Just Ask Them

Watch people (humans,
Sapiens, bipeds),
Stroll around,

Carrying degrees
Of built happiness,
Figuring amounts

Of bare happiness
In their winter air—
What will work for them,

That’s all—not the end
Or the beginning
Of each heavy world

Each biped strolls through--
Each biped’s bare due.

Happy in the Trees, for Instance

A tiny animal,
Some kind of pallid moth,
Haunts the available

Wood walk of a sunny
Day in the desert where
You look up from your trail,

Wherever you are
Waltzing around with calm.
What it is you’ve just left,

Whatever it is lifts
You from waves of the lakes
To whatever flutters,

And ask yourself why trucks
Sound happy in the trees.

Problems in Dying

Are ordinary problems
In living another day.

From chores to conversations
With someone known for deep thoughts

Who has ideas but maybe
Not the faintest clue about

The chores—someone who suggests
The end of democracy

May lurk among skulls and bones
Piled at the mouth of the cave

Accumulating thousands
Of years, heaped generations

For further information—
Pointing out democracy

Had a beginning, surely
It has to come to an end,

In which some other system
That offers a solution, strange

To you now, not production
Per se, means of production,

Any of that sort of general
Descendant from the game where shots

Could delete the emergence
Of a truly new system,

Before any system awareness
Could liberate real awareness,

If such a thing existed,
Better than 2024.

Sixes

A beast that funnels deep
Through evening may look furred
In charm but know nothing

Of the run where strange life
Gets done. Life continues,
And living gets it done,

And in the small evening,
It’s the small thing that knows,
Teeth, and fur, and trembling,

And whatever spots ghosts
As vividly as notes
From the throat of the mouse

Floating up from the throat
Of the mouse who wants grace
For a short hour of life

Deserves explication
Out of the eyes of gods
And the dreams of humans.

Don’t Worry About the Data, Only What You Made It Mean

How do you write a poem when
You can’t remember your name?
Like a vanishing version

Of an old, familiar scene,
Like angels slipping away
From themselves for no reason

Like whatever the world wrote
Into libraries of lost
Information about leaves,

DNA, shivering sheets
Of family history,
Information’s vanishing,

Being replaced by meaning
As it had to be, since leaves
Are the awful immortals,

Those only wonders truly
Bound to come and go, data
Fooling you along the road—

The data hiding somewhere,
In the permanence
Of information, along with

Black holes, every secret file,
Each scrap of information
Rescued from the burning pile,

The conservation of force,
The memory of the face,
Of the best-beloved god,

Who can’t recall the meaning
That went along with the name
The information you thought

You could lose, proved resilient
As information will do,
As force and matter will, too.

The Discovery

Phone I’m just trying to call,
As if if were there that easy,
As if poetry were owls,

As if baby poems were owls,
Tasked with their own egg-laying.
Sunny day in December,

Likely as not to produce
Something hideous, the task
Carefully summarized so,

Instead of monstrosity,
That the species of owl eggs
Tend to generate over

And over again in books
And images, we may make
For ourselves the kinds of grace

We would be happy to find,
Simple words in woods at night,
Or in the shade at evening

And recite, I found a small
Poem last night, and not be wrong
About the discovery.

Could Have Been

The peace could have been
A matter of fact
Lonely afternoon

With green streams smoothly
Surfacing, shadows
Facing the twilight,

And a kind of calm
Ready for night hours
Tagging alongside—

It went the hard way,
Past what could have been
Kind straight through wicked

To a liquidation
Of the placid risk
Were red blood in this drawings.

Gifts for the Dead Guy

What to give a wiseacre
Who has a natural gift
For infinite sleep? Really,

The night gathers strange numbers,
Counting those you could count
Under any other wing—

Any other wing you might
Spot flying—geese at twilight—
Eager to get warmer soon,

Eager to move from image
To metaphor, metaphor
To something metaphorish,

Metaphorish to someone
Warm and real, a poem tonight
That might work for what you

Need to feel, you wiseacre,
Wiseacre enough to feel.

Claire’s Caplet

The shadows move swiftly across the
Evening’s lawn and meadows, eager
To embrace, covering the distance in
A few steps and then done.
You’re unwilling to be the reader
Of earth’s bonds between scavengers
And the engineers.

Usually, It Doesn’t Last Long

One conviction for those deemed terminal
Holds that, however you spend your
Last months, you hang on to all of them,

Every moment. There’s no sense allowed
That maybe the terminal are blessed
To not have to choose to keep living.

The grass and scrub carry coats of frost
This cold, clear morning. Nobody climbs
Uphill from here; the skies so cleared 

By raw morning splendor. Take warning.
Death loves you as much anyone,

Whether you hang on to breath or not.

Sabots, a Pair of Attitudes

Even if this is flailing
Along, it’s something--it’s
Something to avoid, to track--

The pale, worn smile of the horse
Gradually, but more like shoes—more
Shoe is just an attitude.

Bethlehem, Again

This is not the poem

The good poet

With precise lines would 

Have written about

Winter, good poets,

 

Other good poets,

Nature, poetic 

Structure, the deep need

For other poets,

To build the right lines--

 

It's the sorcerer's

Apprentice among

Slop buckets spilling

Over the verge of loss,

Defeat in the eye

 

Of the deer who died

At the roadside, all

It's bones broken clean

Before its eyes sank

Into the stupor

 

It couldn't control,

But oh well, you wrote

Something, and you asked

Permission to be

Sung on the cold, bright air.

Minor Strategy Two, Less Confused

Can you string the small worlds

Through the small targets?

Can you can get get some space for this

That’s not part of the flower,

Doesn’t need help with itself?

Can’t you pity its small Strategy?

Words Watching While

The rain fell, fell
Persistently,
And the words would

Watch from windows,
Wondering.
There’s too much world,

Down to the cats
Held too often
In the lap’s lap.

Neighbor’s neighbor
Preaches a peace,
While mere neighbors

Preach a greater
Something, something
Points an arrow.

Wait, there’s still too
Much here, something
Needs to go, gone.

You could go, but
You’re not quite these
Words, no not quite.

Birthday Party Game Time

There goes another wren,
Good for nothing much but
Another wren, and all day you’ve tried

To get to that previously missing wrens,
And it’s five o’clock and you’re no wren,
A coach without a sure game time,

But getting close to inevitable. Soon
The little bird that hops by will have to
Be an invitation, and the name soon.

Minor Strategy

Can you string the small worlds

Through the small targets?

Can you can get get some space for this

That’s not part of the flower,

Doesn’t need help with itself?

Can’t you pity its small Strategy?

And Nothing Much Else

The light to the left is clear.
So is the light to the right.
Sometimes people ask themselves,

What’s the worst that can happen?
Nothing much keeps happening.
And there’s that sense nothing will,

The sense that keeps it going.
Once in a while, someone gets
Something suddenly very bad,

And can feel the hanging on,
As by fingernails, but most times,
The left and the right are clear.

Any Ending’s a Failure to Communicate

Either we’re all there, or we
All fail to coordinate.
You can find a distraction

To help with anxiety
Whispers someone at the back
Who rarely shows up on time,

Every day’s a small drama,
Trying to weave through the world,
And then, like that, forgotten,

Everything in the drama—
While some days are sad and large
Dramas stranded and struggling

By the wayside, but it’s true,
We’re either there or we’re gone.

The Stare

So you say to yourself, it will all work out,
And you draw the circles fiercely for
The zeros and ohs. And it will; of course,

Until it doesn’t, until it completely fails
And then carries on from there, since
That’s it, isn’t it? The dangerous

And the threatening, you survive for now,
As anyway, that stuff’s all you, all local.
What rocks are about to slide all over you?

You know the others that break loose
Are almost bound to roll over someone,
But there are so many more someones

Than rocks on the loose. So you say
To yourself, it will all work out, and you
Draw circles fiercely for zeros and nose.

Yes, Thomas?

The strange physicality
Of language keeps increasing,
The words crinkling in the hands

As if they, too, were paper,
Or a type of cellophane,
See-through language in boxes,

As boxes, small constructions
That aren’t really words at all—
A falsity to language

At the physical level,
Some other substance, pretense.
A slight shadow at the door.

You’re grateful for that shadow!
It alerts you words watch you
As they fade into the snow.

The Librarian’s Nightmare

One person does something about it,
This thing that’s harrowing all of them—
Attempts to carefully excavate

The tide—not turn it, actually,
Not send the waves all scurrying home,
But climb out of the pit made for it,

By it, where nothing but suburban
Parking lot inhabited the world
Only minutes ago. In horror

Stories, it’s the unmentionable
Mentioned over and over again
That always counts as the horror show.

