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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Time in Real Time

Trends converge. It’s hard to find

An arena of human agreement

That doesn’t harbor human

Disagreements from other,

Larger arenas, escaped

Feuds that turn up everywhere,

Such a quarrelsome species.

Nuns sing Ave Maria

In fury at activists

Protesting their mega-church

Carved from a national park,

And delegates debate time

In an argument over

International standards,

With faith and military

Objections to suggestions

Bringing teams to loggerheads,

And for every hushed meeting

Of silver-tongued diplomats

There’s an active killing zone

And ten fault lines under stress.

Attendees boo candidates

At their own party’s forum,

Where every side’s accusing

The other side of lying.

There’s nothing left in the bank.

There’s nothing left in the tank.

But this will go on, you think.

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.

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.

Just Listen to the Music of the Traffic in the City

At an anodyne franchise cafe,

Menus from corporate headquarters

Specified choices, and a pop song

Recorded some six decades ago

Streamed over the standard sound system

At an obligatory volume.

One of the two folks in a booth said,

That’s the first hit song I ever heard,

Or at least that I remember hearing.

At home we only listened to hymns

On evangelical radio,

But I was playing at a neighbor’s,

I think I was maybe about four.

It was just me and the other kid

And his mother somewhere in the house.

We were playing with plastic letters

With magnets that stuck to a white board,

A pretty boring activity,

And a radio was on somewhere

And I heard that voice soaring, you know,

“Down-town!” over and over around

The lyrics that meant nothing to me,

And to tell you the truth, I was spooked.

To my ears it sounded so eerie.

It still sounds eerie, eerier now

Since it’s that same exact recording,

Just falling out of the air somewhere.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The War to Extend All Wars

Because you birthed that crazy

Daughter, because you are the

Parent of this deadly child,

War complains to Father Zeus

In Wilson’s new translation,

Of the Iliad, asking,

As all the gods are asking,

Help in counterbalancing

The acts of the other gods.

If there’s an unintended

Message in that massive poem

Of back-and-forth gore, it’s that

Balance enhances bloodshed,

That equally matched forces

Are horror multipliers.

With Strategy on one side,

Flashing her commanding eyes,

And Havoc on the other,

Each pleading with their father

That it’s unfair to support

The sister or the brother,

Carnage can be maximized

And suffering extended.

Or maybe the poet meant

That message--if you can’t be

Victorious instantly,

Pray for the swiftest defeat.

In the high country each fall,

Bucks with the worst injuries

Met the most evenly matched.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Reality of the Anti

the anti-hydrogen atoms drifted down like maple leaves in October

Even antimatter falls

Toward a heavy body—

There is no exotica

That avoids needing to join

Together with greater mass—

Not even the opposite

Of objects can be immune

To gravity’s fond embrace.

Ashes, ashes, all fall down,

Which is to say all gather

For the cosmic, crushing love

That leads to exploding stars,

Vast galaxies, and black holes.

Why this should be so, who knows?

But if there is one true law

That governs all, it must be

Gravity, curved compulsion

Of all to fall together—

Even entropy can be

Locally, a while, reversed,

But gravity never swerves.

The Canvas

A Scythian word, maybe,

Since it was once made from hemp.

It was already cotton

In India, three thousand

Or more years ago. You can

Also make it from linen.

Thick fibers, tight weave. Heavy

Textile, in any event,

Good for sails, jackets, and tents—

Stretched, as a surface for paint.

Canvas on frames for painting

Inevitably suggests

Blankness, as in blank canvas,

Possibility, the lack

Of prior experience,

An artistic jape in which

The blank canvas is the art.

What else? A strangely white sky

Without any clouds, not blue

As you would expect, not grey,

But looking faintly woven,

Like this sky, not luminous,

Flat, blank, hinting at some snow,

But it’s autumn and still warm,

And is this even the sky

Or something else entirely,

Some stupid blank abstraction?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Brush

Someone cleared it, piled it up

Between the fence and the road.

For someone it was a chore,

Presumably reducing

The risk of conflagration—

Clearing brush. Decades ago,

Ronald Reagan would clear brush

On his ranch so frequently

It seemed a euphemism—

The president clearing brush,

Whenever the press corps asked,

Although it was hard to tell—

A euphemism for what?

Dozing on his couch? Hatching

Fresh international plots?

