No Unique Conclusion

Cancer is almost the most
Ordinary death there is,
Proof bodies will eat themselves

If predators, parasites,
Violence, and accidents
Are kept from shredding them first.

The body will eat itself,
If broken cells turn selfish,
Multicellularity

And devotion to the whole
Community of the beast
Betrayed for a brief huzzah,

Runaway evolution
By natural selection
Favoring the buccaneers.

The failure of maintenance,
Of policing, of local
Submission to global rules

Produces, briefly, new life,
New worlds of cancer chaos,
And this is ordinary,

This is the state of nature
In the struggle of all cells.
Life hungry for life itself.

Meaningfully Uncommunicative

Accepting that language evolved
For communication, not thought,

One shouldn’t be surprised thought’s hard
To parse, abstraction’s awkward,

And philosophers are often
Horrible writers. But it may

Also be why poetry tends
To inscrutably meaningful,

As meaning is orthogonal
To messaging—information

Isn’t maxed by the same process
Maximizing meaning making.

Meaning doesn’t communicate
As the first order of business.

Final Sleep After Too Many

When the surgeons say
To have a nice nap,
They know well you’ll wake

Up miserable—
They’re teasing, really,
As you are, saying

Goodbye world, drifting
Off to sleep, knowing
You’ll be back in just

A few hours. That’s been
Both life’s long joke and
Life’s small punishment,

Wakey, wakey, rise
And shine, awareness
As obligation.

But now, you’re almost
Done with all of that.
Sleep that’s not joking

Is a last mercy,
You don’t have to give
A chance to come back.

On Barely Being

None of your strategies matter,
Close to your vanishing—it’s not

That they couldn’t possibly work.
Just that there’s no time to test them,

And what are they strategies for,
Really, anymore? Not long life.

This was always the thing about
Hospitals, jails, classrooms, childhood

In general—the more you were
Restricted, the freer you were

In some way difficult to say.
Not free from care and emotion

But from the trap of causation,
Perhaps. Those who can, feel they must.

Those who can’t may lecture the dust
On being less industrious.

Speravi

Things that you will never do
Stand equal to each other,
The grand goals and the humble.

You don’t ever have to choose
Between the things you can’t,
But you never really chose,

So why not keep pretending
You’re selecting, or at least
Dreaming, among your futures?

Your motto may no longer
Be supra spem spero, but
You had always liked to hope.

Pretend to pretend until
Unfulfilled future’s fulfilled.

Looks Like You Won’t Die Any Other Way

Alone in the shadowy room,
Hot sun on the desert outside,

You picked at an old piece of tape
On your arm and contemplated

Whether you were or weren’t learning
Something that amounted to fate.

Dying’s an old fashioned darkroom,
Like the one you used in high school,

Where you bathe the film of frames past,
And develop your negatives,

And scrutinize the contact sheets.
You’ve got nothing but what’s on them.

The end result’s not determined,
But the selection’s limited,

So limited it feels fated
How death is going to look for you.

You flicked the tape in the trash can,
Squinting out the window at the heat.

Fresh Note to Old Fred

This can be right—Poetry

Doesn’t matter in the least—

And this be wrong—Poetry

Is meaningless. It’s habit

To assume meaningfulness

And mattering are tightly

Linked, if not synonymous.

What’s meaningful matters, and

What matters is meaningful,

But that’s not always the case,

At least when mattering means,

As it seems to in your poem,

Something akin to import,

Impact, being the cause of

Real, material effects.

Poetry doesn’t stop war

(You name-checked the nightmare feast

Of Putin as example,

Which I first read as Pushkin),

Doesn’t prevent invention,

Doesn’t pass legislation,

Is at most inspiration

For such actions, even if

You believe in causation.

But meaningless? Anything

Can be gifted with meaning

In the orbit of humans,

And language is expected

To have meaning anyway,

And poetry is language

Distilled—straight up or cocktails—

So it’s especially prone

To collecting meaning clouds,

But even if weren’t so,

The potential would be there.

Look at what just happened here

To your poem, with this reader.

No, your poem doesn’t matter,

But it’s meaningful. Now what?

Bedside

A hospital can be a jovial place,
At least for a week or two.
The staff can be friendly and kind.
You can banter with the crew.

It’s only when you don’t get well,
Just get sicker, start to despair,
Linger, become less inclined to banter,
That it’s heart-sinking to be there.

Yes, it’s mostly self-pity. Yes,
It’s loneliness. You’re estranged
From family, from your own memories,
From any encouraging kinds of change.

You want to be back on the mesa.
You want to be back at the lake.
You want to be with your daughter,
Laughing at how she hacks into birthday cake.

A nurse comes in as you’re shuffling
Through old travel photos on your phone,
And she looks at the pictures, how pretty,
A mercy. To share memory. To not be alone.

Make Your Peace

Once the miracles have been accepted
As lies, once gods go to ground, it’s assumed
The power of faith to console survives.

Not always. Or not uniquely. Comfort
Can come from physics for some. For others,
Somehow, even evolution consoles.

Consolation, like meaning, doesn’t lie
Where people find it, but in the people
With the gift and the need for finding it.

Self-soothing, sometimes it’s called in infants,
And it’s unevenly distributed,
As ability, as product, as scent

Almost, but it’s your own, and neither faith
Nor facts are necessary to your peace.

The Lightest Weight

The butterfly lands,

Busy as a bee

With sprezzatura,

Wings might as well be

Equivalent capes

To a bullfighter,

Here I am and slow

And easily torn

But with work to do.

If you couldn’t see

Color, if you weren’t

Prone to assign moods

To coincidence—

The dolphin’s fixed smile,

The lemmings’ despair—

If you could prevent

Yourself from telling

Meaningful stories

About aesthetics,

Metamorphosis,

Paradox, chaos,

You’d have so little

Bandwidth left you’d see

Papillon as bug,

As insect, getting

Food to fuel laying

Eggs under the leaves,

But you can’t help it.

These brilliant cut-outs

Of shimmering scales

Mean for you Psyche,

Soul, delicacy,

What you mean to be.

Accessibility

You’re in a box, you often

Remind yourselves, although it

Took you long enough to learn

As much—a small, sensory

Deprivation box. Seeing

Out of the box proved the box,

Proved there were more things to see

Than human eyes could. At first

It seemed pure discovery.

Early lensmen were accused

Of lying about their moons,

Monster blobs in ditchwater—

Or, if not lying, blinding

Imagination’s angels.

Even now, disenchantment

Is the paradoxical

Catcall against those who seek,

Through prosthetic devices,

The vast worlds outside boxes,

Waves too deep for lives to count,

Waves so long they’re gravity.

No one doubts you’re boxed, though, now,

Awareness sensorily

Impaired, bound, restricted,

Dependent on assistive

Technologies to peek past

Old tales and angels. You’ll see.

The Magical Materialist Raises a Hand at the Back of the Class

Doubtful that Borges
Thought either that the world
Was changing its appearance
In ways his eyes
Faithfully registered,
Or that his metaphysics
Had disenchanted the world of its light.

But let anyone complain
That we are living in a world
Disenchanted of mystery,
Increasingly bereft of magic,
And they, blind to Borges
And other recent, fine enchanters,
Will surely blame the dimming world
Or materialist philosophies.

It will not occur to them
That, while not their fault,
Not their choice, just who they are,
The disability is theirs.

Stirring, Not Fishing, Not Even Catch and Release

People get proud and intense
About moment-savoring.

The only problem with that
Is that it fetishsizes

A stretch of continuous
And continuously changed

Experience as a bump,
Quantum in the field of waves—

By the way, is it not sweet
That in the opposition

Of points and waves
Both sides are made of the waves?

The moment is wave in wave.
You can let it slide. You can

Grasp that it’s not your moment,
Savor that you can’t grasp it.

Washed Up

The coracle’s a wreck
That somehow hasn’t sunk
Or flipped belly-up yet.

Acorn-cap of a boat,
Who thought of such a thing?
Don’t answer that. Let’s not

Let explanation set
Us adrift. The basket
In which awareness sits

Tilts in the grey wavelets
Close to the shore. Questions
Should invite Yes or No.

Can the boat be rescued?
Yes, although it depends
On for how long—Wait. Stop.

Only the question posed.
Is the coracle safe?
No. Is there a paddle?

Yes. A destination?
Once, maybe. What is it?
A wind is coming up.

Dewdrop Inn

They said, We own it.
So there, that’s settled,
And so were they, puns

And all. This would be
Their permanent stay,
Indefinite grant

To occupy part
Of the past as if
Only visiting.

Step out. Look around.
The narrow tarmac
Between the ghost woods,

Everyone murdered
To get here. No one
Left but the owners,

The hosts, the new hosts
On the old, drowned coast,
Their empty hotel

Next to the warning
Sign for tsunami
Evacuations.

