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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Each particular person,
Every societal wave
Undergoes continuous
Change. So everyone alters
And everyone fades away,
Every idea and nation,
Not just from mortality
Per se, just from becoming
At every moment other
Than at the moment before,
Until what was was estranged,
An alien to what is.
The process is mostly slow.
Change is so full of the same.
Yesterday, you were dying,
And the world was burning up
As you hid under a tree
To get some shade from the heat,
While today, you’re still dying,
And the world’s still burning up
As you sit under the same
Shade tree to wait out more heat.
But today it’s not the same.
Same’s somehow never the same.
Your particular person,
Your temporary standing
Wave collapses in the shade.
Won’t anyone wager there aren’t
Any universal laws of
Nature, that somewhere in spacetime
Your local fundamentals fail?
Don’t the mathematical clues
That led to the suppositions
Of dark matter and energy
Hint maybe foundations can change?
What if nothing’s missing? It’s not
Dark matter but strong gravity
Binding galaxies together
Better than their mass would suggest.
What if it’s not dark energy
Accelerating expansion
Just a shift in expansion’s laws
Spinning things outward faster now?
Sure, some of math’s rules fit so well,
You’re reluctant to let them go.
It must be the empirical
Observations making mistakes.
But given your analogy
Of laws suggests the universe
Could be ruled as capriciously
As human societies, well. . . .
In this context, it signifies
That it has just rained a little,
But what could this transient thing,
This brief collection of water
Swimming with microbial lives,
Evaporating by moon-glow,
Mean? You bring your information,
Your memories to bear. Climate,
You might think to yourself, changing
Climate. Or, tonight it will cool,
Before the heat starts up again.
Or, e.e. cummings, in just spring.
But are any of those meaning
Or just more signification?
If the transient puddle seems
To glow with more than reflections,
If it seems like it’s telling you
Something you don’t already know,
Then that’s its meaning, the meaning
That you feel inherent in it,
The meaning that you brought to it.
It’s capacious for such a remote place.
You’re used to seeing it empty, even
Just before the weekly emptying rite,
When the dump truck labors up the mountain
To forklift the great dumpster
Like a kid draining a cereal bowl.
On this day, however, it overflowed.
A mountain of trash rose over its rim,
Some of it already scattered by winds.
A hard job for the dump crew this week,
You thought, realizing seeing this changed
The meaning of the dumpster in your mind.
This must have happened before. This is why
Emptiness is left here, most of the year.
Between signification
And meaning lies intention
Entangled with memory.
Boxes of tissues are new
Technology, more recent
Than ubiquity suggests—
Cardboard cartons of pages,
Thin, flimsy, disposable,
Absorbent squares of paper
Haven’t been around that long
Compared to mousetraps and wheels,
Never mind language and fire.
Look at a box of tissues
With eighteenth-century eyes.
Isn’t this mysterious?
Through your own eyes you see use,
And what the tissues are for
Blurs to what they mean for you.
No ideas but in names.
Common names seem like things,
Special names like people,
Places, or big events,
While numerical names seem
Like universal truths.
There’s a hierarchy then
Among the names, and when
Someone insists on things,
They’re only challenging
That hierarchy (a name).
By the way, an idea
Is a name for theories
Needing names to express—
No ideas but in things,
The only way to God
Is Jesus, a black hole
Swallows information,
Propane tanks signify
The Anthropocene’s here,
With their shapes all the same,
Industrial metal,
Fossil fuel extracted,
Refined, shipped globally,
Thus exemplifying
Economic theories.
No theories but from games.
Picturesque on a blanket,
Nicely stocked with blueberries,
Cherries, cream cheese, smoked salmon,
Lemonade, and sandwiches,
Perfect for when the sheriff
Arrives to investigate
A complaint about a fight,
Or a shouting match at least,
Among the scattered campers
Occupying shady sites
Up high by stream and aspens
While the heat wave bakes below.
Nothing says just a picnic,
Officer, like a basket
Of food on a checked blanket.
A picnic is signified
To everyone, including
The sheriff, who leaves to quiz
Irritable tent campers
Instead. The picnickers play
A board game on the blanket
While the day gains new meaning
From the sheriff’s small drama.
Now the picnic basket glows.
The world slips suspiciously
Into more frequent beauty,
More frequent noticing it,
The clouds above the desert
In curling, virga towers,
The crisp edges of the cliffs—
It’s not mere handsomeness, it’s
Beyond satisfactory,
Delicious. That’s suspicious.
Are you dying already?
Have you started dying well,
That much celebrated phase
Of life appreciation,
In which the terminal find
The wonder in everything?
Let’s hope not. Let’s hope you are
Just appreciating things
Well worth appreciating,
Maybe even getting well.
Yes. Everything seems so good
Now that you’re getting better.
The smart eye edits the scene.
Are there garbage cans, buildings,
Power lines, trucks, and wildflowers?
The smart eye selects wildflowers.
The rest of the scene remains
But remains irrelevant.
Or maybe the smart eye likes
Architecture or maybe
Is hoping to buy a truck.
The smart eye selects those things.
You have a smart eye. You have
A smart eye for poetry,
For what you want, which topics,
Which attitudes, points of view.
Pick your foreground, your background.
Do you like a memory,
Some scenery, some trauma,
Some astonishing wordplay?
Sometimes there’s nothing you want,
But you’ll focus just the same
Or turn your smart eye away,
And even if the purplish,
Madly invasive wildflowers
Between the buildings and trucks
Are just what you want to see,
The background always remains,
Blurry irrelevancy.
