something to visit,
Or turn slowly in the mind,
The stillness, the simple light,
The figure who’s always there,
Who’s the key you don’t dare turn.
Tuesday, September 26, 2023
The Moon of Books
Monday, September 25, 2023
The Oubliette
Forgotten. You knew the word
Once, young, but you’ve forgotten.
Olds claimed to be no abstract
Thinker, the better for her,
And you are not a body
Imager, the worse for you.
You live in the sunlit room.
You write in the idling car,
And you know there’s a trap door
In the floor, under the tiles,
And you know there’s a chamber
In the dirt, under asphalt,
And you know your words live there—
That is, you keep them trapped there,
Most of them foreign to you,
Few your inventions, carried
On the air and through the eyes,
Lodging in your skull’s donjon,
All of them captured after
You were born, then crammed down deep
In the dark to keep handy,
Some dragged out to work daily,
And some, some soft, fleshly ones,
Allowed to rot, forgotten.
Sunday, September 24, 2023
The Jeremiad
Such a sad little object,
Bound in black cloth on a shelf,
Closed up, signing to itself,
Maybe murmuring as well,
Albeit so quietly
Not even a bat could tell—
Little lump, invalid’s bed
And the invalid in it,
Warning, trying to warn us
Of the most apocryphal
Apocalypse, it won’t quit.
The finish it predicted
Came and went so long ago
No one believes it happened
At all, although that won’t stop
This lump from prophesying,
May even help it attract
New believers, self-convinced
The long-gone apocalypse
Still waits in the wings. The thing
With any apocalypse
Is either it came and went
Or it hasn’t happened yet.
How else would this dull object,
This black brick, this lump of coal,
This pitch-dark ink complaint
Still continue to exist?
Saturday, September 23, 2023
The Forest of Weeds
Once upon a time redundant,
The English word, wildwood, doubled
Etymology from the woods,
Whatever’s uncultivated.
Let’s leave wild like that, nothing more
Sophisticated, no subtler
Distinction between wild and tame,
Just whatever grows on its own
In any way not mandated,
However indirectly shaped—
In other words, frankly, feral.
Even humans can be feral,
Can half escape to the margins,
Maybe through sewers, abandoned
Structures, alleyways, vacant lots,
Maybe as far as the wildwood.
There’s no pleasure, there’s no freedom
In insecurity, no joy
In desperation, but there’s calm
Around the edges, there’s release
From people’s collective rhythms,
The pulsing traffic, tromping feet.
There’s that hour and then another
As one of the forest of weeds.
Friday, September 22, 2023
The Pure Dark Matter That May Not Exist
The universe appears more curvaceous
Then all the burning suggests it should be,
So the hunt’s on to capture dark matter’s
Exact nature to explain that excess
Bentness, curviness, curling gravity.
But imagine some massless gravity,
Unmoored to matter, like an intellect
Without any need for skulls to cup it,
Like a soul that actually exists,
A ghost, words, in other words, an idea,
Meaning unmoored from information,
Somehow still holding it together.
Something is off about the cosmos,
Either since you can sense something’s off
Or something’s off about your senses.
Thursday, September 21, 2023
The Puddles
The hollowed dirt,
The empty earth,
Wasn’t waiting
And had nothing
Much to speak of
For a season.
Then it rained hard
For a few hours
And puddles formed.
The puddles sent
Out messengers
Of puddle life,
Of what it meant
To be water,
Exciting times
For the puddles.
Then the rain stopped
And the earth dried.
Wednesday, September 20, 2023
The Retroactive
It’s a small device, wired
As densely as a text
By Brandon Som, switches
Packed into the blackness
Of its compact insides.
Go ahead, pick it up.
Kind of a hockey puck,
Heavier than a phone,
A solid in the hand.
Know what it does? Magic.
It makes what you do next
Affect what you did then,
What happened to you then,
Anything that happened.
So be very careful.
With the retroactive
Device clutched in your fist.
You could do something now
That undoes what you did,
Changes what you deserved.
This isn’t always good.
Hold the retroactive
While you do a good deed
Or do something selfish,
Before you check your inbox.
Ah, see you won a prize
Yesterday! No, you lost.
Tuesday, September 19, 2023
The Pulse Oximeter
More incapacitating
Than you might think, this small clamp
Lightly squeezing one finger
With a cord trailing away
To the wall, monitoring
Pulse and oxygenation,
Canaries in your coal mine.
Measurement, information
Aimed at confining meaning
To two interpretations—
No problem here, all is well,
Or, high time to intervene.
It means you’re in hospital,
To you, and that you can’t use
That hand to make meanings much.
Monday, September 18, 2023
The Breathing Space
Earth is a walled garden
And not an oasis.
Just throwing that out there.