Here it was actual brush,

A heap of twigs and branches,

Abandoned as Frost’s wood pile

To the slow smokeless burning

Of decay. Terribly slow,

Actually. Slow enough

Whole lives—families of voles,

Colonies of ants, seasons

Of spiderlings—had lived there.

It’s possible the fossil

Of this brush pile could be found

In an excavated mound

A few centuries from now—

That’s if Archaeology

Survived as a profession.

Probably not. Already

It had become settled past,

Something someone did one day,

The doing of which remained,

However unrepeated,

Cleared brush one side of the way.

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.

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.

The Vector

The carrier,
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?

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.

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.

The Luck

It sits on a page. It’s a word,

After all. They do that. Also

On screens and on the tips of tongues,

Fingertips, anything that works

For words as forms of signaling.

Sometimes words are tricky like that.

More words on the page, next to luck.

The words are explaining that luck

Is tricky since it goes both ways—

A stroke of luck is a good thing

But a stroke is bad luck. Maybe

It’s stroke that’s the trickier word.

Writing’s made by series of strokes.

Some say that all writing systems

Max at three strokes per character,

Which seems the opposite of luck,

Necessity, a rule, a law.

Lots of luck with the rule of law.

The Wing

You don’t want to see

Anyone too young

In the cancer wing,

Since that would feel sad,

But you would at least

Hope to see someone

Who’s younger than you,

Or you’re the sad one,

Too sick and too young,

And somehow that feels

Like failure for you,

Like leaving the game

Of musical chairs,

Misspelling your word

At the spelling bee,

Or not being asked

To the next call-back—

You weren’t good enough,

You crapped out too soon,

You lacked the talent,

No knack for the game.

Wispy, silvery,

Elderly people

Wait all around you.

How many extra

Decades did they stay

Away from this place?

You imagine Death

With traditional

Hood, robes, and sickle,

Showing up for some

Of them, murmuring,

Well played, yes, well played.

You smile, but the nurse

Has come to get you

And take your vitals,

And it seems you might

Not be well enough

For treatment today.

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.

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.

The Boulder

The most solidity you’re granted

Is homeostasis, a standing

Wave. A mountain is a standing wave.

A galaxy is a standing wave.

A bacterium, bumps on a crumb,

Your words, your ideas—all standing waves.

That’s the most solidity you get.

You sit by a brook, watching closely,

As you’ve often done, as a wave crests

Over a boulder, thinking again

The usual Heraclitan things.

Some waves stand more firmly than others.

Can you step on the same boulder twice?

Ha, you may think you can but you can’t.

What appears firmer is just slower.

You imagine yourself slow, slower,

Slowest standing wave in the whole world,

Immobile down to a few quanta

Doing something spooky in your thoughts.

It’s an image imagination

Can’t maintain, and for life maintenance

Is everything. Well, not alive then.

One coherent pattern in the rush.

Even then you would gradually change.

Come back to yourself. The brook gushes

Over the boulders. The heart pulses.

What do you mean, standing, anyway?

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.

The Moon of Books

Praised be the moon of books!

What did she mean by that phrase?

Whatever she intended,

It’s up to you, now, to bring

The meanings to it. The moon

That orbits a planetoid

Of books, scrolls and codices,

Enough of a library

To bend gravity a bit,

To attract an asteroid

And capture it for a moon?

Or maybe this moon of books

Functions for the books themselves

As the moon of Earth functions

For Earth’s grave mass of poets,

That ancient image invoked

Whenever the volumes need

To sound profound in some way,

Some vaguely serious way.

But how would books get a moon?

Maybe this moon’s made of books,

A silvery library,

All dust and compressed insects,

Discarded but orbiting

What? What possible planet

Would a moon made up of books

Circle servilely, mutely,

Despite craters and mountains

Of languages, globe of words,

Sphere of phrases? An old soul

Of skulls, all the human skulls

Rolled up together, that’s what,

Not some rock and iron world,

Not a vaporous giant—

A planet of bones, near which

Spins this airless, battered mass

Of impacts, the moon of books.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

The Surface

Something changes abruptly

On continuous likeness,

As a calm darkens among

Water lights. To the one side

Of the shield, when there’s no wind,

Only air. To the other,

Only water. A surface

Being a name for where waves

Interfere with each other.

Here we go. Let yourself float

Over these lines surfacing

Between a small collection

Of watery notions and

Clouded hemispheres of air.

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.

The Stranded Cafe

You don’t come here. You get left

The man at the two-top said.