Decades ago, when
Poems tried different things,
When both right and wrong

Those tricksters, would come
Down to the glassed-in
Hothouse swimming pool

Behind the inn, join
The deer in sneaking
In, eager, nervous,

Unaware how soon
They would fail to make
The key decision,

And begin to change.
They said, We own it,
But they kept going

And forgot to sign
The precise papers
That would have let them

Stay—Now they’re too old.
The inn is still there,
But they didn’t stay.

Encoded Content

Could be memory.
Could be digital
Or a printed book.

It feels misleading,
Too general somehow.
You stare at your hands

Of information,
Wriggle the digits
You learned to count on

Taught your child to count
With as well. Nerves, skin,
Capillaries, bone,

Encoded content?
If you mean it, if
You really mean it,

Understand it’s you
Who makes it mean so,
And you ought to know,

What you meant isn’t
Content encoded,
Isn’t encoded

At all—those were wings
That were capable
Of flight without fall.

Purity and Belligerence

The tent poles of commitment
Can be set to capacious
Enough for field commanders—

Even brooding emperors—
For a whole world-class circus
With vendors and audience—

Or to frightened narrowness,
So close as to be absurd,
Useless for holding things up,

Bound to twist, topple over,
Sad, incompetent madness
Collapsed in heaps of canvas,

But don’t laugh. Pillars of fire,
Pillars of cloud, of Moses,
Caesar, Aurelius, Khan,

Balance holding high the roof,
However temporary,
Of human authority,

Retaining capacity
To incubate tragedy
And hide it under trappings

Of gaudy extravagance.
By the one pole, purity,
Belligerence is anchored,

And, in turn, belligerence
Grants tension to purity.
Are you really one of us

Through and through, grounded, upright?
Will you lean into the wind
In defense of principle?

Mostly, it’s not dramatic
As all that, but there’s a tilt
Toward alignment, a tilt

Against whatever isn’t
In that alignment, and one
Never without the other.

You Lie, He Cried

Where does an opinion end
And a settled fact begin?

Right there, on the horizon.
All the human violence,

Mercy, keeps confined within
The landscape of opinion,

While calm contentment has been
Waiting past certainty’s thin

Division where the sky spins
To ink the infinite skin

Of what cannot be questioned—
Truth in its own environs

Past that line, in your vision,
Within sight, the horizon.

Assassin Sonnet

An exceptionally incompetent

Assassin seems to have been tracking you.

You got jaundice. You got cancer. You got

Sepsis. You were wreathed in a cloud of tubes.

You got a hernia that grew and grew.

You compressed and fractured a vertebra

Without hardly noticing it. You puked

Blood, you shit blood, you got holes in your gut.

You got yourself cauterized frequently.

And still, in all this, you’re missing something,

And you keep breathing. You swear you can hear

The desperate assassin whispering

Prayers at impossible distances, Lord,

Lead us the way we want to go, Amen.

Riddle

It’s interesting and contains
Occasional pleasures, that’s all.
It doesn’t win competitions.

It doesn’t measurably make
A net improvement to the world,
A net reduction in good things,

Partly as those can’t be measured
In any way everyone likes.
It self-soothes with reproduction

And cultural production.
It’s interesting and contains
Occasional pleasures, that’s all.

Temple Detail

It’s not all that important,
What your life is made of—it’s just
Astonishingly detailed,

Astonishment being one
Occasional chime among
Those details, like the herring-

Bone weave of the blanket mass-
Manufactured that happened
To end in the hospital

Bed struck by lamplight, being
Contemplated by the man
With the bald head and long beard

Who is both a dustbunny
And a thread passed through the weave
Of the mechanical room

Of blinking, beeping signals
And its own humble details,
The small rip in the cushion

Of the swivel chair a nurse
Snuck in, so that she wouldn’t
Have to stand at her station.

If you happened to look up
From the weave of the blanket
Cranked out along its template,

You’d glimpse night and a temple
Lit up all night long all nights.
More details in the temple.

Twelve Thousand Seven Hundred and Seventy Two

The real gorgeosity
Of numerology is
It’s near-perfect uselessness.

Pick any spooky number
Recurs on a calendar—
Angel, devil, or divine—

And then track it through your days.
Do days that fit the number
End up sharing anything

Striking in common, opposed
To other days? Or even,
Select by one of the odd

But recurrent properties,
Such as numbers that are prime.
Count all the days of your life.

Now, going forward, note days
That are prime numbers you live,
Say, two-two-five-six-seven.

Are your prime days notably
Different from all the others?
Can you spot a prime coming

And mutter, oh that will be
A good (bad) day, a rupture
(Or halcyon) in the waves?

Whatever number or trait,
You’ll find those days, too, are mixed,
Drunkard’s walks meandering.

Do not despair. Do not yield
To wishful denial. Look,
You’ve experienced something—

Existence is panmictic,
And if you can’t predict it
With your appeals to meaning,

Meaning is orthogonal
To happening, meaning that
You’re free to mean as you please.

The Silhouette’s Head at an Angle

Sometimes, just knowing
The genre’s cheating.
If these lines arrived

With your foreknowledge
That this was a ghost
Story, and produced

A corpse of themselves,
Wavering shadows,
You’d be contented,

Expecting hauntings
Around the corner.
But what if you were

Told incorrectly
Or tricked with malice
Aforethought? The corpse

Is from a high-brow
Realist novel
And the shadows stand

As nuanced symbols
Of its character—
Or, this is science

Fiction that you thought
Was a ghost story,
And the corpse is soon

To experience
Life as a machine
Built by aliens

Who look to humans
Like shifting shadows.
How much of meaning,

How much of comfort
While reading dangles
By the neck of genre?

Particular Lightning

When you’re alert, you’re a poem
Of generalized desert
Light, plain cornucopia

Of abundance making small
Variety out of fierce
Dust and the empty basket.

When you’re asleep in situ,
Narcoleptic and dreaming,
You’re the forest of forecast,

In which the particular
Mocks the inevitable,
Darkness tossing the branches

Lightning may strike, since lightning
Must strike, but never that one.

The Gutted Allegory

A brown blood frog, dried
Where it smeared the floor,
A gob of dark oil

Paint on stone, triggered
The wish it were gone
Every time passed by.

Had it been outside,
It might have seemed part
Of natural rot

And texture, like leaves
In clumps after floods,
Roadkill’s last stages

As bones in a ditch,
Decay’s rich details—
But a smear of blood

Deep inside the house
Never loses that
Horror of trauma.

This Is Your Afternoon on Meds

At this point, your sleepiness
Is such that even sitting
Straight up in a straight-backed chair,

You lead a double, triple
Life—this quiet, sunny room,
Black cat at the windowsill,

The novel that you’re reading,
And matter-of-fact dreaming.
The cat sighs, already gone

Into its own dreaming nap.
The book crosses a graveyard.
You dream of the silver lake

Where you are telling a friend
About the cat and the book
And the drugs you have to take.

Your head jerks—you catch your hands
Literally gesturing
With non-existent objects,

Still at the shore of the lake.
The cat has recurled itself.
Wasn’t there a funeral?

Early Domestication

Every time you close and drift,
The phrases sneak up on you
Like eyes reflecting firelight.

The poems start to assemble,
Hallucinatory, weird—
Then your own eyes fly open,

And in your waking moments
All the reflective phrases
Darken into ashen glitter.

You breathe evenly, softly.
You start to doze. The phrases
Approach the firelight again.

But There’s Canopus, Old Man, Right on Time

The pressed paper planisphere,
About which you’ve shaped poems
Before, rests hidden somewhere.

After lasting twelve decades
Intact, its alignment string
Has been clawed loose by the cat,

So you’ve stopped displaying it.
It could be repaired. It should.
Often the only charming

Item in whatever dump
You were renting at the time,
An out-of-place artifact

Redolent of libraries,
Edwardian gentlemen,
Academic collectors,

Antiquarian tchotchkes,
No value except their charm,
It did orchestrate for you

A pas-de-deux between clock
And the coincidental
Origin of rhythmic time

That wouldn’t have existed
Except for the world’s spinning,
Focusing life on the beat.

All nights you didn’t forget,
You turned the black paper wheel,
And, whenever skies were clear,

You could check. Clocks can’t do that,
Nor calendars, for all their
Très riches heures, pretty pictures.

You can’t see that three-thirty
Matches the clock face with sky;
There’s no ploughman in the air.

Mosses

The best life to look at goes on

Like suffering as understood

By Auden’s Old Masters. That’s not

To say that it is suffering,

Only that it shares the aspect,

Seen from the human position,

Of happening in a corner,

Some untidy spot, while someone

Else is opening a window.