Horror’s just what reverses itself
To return quietly to its shelf.

If You Don’t Go, You’ll Never Recall

Quick pushed, sure, yesterday was
What any day is, and pushed
A bit more, more boring, but

Then you recall the two hours
Of misty, gusty rainfall,
Dark house, early candlight

That at the time was magic,
A morning to remember,
Already ready to go.

Apostrophe to a Library Shelf

People might study you if they knew
You were suffused by calm contentment,
A contentment that could be transferred.

If you preached and had a following,
If you had a following, if you
Never preached and had no following

But had a reputation—human
Constellations, all of those scenes.
Maybe even if you were only

Human, without a reputation
For remarkably calm contentment,
Someone might find you out for study,

Since the discovery would amount
To something remarkable people
Quest for and discuss around the world—

The wholly contented, calm human,
A hazy miracle—but you’re surface,
With words impressed or inked upon you,

Paper and brick, glass and bits—no one
Is surprised by a calm library.
No miracle there. But folks visit.

Sonnet on the Edge of a Knife

There they are, the houses—
How she’d managed to get
First, a deathbed confession,

Second, pro-tips, post-mortem,
For transmitting messages,
To the living, who really

Don’t often try to listen,
Was beyond him. He listened.
He had good tips, but his own

Twitching ears, rotating,
Snagged him, reinforcing him.
He was not a good actor—

He was good at listening
For the knife’s edge, glistening.

Door in the Floor

There are also oddities,
Your birthday plan, for instance,
To get a new toy around

The holidays, bury it
In the dead of winter then,
And let it bloom in the spring.

The idea is to forget
Intentionally, instead
Of struggling to remember.

You just need to find the hoard
Of your artificial self,
You can cast off and call dead.

You’ll get what you want at last,
Escape from this troubling task.

Get Under It

There was one rock,
Size of a house,
Perched on a slope,

The kind of rock
That would dare you,
Anybody,

To stand beneath,
Get beneath it.
Could slide

Any minute.
Could rest for years
Or centuries.

You watched that one,
Thinking the whole
Time, What a fool.

Someday, the rock
Would move, must move,
Hasn’t at all.

Look Here's Another Hour

You recall the airy flavor
Of an old day, one from childhood,

When you glance out now at porch chairs,
At return of relentless light,

The colors bleached to full-spectrum,
Somehow all-white light. Give you time.

Give you space to sit and take it
In, a roller of a line raced

Ahead of the rest of the text,
One roller that never makes it

All the way to dissolve on shore.
If everything tomorrow were

Removed from its thoughts, from the mind,
And the day grew open-ended,

Endlessly more open-ended,
And your thoughts only grew with light.

I Know This Joy

You can’t recall
If she meant it,
With or without

Implied put-down.
The dishes clinked,
And the cosmos

Grew another
Six hours meantime,
Other events—

No piece of which
Can quite go, now,
And still, it grows,

Now candlelight
In a warm room,
The flickering

On your eyelids,
By which you see
You know this joy.

You Were, You Were

Jesus, your heart flopped ever
And lay still, made of of nothing
Except loneliness — What can

You do with doors adjacent
To each gift of collections?
Are these hills out? Are these doors?

Is this even loneliness—
Ok, the cats are free to linger.
It must be something,

Must hit something
And miss most things
And maybe that not-quite it.

Pain Med

Sorrow, well, you should have sorrow.
Supposedly, you’re dying soon—
But supposedly has been months,
Much of which you’ve been contented

And happy as you’re sorrowful
Now. And pain, well, you should have pain,
But the drugs increasing sorrow
Seem increasingly nonchalant

About decreasing pain. Upstairs,
The pets are sad, locked in a room.
The dishes overfill the sink.
Daughter slept over at a friend’s.

Hale and hearty young men’s voices
Echo around the parking lot,
Discussing this morning’s bike ride
As they fiddle with equipment.

Then they’re off. The sun shines. One dog
Starts a local bark. A cockroach
Struggles on the porch to return
Upright, and you wheel back inside.

Once Upon a Time There Were Only Living Ghosts (To an Adolescent on a Sleepover)

Sitting cross-legged on a grass hillock
High up on a mountain mesa meadow,

The ghosts of long-ago autumn weather
Wander around in living memories.

There’s nothing to memories but living.
They all rise, crest, reform inside your skull,

Every last memory of yours, alive,
Waves of memory being all you are,

At least that you can remember.
So it’s all living memories, all waves,

But all the waves are also haunting you,
We say, inhabiting your skulls like ghosts.

Ghosts as waves as ghosts and all memories.
There. There’s your bedtime fairytale. Night night.

Held Golden in the End-Stage of Your Days

That’s when it blanketed you

In your sunny room, reading

Fern Hill, of all things—Fern Hill

Among the stone skeletons

Of red-rock Utah desert—

That, as surely as this room

Glowed in the lowering light,

Tens of thousands of people

Who’d come to tour these canyons

Would here, soon—here or somewhere,

But not before long—suffer

Grisly, unexpected deaths.

Minor Leaning Major

Grey and hard to say what
In this scene is going well
Today. Maybe you can

Explain it by the end
When the evening descends.
You’re waiting on someone,

Someone else waits on you,
And another on them,
But it’s not just sequence,

It’s the series of tangents
That would follow on them.
Try a phone call again.

Night Purpled in the Ashen Air

Blue figure ground
Around blue at noon
The day’s slabbed wash

Of color in
Ragged patches
In formation

The bronze broken
More down in beige
Than ruddy brown—

It will never
Be over but
It will be one

More exhaustion
In the gutter
Of the green world.

Bound in Hiding

The book was the book
You’d dreamed of so long—
In your hands, lyrics,

But, in rewriting,
A novel of woods,
Impenetrable

To axe, chains, and fires—
Woods such as humans
Are becoming, dark

As woods used to be,
All the characters,
Trunks and branches

Who deep in the bones
Of their roots and dreams
Have reacquired speech.

You opened a page,
Deciphered a line,
And there was a text

With a narrative
Twist, remote aspen
Clone having betrayed

A cottonwood seed.
Ponderosas, wind,
The night coming in,

Songbirds weren’t
Communicating
So much as the tips

Of the roots of trees,
Intertwined, named, with
Personalities.

That’s your story, then.
The lyrics stay in
The ur-text you see.

And you can keep both—
Prose tales from lyric
Anthropology.

Enjoy Dragging It Out

And then you got what you wanted,
Permission to take your sweet time
Gazing at ever-the-ready

Death, death at hand and on demand,
Each of you there for each other,
Neither one needing to be rushed.

While, as for life, falling behind,
Please take any you wish to eat,
Any you wanted for yourself—

You don’t have to make it dinner
Or especially like dinner.
In the moment you encounter

These words you’re embracing this life,
And for now, there’s nothing better.

Replanting

The moss was rich, green, soft,
Compactable in hand,
Scooped from the woods between

The sentimental lawns
Of florilegia,
Just the thing for a path

Kind enough to bare feet,
But you didn’t collect
It for reasons like that—

You imagined bare hands
Shaping moss in the rain,
A sort of a poppit

With a sort of a face,
With nothing holding it
Together or in place.

How Was Math Today?

In a middle-school classroom
In the southwest USA,
Uproarious laughter may

Greet an atrocious pun that
Gets laughs from its racism.
Later, one student punches

Another square in the face,
Drawing blood and suspension
While the teachers do nothing.

Who wants to risk messing with
Tall teenagers in the land
Of the concealed-carry Glock?

If you’re reading in a world
Without such fun, imagine.

How Will This Go?

When was the last
Time you planted
Some living thing?
How recently?

How long ago?
Is it alive
Now, still alive,
Far as you know?

Presumably,
It was something
Small at the time,
But do you know?

How much would you
Guess it has grown?
There was a tree
Over a roof

You noticed just
A day or two
Ago—you used
To live there. You

Planted a seed
In the backyard
Five years ago.
Could that be it,

Now looming large
Over a moonlit
Roof that looks wrapped
In swaddling snow?

It is going
To take over
All the known world,
And you’re so pleased,

You can’t prevent
Your wide, thrilled smile.
What you planted,
Seed then seedling,

Comes for the world.
You can’t even
Read for thinking
How this might go.

So Go For It, Just Go

There is no shortage of people ready
To pack up and run, ahead of the storm.

There is a shortage of places to run,
No place far enough ahead of the storm.

Those with the most resources dig bunkers
And vaguely dream of surfacing on Mars,

The way as a child, you vaguely dreamed
Of digging through your backyard to China.

There is no open meadow, no wild land.
Do not think people did not know it was

Time to go. And people wanted to go.
Plenty of people were trying to go.