Red sun flooded the tables

With early or late daylight

From the bare desert outside.

A small boy at the counter

Stared down at his empty plate.

He’d been trying to pretend

He was just a runaway.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Dirt

Or the soil, the ground, the earth.

The opposite of meaning—

Either be a transcendent

Meaning, or only the earth.

Es war Erde in ihnen.

Nothing but dirt inside them,

And so dirt gains its meanings,

In some cases, as stand-in

For meaninglessness, opposed

To meaningful transcendence,

Purposeful intelligence,

The universe of intent.

Well, the term at least. Not real

Dirt, actual soil, bare ground,

Solid earth. Capitalists,

Farmers, builders, homesteaders

Constructing rammed-earth houses—

They attend to soil as soil,

And of course it has meaning.

You could stare at a patch now.

Give it your full attention

Like a child who wants to dig,

A potter hunting for clay.

Feel how your meanings find it.

The Liver

Having had part of your liver cut out

And examined for cancer, is that not

A medical type of extispicy?

Might as well have been a Sumerian

Divining for divine information

About your chance of assassination.

It’s the same question, really, isn’t it?

Do these guts betoken imminent death?

The answer returned is never certain.

Diviners and diagnosticians know

Every future is probabilistic,

As every future will repeat the past

Inexactly, leaving some small fissure

Wherein living could outlive the liver.

The Cloud, No, That One

Black-eyed Susans, purple sage,
Where’s the use In naming names?

Maybe just describe the clouds
Of detailed crowds as common

Nouns and boring adjectives.
The stone with the dry, green lichen on it

Sits in fallen needles near the cliff’s edge—
No that’s not working either. There’s an urge

Once words start congregating together
To narrow the naming, make it precise,

And, once that’s started, there’s the addiction—
Sites, then species, then individuals,

Until names aggressively substitute
For all that names pretend to indicate

For triggering imagined memories.
Then again, where’s the use in not naming?

There’s a vast cloud overhead
Wasn’t up there yesterday,

Won’t be up there tomorrow.
Winds will push in something else,

Nothing created, nothing
Lost, only something borrowed.

The Flower Petal

Part of the blossom or on the ground,
It still keeps busy with exchanges.

In bloom, it releases molecules,
Organic molecules, no longer

Themselves part of its life. On the ground,
Voracious littler lives ingest it,

Lifeless petal, in their liveliness.
Life’s a steady trade in lifelessness,

And gardener you are you should know this,
Troweling decomposing petals.

With every breath, you drag in something
Lifeless you convert to living flesh.

When breezes evaporate your sweat,
Living water leaves as lifeless wet.

The Real World Can’t Be This World

One of the loveliest aspects
Of that nearly universal
And loveliest of fallacies,

The illogical argument
From incredulity—Can’t be!
That’s absurd! That’s ridiculous!—

Is that, whenever someone finds
Circumstances beyond belief,
They ease their incredulity

By cooking up something truly
Incredible as alternate
Explanation, usually

Sorcery, secret weaponry,
And/or some vast conspiracy.
Whenever asked for evidence,

They say they have it already
And will reveal it all shortly
But not now. They’re still collecting.

Pressed again, the response is to say
A crazy world can’t be explained
Any other way. Then they snort

And cut things short, condescending,
Incredulous—do you really
Believe xyz could happen

In any ordinary way
Without some malign wizardry,
Without secret technology,

Without a vast conspiracy?
Ah, isn’t it just wonderful
That what is found incredible

Must be explained away by means
Of some tale more incredible,
Since the real world can’t be this world?

The Blind Drawn

This one’s never opened,
Only lifted to peek,
Or shadowed by the cats

Who slip back behind it
Along the narrow sill.
The window’s by a bed

And unfortunately positioned
Such that pedestrians
And neighbors can look in.

So the blind remains drawn
All hours for privacy,
And neither exposure

To the street nor daylight
On pillows and blankets
Will ever be complete.

The Acorn Cluster

Pulled from scrub oak
A year ago,
Two years ago,
Something like that,

Brought to the car
As memento
Of a good day
On the mesa,

The day itself
Long forgotten
Anyway, they
Are fossils now

In the car door
Where they’ve rested.
They didn’t sprout,
But are they dead?

The Meaning of Ezra

Ezra could be poetic
And generous with poets,
A champion of the arts.

He was also self-righteous,
Obsessed with conspiracy,
And a despiser of Jews.