The best life to look at, in fact,

Could be in that very window,

Mosses growing behind the glass.

You’ve seen it, some idle moment,

Some pocket scene, macroscopic

But minuscule, tableau vivant

Of seeds and gnats, a rotting scrap

Of orange peel, something like that.

Viewed by a child or an inmate,

Another world, original

Of the concept of other world,

From fairy land to multiverse,

But not other at all, humble

Ancestor of mythologies,

Terrariums, and space stations.

The best life to look at shows

Scale invariant to challenge

Or complexity. It’s still life.

Team Leader

In the horse languages,
Thousands of years ago,
They made a metaphor.

The domestication
Of horses, after all,
Isn’t just the riding,

Although that’s image
Uppermost—the centaur,
The warrior on horseback.

Full domestication
Means coordination—
Can you bundle your beasts,

Get them to follow you,
Align in directions
You point them, sync in groups?

So, along with riding,
Forms of the verb, to lead,
Became linked to horses.

Words for bridle were made
From the verbs for leading,
And bridle came to be used

As a metaphor for lines
That linked and controlled, steered,
Coordinated groups

Of humans themselves—lines
Of descent, lines linking
Extended families

And fictive kinship groups.
So, for the horse peoples,
Human society

Kept that ghost metaphor
Of the bridle, steering,
Signaling, aligning,

Primarily as terms
For kinship, brood, and clan.
The bridle’s descendants

Today are mostly words
For team. Remarkable
Semantic persistence—

Raw rope of coercion
In domestication,
Strap linking mouth to hands

From horse to human, team,
Teams of horses pounding
Into battles, welcome

To the team, team-player,
As bridled as the rest,
Taking one for the team,

That leather strap tugging
Your tender lips, can’t wait
To have you on the team.

Frozen Stacks

Most microbes are starving, so
At any moment, most life
On Earth is waiting, dormant,

For the good times to visit
When they can divide and grow.
Until then, pause, and lie low.

Most ideas, likewise, exist
In a state of want, waiting,
Metabolizing nothing,

But ready to spring to life
As soon as it’s warm enough,
Soon as opportunity

Glides wide-eyed beside, as soon
As someone picks up a book.

Gazing

You’ve got to admit you most

Crave what what Gogou most dreaded—

Locking myself in the room

gazing at the sea

and forgetting

But it’s too late for that now.

There’ll be no room with a view

Of the sea and forgetting.

There’ll be pain medication

And maybe a big window

Allowing natural light

That you no longer notice.

Something like that, most likely.

To have had a bright corner,

Safe, quiet, and dry, to watch

Something not being human,

Not needing to be human,

Until you forgot being

Human, yes, that would have been

Something like the word, poet,

But honestly, how many

Poets of the sea but not

Humanity have you seen?

Unmarked

It takes a few seconds, but

You come to realize that

The voice from the speakerphone

Squawking across the hallway

In the Emergency Room

Is speaking in Navajo.

Rina, the interpreter,

Is on the line to smooth things

Between elder and doctor.

It’s getting close to midnight.

As it happens, you’re reading

A book about occasions

Translators serve as fixers,

More than literary work,

Nearly psychopomps of sorts.

Are you hurting anywhere?

Do you have any questions?

We’re sending blood to the lab.

Ever Once at All

The hills aren’t rumpled,
But they look rumpled,
Olive drab blankets

Under desert sun
Setting soon enough.
It’s the smallest thing,

The most obvious,
Maybe stupidest—
Everything’s setting

Soon enough. You can
Make anything stand
For the end—the sun,

The quiet city,
Your crumbling body,
The clouds that gather

To discuss and judge
Whether the humans
Spoke adequately

On this occasion
About the weather
Or flubbed it again,

And at the same time
The same afternoon
Of clouds and olives,

There’s nothing setting,
Everything’s going
On and on, whether

Sooner or later,
And all your making
Things stand for the end—

The spider means death,
The stranded seals mean
The decline and fall,

The olive hillsides
Bathed in low light mean
A long-gone era—

Means nothing at all
Will ever stop, not
Ever once, at all.

Battlefield

A voice announces quiet time
In the hospital, as the sun
Leaves the windows for good for now.

In each honeycombed room, someone
Lies entangled in bodily adventure.
All the little signals beep and wink,

Coordinating all the teams
In their coordinated scrubs.
The tasks will carry on all night,

Although most major plans will wait
Until just before dawn to jump
At the sun, to see who survives.

Menu

You have what you’re not given
To wanting too much to keep,

Which has two categories—
That which you know you don’t want

All that badly, and that which
Would devastate you to lose

But you don’t worry about
Since you’ve never felt its loss.

Either way, it’s not your choice.
You just have to try to choose.

That’s the true torture of it—
The necessary pretense

Of choice where there is no choice.
You have what you’re not given.

Done It

Which event deserves fine words,
The lizard discovered dead
And decomposing to stench
Within the laundry hamper,

Or the rich man on trial
For using his wealth to spin wealth
Through the keyholes of locked laws
That can’t seem to contain him?

Which event more deserves words,
The day spent household cleaning,
Or the year spent finishing
A lifespan in last decay?

No event deserves words, none,
Except events words have done.

Of the Chaos

The final book of Porta’s

Natural Magick, published

1658, other

Sections covering beauty,

Alchemy—All the Riches

And Delights of Natural

Sciences—the stuff people

Would love to control themselves,

Seems almost abstract, modern.

People still want to get rich

And be beautiful. Chaos,

As an object of study,

Seems a more recent concern,

One for quantum physicists,

Infinity theorists,

Metalepidopterists.

But a leap year of Sundays

Ago, it was already

Awarded the closing act

Of a tour of natural

Magick in the sciences.

Chaos. A bizarre concept—

Covering the range from mere

Messiness to specified

Degree of patternlessness,

From the unpredictable

To the pure entropic soup.

Isn’t it miraculous?

If you understood chaos,

The science of the chaos,

Would any of the other

Technologies of magic

Matter, anymore, to you?

Lump

As soon as you doze, you dream,
Not even a pause, just gone
Into counterfactuals

Then jolting awake again,
Slumped over in a wheelchair,
Uncomfortably aware

Of being a drooling heap
Of unwashed clothes and grey hair.
And what were you dreaming of?

You can’t remember. Not this,
That’s for sure. If you could stay
Alert, this would be better

Than dreams anyway. Mild breeze.
Birds sing. Try hard not to dream.

Entryway

The phrases feel estranged,
As if estranged themselves,

As if each text were boxed,
A folded cube of home,

A model house to set
Among the other blanks

Without doors or windows,
Without interiors,

Making up the city
In which people pretend

To be living to get
Some kind of perspective

On not really being.
You step up to a cube

Of neighborhood phrases,
Place a palm on smooth blank.

You’re obviously here,
But you still can’t get in.

The World

I knaw the greit unstabilnes

Brukkill as glas

Cresseid referred to character,

Her own, and fate from the fickle gods,

Who rewarded her with leprosy

For daring to complain. But you know

Those phrases, the great unstableness

Of things, brittle as glass, your own way.

This is not the world. This is a poem

On the origin of frailty.

You could never drag the world in here,

Not even as a simple model.

And yet, you can’t keep frailty out.

You have to presume it’s pervasive,

The world’s frailty, its brittleness,

But unevenly distributed.

Cresseid must be exceptional

To make so many bad decisions.

You must also be exceptional,

To break over and over again.

Glass must be exceptional to crack,

To have become the type specimen

For brittleness. But it’s in the world.

It all begins in the world, the great

Unstableness that demands all change

And then the places where change is slow

And builds up to an unevenness,

Potentially discontinuous,

As when a bone breaks or a poem ends.

Inside the Building Cut into the Cliff

Yes, you may enter.
This didn’t exist
Until you got here.

In that sense, it’s yours.
Nurses making rounds
In moonlit wings

Of a stucco matchstick
Building someone built
To generate wealth

Off recovery.
Everyone in here,
After visitors

Are done for the day,
Is already old,
Either customer

Or certified staff.
What else can you say,
Asks the moonlit nurse

Looming with plastic
Cup of pills in hand.
We waste so much stuff

In here. Everything
Is a single use
Serving. The patient

Nods in the silver
While considering
How that only means

Each dose vanishes
But deliveries
Pile forever.

Acknowledgement

All life has to end by dying,
But if you could be a story
And select a spot for stopping,

Would you look back on what you’ve lived
So far and see you’ve passed that spot?
Or would you gamble your ending,

Your ideal place to wrap it up,
Hasn’t been quite located yet?
Hard to say, given the body

Is not a story, and is built
To keep on going in the teeth
Of increasing unhappiness,

Gambler scrounging for anything
To put down on another round.
Happy endings are good enoughs—

Let the narrative wrap up here,
A good point with a bright future,
A vague one at least, the crises

Settled and behind you for you now—
You can scan your past and find some
Moments where a story ended

Well, maybe told them yourself.
Then, like any good novelist,
You added your acknowledgements.