Going prevented no one from dying.
It may have caused more people to be born,

If the people going lived a little
Longer, drew their lives out longer—but then

Maybe trying to go made for fewer people
Who had children, on the whole. From the side

Of the gone, we will never know. How could
We ever know? We knew we could not go,

And we wanted to go, but of the gone
Who went the nowhere way anyone could go,

Way that got you nowhere, nothing to show,
Of them we never knew. How could we know?

Cheerio

Doesn’t matter how
You huddle or sleep,
The natural world,
Gathering the natural
World without rain,
No knives, no moss,
And when it’s done,
Or often well before
It is, you are embraced.

And Less Than No Why

Little, physical changes, small
Events that start, stop, or alter
Life in large ways, decades after—

The way you opened a door once
On a bland, sunny morning, light
Workload, no peculiar stresses,

Could have set off a chain of thoughts
That coursed around your other thoughts,
Maybe turned up in your writing,

And so on, on, and on it goes,
Small gestures swirling in ether
That add, subtract, or vaporize,

While some motions, large and small,
Leave no alterations at all—
Those waves summed together, canceled

Each other out—and you can’t know
Which will be which, and maybe not,
Even retrospectively—seas

Are like that, and you are at sea.
Surrender causation’s fictions.
Your world goes. Ain’t no how it goes.

Request a Tour

There’s a charm to daydreaming

Of a clear and welcoming

Future that extends in curves,

When you’ve already been told,

In solemn tones, you have none,

Or not much of one. The charm

Lies in gilding the lily,

Although you may not notice

This—you were always dreaming

About a nonexistence,

A future never really

Existing, no more than God,

An idea to consider,

Not a part of simple things

Like tables, old calendars,

Things that now exist as past,

Matter of fact as a dog.

The doubled absurdity

Is the particular charm.

You think of future decades

Living this or that a-way,

When you’re working with mere months,

So your oncologists say.

You browse for houses.

Peculiar Poem

The vivid and the peculiar
Vie to take up space in the paint,
Like colors daubed on a palette,

Like two huge basketball centers
Jockeying to get the ball first.
Which of them wins this possession?

Let the vivid be dread, and let
The peculiar be indifference.
Let the vivid look like dark mold

With fuzzy, spore-dust-heavy threads
Reaching out to latch on your eyes,
To spawn within your moist vision

Of this world as a mass-produced
Jungle of colorful terrors,
A bit too much glow in their dark,

Conversely, the peculiar doubts
There’s ever a reason to dread.
For the peculiar, the sunlight,

White, is as vivid as it gets.
How ever could the peculiar
Win the battle for the bright paint,

Disinterested in the outcome
Of the context, in any case?
Ah, but you see how it gathers,

All that peculiar indifference?
Fill the canvas with that, with not
Exactly the original—

The bleached, mass-produced shade of pale—
But something subtler, something dread
Can never, ever dread itself,

A meaningless shift in context,
A just slightly whiter canvas.
Dread will sally forth, confident

It’s got an angle on the paint,
But the background, the existence
Of the art itself, the contest

Is now wholly peculiar—
Peculiar is the indifferent
Ground against which the vivid splays

Some splashy story of nothing
Much at all, a few dashing lines
On the untroubled Face of God.

Who Blocked the Royal Sight Lines?

The language of mystery
And the unknown, the language
That isn’t really language,

So much as meaning’s wishing
Well. So surrender wishing.
Maybe you made up the tale.

Maybe you would like credit—
Winter, shadow, mystery--
For language you inherit.

Sometimes it still startles you,
The beauty of this planet,
But it’s not since you’re quitting.

It seems perfectly able
Of being this wonderful,
With light radiating cliffs,

With quiet and these small sounds
It doesn’t need hungry ghosts
To manufacture. So what

Brings you here? The mystery
Of language and the unknown.
Language lacking any kind

Of capacity to frame
The unknown as if it were
What brought us here today.

The Unknown World

It’s all you ever wanted
To visit, the unknown world.
All you needed to explore.

Does anyone really doubt
It’s vaster than the known world,
Probably by multiples?

Unknown’s not unknowable,
But that world’s definition,
Plus your awareness you know

Much less than you don’t know
Should convince you the unknown
Is as good as a cosmos

Of its own—you have so much
You might come to know no one’s
Ever known any before—

Just days in the unknown world
Would make you an explorer
Of the first water. There’s more,

Likely infinitely more,
Unknown from edges to core.
Oh to ever so slightly

Reduce the staggering, vast
Expanse of the recently,
Wonderfully unknown world.

You Only Get One Exit

If you were born into a peaceful,
Largely egalitarian society
With universal suffrage
And excellent health care for all,

A stability that lasted throughout
All the decades of your life,
So that neither murder, war, nor torture
Invaded your personal narrative,

You would die. You as one person, one
Single instantiation of human, would die.
And if none of the nicer stuff were true
For you, you would, as one instantiation

Of a human, still die. In the latter case,
You would probably die younger, maybe
Much, much younger, and you would
Witnesss much more suffering and death,

You might know the horrors of surviving
A scene grotesque on all sides with death,
But you would still, as a single instantiation,
Die once, one way, not many more at once.

The tedious singularity of your death
Might be put aside to consider ways
Of mitigating the suffering of living,
But no such intervention will actually

Save a life or reduce your personal
Count of the body bags you stuff. Spare us
Pain. Spare us the witnessing of brutal
Behavior between us. Don’t try to save us.

Until Then

Something’s gone off again.
Past the glass, the day’s bright.
You contemplate the line.

You could break it, make it
Clearly text scraps—forget
That you started to read—

What was it you started?
Something’s out of control.
You know how you know this?

Mild anhedonia, mild
But broadly expanding,
And really more like lack

Of feeling anything
Than like having a lack
Of interest in pleasure.

You’re not so anxious, now,
To let go the main chance.
You’re briefly less-concerned

With the end of supplies,
With being left alone,
With not being able

To complete any one
Of your tasks for today,
Of things you thought you chose.

And is this not a good,
Considered full circle?
The mythic future’s lost

A great deal of its grip on you.
So here you sit, feeling
There’s a gap in this text,

The lack of caring what
You might be compelled
To do next, until then.

One Break, One Rip, One Tear in the Rules

Natural is anything
You don’t need to believe in
For it to work—natural

Works as it works, while it works.
Nothing in your attitude
Is necessary, nothing

In your statement of belief
Has to be worded just so,
Nothing cares how well you did

The steps of the ritual.
It’s all only natural,
Feral, even, bits of it,

The undomesticated.
Does that make it good? Oh hell,
No. Natural is not good,

Except occasionally,
Nor evil, except the same.
And why so much carryon

About what is natural,
As if natural weren’t all
There’s now or ever been?

If you’ve got something to say
Something that’s demonstrable
Re the supernatural,

Please come back to the table.
We’re all ears. We want to know
How the unbelievable

Can work, so that we’ve got some
Chance to make its acquaintance,
That hole in the world that is.

Some days a body may sit
In perfect quietude, hours
And hours, hoping the world falls.

Some nights a body may dream
Of a brilliant afternoon
With the smallest puncture wound

In the true nature of things.
Let it loose. Pay attention,
But let it loose. Worlds will change.

Allergic Reaction

You don’t know it yet, but you

Live in a cosmos of lace

Where the gaps exceed the threads,

Where acknowledging as much

Would put you within danger

Of tumbling through a portal,

Now that you know there’s nothing

Much but portals in your world.

You’re the Great Central Station

Of a universe of gaps,

With no sure way of guessing

Which loop in the lace leads on

To world-building adventures

Of the quiet kind, which leads

To fantasies and sf,

Which leads to some rare, real hell

Or another, and which is

The portal to being free.

What should you do to be free?

Clutch the world delicately.

Inhale deeply. Ready? Sneeze!

Doubleday

Two days are always
Becoming themselves,
Accumulating

Fresh daytime stories
On separate tracks
That run parallel—

There’s the world at large,
Events of the day,
What you may call news,

And there’s your own world,
Events in your day,
That also arise.

All this is one day,
Or one date, at least,
Raising the question

About which events
Will matter the most
In the longest view,

As well as whether
Anything belongs
To a single tale

Uniting them all.
The days grow. They bloom
The way flowers do,

Petals off a stem,
Each day’s paired blossoms,
Toxic or helpful.

Time just keeps adding.
You exist as part
Of a universe

Bigger by the day,
Those miraculous,
In their way, twinned days.

She’s up in the Grotto Again

Muse of exile,

Mother of the road

What if it had been you and not

Your son driven out, made outcast,

You wandering off, all three boys

Left to shift for themselves back home?