A lot of his energy
He spent on tirades ranting
Against perceived enemies,

Including, of course, the Jews,
Democracy, factories,
The modern world generally,

But somehow he made his name
With modernist poetry
Made of fragments and edges,

In which the lyricism,
And the aesthete’s name-dropping,
And the buckets of venom

Were collaged in a mountain
Of weird associations
Peculiar to Ezra’s thoughts.

It was aspirational
And vicious, and it failed, but
It accumulated shards

Of occasional brilliance.
Now what do you make of this?
In defense of a dogma

Of an omnipotent God
Who is also pure goodness
And the omniscient maker

Of a world of suffering,
Theodicy’s logical
Lunacy was invented.

An inverse theodicy
Could try to deal with Ezra—
How could this hateful person

Think of himself as moral,
Sometimes practice real kindness,
And compose some stunning verse?

One trick’s been to separate
Good Ezra from bad Ezra,
Although his poems unite them.

Another’s asserted art
And politics are different,
Although his poems unite them.

Or you could not be bothered—
Say all of Ezra’s worthless;
All of art is politics,

And to admire anything
He wrote makes you complicit
In all of the things he said.

He might more or less agree—
He fused art and politics;
He believed in what he said.

But aren’t all these approaches
Sandbagging and barricades
Around your own moral self?

You forgive Ezra or don’t
Based on how you see yourself,
How you think you should be judged

By the judges you’ve approved,
Given there’s nothing hateful
Nor truly awful in you.

Why not judge knowing you will
Be judged by other judges
Than you’d want or imagine,

If you are recalled at all?
How does any wickedness
Coincide with any art,

And why do both grade smoothly
In and out of each other?
What’s the meaning of Ezra?

The Text of Consolation

Actually, there was a stack of them
Picked and arranged by an editor,
And through each one you could imagine

Some person half talking to themselves,
Half to no one in particular,
In more or less strictly patterned lines

Making more or less articulate,
More or less explicit, arguments
For how to bear some dreadful event

And how to bear up against knowing
The world’s full up of dreadful events.
Some advised, chided. Some simply grieved.

Feeling them move around in your head,
You noticed there were no people there,
Only words, the voices of the dead.

The Book in Your Stack

How far into your day are you
Right now as you encounter this
Disembodied question composed
In an earlier time and place?

Is it a long time since you slept,
Or did you wake up just a few
Hours or even minutes ago?
Either way, some things are settled

Events, permanent history
Already for you on this day—
How you woke up, what chores you did,
Any big or small surprises—

Anything that’s happened happened,
Each newest moment forever
Now part of your adjusted past,
Now another book in your stack,

And even forgetting’s like that.
What happened was that you forgot.
You may re-remember later,
But that won’t change that you forgot,

And, if you never remember,
Which most of your moments you won’t,
Those moments go on gathering.
Events sum forever. You don’t.

The Dread Necessity of Breath

Fear of wastage torments people,
You mutter while you waste away.

The neighbor who can’t bear to throw
His dead pet’s pet food in the trash,

Determined to give it away
To someone with a living pet,

The adolescent with all day
To spend, pure waste without a friend,

The woman who won’t clean the fridge
Until it reeks of rotten fruit,

The writer who’s done no writing
In the free hour of that morning,

The terminal patient who failed
To make special another day—

And all the other forms of waste,
So what? To breathe makes waste of breath.

The Teacup

From a set of what used to be
Some of grandmother’s good china,
Handed down some decades ago,

Already partial, to furnish
Your first on-your-own apartment,
Having survived dozens of moves

Around the continent and years
Of storage in flimsy cardboard,
Unlike most of the long lost set,

The teacup, now one of a kind,
Fits your hand as you put it up
On a shelf of miscellanies.

Somewhere on the path to dying,
Moving on, you think of long life,
Your grandmother nearing ninety,

Widowed, felled by a sudden stroke,
Your last visit, still years to go,
A shadow with a gaping mouth

Silent in a hospital bed.
All those other dishes that broke,
And here’s this teacup, on its own.