Restoration Commission

Take whatever
Satisfaction
Crumbling body
Sometimes allows.

If bones feel fine
In this moment,
If the belly
Doesn’t quarrel,

Consider this
Earned halcyon
On the calm waves
And don’t question.

Around the globe
At each moment
Some old bodies
Forgive themselves.

The Community Room

All the ways anyone
Can end in the corners
With the rest of the dust,

A body living through
Whatever life it has
To keep on living through,

A little past the point,
A bit beside the point
Of trying to figure

Retrospective purpose
For all the behaviors
Of that life in context—

There are so many paths
That end in little heaps
Of this is what you did

And these are who you’re with
Now, quietly cornered
As the world carries on.

As It Is

If someone told you
To your face you weren’t

Real, and you knew it
Was true, would you feel

Differently about
Dying, persisting?

Could you say, I’m not
Here in the first place,

And mean it, and not
Care if you went on

As something unreal
Talking to itself

Or just stopped right there?
Wouldn’t it feel like

Freedom from ceasing
To know you never

Were any being
Here ever at all?

Bit of Craft

Relief or incision,
Which is the condition
Of your identity

Following surgery?
Is your character now
Riding on the body

As its cameo or
Cut in as a pattern,
A soul in intaglio?

You don’t know. You suspect
What’s left is cognitive
Illusion either way,

The dual patterning
Created by carving
With a viewer in mind.

Little Flames of Language Floating with Them

A human body,
An ecosystem,
A city of cells,

Collection of lives,
And yet one machine
Processing living,

The crank keeps turning.
Material in,
Material out,

The vortex anchors
The machine as such.
Other vortices

Mark other machines,
Their interactions
Too complex for them

To master themselves,
Each ecosystem,
Each city of cells.

A Real Love Poem

A real love poem would be composed
By everyone involved,
The lovers snuggled head to head
At a cafe two-top,

Or in the chaos of their bed,
Finding words together
To say exactly what they share,
To explain to the world

Each other’s virtues, each other’s
Touch, strokes, gaze, skin, hair,
Delectable necessities,
How they are devotees.

Angel at the End of Sleep

The messenger whispered, Don’t dig too deep.
The cosmos is a scratch-off, not a mine.
Wake early enough and you won’t see dawn
So much as feel it growing around you.

It comes all the way to the surface, waves
Where other waves rasp in transformation.
Whatever’s going on down there, far off,
In the heart, reports as the skin of things.

The near is always here, in the friction
That announces what’s happened can’t be changed.
Want to pursue this further? Remember,
The dawn is here. The messenger withdrew.

View without You

There’s no view from inside sleep.
You wish there were. These are paired
Observations you’ve written,

In one way or another,
Too many times. What would be
The value of perspective

From within sleep anyway?
Sleep is sleep since no one’s home.
But then, that’s another one.

To be the observation
In a wholly empty house,
Wholly empty, no one there—

To be watching in the room
Of shadows since you’re not there.

It Felt Like the Middle of the World

Sometimes, drifting along
Through ordinary days
When your life’s a wreck

And the wide world’s a wreck,
But the neighborhood’s fine,
Functioning, going on,

You think of how people
In local disasters,
Say, the storm, quake, or bomb,

Say it felt like the end
Of the world. What would be
The inside-out of that?

The world, at least your world,
Really ending, except
It feels like these plain days

Will go on forever,
Are immortal, no end
To the ordinary.

Nothing That Night

It was breathing.
Everyone swore
It was breathing,
And we were camped

In rare canyons
Beyond waving
Consultation.
The comet rode

In that still way
Of all fast things,
Just smeared up there,
As expected,

Except it breathed,
In long slow breaths
Of light. We slept
Nothing, that night.

Dreaming Satellites

If it hurts too much to sleep,
It hurts too much. Otherwise,
Carry on without complaint,

And count yourself fortunate
In a world where people shoot
People or simply ignore

The unfortunate to death.
It’s a strange planet, this one,
No matter how many times

You observe that plaintive fact.
Life has found a way to blend
And perfectly commingle

The marvelous and awful.
Your ancestors adapted
By evolving an impulse

To sort experiences,
Naming and narrating them
Into their separate bins,

But here you are unsleeping
In refulgent evening light
Reaching you through pearled cloud banks

From the same source that tonight
Will expand the auroras
Of the greatest solar storm

In decades, creating risks
Of mistaken dreams among
Military satellites.

On Numerology

If math were magic,
That is, powerless,
It would mean it was

All lovely pattern,
Secrets and taboos,
No applications,

None matter of fact.
A small paradox,
Perhaps, due to ways

Humans want magic.
People want magic
To be powerful,

To accomplish things—
When that’s included
By definition,

Math’s the most magic
Language for magic,
Making predictions,

The one true magic.
People also want
The impossible—

Impossible things,
The impossible
As such, for itself.

That wished-for magic,
By definition,
Stays wishful thinking,

Which may include math
As pure elegance,
Chasing in circles,

No applications.
That kind of magic
Math really isn’t.

Math is and isn’t
Something named magic,
Which is and isn’t.

Hard Floating World

The hippocampus travels westward.
The amygdala heads for points south.
The hypothalamus forever

Chases the ever-receding dawn.
The finest point to which a needle
Can be seen to point, so to define,

Owns some named neuroanatomy,
And if it doesn’t, it can get one.
This illustrates a point about names.

This points out pictured geography.
This names the way points can illustrate
The pointlessness of the quantum field.

Maps is maps, is what we’re painting here,
All of them sprung from a world of waves.
The waves on the maps are fictional,

Since a map can never catch a wave.
But the maps float on a field of real
Waves underwriting myths made of names.

The Last Tenth of the Law

Pushed in a corner adjacent
To outlaws, the shrunken tenth sits
Still, unclaimed by definition.

From its cramped perspective, the rest
Of the law is madness, possessed,
Not law at all, all unjust strength.

But who asked it? It looks around,
Knees to its chin, arms around them,
Thin neck holding a heavy head.

Ten percent. A tithe. A digit,
A pretended philanthropy
Granted by greed to be legal.

Tiny, but not insubstantial,
A permanent minority
Where society intersects

With freedom from society,
Not antisocial, not angry,
Not forceful, not even feeling

The myth that anything is owned.
Who wants to be this, vestigial
Anchor of camaraderie?

The last tenth struggles to its feet
And contemplates oblivion,
Then sits itself back down again,

The elder in the wattled hut,
The small child with strange legs watching
The world through the dusty window.

This is the role. To own nothing,
To feel no pride in ownership.
Not to have, not to take. Stay small.

Dusty Afternoon

Even the names of winds

In English carry on

Mediterranean

Cartographic concerns—

The zephyr, the mistral,

African scirocco—

As absurd in England

Where the poets loved them

Despite those North Sea storms,

As in America

Where, thanks to the English,

They suggest old-fashioned,

Flowery poetry

Dragging in adjectives

To account for themselves,

As in, gentle zephyrs

Or, the fierce scirocco.

Standing on a mesa

In the desert southwest

In an alternating

Fierce and then gentle wind,

It’s odd to contemplate

How association

With being poetic

Can both extend the range

Of an old, working term

And make it seem foolish,

How each wave of poets

Disavows poetic,

Remuscles the language.

Then, whatever they use

Well to do so becomes

Another fancy word

Ordinary language

Wouldn’t be caught dead with

To name a dusty day.

Poems Before Words

Disoriented,
You thought of the poem
You’d dozed composing.

Turns out, you hadn’t
Started the phrases
At all, not even

The ones in your head
It felt like you had thought
But hadn’t yet said.

That would be something
To compose—phrases
You’d felt you’d gathered

That were smoke shadows,
That hadn’t yet formed—
Is it possible

To think honest lines
That don’t exist yet
Before giving them

Words, syntax, rhythm?
Not a visual,
Not squiggles, but lines

Of language before
Language for them formed,
Verse pre existence.

Meaning Your Soul

Meaning is the power of attention,
And the attention doesn’t have to be
Magnificent, collective, curated,

Or sustained. Attention is valuable,
But it’s not a resource, not endangered.
Whatever it is in other species,

Among symbolically minded humans
It’s a sort of spinneret of meaning,
And it will make meanings, wanted or not.