Mythology would have given

Them some kind of magical wife

Or wives, some twist ex machina

To keep their creation going,

But what would there have been for you?

I like the idea of your tale better,

Eve, free at last, meandering,

Really pulling it off and not

Just burdened with too much knowledge.

Eve, the proper taxonomist,

Capable of understanding

The Darwinian behaviors

Of a planet abundantly

Prone to good and evil.

Let us know when you discover

How to live outside these old myths.

Miles from Any End to Them

In either twilight,
Those milestones are ghosts
Of rectangular

Slabs of while granite,
The headless torsos
Leaning in long grass,

Glowing in the shades,
Each abandoned door
Without any home.

You like seeing one,
The way it throws hints
Of stones as lost souls

To commemorate
Measurements’ sorrows.

Completer

The news, if not the world,
Keeps finding ways to grow
Ever darker. Does it?

Or is it just what’s next
Never looks promising,
Being inherently

False and full of horrors
Brains cull from memories?
And all the little things

You add up through the hours
Of ordinary days
Lean toward disaster,

If you incline that way,
As most of you do, and
Most of the headlines do.

Sometimes you imagine
A glorious, gentle,
And calm realm at the core—

Not like a star blazing,
Not relentless shining,
But simply, all is well.

What is coming isn’t.
The great scarves of stars
Are their own universe,

Far more than they’re your own,
And you have been growing
Ever gentler with knowing

That the next wave leaves you,
Well and good, ghost in sand,
Or takes you, better, true.

Trick Answer

How you enter and exit
The work, and then what changes
In between. There’s no entrance,

And knowing that’s the first trick.
That’s a proper labyrinth—
Nowhere to get started.

You walk up, thinking about
How you’ll handle twists in there,
How you’ll avoid getting trapped,

Until it finally dawns
On you that you’re still outside
Locked gates, and a storm’s coming,

Spider on the horizon,
Eight-legged black sun. You’re done.

In the Woods You’ve Shielded All These Years

It’s your subject that we’re missing,
Or something the heft and outline
Of a proper subject. You paint

Your dreams. You compose melodies
That started as random snippets
Of notes. An enormous novel

Lurks under your chafing breastplate.
You’re a marsupial hiding
A baby dragon in your pouch.

The dragon is dark. It wanders
Away from the pouch in the night.
It is neither water nor fire,

Nor even a dragon’s story.
It’s a story in your dragon
That you shield and worry about.

The story takes place in a frame
That is really impossible,
In a window sunk in the waves.

You can sit however you like,
With regard to that wave window,
Looking through it from either side.

You will notice, the way one spots
A faint celestial event
Like a far comet or eclipse

That won’t cover much, how iffy
Your perception of rare things is.
That’s your subject. It’s in the woods

The dark dragon swallowed, behind
Your glittering breastplate armor,
The story you won’t live to tell.

The Sun’s Joy

The long-armed sun goes loping
Like a teenaged boy who may

Feel free as the hours he makes,
As the grass he helps create,

As only the sun can be
In the middle of the day.

Cubic

Now you know what’s riding in the ice—
It’s the tipping point itself, writhing
Around in the tunnels, like mole rats

Inside the tubes you’ve drilled to study
Their cores. But you see, it’s not the cores,
Not anything in the cores—it’s what

Starts to move once the cores are removed,
And all that hard-won real-estate, chunked
From impossible rivers of ice,

Gets threatened by the next wave of greed.
You sense it clearly, haptically,
Tactilely, right at the moment you start

To ease the core out of the hole, blank
Sensation giving way to a worm
Or worm-like turning, felt in your bones,

In your arms, in your chest, as you grasp
The column of what is, after all,
Only ice. A kind of poltergeist

That needs emptiness for survival,
May need real nothing for survival,
It wriggles around your skeleton

Like when an orthopedic surgeon
Removed wrist pins while you were awake—
It was the new emptiness that squirmed,

And it signaled that something of you
Was about to leave as something else
And the old world was not coming back.

Into Strange Thousands

How weird to start with a brick,
To intend to make a brick,
Work as a brick-layer, when

The work feels more like cement,
And not at all like a brick.
Every time you start a line,

You’re pouring the admixture
Meant to go between the bricks
To hold the bricks together—

But where did the bricks come from?
Who piled the loose collection
Of items, quanta—not waves—

With which you’ve conjured a home,
A palace, a great big heap
Of many-roomed residence,

An edifice of maybe
Something that could be called
Home, if you knew why cement

Could be hallucinated,
In its process of making,
Into strange thousands of poems?

Maybe Not Before Leaving a Poem

Better a text littered in death,
Spiced by a salty happiness
Than a lot of suffering, cut
With shouts out to a lightweight joy.

The overall shudder transcends
The irresolvable puzzle
Of how this species can be both
In love with the worst violence—

The hunger to obliterate
Other sorts of people, but not
Before forcing them to suffer—
And capable of love itself

Of tenderness, forgiveness,
Staggering generosity.
Why pull so hard, opposing ways,
When a little neutrality,

Held to consistently, would do?
What are these bodies built to want
Beyond meals, mating, and long hours
Of sweet, uninterrupted sleep?

Someone will pray, halfheartedly
At least, for at least a short while,
For you, after you’re known as gone.
Then they’ll forget. And then they’ll go.

Body by a Comet Going Gone

But it will be for something
And you’ll never know what else
It could have been for, better

(You might have seen the comet
In the dark sky back at home)
Or worse (innumerable,

The ways it could have been worse).
For right now, in any case,
Here you are, waiting for now,

Will you remember your choice,
Be content or never care?
How long can this choice matter

To be considered at all
By a body going gone?

Down in the Hollow

It’s play, not a game, not quite—
No rules, no inside/outside.
You have the strong sensation

That the language of the poem
Isn’t the poem. This language
Is more like a chrysalis,

A containment in process,
A framework inside of which
A poem may be secreted.

The lines feel like underground
Railways, subway lines, tunnels,
Which real poems will travel in.

There’s no goal, yet. You’re playing
With shifting what you’re saying.

Jack Dreaming Beanstalk

Now memory falters
At the slightest interruption.
There’s a blur,

Somewhere between now
And never.
You don’t know what
Will happen there.

You wish you had magic words
Like magic beans
You could shove in the earth
Before bed, then sleep

To wake to floating lights
In the room before death at dawn.
Harvest the poem.

Book Cliff

The cliff spills all its worlds
Down one side, from sand grains
To mansion-sized boulders,

From wisps of grass to trunks
Of grand, uprooted pines.
Where did you mean to go

When you first saw the cliff,
And thought, maybe a poem?
Daughter’s getting ready

To spend the afternoon
At the bookstore, meaning
She intends to look good.

Decades have wandered by
Since the last time you browsed
Shelves meaning to look good.

You’ll settle for pain-free,
Your daughter’s company,
New books to browse or read.

You check the time, glance up
At the enormous cliff.
There’s no rush to finish

This or any other thought—
From the base of the cliff
You can witness the mind

Advancing on the world
As clearly as you can
See it crawl through bookshelves.

Going Great

Officially dying, there’s still
A wide variance in your days,
Ranging from those when you wake up

Feeling death is, for sure, too close,
To days when you feel all is well—
Days when you feel life’s turned out well,

Which you shouldn’t, since you’re dying.
But those days (and hours and minutes)
Are in there, where you catch yourself

Pleased with your life in general,
And why not? It’s not as if those
Who aren’t officially dying

Won’t ever die. It gets summed up
Sooner or later. You’ve done well!

Simultaneity

Is that the problem?
Watch the memory.
A second ago

You had an idea
You can still half-feel,
A shape in your brain,

What you were about
To compose—and here
You are, trying hard

To out-race the loss
By typing faster,
Only losing more

By making errors
That require pauses
To stop and fix, but

Better to have fixed
What you have so far
Than to finished it.

Is it? You’re trying
To compose and revise
At once, which becomes

Your subject, given
The first—wait, what first?
Did you mean verse? No,

You meant the first thought
You had to write about
For this—is long gone.

Although You Do

Shadows move on what they shade,

And they’re almost never still.

The mind, that is, all of it,

That fragmentary shadow

Of thoughts encircling the world

As the sun does, but intimately,

Less predictably, almost

Human—here someone stops you.

The mind’s nothing but human!

Nothing’s more human than mind!

You take the interruption

And pause to think. A human

Is a combination, no?

Maybe the mind is almost

Human the way abandoned

Webs are almost spiders, webs

Of any kind are spiders—

Uniquely so, but not quite

Exclusively. Webs exist

Outside of spider species,

Outside of spider bodies,

And mind exists past humans,

Outside of human bodies,

But when you think of a web

Or of a mind, you’re likely

Thinking spider or human.