The Decoration Rock

She likes to browse through crystals
In the rock shop, searching out
The perfect combination

Of an odd shape, rare color,
And the right feel in the hand.
She’s building her collection

Of inexpensive prizes.
You peer over her shoulder.
For you it’s combination

Of pieces, not the perfect
Combination of the piece.
What could lines of small stones do,

The dull and ordinary
Phrased between the unusual?
You don’t want a mosaic,

Just a suggestive pattern
That could attract attention
Enough to yield a meaning

That no one could have foreseen—
Not the owner of the shop,
Not the crystal collector,

Not your imagination
Arranging combinations—
Only the nonexistent,

Other you, arrived later,
Puzzling over the pattern,
Ascribing meaning to it.

The Soap

Sometimes meaning’s written about
In terms of aboutness, in terms
Such as intentionality,

Which come close to conflating it
With significance—what is this
All about? But information,

Whether inherent or read out
Like the label on this soap bar,
Like knowledge that this bar is soap,

And soap is all about cleansing,
And so forth, can’t encapsulate
All the meaning attention gives,

When you give the soap attention,
The bubbles that mean the cosmos
Is ephemeral, as you mean.

The Nameless Plant

To you at least.
You know it’s named—
English, Latin,
Paiute. Silvered

Green, scrubby thing,
You could name it
To please yourself,
But it’s better

Unnamed. You watch
As the late light
Slips over it
And wind bends it.

It’s working hard
To stay alive.
It can’t help it.
That’s what it means.

The Cushion

Even a pillow, a cushion,
A random bolster or back pad,
Can become entangled in meanings
If one or more of you spin them.

The functional significance
Isn’t terribly relevant,
But if one of your family,
Since deceased, clung to that pillow

Or carried that damned seat cushion
With them everywhere, then later
You may project all kinds of thoughts
Onto the sight of that object.

If asked why you keep the cushion,
Unused, in some dusty corner,
You will explain its importance,
Its wealth of associations.

You may throw in an anecdote,
Something about the departed,
Amusingly illustrating
Their attachment to that cushion

That might yet end up in the trash,
After you’re gone, or a thrift store,
Be used as a movie-set prop,
Gain still someone else’s meanings,

Meanings being like that, webbing
Cast by human attachments, weak,
However—so weak they can’t cling,
Evaporative, true spirits.

The Rain Veils

They signify uncertainty,
The middle way between zero

And one. Dragging their blue curtains
Decorated with dry lightning

In the distance, they could touch ground—
A storm’s a possibility

In the immediate future
But a coin flip from certainty.

That’s why such weather’s ominous.
It’s not that there will be a storm

But that there might be, might not be.
When something doesn’t signify

A more-than-likely yes or no,
That’s when it can be meaningful.

You scrutinize the fine blue veils.
Was that wet you felt on your neck?

The Obituary

An obituary’s an odd
Misdirection, all about life

Once the life is already gone.
If you didn’t know the person,

It’s not much different than reading
A profile of a scientist,

Say, or a new celebrity,
Someone living you’ve never met.

Celebrities and scientists,
For that matter, are popular

Topics for obituaries.
You read about someone, they live

In your thoughts, and a great many
People you know, you know this way.

You read the obituary
And, like that, someone comes to life.

The Plastic Sack

White and light as a ghost
Floating across the road,

Tenacious as a bat
Flapping from a tree branch,

Mobile as tumbleweed
Piling against fences,

Basin of attraction
For the bleakest meanings,

The sense of pollution,
Impurity, and waste,

It stays true to itself
As carbonaceous shell.

The Cat Basket

It’s likely to end
In a garbage dump,
One of the middens
That will never be
Well-excavated,

Archeologists
Having gone extinct.
The bereaved owners
Of the cat who died
After thirteen years

Gave it to neighbors
With two youthful cats,
But the young cats sniffed
At the old cat’s scent
And more or less shrugged.

It’s been left sitting
By a good window,
But it’s never used.
Soon the new owners
Will throw it away

To outlast them all,
A crushed artifact
In the enduring
Strata of waste heaps
Weathered into cliffs.

The Canopy of a Nameless Tree

Writers love to sidle
Up to it, the nameless
Tree, just at the moment

Its canopy is full
Of afternoon shadows,
Just before the shadows

Fade with the loss of light.
It’s the moment after
The loss of light writers

Actually want to write,
But they can’t. Witnessing
Is impossible then

With no one and nothing
To write. They imagine
Anyway, bird shadows

In the thick canopy.
A shadow theater
Always requires the light,

And takes place on the side
Of the light. Only lies
Made of varying light

In the language of light
Speak of the loss of light.
Still the writers sidle

Up to the nameless tree,
As close as names allow,
And there the writers write.