The spaceship, oasis,
Egg, and bead metaphors
Emphasize the smallness,
The sheer isolation
Of a living planet
Tossed in the lifeless dark,
But the interactions
Within the solar winds,
The constant bombardment
Of dusty organics,
The give and take of this Earth
With all the acts of night
Seem more like the partial,
Half-measure enclosures
Of a garden with walls.
Yes, it’s rougher outside,
But inside’s not so pure,
Not so sealed off, not bound.
Some flowers might get out.
Some storms and seeds blow in.
Hunger can jump a wall.
Sunday, September 17, 2023
The Details
You can’t enumerate them.
You can’t catalogue them all.
When the body’s claims recede
Enough they’re not uppermost,
And the same for social claims,
The world comes to attention,
Your attention, suddenly
Swarming with particulars—
A bit of dust in the sun,
Mud flecks on a passing truck,
The way the dry straw’s tangled
With sunflowers by a wayside.
Stop there. You’ll never finish.
But it feels good doesn’t it,
Awareness of all you aren’t.
Saturday, September 16, 2023
The Plain Morning
It doesn’t look like much,
The day this morning, but
What have you seen so far
Of previous mornings?
That’s the hitch, isn’t it?
If you’ve been unlucky
In your days—not many
Or not many splendid—
Maybe this mostly blue
Sky, human violence
Now far away from you,
Could be enough for you.
If you’ve been privileged
By beauty and comforts,
Then no, this plain morning
Won’t look like much to you.
Friday, September 15, 2023
The Fire Hydrant
Ordinary red,
Extraordinary
Context—a meadow
High in spruce and pine,
Barbed wire around it.
Why a fire hydrant?
It was authentic,
Connected to pipes
That sank in the soil.
The grass grew lushly
Around it, not one
House for half a mile.
A hermit hydrant,
A poet hydrant,
A hydrant recluse,
One of the useless
Who ought to have served
Some sorrowful town.
Well, had the woods burned,
It might have helped some,
But absurdity
Was all the value
You’d find in it now.
Red hydrant, deep field.
Thursday, September 14, 2023
The Cosmos Is Not Ominous
That iron cloud is not a sign,
Nor is the bird at your window,
Nor the twenty on the sidewalk.
If the stars have information,
It’s information about stars,
Not portents for your tomorrows.
The skies swarm with plenty to say,
But they’re signals you sent up there
You’re now decoding for yourselves.
If the lights change, if the day twists,
There’s no hidden meaning struggling—
Just you, and you mean everything.
Wednesday, September 13, 2023
The Mile Marker
One’s missing, or seems to be,
On the twenty-five mile road
From canyon to reservoir.
Little metal plate painted
With a number, shoved in place,
Trivial piece of empire,
Regular signage measures
The strength of bureaucracy
In the face of entropy.
Humans overlook humans
Regularly, the systems
Of teams that maintain order.
Teams were sent out here to plant
Regulation mile markers,
As all over the country.
The markers tilt in tall grass.
Who really notices them?
If one’s missing, it could mean
A new one will be up soon
Or the decay has begun.
Failure’s the system’s revenge.
Tuesday, September 12, 2023
The Actual Hummingbird Allegory
There’s no intention in it,
That window, you poor small thing.
Now you’re sitting on the ground,
Bad spot for a hummingbird,
Broken, with no way to hide.
Admirably stoic, though,
Looking quite contemplative,
Head up, not twitching at all,
As if observing the world,
Coming to some conclusion.
Well, that you are. Some raven
Or housecat will see to that.
Or maybe you’ll just fade out.
Not sure which is worse. No one
Here observing has courage
Or tenderness sufficient
To scoop you up, snap your neck,
Or set you up in a box
With cloth and sugar water
To see if you recover.
You look so solemn. You are.
Monday, September 11, 2023
The Ruminant
Awareness feels worthier
Among the minor details,
One leaf tumbling in the sun,
Nothing profound about it.
A bluish-grey butterfly
No bigger than a thumbnail
Skitters through the invasives
That have commandeered the ditch.
How long before a species
Should be considered native,
If species even exist?
The butterfly got away
From you, didn’t it? You were
Aware of it in the weeds
A moment, before wonder
And abstraction captured you.
Each hill has its cap of cloud.
They sit like village elders
In a circle around you.
What are they to do with you?
Sunday, September 10, 2023
The Surface
Saturday, September 9, 2023
The Tree of Less Than Good and Evil
Blue yard behind a shadow,
The life lived within the faith,
Holds a peach tree’s dim gold glints.
Tonight, fruits will gleam silver,
Tomorrow, ruddy again,
But at this hour, almost grey.
That’s what a shadow will do,
But shadows don’t do. They’re done.
Voices float out of the shade.