Still, a web’s not a spider

And a mind’s not a human.

Both kinds of species combine

Bodies with these extended

Phenotypes. So, the mind is

Almost human; a shadow

Is not. The mind may not move

In the way a shadow does,

But, as the shadow of thoughts,

Mind is thrown (peculiar verb

For the calm of a shadow

Or mind in motion) by kinds

Of interference with light,

The interference, for mind,

Consisting of thoughts. Lesser

Light, subdued light, bearable

Is the result of both kinds.

The mind, the shade that stretches

As you tire, the dilution

Of being that thought creates,

Moves around within your skull

And says, you don’t want to know.

A Hunch

Elizabeth lived in times

Exact reference wasn’t

The most poetic target.

What’s the best thing in the world?

She asked, then answered herself—

Something out of it, I think—

How the mind works, when you blink,

And it finds anti-matter

In a box by gunpowder

In the cool, shadowy back

Of a storage room, among

Soft scents of lumber and dust.

Experience is one thing,

The hunch there’s more’s another.

Maybe Meaning

You love how life, as a word,
Can unfold so many lives
And then let them drift and sink,

So many paper blossoms,
Soggy within memory,
Getting dimmer in its depths,

None of them alive themselves
For all the definitions
Of themselves they carry on

Into the dark, this is life,
No, this is what life is, no,
Life’s meaning, not a being,

But no one’s sure what meaning
Is, either, maybe living.

Empty Day Almost Spent

There’s another moment
When you imagine it,
Whatever it might be,

That a moment ago
You thought you had, slipping,
This next moment, away—

And something in you cries
Out to the rest of you—
Waste! Whatever thing good

Or indifferent you have
Been doing distracted
You from what you have been

Losing while doing it.
And what you had’s going,
Your surplus dissolving,

Its dissolution waste.
You won’t regret it long.
You regret so little

That’s gone, once it’s long gone,
But right now it seems like
Something’s going to waste—

Free day, free afternoon,
What disappears without
Being consciously spent.

So that’s another form
Of it, isn’t it, waste?
But still you don’t know

What the word’s all about
How it functions, connects
To feeling it as waste.

The emptier the hour
Promised to be, the more
You hungered to feel it,

All the way through it all.
The closer to nothing
Nothing much feels, the less

You will jolt to the loss
Of near nothing at all
To near nothing at all.

How to Get the Day Talking

The mentor said break,
Break first. Then we’ll think

About what to do
With all your fragments,

How to make something—
The morning wind slipped

Down through the canyons.
Somewhere someone fell,

Wading in a crick,
Picking up pieces,

While someone else searched
For that collection

Meaning the canyon
Would start talking soon.

It Was 1:20 PM Just a Minute Ago

Death can seem to rattle time,
But that’s just since you begin,
Briefly, to pay attention,

And when you pay attention,
You notice clocks can’t agree,
For more than a day, on time.

It’s not death that rattles time.
It’s attentiveness that shows
How deluded counting is.

A weirder question would be,
Why proximity to death
Makes some folks pay attention?

Come on. You’re not escaping.
Humans love to wait too late.

Now Solve These

You have three
Words to make
A new world,

But you don’t
Know which words
They will be.

Use. That’s one.
Worth. That’s two.
Waste. That’s three.

A Thought Could Make Life You

Shuffle through the book, the books,
The tales of entertainment,
Of history, math, silence.

The mind may be one but small
Or vast, without cohesion.
In either form it travels

From egg into your stomach,
All thought’s hallucinations,
To find an inn in your skull.

Mind’s thus a thing, a substance,
But not, in itself, a life.
Without living, mind evolves,

And ancestors adapted
Through mind’s lines that led to you.

Rampaging Baboon Nebula in Forever Falling Snow

Once everyone accepted the heat
Was rising, its consequences dire,
There had to be a weird exception—

In this town where it started to snow
Scarcely past the first day of autumn,
The universe decided to snap.

Here it would never not snow again.
Performing chores keeps a ghost alive,
God roaring inside, afraid to be

Alone. No, not afraid. Dreading chores,
The gift of responsibility,
The way they can appear from nowhere,

Just turn up, from nothing to be done
To a list as long as your old arm
And a twist in the belly that says

Even the cancer objects to this.
Well, if it’s going to keep snowing,
At least here in this narrow canyon,

Best to move the wood stove to the top
Of the list of what has to be fixed.
The evening is white all afternoon.

There’s an oversized, glossy journal
Of deep-space photography sitting
On the bookshelf not far from the stove.

This issue’s garish cover photo,
NGC 6727,
The Rampaging Baboon Nebula.

The Diplomat’s Burial Garden

The words that trigger the soulful
Pictures have been hiding.
Without them, what’s a thought

But a blank from a dummy gun?
The body of the frail contains
A suitcase crammed with folders.

This internal folderol amounts
To paperwork on the scales,
And the scales assess bureaucracy.

So much goes missing near the end,
The funk and the careful threading
Of these fungi more ancient than bone.

Are they? The fungi? Bones are old
Inventions to be sure, but so is rotten.

You Can Alter

Natural’s no good,
And the accusation
That someone, by naming

Or portraying
Evil as natural,
Has thereby justified

Evil, even taken
The side of evil
As how things ought to be,

Is false. Natural moves
In cruel ways. More telling
Than nature’s wickedness

Or shiftiness, are thoughts
That pointing out nature
Has been cruel forever

Forgives it. The vicious
Going on the longest
Is the vicious most ripe

For change. Noting something
Has been going on long
Generations needn’t

Be a claim it can’t change.
More ancient regimes
Aren’t less vulnerable.

Nothing natural’s not
Temporal. The longer
It’s been like this, the more

Suitable for ending.
Pain can be natural,
Not inevitable.

Bright Apple Sunset

No peanuts from the moon
No results from the living

Room—the road had sufficient
Expanse through hours of desert

Driving home—and there you were
Rolling in the door Hello

To bills and claims on your time
Hello to ordinary

Hassles of getting through life
On days when death isn’t there.

You People Will Have to Leave

To sit under a cottonwood

By the edge of the parking lot

Of Old Fort Boise Park and read,

In Parma, Idaho, of lost

Empires from the early eras

Of cities and standing armies—

Silence descended—is to want

To inflict an observation

About humans on the human

World that lives to make and misshape.

What does this frontier replica

Of a fort not two centuries

Old have to say in the shadow

Of phrases translated from times

When Ur’s city walls already

Counted millenniums backward

Through civilizations ancient

Enough to have changed their climate,

Salted their marshes, and so forth,

Already moved on to stages

Of grieving and lamentation—

Silence descended? People talk,

In a noisy era, about

Fresh decimation on its way,

But it’s hard to say, on a day

Like today in packed Idaho,

Industrial agriculture

Plugged into global supply chains,

Streets and parking lots rife with cars,

Trucks, pick-ups, rolling second homes,

A general sense of bustle,

Despite the rural surroundings,

What will this be after the end

Of all the systems that made it

Into the obstreperously

Patriotic, confident land

It is now? Will silence descend?

Will the gods right now contending

For believers and wealth vanish?

You read a little more, this time

About Hattusha and the Late

Bronze Age Collapse. You imagine

Your daughter and her friends grown old,

The survivors at least, leaving

The stagnant remains of small towns,

Or the smoking piles of ashed roofs,

Maybe on foot, as so many

Displaced people already move,

Only, by then, refugia

Like Parma, Idaho, will be

Themselves ruins from which to flee.

What do you want to say to them,

Writing from the end of your frail

And painful but sheltered lifespan

Lived within a kind of empire,

A land you never had to flee?

That history encourages

Us with evidence things come back,

Under new management, glory

Days starting again, for someone

If not them? That the Dark Ages

Of any given location

Are not only not forever,

But never as dark, on closer

Inspection, as people believed?

That some happiness seems to breathe,

Some ordinariness at least,

Through every archaeology

Of the people that had to leave?

Picking out the Shards You Had in Mind

Saroyan and Dietrich, roll call—

The oldest we know, his cave, his wall,

The doorbell so / Lost in the wall . . .

What? Stops it. There you go. Collision

Of lyric fragments shattered. They work

Like any abandoned land mine.

Little trigger phrases intended

To drive shards of language through you.

That they rarely work is not the point.

The point is that phrases can ever carry

A grimy bit of small thought across

The barriers you counted on to hold.

Spider Hockey at Sleep

We’re leaving and none too pleased,
So we pause to waste some time
With Eggs Benny at Sleep Is

For Sissies, roadside Winlaw,
Pretending we’re arriving,
Departure some other day,

From some other life, not ours,
Not this one, in the woods
Beside the rural highway.