This seems to have an adaptive function—
Meaning’s special for humans, and is tied,
Almost invisibly, to all structures

Involved in the species’ outbreak success.
But meaning’s more than a special trick,
More than echolocation, webbing, flight—

Whatever it does for modern humans,
All busy making it by attending
To whatever captures their attention,

Meaning is ontologically unique.
In a universe in which everything,
Even pure information, is conserved,

Meaning comes into being from nothing
And to nothing returns—it can be lost,
Genuinely lost, more lost than the light

A black hole swallows that somehow persists.
Meaning is the only thing that exists
That doesn’t continue as something else.

When humans speak fretfully of their souls,
Struggling to hold immaterial real,
They mean the meanings that attention brings.

When people speak of soul as profound core,
As essential, immortal, transcendent,
They’re clutching exactly what no one holds,

What can and will go for good, but also
What mere attention, while memory serves,
Keeps making from nothing—and more, and more.

Spear Horizon

It all seems very, very close, in a way, even though it was such a long, long time ago

Not the jump back from now

To then, long ago,

Humans around a hearth

Working on hunting tools,

Coordinated groups,

Humans being humans,

But the number of lives

It has taken to fill

The interval since then,

Almost all of them lived,

End to end, and then sunk

In the past of each next—

Time’s linear neighborhood,

A city’s worth of lives,

Strung out one at a time.

Reboot

You wouldn’t expect machine code
To bear an obvious likeness
To the applications it runs,

But of course you could reconstruct
The working set of instructions
From what appears inscrutable

If you had to and knew how to.
Imagine waking a writer
From suspended animation—

Could you feed them all they needed
To recover themselves from the code
Of their complete collected works,

Even the sides of them the works
Don’t seem to have in evidence,
Those bits of personality

Known well to friends and family
That made the living person seem
Another creature than the words?

You Are to Life as Chatbot to Chatter

It may be worth recalling
Most life on Earth is just that—
Life, and one big vat of it.

The old primordial soup
Still serves the mess hall of cells,
Singular, prokaryotic,

Maxing out as mats and slime,
And the lion’s share belongs,
Really, to bacteria

And bacteriophages,
Not to blue whales and sea lice.
Before you say what life’s like,

Consider what most life’s like.
Fierce minutiae in the waves.

Do Not Insult the Being

In the end, the end’s not dead.

The moon’s not dead. Mars isn’t.

Asteroids and comets aren’t.

They are. They exist. They move

Around as they must, and who

Among you isn’t moved thus?

Do not insult the not dead

By saying they’re not living

So far, as if mere being

Were lesser stage to living

And living must be progress.

Don’t pity the molecules

That used to live for being

Only molecules again.

Pity they went through living.

Serena

Been hot, so when the evening

Cools, it’s pleasant to open

A porch door and feel soft air.

A couple of famous lines

Attributed to Sufi

Poets keep circling the mind,

One using reason to cut

Reason off at the knees says

One’s own intellect cannot

Be used to comprehend one’s

Own creator—the other

Is similarly clever

But more intimate, I shall

Hide in my poem to kiss your

Mouth as you read it. The thoughts

Play with these plays on reason.

And if you never read this

Aloud, where have I kissed you?

The soft air wraps around us

As the evening sun goes down

To play its own creator.

Mass Matters

One physicist calls gravity

A journey . . . that may never end.

Tempting as it is to request

Of this poetic physicist

That she remain in her own lane,

These words are already in hers,

So let’s just attempt to steer clear

Of figurative collisions.

Gravity is not a journey,

But it is always in motion.

Perceived as gravitons or curves,

Falling isn’t truly falling,

It’s more like joining an embrace

That can be weak as anything

But gains strength in joiners joining,

Which would be fine, would be lovely,

Resembling love in poetry,

Except that, as with poetry’s,

Gravity’s love is dangerous,

With even worse asymmetries.

All hearts of little mass are crushed

By the clutch of massed collections

Already madly embracing,

More like a mating ball of snakes—

If those snakes all clumped to make one

Giant coil attracting others

To its single, possessive self,

Until that self itself got gripped,

Compounded in yet another.

Poets haven’t understood love

All that well yet, and physicists

Don’t, yet, comprehend gravity.

There is that clue of the movements,

The motions without which the laws

Would not only be different, but

Not discoverable at all.

Love loves the language of falling,

The metaphors of attraction,

But human love doesn’t require

Asymmetry for love at all

To ever be caught in action,

Does it? Dark matter, if that’s it.

The Last Ferry

You would have thought it stopped
Once the bridge was finished,
But it didn’t. Eighty

Years, a full human life,
It continued to cross
Daily, keeping schedule.

An epic catalogue
Would sink carrying all
The changes of those years.

Then, finally, it stopped.
There was only the bridge—
Well, bridges—after that,

And those bridge crossings were
Themselves celebrated
And nostalgic by then.

Would it have been likewise,
If it had been a bridge
To start with, no ferry,

No long pole, no obol?
Why ferry, anyway,
As opposed to wading,

Swimming, rowing, sailing?
The real trip stays one way,
So why pick an image

Of endless back and forth,
To belie the only
Sure tour of no return?

In those decades after
The bridge had been finished,
While the ferry still crossed,

What percentage of souls
Never came back to shore
Following one crossing?

Pretty small, probably,
Probably most of them
Passengers for that last

Ceremonial ride.
But the image lingers
Of crowds waiting to board,

One of them a poet
Staring at the river
And rhapsodizing vast

Declarations, since words
Can do that, can leap straight
Over the slow passage

Of experiencing
To sum up all eras’
Black shadows at nightfall.

Old Vehicle in a Gravel Driveway

The events will not pause in arriving,

Even if the Earth itself stops spinning,

Which likely it won’t, not any time soon.

People will continue to find themselves

Somewhat surprised at what’s happened, somewhat

Prone to tell each other, I told you so.

The balance of lives ending quietly

Or violently will go on shifting,

Back and forth. At each moment, survivors

Somewhere will say to other survivors

Of that moment statements to the effect

That, It can’t go on like this! Then it will.

Odd Fish Are the Ones Who Need a Bigger Pond

Take one regulatory gene
Highly associated with
A tendency to explore and
Let loose in an environment

With a range of empty niches—
Watch adaptive radiation
Radiate into all of them.
That’s one regulatory gene,

Triggering greater tendency
To explore what is new—voila!
In an open environment
You’ve got an adaptive syndrome,

And pretty soon you’ve got species,
Colorful and oddball versions
Of the last common ancestor
Everywhere, glittering, galore.

Elsewhere, of course, it’s quite likely
The same gene, or something like it,
Hides in behaviors dull as mud,
Nowhere to dazzlingly explore.

Here’s Mercy Now

Don’t daydream to fall asleep.
Let the dreaming come to you.

Do you like sleep? Are you glad,
When you’ve slept well, to know that?

Experience is dreaming,
Briefly, in extensive sleeps.

You never had to seek it—
In dreams dramatically mixed,

Experience came to you,
But its setting remained sleep,

Which is being as being,
Existence as existence,

Vast, whole in all directions,
All that holds you, and is home.

Each After Its Own Fashion

Actually, the diversity
Of the orbiting wanderers
Around this one, rather plain star,

Hint Earth’s less strange in being strange
Than Earth’s human descendants think—
Our habit’s to draw the ledger

In two columns, living bodies
Or bodies with no signs of life,
In which case, Earth’s in one column

And all the rest, as far as known,
In the other. So Earth looks strange.
But does Io resemble Mars,

Mars Venus, Venus Jupiter,
Jupiter Mercury, so on?
Beyond small categories—

Rocky, icy, gassy—maybe
Two or three distinct worlds in each—
None of them have much in common.

Humanity, likewise, looks strange,
Listing species with ratcheting
Culture in one column, species

Of any other kind elsewhere.
But the rule could be here, Titan
Isn’t Saturn, lobsters aren’t crows

Aren’t tri-symbiotic lichen.
It could be the norm to be weird,
On Earth as it is in Heaven.

Success Has Success to Blame

Still thinking about the combination
Of virus, egg, and venom creating
Efficiency for parasitoid wasps

While attracting hyperparasitoids
To do you know what to them—not revenge,
Just a new layer of exploitation,

Using the same principles as before
But taking advantage of the signals
The involvement of virus created.

Here the virus was such a winning trick
For the parasitoid wasp, evolving
To make the host’s immune system weaker

But also to make the host eat faster!
Yet now the host’s host, the poor plant, emits
Chemical distress at being devoured

So voraciously, inviting the new,
Hyperparasitoid wasp to descend
On the hungry, hungry caterpillar

And lay its eggs in the first wasp’s larvae
(It now goes, wasp, wasp, caterpillar, plant,
If you’re keeping score of the hosts at home),

And what’s on your mind, honestly, isn’t
The science or the horror of it all,
Not at the moment, but what you would call

The necessity of unintended
Consequences—if egg-virus-venom
Had been a human invention—the trick

That enhances one problem’s solution
And inevitably somehow invites
A new problem, no kin to the first one.