Friday, September 8, 2023
The Stranded Cafe
Thursday, September 7, 2023
The Stalk
Looks almost exactly like
Every other stalk, but
It’s not exactly like them.
The wind makes the others talk
Of nothing but how shuffling
Stem to stem’s like whispering.
Another stalk confirms what
Another’s talk put in doubt—
Only wind lets the wind out.
Wednesday, September 6, 2023
The Patagium
For swimming, keep the webbing
Between the fingers and toes,
But, for gliding or flying,
Webbing grown between the limbs
Did the trick for squirrels and bats.
Do you remember longing
To catch sight of a flying
Squirrel among the scampering,
Chittering, ordinary
Tree squirrels that were everywhere?
Patagium like a cape
Flaring in the canopy,
A shadow gliding through oaks—
The squirrel as superhero—
Think of all the sketches drawn
Of one-person contraptions
With leather webbing for wings.
Despite the propeller planes,
Jets, rockets, helicopters,
People still build one-person
Gliders of frame-stretched fabrics,
Closer to proper flying—
Just you stretched flat, bellying
And buoyed up by the wind.
Tuesday, September 5, 2023
The Time
Is not short, is not
Essential. Nothing
Is being pared down.
It’s a fantasy
Of those who can’t feel
Themselves dying yet
That those who can feel
The closeness of death
Achieve clarity
Or an awareness
Thanks to the knowledge
They have little time.
But they don’t. They can’t
Fantasize or plan
The way they used to,
It’s true, and the lack
Of that escape valve
Reforms some of them,
But time is not short,
And death’s not wisdom.
Death seen on approach,
Like a cityscape
Of lights in the night
As your plane descends,
Can be enticing
Or terrifying
As any looming
Destination. Death—
Actually having
Died, lost awareness
For one final time,
Finally being
Dead—carries nothing
To do with dying,
Knowing you’re dying,
Or being clever
Or pure or wise or
Holy on approach.
Time remains a name
For measurable
Kinds of rhythmic change,
Not the sum of things,
And dying people
Are people living
With all kinds of change—
Rhythmic, chaotic,
Patterned and random—
As anyone is,
Anyone living,
And how they behave
Can only conform
In a few cases
To what’s projected
For them in fables
Of time as substance
Cupped by the living
Hiding some vision
Under its essence
Perceptible just
As essence empties.
Monday, September 4, 2023
The Crushed House in Rockville
In southwestern Utah’s canyons,
Where the vegetation is spare,
You can see the Earth is crumbling
Everywhere. Intermediate
Stages between sand and mountain,
Mud and million-year cliff strata
Are elsewhere obscured by dirt, trees,
And buildings growing over them—
The truck-sized boulders, house-sized stones
Lying around on broken mounds
That in these parts just sit there, bare,
Motionless for hundreds of years.
On the canyon roads, the small slides
Of fist-sized, skull-sized rocks aren’t rare,
While their parent fractures hover
Over them, not at all hidden,
Heaps of them, broken as bread crumbs,
Just so still you don’t notice them
Except that one day, that one year,
When some tourists or the neighbors
You never got to know are crushed
Driving, hiking, sitting at home
Watching a holiday program
As a little more Earth lets go.
Sunday, September 3, 2023
The Swallows over High Pond
For a while, they fill the sky,
And then, look away, they’re gone,
Just when ducks swim out again.
Is this not coincidence?
Do swallows and ducks take turns
The way swallows and bats do,
Almost as if changing shifts,
The light too dim for swallows,
Then the bats pick up the slack,
Their turn to hunt down the bugs?
But this is anecdotal,
This one instance with the ducks.
Regular observations
Recorded night after night
Might establish a pattern,
But it’s highly unlikely.
The old battle of the mind
With the world—the mind leaps out
At the slightest possible
Observation of pattern,
Then the world does something else.
Saturday, September 2, 2023
The Scenic Route
There’s a tree along the scenic route
That’s clearly getting busy dying.
Could be a long process, regardless.
It surveys the surrounding forest.
Go ahead. Anthropomorphize it.
It wants to see as much as it can.
There’s a truck driven by a wide man
Carefully unloading a dumpster,
Carefully extracting a dumpster,
Then reloading the empty dumpster
And sliding it where the full one was,
Then reloading the full-up dumpster
And driving off, past the dying tree,
Down the scenic route, down the mountain,
Down to the desert transfer station
To offload the full-up dumpster’s trash
Acquired on top of the mountain.
Go ahead. Anthropomorphize it.
The weekly ritual of the truck
That changes out the mountain dumpsters,
It wants to carry on forever.
The clearly dying tree understands,
But it also holds a secret wish
That it will keep dying long enough
To outlast the dumpster ritual,
At least for another winter, once
Unplowed snows close down the scenic route.