A jumping spider leaps down
Lightly and skitters across
The two-top. One of us taps

The table just so it leaps
Toward the other. Go! Go!

Five Years After the Last One

The edge of knowledge,
The threshold of death—

Now add this petal—
Last of the polished

And deep-pocketed
Soul’s predilections—

The step against steps,
The rule against rules—

Nothing’s very good
At being nothing.

People stand around
Talking about fires

That scorched the mountains
Just this past summer.

In Any Medium

This is not a good solution,

She said as she steered his heated

Power chair up the icy street

Through a non-existent winter

Evening someone had imagined

Just before they had imagined

Being on a picnic picking

Raspberries one summer morning

Also non-existent. But back

To the winter evening, the ice,

The steep slope of the frozen street. . .

Zig-zagging the power chair was

Not a good solution to those

Problems in any medium.

Weekday

Monday, it was, just
Regular Monday,
No holiday, no

Annual awards,
No events rooted
In church or in state.

You could pile fine dry
Splits to honor cold
Weather on the way,

Still it was Monday,
And seasonable
For early autumn,

Leaves not even down,
A kind of dusty
Gold haze on the green.

There was no one here.
Let it sink through you.
Nearly no one there.

Ill Advised

Jolting awake, once again
You frighten your future self,
That is, the self that ponders

Risks and disasters ahead.
That self is never correct
But often nearly correct,

And it’s really all you have
To mitigate, to ward off
All your looming disasters.

If you’re nodding off without
Knowing it until you start
Awake, bewildered, you may

Nod off while driving the car,
So that death or injury,
Financial catastrophe,

Overwhelming guilt and shame,
All the horrors pursue you
Through what little life’s left you,

Who didn’t take your future
Self seriously enough,
Harming your self and others.

See You as a Wave

It’s not always easy,
Although you all are waves,

To seek you in that shape,
To see that shape’s made you.

The continuity
Extends at all edges—

Periodicity
Governs where your wave breaks.

What to do with those chunks,
Quanta, spindrift, churned foam?

They’ll become waves again.
A black hound goes berserk

On the wet, empty street
With one amber streetlight.

Missing Hunts Itself

As often as sunlight threads through water,
So often soul will thread itself through you.

Nothing about this is meant to be cute.
Snorkel gold shadows through mossy green ponds,

You’ll notice how the sunlight threads and weaves,
And the existence of the soul is moot

If you only ponder what the word means—
The word soul is as real any word.

It’s as a word, numinous as sunlight,
That soul will continue to thread through you—

Glowing, mobile, and slow from side to side,
But good as instantaneous straight on.

The weird, freighted weightlessness of the soul,
That word most like a missing particle.

You Meant So Much More Than You Knew

Messages and meanings were encoded
Into everything, no matter how
Inert—indeed, the point of encoding

Was to discover how nothing could be
Inert, nothing could avoid meaningful
Interpretation—it’s all meaningful,

And humans had at it, adding meaning
To every insignificant wavelet
They swam across before it was their turn

To turn under and disperse with all their
Carefully articulated meanings.
They all said there were none. They all made more.

Triumphal Old Couch on a Grey Morning

You lose the doctors focused
On your recovery, on
Their potential victory—

You gain the nurses caring
Mostly for your comfort,
But unsure how to get there.

You may spend a grey morning
Wrapped in extra shawls and scarves,
Watching the fire someone built for you,

Hoping mainly for comfort,
Which by now hardly differs
All that much from victory,

But considering the cat
Of the host who naps. Triumph.

The Plan

You three circled the village
And came to a decision—
All you would need was a spell

Powerful enough to twist
The massive fasces of odds
Against you in your favor.

Then, when you bought a ticket
You would, most likely, win it.
Then, you could pounce on the house

By the lake, buy it in cash,
And move right in before death
Could tap you on the shoulder.

A plan is a simple thing.
You’ll die in that house, in spring.

The Swallowed Poem Meant for October 2nd

The words that no one could find,
That everyone talked about,
Weren’t words as you might find them,

Not sounds as wavelengths or waves
As signs. They hid in letters,
The way small lives hide in large.

These were the words of meanings,
The ones that don’t need to be
Accessible or pre-made—

They weren’t really words at all,
More like alchemical tricks
That were barely there, then gone.

For something to mean something
It pays informational toll.

Thought Extruding Structure

You live perpetually
Underinformed, and yet you
Are a spinneret of thought—

Not the whole spider, mind you,
And not the gossamer thread—
An extravagant device

That combines the polymers
Produced by a spider’s life,
Then sends those legendary

Skeins of miracle ideas
Into the world to do things
Impossible without you

But so much greater than you,
The weavings, orbs, ambushes,
And world-sailing parachutes,

The irreproducible
Suite of silk adaptations
That undergird spider myths,

Since it seems impossible,
For so much from so little,
Thoughts tapestried of unknowns.

Nothing Left

How do you prefer your emptiness?
What sense or set of phenomena
Do you savor in absentia?

Less sound, less light, fewer personas,
Shorter lists, more barren calendars?
How do you prefer your emptiness?

No mind? Non self? No rumination?
Have you ever tried it neat? The way
A day in, say, a foreign city

Can overwhelm you with everything,
So that only purest emptiness
Can find the secret to slipping in,

In the form of bereft awareness
You’re emptied of emptiness again.

What Happened

The universe, the everything,
Down to the way these phrases sank
Together in previously

Nonexistent rearrangements—
What’s new? In an organism
That’s really an ecosystem

Of single-celled organisms
Cohabiting in one giant
Of multicellularity,

A little fizzing keeps zipping
Among trillions of synapses
And, would you believe it, creates

In itself, in its tiny buzz
Of busyness, a small model,
A minuscule effervescence,

That believes itself an account
That covers the whole of everything,
More or less. That’s what true faith is—

Not trust in the miraculous,
But the willingness to as-if
The whole as blips of awareness.

Moving

The pause arrived,
And, as always,
You took a sec
To notice it,

Then a moment
To decide how
You ought to feel
About pausing—

The sun seduced
You in the end,
And you relaxed
To watch and wait,

For what, who knew?
The pause arrived
And you begged, stay,
But pauses move.

Epiphanic

Find the shade to watch the light.
A parking lot with shadows
From buildings on its west side

Will do fine. Study the white,
Full-spectrum sunlight. On tar,
On a white-washed wooden shop,

On otherwise grey cement.
You can still list the colors,
Even the bold marigold

Of the railings and fence posts,
But at all points, you’re seeing
Everything reflecting white.

The brown stucco wall is white.
The dusty green leaves are white.
The blue window trim is white.

This is what happens with light
That can wash but not wash out.
Find the shade to watch the light.

Handsaw and Shitepoke in a Siege

An old friend’s new book to hand, along

With notes on the etymology

Of heron just to the other side,

Both of them giving reason to think—

Are you up for beginning anew

At this late hour? The first friend’s challenge,

Implicitly, is to write your book,

While the second challenge someone else

Invoked perfectly explicitly—

Can you write us a poem on the theme

Of heronry's etymology?

Not that heronry’s a mystery,

But it’s one of those peculiar terms

That seem to belong to poetry,

So show us what you can do with it,

You, who never stop writing up things,

But never manage a book from them,

Never get an offer to publish

A proper book from a gatekeeper.

In your imagination, you see

A prize-winning book named Heronry,

But that’s as far you get with it.

That’s as close as you get to it.

That, and a few lines to do with it.

But Isn’t Zero

All the many lotteries

Every body totes around—

With three-billion plus base pairs,

Even tiny error rates

Produce a few mutations,

And even though most of those

Are blips, insignificant,

There’s bound to be a body

Holding a losing ticket,

Pleased to make your acquaintance.

Winning tickets are rarer,

Still—still inevitable.

In the nature of nature,

Never’s inescapable.

Condensery

The complexity of a flycatcher

Foraging for breakfast shamed you

When you looked up from your simple poem

On Labor Day, quoting, No layoff

From this / condensery. Small bird,

You said to yourself, being

The only one of the two of you

Who knew what it means to be

A bird and be small—meaning not

Being the forte of flycatchers

For all their complex intensity—

It’s ok to be simple someplace,

It’s ok to try to make words mean.

They’ll go back to merely being

Things for other complicated thinking

To consider or quickly reject,

Once you and this diligent flycatcher

Have finished with your laboring.

Finches erupted in the trees,

Like applause made by singing

In your simplistic fantasy,

Like praise for your simplicity.

May the flycatcher have found

Some rest in satiety.