Heat Approaching

Now the trees bend
Past your window,
Now they’ve leafed out,
Stretch to go.

Skies would join them
In escaping—
See how sunsets
Turn shades green?

All that can’t move
By volition
Grows more restless
Late in spring.

Ordinate Fondness

A sizable black beetle
Of uncertain lineage
Meandered across the road.

The light was low, and the road
Hadn’t seen a vehicle
In half an hour. The beetle

Appeared routinely focused
As any foraging thing,
Proceeding near linearly.

Among common responses
Of anyone noticing
Could have been speculation

(What sort of beetle is that?)
Distaste (ugh, ugly beetle!)
Superstition (an omen)

Or art (let’s take a picture,
Make a sketch, write a fable
About a bustling beetle).

The beetle reached the road’s edge
And continued through the grass.
At what point would the actions

Of a large-ish black beetle
In late afternoon shadows
Have ceased to impinge on things?

Is every event tied up
To every other event
From one scale of the cosmos

To the far ends of all worlds,
Or can actions be absorbed
Whole, as if they never were?

You’ll never know. That beetle
Didn’t know, unless, of course,
You have been much mistaken

About the nature of worlds
And the actual beings
Of sizable black beetles.

Possible to Desire

What are the conditions
Of abiotic states
That make it possible

For such states to desire
To live, for molecules
To hunger to consume?

What is desire to live
When living is desire
Unleashed by chemistry

That had shown no hunger,
Had no hunger in it?
Some of the steps are known,

Some stages have been mapped.
Not where hunger comes from.

Social Construction

In the language of cuticular
Hydrocarbons, identity rules,
And to the extent that politics

Has metaphorical relevance,
All politics is identity
Politics. Does your grease smell like ours?

If it doesn’t, you’re an enemy.
Simple, see? Well, not simple at all,
Molecularly, but functional.

Doesn’t seem necessarily bad
To organize by identity
If you just want coordination.

Where it gets tricky is when you want
Facultative coordination
In diversifying arrangements.

For that you need your identities
More light magnets, less cuticular
Hydrocarbon gluey greasiness.

Update Your Priors

No evidence of metabolically active

Recurrent, residual, or metastatic

Disease. And there you were, all set for hospice care.

Oh well, time to work on other complications

Arising from being feckless, old, and breathing,

All the small frailties, all the mounting debits.

You might live to see genuine disaster, yet,

The sinking cities, bombing drones, and rising seas,

The drought’s return, the next, more devastating plague.

You fortunate fool. The government may get you,

Or the anti-government rioters, or both.

You always dreamed you were a kind of no-man’s land,

Little hermit DMZ. It won’t be pirates

From the inside, though, not for a while now at least.

A Golden Age

Wonders are sorrows.
They only appear
When someone’s winning

So excessively,
There are resources
And labor galore

To spare, to make work
On their fantasies
Of the wondrous world

They think they deserve.
Royal architects,
Artists, musicians,

Hordes of encoders,
Mathematicians,
Enslaved engineers,

Armies of workers,
Whatever it takes
So wonders appear.

Blankness and Grief

Karen Solie implies
Waste’s final form is grief.
The deer on the road’s edge

Browsing spring green in gusts
Of cool, dry wind look up
At an approaching car.

Is grief waste’s final form?
You suspect it isn’t,
Much as you like the phrase.

Something like a blankness
Of perfect entropy,
Something that couldn’t waste

Any further, had nothing
Left to waste—wouldn’t that
Amount to waste’s last stage?

There’d be no grief in that.
Grief is an animal,
Living thing linked to loss

Like a terrible wound.
It may be the final
Form of love, memory.

The last memory grieves
For memory itself.
Waste is more productive.

The deer move on. The spring
Moves on into summer,
Doe and fawn now in trees.

The Trial Is Now upon Us; the Jury Is in the Hallway

The judge is at the bench.
Our fate is in their hands.
We love to set the scene.

We love it to be grand.
Let’s have human drama
And imagine the world

That’s not at all human
As human as we can.
Life can be the trial,

And an omnipotent
Deity can preside—
Serving jury duty,

Spirits or apostles,
Ancestors or angels—
Anything with voices,

Faces, and opinions
About wayward humans
And how to enforce laws.

We’ll pretend it’s this way,
Cosmos as assembly
Gathered to assess fates,

And when we see an end
Approaching yet again,
We’ll nod and we’ll murmur,

Lo, the trial is now
Upon us; the jury
Is shortly to confer.

Overkill

It is the failure of words that makes us repeat them

When someone went to the post office

In Rehoboth with a pile of stuff

To mail back to the United States,

He was kindly provided with tape

To close his cardboard boxes safely

For the trip across the Atlantic,

But many of the items were awkward,

And the cardboard boxes were flimsy,

And he found himself adding more tape

And more tape, guiltily, sheepishly,

Gratefully, knowing the hideous

Wrapping job was unlikely to keep

The contents safe. Some of the boxes

Mailed ended up less cardboard than tape.

Six months later, and back in the States,

He cut open the lumpen objects

And found most of the contents still whole,

Except for one broken-headed cane,

Carved of ironwood, ironically.

Did he blame the tape for that? Did he

Blame the tape for his fragile notions

Of how to box up his awkward things,

The ugly tape that held together,

That had been given to him for free?

If You Hadn’t Paused to Read This

The game if doesn’t exist

Without language. The game if

Needs a way of constructing

The not as definitely

Not but not impossible,

That is, hypothetical.

The game if has three major

Variations, along with

Innumerable subgames.

The pragmatic game of if

Is the most valuable.

It uses past to predict

The way the past is likely

To change. Based on what is known,

What’s expected next, if this.

The forward speculation

Is more hit or miss. Call it,

At best, thought experiment—

Fantasy, at silliest—

If this unevidenced thing

Were to exist, then what’s next?

Then, there’s the backward, hopeless

Game of if. If some past bit

Had not happened as it did,

How would the rest of the past

Be different? One can change

The past, of course. The past is

Always changing, but only

By the addition of new

Things happening. There is no

Unhappening. There is no

Scenario in which life

On Earth never got started,

In which the sun never burned,

In which this or that tiny

Thing someone did wasn’t did.

And yet, in language there is.

In language there always is,

If x hadn’t, maybe this.

Petal Storm

Can anyone reconcile
The knowledge that the hours spent
Writing, sleeping, anything

Will coincide with the deaths
Of people, thousands of them,
And an interminable

Agony for even more?
No one tries. What people try
Is to focus on the deaths

And suffering that matter
Most to them. Usually,
Their’s, their loved ones’, their people’s,

Sometimes those in the headlines,
Those most horrible, those most
Concentrated, those most cruel.

This is understandable,
Understandable to scream
At others, Pay attention

To the deaths of my people
Who are being killed by yours!
Bearing witness may be all,

May be the best you can do.
But then, the day your people
Stop being assaulted, or

The day your people, yours, launch
Their own premeditated
Assault, or just the merest

Quiet day at last for you,
Can you reconcile knowing
That while your jaw unclenches

Thousands of people still die,
Albeit, this hour, not yours?
The moment you stepped outside,

A huge gust of wind blew through
The trees in your neighborhood,
Showering you in petals,

Millions of thrilling petals
Swirling in clouds around you,
Not to reconcile with you.

Assembler

Insubstantial futility,
Ephemeral absurdity,

A puff of vapor you exhaled
To haul back in your lungs again,

All flocks of molecules of wind
Circling around this rock since when,

Anything worth calling wisdom
Worries recycled worrying.

What you do with the air you breathe
Matters less than what the air will

Disassemble and distribute
Throughout the daily circular

That like all news compiles and piles
Without arriving anywhere.

Caver Beware

There are chambers in the brain
Consciousness should leave alone,
Awareness never visit—

Not the Freudian corners,
Not Jungian archetypes,
Just basements of memory

So jumbled and waterlogged,
So prone to radon and mice,
That the value of the search

Is unlikely to exceed
The expense to mental health,
Not in terms of emotion

But in terms of confusion.
If you really understood
How memory storage works,

You might could disentangle
The webs from the Christmas lights.
But you don’t. Think of your dreams,

Think of the thousands of years
Spent by millions of people
Attempting to explain them

And still failing, still failing.
Unless those dreams are magic,
Drawing from other sources,

Everything strange about them
Came from memory’s basement,
Your own memory’s basement,

And there’s likely good reason
The brain’s evolved to forget
Dreams by and large. If it weren’t

For language, how it tangles
Facts in syntax and syntax
In narrative, rewiring

Events to wrap up a few
In knots you can’t tease apart,
No dreams would be remembered.

