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.