A More Lunar Fermenter

The dark broth of the run-off can’t not
Be an acquired taste, appealing
Only to the odder connoisseur,

But it’s a potent distillation
For those ready for a weirder brew,
And meanwhile, clarified contentment

Is a joy to share with those who share
Your space to converse in the same air.
Mornings for chatter; nights for readers—

Save your happiness for companions;
Save your complaints for poems. You’ll gather
Fewer readers but improve your friends.

Which Is Barely a Poem

Stories that bind are often
Barely narratives at all.
The goal’s not entertainment

In a conventional sense—
It’s about the recounting
Of some shared experience

That’s especially potent
If only one teller can
Remember it at all well,

As when children ask parents
About about what their births were like
Or when children tell parents,

Disappearing into fog,
Some fond memory to lure
Their parents back a moment.

What was it you used to do,
Papa, that chased my bad dreams?
I know you commanded me,

Sort of, like, You won’t have bad dreams
Tonight! And somehow, it worked.
How’d that even get started?

You were eight, in that bunk bed
In the house in Hurricane,
And you’d had a string of nights

With nightmares, and you wanted
To make them stop. I told you
To tell yourself you wouldn’t

Have bad dreams that night, but you
Didn’t believe that would work.
On a whim I raised my hand

And said I was telling you,
You won’t have bad dreams tonight.
The first night we got lucky.

I think since I trusted you.
After the first night, you did.
And basically that was it,

The story of how Papa
Stopped you from having bad dreams.
Not much of a tale is it?

But much more satisfying
Than a plot twist. And who can
Even tell which of us said what

Just now in retelling it?
Like the time my grandmother
Surfaced from her dying bed

To join me in the story
Of the time my sister spilled
A whole milkshake down my shirt.

And just the other day, she,
My sister, your aunt, reached out
To me, since I’m dying now,

Recalling old anecdotes,
And that one came up, which she
Was too young to remember

Well, and that broke the ice.
What’s the point? I guess the point
Is that the arts don’t function

Best as what we think they are.
Stories, like singing, were balm,
Were human kinds of grooming,

Elaborating meaning
As a kind of offering,
Creating intimacy.

The grander social uses
Came later, for all the arts,
And that includes poetry.

Another Piece Put in Place

Thoughts wander up and down the green
And flowered tapestry of mind,
Just looking for a place to rest

That isn’t imaginary,
That lets thoughts sleep
Without nightmares, to wake refreshed,

A pleasant bit of living done,
As part of getting dying done,
At a steep cost to no one. Yes!

Dying’s part of living and not
Always the hardest part, although
Likely never the easiest.

There’s maybe not so much to dread
From dying, then, and certainly
Nothing at all from being dead.

Its possible for much of it
To be completed peacefully,
Sun on your chest a few moments,

The afternoon accomplishing
What it can’t help but accomplish,
Your thoughts, for now, in sync with it.

See? There, you go—another hour,
Another shift in the shifting
Natural light of the planet,

Tucking away a little bit
Of what you, like the light, can’t stop,
Can’t help, can’t—and yet will—finish.

Stage Four

What’s a prepper to do
When the phone call’s coming
From inside of the house?
The bunker’s bolted down,
Silo’s locked and loaded.
No one’s getting in here,
Ever, to rescue you.

Outside, the world goes on
Taunting apocalypse,
Still foolish and clueless.
Inside, you’ll be preserved
As perfectly prepared,
Save for the visitor
Your insides brought with you.

The Painkiller’s Singing

Pain is the only real
Reason for real grieving—
It’s how loss makes you feel,
How tortured your breathing,
Worst when there’s no appeal,
No drug that’s relieving,
When you’re tumbling downhill
Still not quite believing,
When you’re crushed by pain’s heel
And angry, and seething,
And the pain makes a meal
Of all you believed in.
Simple pain is all steel.
You’re only the bleeding.

The Many, Too Many, The Few

In the same hour’s world-wide news,
A piece on global warming
Coming to get everyone,

And a piece on the losses
When death stalked one family
And two or three members died

Overnight. Now here you are,
Heading home between the news,
Between death for everyone,

Which is what looms, and always,
Locally, death for a few.
And? If you’re one of the few,

What can you do to prepare
The rest joining up with you?

Prosodoxy

The night was August,
The summer waning,
The laughter screeching.

The kids were dyeing
Each other’s hair and
Discussing the tracks

Shaking the kitchen,
Deep theologians
Debating scriptures.

You perched in their church,
Where rhymes were sacred
And every verse cursed,

And all the boasts lies
That knew truth lied worse.

Contrarian Reception

And we miss more than we see,

Wrote Max Finstein long ago,

A common misconception.

It seems like it must be so.

All our prosthetic senses

Preach to us about wavelengths

And what’s going on beyond

The doors of our perception.

But miss is a tricky term—

At any given moment,

Sure, we must be unaware

Of most of what’s going on,

But the wand of molecules

That constitutes a body

Constitutes an antenna

That’s as tuned as anything

To everything underneath,

And we see more than we know.

Kindness Is a Kind of Metabolism

How we live within our times,
Largely forgiving of those
Who are close to us, largely

Unforgiving of others
Who are mostly imagined,
Given they’re farther away—

Little clouds of thoughts inside
Small orbits of behavior—
Few of us more than manage

More or less acceptable
Lives within our small contexts.
Lots of people have observed

How life is like a bubble,
Just a bubble, a bubble
Of awareness—it’s also

A sphere of ethical sense,
An enclosed parameter,
Sometimes many such bubbles,

Articulating outsides
Relative to our insides,
Like living cells, like our cells.

Afternoon Alucinari

You were surprised
No one was there.
You closed your eyes,
And they were back,

The child talking
With the adult
In soft voices
On those chairs,

Those empty chairs,
Which remained there.
Your eyes opened.
Again just chairs.

You tried to hear
What the child said
To the adult
Or the adult

Said to the child—
You could clearly
Understand them
With your eyes shut.

You could see them.
But, eyes opened,
Again just chairs,
And no words left.

You’d never had
This dream before,
This lazy dream
That didn’t change

Backdrops between
The scenes. The same
Setting, the same
Chairs, and you there,

But the talking
Pair blinking in
And out of air.
You closed your eyes,

The room remained
The same as when
You were awake,
Just the adult

And child returned.
Allegory,
You decided,
It had to be

Allegory—
Mysterious
Child stands for what?
And the adult?

You dozed back off.
They were talking
Again. This time
You realized

Neither noticed
You watching them,
Trying to hear.
They must have been

Spirits or gods
You decided,
And always there—
The chairs weren’t dreamed.

Nothing was dreamed.
You were never
Really dreaming,
Even when you

Had your eyes closed.
More like dying,
You heard them talk
And saw them there.

Further from death,
You lost the strength
To conjure them
Conversing there.

Closer, further,
Further, closer,
Time to wander,
Whatever’s there.

Announcer

For one writer, the radio

Playing on his kitchen counter,

Something like fifty years ago,

Was the voice of a true doubter

That didn’t fill but tore a hole

In quiet for future’s power

To invade, like a cold wind blows

Through any chinks it encounters.

Tomorrow! roared the radio,

Any lone pulse that still flounders

Will belong to someone who knows

Invention operates downward.

Turn In

Dreaming on the evening porch,

Literally, lit-er-al-ly

Before you even know it,

You wake up with your last words

To the interlocutor

Of the dream all you recall—

We know which life is the dreamed

Since we forget it faster.

You write that down and ponder.

At the start of sleep, often

There’s a segment before dreams

In which nothing’s remembered.

And, when sleeping between dreams,

Also, nothing’s remembered,

And all those amnesias

Hit instantaneously,

Remainin complete until

You wake or you start to dream.

When awareness winks for good,

There could have been dementia

Or a clear head beforehand,

But once awareness is gone,

The amnesia is total—

In fact, the truth’s the reverse

Of that claim you remembered

From your dream—you know the dream

Since it’s what fades more slowly.

No. It’s when you’re not dreaming

That you recall or forget

Anything you’d been dreaming,

And when you’re not dreaming, dreams

Do fade faster than what’s not

Dreaming—but what’s not dreaming

And what was dreaming vanish

In a blink together when

Awareness stops awaring.

You’re still on the porch and still

Dying, but you should turn in.

You’re feeling sleepy again.

Life Behaves

That’s one proposed way

Of confirming it—

If there’s behavior

Going on, it’s life,

It’s alive! Assays

Of motility

Have been recently

Mooted in Nature

As potential tests.

The difficult trick

Will be weeding out

Human behaviors

That tend to extend

Semantics over

All phenomena

And use metaphor

To extrapolate

Meanings from objects—

How often have you

Seen some agency

In a tumbling leaf?

Alive? Exactly.