You’re not gaining anything
Spelunking in memory
With language that won’t come back

Except in a monstrous mess.
Something’s going on in there,
Something retelling won’t clear.

Hold Close

While you remember, while you’re lucky enough,
You can’t help trying to make your memory
Do stuff. Small things (Hera was the wife of Zeus),
Of course, all the trivia, the minutiae
You use to get through conversations with life
And everyone else as they recall themselves,
But also the more substantial, quality
Of awareness of awareness kind of stuff,
Which tends to bin into two categories,
One, the spookier side of recollection,
The other on the side of consolation.

The spookier side you know can’t control,
Can’t even fathom. Way out in the ocean
Of deep memory’s night, you lean on the bow,
And you wait and you hope for what will surface,
Watching for the bioluminescent lights.
You wait and you hope for something to surface,
And even if it isn’t what you wanted,
And it usually is some kind of surprise,
Disappointing, delightful, or frightening,
You’ll take it just for the mystery of it,
Memory out of darkness, you as witness.

But you school memory as consolation.
You feel this is something you should be able
To make memory do, to put it to work on,
To ask of it, within reason. You have lived
A goodly number, a vast number, really,
Of specific moments of especial bliss
During which you were aware, for that moment,
However briefly, that living couldn’t get
Much better than this. And you remember those.
If memory is really worth the having,
Access to those moments should always be close.

Earth as a View Down a Rotating Tube

It’s a very small whole
We’re all part of, and those
Who struggle to see that

Whole, while struggling to see
Humans whole, are struggling
As part of nature’s whole.

Exceptionalism
Is a buzz word that won’t
Cut much before too long,

But it’s as important
As carbon and plastic,
As part of the output

Of human behavior.
This is an animal
For whom identity

Isn’t pheromonal
Or visual and done.
It’s constant construction,

It’s an art, a defense,
A feint, and a weapon,
And there is no human

Interaction in which
Identity’s finished
Between them, good and all—

There are no two people,
Socially, who purely
Consist of one plus one.

There is no human whole.
There’s always another
Exceptional person

In competition or
Cooperating in
Each ordinary one.

It’s a terribly small
Whole, this kaleidoscope
Of mirroring fractures—

There’s no perspective can
Keep one eye to the end
Of Earth’s lenseless actions.

Good Use of the Damned

Possibly, the Earth
Could be forgiven
For not foreseeing

Inventing bipeds
Could lead to chaos
Inside selection.

It was a long time,
Sort of, from the first
Tools to extinctions,

To reorderings
Of ecosystems,
To tearing Earth’s flesh.

Of course, some insist
Earth would have been fine
Left only to them—

It was the others
And their peculiar
Ideology

That led to this mess—
Not our ancestors,
Not our equipment.

We had it sorted.
We remained cautious,
Small, reverential.

We were Earth’s children,
Some still say—polite
And harmonious.

And maybe they’re right.
In any event,
It’s a human thing,

Whatever goes wrong,
To pick out persons
Whose wicked misdeeds

Were responsible.
Could Earth have known this
Would make matters worse—

Rules-obsessed passions,
Punishments, hubris,
This love of the curse?

Or was it in fact
All part of Earth’s plan
To finally get

Freed from life again?
Humans, Earth’s agents,
Earth’s humans, the damned.

Answer Yourself

The answer is
You don’t know. You
Are far too small

To know, so don’t
Bother to ask.
Out of the storm,

The great voice roars,
I made it all,
Including you,

And who are you,
And where were you
Then, to ask now?

Smile a small smile.
You wrote that voice.
Someone as small

As you produced
That voice and roared.
That’s you. That’s who.

The End of Eloquence

To your surprise, the name conceals
A reference to another name
You knew before you knew the first,

Which makes you reconsider grief.
The name covering the other
Had been, in grieving, eloquent,

But you hadn’t known it was grief
Gifting the eloquence. You’d gone
Searching for further eloquence,

And instead you had uncovered
The hidden name, the source of grief,
Like a burst pipe warming the floor

Before it pushed apart the tiles,
Like the lives boiling underneath
The fallen fruit, so that it moved,

And you were sad, not for the name
The other had been covering,
But for the end of eloquence.

The Wind Outside the Prison Hummed

The poem is not lost
In translation, since
The poem is never

Translated. The poem
Is the translation,
The language that’s not

Really the language
Of the world the poem
Is about, the world

Of the body, say,
Or of the heart, or
Even of people.

They’re so close, of course,
People’s languages
And their translations

Into poems, almost
Intelligible
Dialects without

Translation. And then,
The other extreme,
The beyond-human

World, not a language,
Hardest to translate,
Most often what’s lost.

For Lack of Supporting Character

The protagonist takes the stage alone.
There are no furnishings. There are no props.

The protagonist hesitates, glancing
Around the bare boards, ignoring the dark

Beyond the cone of light, despite rustling
Of clothes and playbills, despite muttering.

So, the protagonist is pretending
To actually be alone. Is that it?

Are we to believe the protagonist
Has no idea we’re all crowded in here,

Politely breathing each other’s odors,
Trying to keep quiet, as if we could

Accidentally give ourselves away
And scare the hell out of the pretender?

Accretion

The imagery around

The unimaginable,

The torque of magnetic fields

Encircling present absence

As pictured by telescopes

And enhanced reproductions,

Isn’t it reminiscent

Of the way the creators

Of fictional characters

And first-person narrators

Will dance words up to the lip

Of where awareness leaves them—

All is darkness and silence,

Something huge and merciless,

Plunge, and Finished knowing—then—

Leaving an outline

Of where awareness can’t go

As where awareness had gone?

Delirium

How many words do you need
To stitch together a ghost?
A case can be made for one—

Ghost, or any synonym.
A better case for just one
Can be made by countering

The first. Just as you can say
The word ghost isn’t a ghost,
Only a label for one,

The way the word chair is not,
Definitely not, a chair,
An actual chair, you’ll note

That the word chair is the ghost
Of any actual chair,
And now there’s an argument

That any language label
For any tangible thing,
Anything experienced,

Is a ghost of that thing, that
Experience, as Plato
In the dreaming of ideals

Both suggested everything
With a name carried a ghost,
Or just was a ghost, because

It wasn’t the real ideal,
And meanwhile, the ideal real,
Never quite experienced,

Was the ultimate haunting.
Let’s say every word’s a ghost,
But that’s dissembling. The ghost

Isn’t the word. The word God
Is a most material
Thing in every offering,

And yet, if used as a name,
It drags a ghost, many ghosts,
All its possible meanings.

No word does that on its own.
The ghosts that words can conjure
Are infinite as meanings,

Infinite in every word,
But the whole system, the whole
Method of making meaning

Must be in place for one ghost,
Any ghost made of whole cloth.
Words haunt you. You must haunt them.

A Little Tisane at Bedtime

Proto-weeds from the Last Glacial Maximum—
Including wild barley—at Ohalo II,
Already in small-scale cultivated plots,

Perhaps—certainly in dense concentrations
Around grinding stones at the site, but it takes
More than half of all the years from then to now

To get to Jarmo farmers in the foothills
Of the Zagros and find primitive barley
Varieties among emmer and einkorn

Wheat and the bones of domesticated goats,
Sheep, and dogs, along with sickles and pottery.
The nonshattering mutations of barley,

Reducing the brittleness of hairy spikes—
Latin hordeum, horrere, to bristle—
Rendering barley grass helpless without us,

Then spent the next few thousand years being spread
In combination with various other domesticates
Through increasingly agricultural worlds—

Useful for beers and whiskeys, of course. Also,
Here and there, barley-water drinks, kykeon,
Agua de cebada, or jau ka sattu,

Robinson’s barley water at Wimbledon,
Which brings us to barley-water teas themselves—
As pearl, that is, peeled, barley—the origin

Etymologically, of herbal teas,
From the Ancient Greek ptisánē, peeled barley,
All these worlds held in this tisane you sip now.

This, Clearly, Isn’t Language

Any communication
That can say what isn’t is
As easily as saying

What is isn’t, and be known
To be communicating
A state that isn’t the case—

To the communicator,
To the receiver, to both—
That can propose p, not-p,

As easily, regardless
Of the experienced state
Of p or not-p outside

Of any statement, isn’t
Simply communication
Or effort at deception,

But is language. The presence
Or absence of some agreed
Complexity of syntax,

Symbolism, or abstraction,
Is not the criterion
To vet a proposition

That the communication
Is or isn’t echt language.
Can the proposition state

Of itself or anything
The opposite of the shared
Experience of the case,

State p when not p, not p
When p? That proposition
Is a statement in language,

Not a communication,
Not only one. Every poem
Is genuinely language.

Getting to Do Stuff

That’s really what you live for,
Isn’t it? Not getting stuff
But getting to do the stuff

You, whoever you are, think
Is important stuff to do.
Raise your children. Lead people

To Jesus. Write a novel.
Tend your garden. See Tibet.
End late capitalism.

None of it’s unimportant.
The importance comes from you.
You think that Mars gives a damn

About peace or war on Earth?
About who holds the record
For the longest-lived human?

But somehow it bothers you
To be told what’s important
Is what’s important to you.

You want importance to stand
Above and apart from you,
Like that peak you meant to climb,

One of those things you may not
Ever get to do. Stuff shrinks
In importance in your mind

If it’s only important
To you, even if it’s just
Important to everyone

Else in your important boat
Of a species arguing
Over what’s most important.

Imagine the sun wishing
All the light from its planets
And from all its planets’ moons

Wasn’t its light bouncing back.
You live to get to do stuff
You find important to you.

Evening Reading

Sweep the room and clear off the table.
Palm leaves, birch bark, papyrus, vellum,
Bamboo, baked clay, acid-free paper.

This is a dream, and everything’s blank.
No, it’s only imagination.
Dreams are like falling, falling itself.

Imagination is like lifting,
Carrying the images uphill.
Entropy’s in favor of dreaming.

They’re out there somewhere. You know they are.
You know this is lying to yourself.
It means you want them to be out there.

Palm leaves, birch bark, papyrus, vellum,
Bamboo, baked clay, acid-free paper.
Why do you care that they’re written down?

Inhuman. That’s what you really want.
You aren’t expecting ancient wisdom
And won’t mind any lack of beauty.

You want something your small mind can read
That won’t remind you of anyone,
Which is impossible, inhuman.

Only Yesterday

End stories concentrate
On the few survivors,
Since that’s where stories thrive,

And, however many
Deaths a story tots up,
Who wants a tale that’s died?

Nonetheless, a bent mind
Imagines a novel
Made udystopian,

Blank of all characters—
Say a huge solar flare
Or nuclear warfare

Did just as you’d expect,
But you focused tightly
On, let’s say, a prison,

Deep in the Midwestern
US, some maximum
Security fortress,

Completely dependent,
Of course, on its systems
And global supply chains.

Inside, emergency
Generators held up
A while, but the guards ran

And/or supplies ran out,
And the radiation
Drifted steadily in.

For a brief while, maybe,
Days or weeks, you’d get some
Trapped survivor drama,

But once everyone died,
Most still locked in their cells,
Your novel settled in,

Not searching for stories
Of horror and tension
Where there were revenants,

Just sticking with the prison
Through nuclear winter
As the bodies decayed,

Writing how bugs wandered
Through each widening crack.
Recalling deaths as deaths—

Suffering, horrific
Deaths, as deaths tend to be—
But just deaths. Just the past.

Mot

What you can’t find to read, try to write.
What you can’t write, try to find to read.
If you grow too suspicious, give up

As long as you can stand to give up,
And then let yourself get back at it,
Searching libraries of amassed texts,

And then, by turn, scrutinizing blanks
The way you used to spend afternoons
Carefully built with nothing to do,

Waiting to see whatever emerged.
There is an arrangement of phrases
Somewhere, mother tongue or translated,

That will click into place in your thoughts
Like the clicks of pins against your palm
Tumbling into a whole you can hold.

Lathe in the Ribs

When the kindness of feeling
Pretty damn good for a change,
Not too bad for this body,

Slips in, it glides as subtly
As the proverbial knife.
Contentment, like injury,

Apparently, can be swift.
How often do people think
Of their lives as a series,

An oscillating sequence
Of sensing comfort or pain,
Bodily alterations

Naked of storytelling
Or contextualizing
Social data? You felt bad.

You felt good. You felt better.
You felt worse. Who knows why then.
The shifting has its twilights,

Its sunrises and sunsets,
And is as often ignored,
Occasionally fawned over,

As days’ changing of the light.
The sphere of feeling rotates,
Whether or not you notice,

A slightly wobbly spinning
With no character to it,
No plot, no destination,

Other than that, at some point,
It will stop. The pleasant knives
And the painful alike then

Withdrawn. The body won’t feel.
The enculturated self
Won’t notice feeling again.

In the meantime, how is this
Not as important to life
As any rooting interest,

Any planned accomplishment,
Maybe, even, any love?
Like the days and nights themselves,

If not so neatly balanced,
Contentment and pain remain
The ground your figures pace.

Insufficient for the Surplus

The stories aren’t good enough.
A man drives a truck by you
With a message on the back

That reads, Jesus Is Enough.
The stories aren’t good enough,
Not anymore. The best ones

Present small worlds carefully.
The large worlds implode in dust.
The stories aren’t good enough

To cope with everything known,
To hold half of what is known,
Anymore. There’s a hit show

About aliens, a film
About a galactic war,
And many, many, many

More. There are warnings about
What you’re doing to the world
From new religions and old,

Stories about origins
And ends, systems and villains
And villainous systems,

But they don’t begin to hold
Water under scrutiny—
It’s not that they’re bad stories,

It’s that stories can’t carry
The ore. They crumble to dust.
Stories just aren’t good enough.

There’s a woman half in tears,
Smashed groceries at her feet,
The burst sack still in her hand

When you come out of the store.
These stories aren’t good enough
To carry us anymore.

So Like You

It’s not awful, whispered
The skull voice to itself,

As usual, It’s not
Awful, but it’s not that

Good. And a little flame
Like a propane pilot

Blue light flickers in thought
Not quite reaching to voice,

Pleased at first, the pleasure
Of comparison, of

Self-flattery, snuffed out
By the cold follow-thought,

That’s what you’re aiming for?
Better than not that good?

Fire up hot and bothered
When you find one you see

Is both better than good
And awfully like you.

The Unholy Stone

A side of cliff calved
A slab of sandstone
That slid like a sled
Downslope and smashed.

The pieces scattered
In a cloud of dust
That settled over
Earlier rockfalls,

Rubble on rubble,
That’s all. A prophet
Picked up a fragment
Of broken sandstone,

The waves of the old
Wind-built dune in it,
And brought it to town
And hammered it down

In irrigated,
Weeded, manicured,
Soft green temple ground
To make a statement

About holiness
And unholiness
And hypocrisy.
Eventually

The prophet’s new faith
Spread, until the stone
Became considered
The true sacred ground,

Although by that time,
No one was certain
Which stone was the one
The prophet put down,

And competing claims
Divided pilgrims
Among holy sites
Scattered around town.

Project

Some say, Every day
We get a little
Closer to the end.

That’s not true. The end
Isn’t out there. No,
The end is behind

Everyone, something
To be imagined
From previous ends.

The body typing
A poem may, to you,
Have previously

Ended. To itself,
No, never. And you,
Your end, no, never.

The end’s not out there.
You extrapolate,
My dear, you project.

You Are But Yesterday

And yesterday refuses
To stay still for one moment,
Being always yesterday

And never itself again.
You’d like to think you’re just slow,
Too slow to catch the changes

In the exact act of them,
As if you experienced
Now, but just caught it a beat

Late. There’s no now, not like that.
You’re not approximating.
Now’s past, with or without lags.

You sit in an unlit room,
Nothing but how twilight bloomed.

Somewhere Along the Way

Someone in earshot
Notes, All journeys end,

And first you think, yes,
While imagining

Repeating that phrase
By way of last words.

But then you’re bothered
By the thought, It’s wrong.

Journeys never end.
They decelerate.

They change direction.
They lose companions.

You’ll say your last words,
Probably a gasp,

An incoherent,
Inarticulate,

Air-hungry gargle,
And then the journey

Of everything else,
Of everyone else,

Even the body
Still shedding its cells,

Will continue on
With and without you.

Would it be better,
You muse, if journeys

Really did all end?
But then, if they did,

With everything still,
Who would know? Nothing.

Job Lite

The details of the fable—
How many cattle he had,
How many children, so on—

How everything was taken
From him, including his health,
Everything except his life—

All of that, even the fact
That he was a patriarch,
Really don’t matter, nor do

The details of the doubling
Of everything on return,
A whole fresh set of children

To go along with double
The cattle, etc.—
Wondertale mathematics—

Once he proved he was faithful,
So God could win his throw-down
Against the Adversary—

Not once the unknown poet
Interpolated the poem
To make it universal,

So far as humans can be
Universal. Anyone
Can feel the anguish of Job

In those verses, and decide
For themselves how much to trust
The Voice out of the whirlwind,

And who hasn’t had to bear
Sanctimonious advice
About tolerating life,

Sometimes from interpreters
Of Job’s poem itself, as if
These pains were only Job Lite?