Waking inside a World at War

Dreams couldn’t care less
About the company
Of other dreams they keep.

Even the overall
Emotional tenor
Can swing from dream to dream.

In an hour before dawn
A little restlessness
Can yield romance, terror,

General frustration,
The ghosts of your parents,
A world implausibly

At peace in all corners,
Not even a quarrel,
Inside a world at war.

Some Nights, Death Plays with Its Food

Even dying, the chores of the living
Keep trying to reoccupy your mind
So insistently you start to believe

Your diagnosis was always a lie.
You’re not dying at all. You’re just a wreck—
Unhealthy, sure, and dependent on meds,

But with all the old chores, old work, old dreck
Of deadlines and bills, general busyness.
Here you thought dying meant better living,

Life without effort, not striving to live,
But instead you’ve just extended living
With all its nuisances, into a phase

Of lingering unhealthiness, sped up
Version of the ordinary aging
Everyone not dying has to work with—

Faster than average disintegration,
But nothing like detachment from the world
Of brute maintenance, nothing like the glide

Straight into the wide-open mouth of death,
More like finding yourself speared by the end
Of death’s many-tined eating utensil—

Gobbet vaguely waved around in the air
As death gestures with you to make a point.
How long until you can get swallowed whole?

Phrases and Fragments of Unusual Language

Too reductive? You fold up
The plaid blanket you had wrapped

Around your waist, rummaging
Memory as you do so.

The best stories had three things—
Characters you found yourself

Deeply emotionally
Invested in, never mind

That they were only phrases
And rehearsed performances—

Plots whose basic outlines served
To provide a scaffolding

For comprehending
This or that schema of life—

And unusual language
At points in the narrative,

Memorable turns of phrase
In the mouths of characters

Or in the surrounding words
Describing scenes and events.

Focusing on the latter
Alone, apart from the plot

Or character, yes, that is
Reductive. You put away

The blanket in the cupboard.
Locally, another day

Had begun, dominated,
Like all the rest, by events

And various characters.
But here, in the quiet room

Where you watch the sun alone,
You find your mind hunting down

The footpaths of memory,
Hungry for just the right phrase,

The remarkable fragment
Of unusual language.

Never-Ending Genesis

The subject of the art is not
Out there waiting for you, is not
Necessarily in your mind,

Although you will have to dragnet
Your memory to dredge it up,
Or something close enough to it

So that you can begin your sketch
Or elaborate your first scene.
The subject of the art may turn

Out to be so derivative
That no one finds any value
In it past perhaps craftsmanship,

But even then—even stolen,
Lifted from memory, largely
Or entirely imitative,

The exact subject for your art
Doesn’t yet exist. You stare out
Across the lawn of the summer

Park lodge to where several easels
Have been set up facing the cliffs,
As plein-air enthusiasts paint

Just what they see in front of them.
Surely the subjects of their art
Exist, the cliffs, as they’re given?

No, in your skull you disagree,
And draft your disagreement here:
They may paint pre-existing cliffs.

They may rely on memory
Of past plein-air paintings, of craft
They were taught in this or that class,

But the subject each will capture
Will be the subject each has made.
You feel you must insist on this

As the most wonderful aspect
Apparent in this universe.
Things can come into existence,

And with each flick of a paintbrush
A subject of art has been made—
The whole history of the world

Has been increased by that subject,
That painter on the brilliant lawn
Of a public park in the shade.

Departure for an Exciting Trip, Pulled Off Without a Hitch

What did you want today to be like
When you were thinking ahead to now?

You weren’t really thinking about now.
You had no experience of now.

You were thinking about today’s date
As upcoming on the calendar,

And then casting your memory back
Over such pasts as you have retained

And trying to make a shadow box
Of this blank spot on the calendar,

A specimen of assemblage art.
So, asking the question differently,

What memories did you put forward
That you would have liked to discover

Waiting for you today? Glowing health?
A love poem of delight in the world?

Or were your desires for now less bold?
Maybe bills paid, adequate supplies,

And something hopeful about the world
That you could pass on to the next date.

There is this—for all the murdering,
Mere quarreling, and exploitation

Members of your species do know how
To do a couple of things quite well—

Have a raucous good time together;
Coordinate on something complex.

Did you wish for one or both of those
When you were thinking ahead to now?

How to Tell History from Fiction

Even empires come out of retirement—
Neo-This and Second-That flourish
For a little while in imitation

Of their namesakes. Aftershocks. All they are.
As far back as ancient Sumeria,
Ancient Sumeria made a come-back.

But no one builds epics quite like athletes
Reluctant to let go of glory years.
No one builds sequels like hegemonies,

The first iteration more extensive
Than each shrinking descendant. Yes, the first
Season is generally the finest,

But they don’t return geometrically
Reduced like radioactive half lives.
That’s how it goes with the civilized world—

If a human or something human works
Really well, someone else will run it back
Or try to, New Kingdom, Third Dynasty,

Last campaign to win the presidency.
If trilogies were written in that way,
They’d have a better claim to mimesis.

The closest approximation comes when
Some creator sets off on a prequel
Or a tangential world-building project.

But even a story about failure succeeds
Best as a tale in which story succeeds,
One narrative arch, not hoodoos that shrink.

Oneiricism

Frequently, while you’re reading,
Your dreaming mind continues
In the manner of the text

You’ve started dozing over,
So that, for a little while,
You are the author’s other

Self, transplanted to your skull.
If you’ve been reading fiction,
The characters keep talking.

If you’ve been reading science,
Thoughts keep hypothesizing—
No! Says a voice in the back,

Grad student in the shadows—
You keep experimenting!
Whatever. The text goes on

Until you’re fully awake
Or have run out of supplies
To go on in that genre.

For now, you’re still half-asleep.
An early original
Copy of the text folded

In your lap as your eyes drift
And you ask all the words left
To finish this mess at last.

You Are if You Care if You Are

People as monsters
(Only in the minds
Of people)—people

As people (only
In the peoples’ minds)—
And people as words

(By people, about
People, for people)—
Can you spot the trend?

What people are is
Something that doesn’t
Ever deeply change,

Something that flickers
When tilted in light,
Something that erodes

To something ghastly,
Or so it can seem
To squinting people,

To something lusty,
Hungry, creaturely,
Or to something said.

There are physical
Phenomena named
People—arguments,

Also about which
Phenomena count
As really people,

But the catch is that
Only people care
Who people are, what

People are, and which
People can decide.
It’s as if, say, God

Was the only one
Arguing about
Who or what is God,

Or if only ghosts
Considered haunting
Taxonomically,

No input outside
Of ectoplasm.
Well, maybe that’s just

People for you, hey?
Whatever they are
That other things aren’t.

Desert Thunderstorm Right Before Bed

No, God is not dead,
A website argues,
Serenely certain

Everyone agrees
What the word God means.
How about, no God

Is dead, all versions
Live? Suspicious stares
Swivel at that claim.

How about, no God
As mostly defined
By your faith leaders

Is dead? No Christian
God is dead, or no
Baptist God is dead,

Or—pick your people,
Your congregation.
Does everyone in

Your congregation
Have the same notion
As to what God means?

That God is not dead.
Other Gods may be.
Little gods should be.

Hard to find a faith
That lets all Gods live,
That lets all Gods be.

Your God is not dead
Since you believe, and
What’s God without faith

In any case? God
Who lives should live when
Nobody believes.

The Day Is Uncertain

Sleep’s been lurking in the corners
Of your scattered aches all morning,
So that you drift between alert
And dozing some more in your chair.

The nests of texts you wallow in—
News, letters, fiction, and your own
Poems—all feel grubby as unwashed sheets,
Tiresome as being invalid.

Too much cancer, too little sleep
(Real sleep), too many painkillers,
Too many trivial setbacks—
All too much like the show you watched,

Or tried to watch, with your daughter
The other night, when the service
Started glitching just as you were
Both getting into the story,

The scenery, the charming lead.
For a while, you kept watching,
Hoping the stream would sort itself
And quit abruptly seizing up

Mid-word, mid-eyeblink. Finally,
It got too frustrating, and you
Decided to turn off the show.
There’ll be none of that in real life.

If you keep blinking out mid-thought,
If the thought your dreams invaded
Was how mediocre your thoughts
Tend to be, well too bad. You are

Still in the middle of the stream,
And you can either cultivate
Patience with your frequent glitches
Or keep glitching impatiently.

The soft hum of a distant plane
Somewhere over the canyon’s walls
Laps like lake waves against the shore
Of your eroded awareness,

And maybe you’re okay with this.
You can see leaves tossed in the breeze
Outside the windows on your dreams.
You can dislike these lines later.