Down in the Hollow

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

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

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

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

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

Jack Dreaming Beanstalk

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

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

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

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

Book Cliff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Going Great

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

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

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

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

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

Simultaneity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Although You Do

Shadows move on what they shade,

And they’re almost never still.

The mind, that is, all of it,

That fragmentary shadow

Of thoughts encircling the world

As the sun does, but intimately,

Less predictably, almost

Human—here someone stops you.

The mind’s nothing but human!

Nothing’s more human than mind!

You take the interruption

And pause to think. A human

Is a combination, no?

Maybe the mind is almost

Human the way abandoned

Webs are almost spiders, webs

Of any kind are spiders—

Uniquely so, but not quite

Exclusively. Webs exist

Outside of spider species,

Outside of spider bodies,

And mind exists past humans,

Outside of human bodies,

But when you think of a web

Or of a mind, you’re likely

Thinking spider or human.

Still, a web’s not a spider

And a mind’s not a human.

Both kinds of species combine

Bodies with these extended

Phenotypes. So, the mind is

Almost human; a shadow

Is not. The mind may not move

In the way a shadow does,

But, as the shadow of thoughts,

Mind is thrown (peculiar verb

For the calm of a shadow

Or mind in motion) by kinds

Of interference with light,

The interference, for mind,

Consisting of thoughts. Lesser

Light, subdued light, bearable

Is the result of both kinds.

The mind, the shade that stretches

As you tire, the dilution

Of being that thought creates,

Moves around within your skull

And says, you don’t want to know.

A Hunch

Elizabeth lived in times

Exact reference wasn’t

The most poetic target.

What’s the best thing in the world?

She asked, then answered herself—

Something out of it, I think—

How the mind works, when you blink,

And it finds anti-matter

In a box by gunpowder

In the cool, shadowy back

Of a storage room, among

Soft scents of lumber and dust.

Experience is one thing,

The hunch there’s more’s another.

Maybe Meaning

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

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

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

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

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

Empty Day Almost Spent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Get the Day Talking

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

About what to do
With all your fragments,

How to make something—
The morning wind slipped

Down through the canyons.
Somewhere someone fell,

Wading in a crick,
Picking up pieces,

While someone else searched
For that collection

Meaning the canyon
Would start talking soon.

It Was 1:20 PM Just a Minute Ago

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

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

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

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

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

Now Solve These

You have three
Words to make
A new world,

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

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

A Thought Could Make Life You

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

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

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

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

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

Rampaging Baboon Nebula in Forever Falling Snow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Diplomat’s Burial Garden

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

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

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

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

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

You Can Alter

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

Or portraying
Evil as natural,
Has thereby justified

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bright Apple Sunset

No peanuts from the moon
No results from the living

Room—the road had sufficient
Expanse through hours of desert

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

To bills and claims on your time
Hello to ordinary

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

You People Will Have to Leave

To sit under a cottonwood

By the edge of the parking lot

Of Old Fort Boise Park and read,

In Parma, Idaho, of lost

Empires from the early eras

Of cities and standing armies—

Silence descended—is to want

To inflict an observation

About humans on the human

World that lives to make and misshape.

What does this frontier replica

Of a fort not two centuries

Old have to say in the shadow

Of phrases translated from times

When Ur’s city walls already

Counted millenniums backward

Through civilizations ancient

Enough to have changed their climate,

Salted their marshes, and so forth,

Already moved on to stages

Of grieving and lamentation—

Silence descended? People talk,

In a noisy era, about

Fresh decimation on its way,

But it’s hard to say, on a day

Like today in packed Idaho,

Industrial agriculture

Plugged into global supply chains,

Streets and parking lots rife with cars,

Trucks, pick-ups, rolling second homes,

A general sense of bustle,

Despite the rural surroundings,

What will this be after the end

Of all the systems that made it

Into the obstreperously

Patriotic, confident land

It is now? Will silence descend?

Will the gods right now contending

For believers and wealth vanish?

You read a little more, this time

About Hattusha and the Late

Bronze Age Collapse. You imagine

Your daughter and her friends grown old,

The survivors at least, leaving

The stagnant remains of small towns,

Or the smoking piles of ashed roofs,

Maybe on foot, as so many

Displaced people already move,

Only, by then, refugia

Like Parma, Idaho, will be

Themselves ruins from which to flee.

What do you want to say to them,

Writing from the end of your frail

And painful but sheltered lifespan

Lived within a kind of empire,

A land you never had to flee?

That history encourages

Us with evidence things come back,

Under new management, glory

Days starting again, for someone

If not them? That the Dark Ages

Of any given location

Are not only not forever,

But never as dark, on closer

Inspection, as people believed?

That some happiness seems to breathe,

Some ordinariness at least,

Through every archaeology

Of the people that had to leave?

Picking out the Shards You Had in Mind

Saroyan and Dietrich, roll call—

The oldest we know, his cave, his wall,

The doorbell so / Lost in the wall . . .

What? Stops it. There you go. Collision

Of lyric fragments shattered. They work

Like any abandoned land mine.

Little trigger phrases intended

To drive shards of language through you.

That they rarely work is not the point.

The point is that phrases can ever carry

A grimy bit of small thought across

The barriers you counted on to hold.

Spider Hockey at Sleep

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

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

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

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

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

Five Years After the Last One

The edge of knowledge,
The threshold of death—

Now add this petal—
Last of the polished

And deep-pocketed
Soul’s predilections—

The step against steps,
The rule against rules—

Nothing’s very good
At being nothing.

People stand around
Talking about fires

That scorched the mountains
Just this past summer.

In Any Medium

This is not a good solution,

She said as she steered his heated

Power chair up the icy street

Through a non-existent winter

Evening someone had imagined

Just before they had imagined

Being on a picnic picking

Raspberries one summer morning

Also non-existent. But back

To the winter evening, the ice,

The steep slope of the frozen street. . .

Zig-zagging the power chair was

Not a good solution to those

Problems in any medium.

Weekday

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

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

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

Still it was Monday,
And seasonable
For early autumn,

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

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

Ill Advised

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See You as a Wave

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

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

The continuity
Extends at all edges—

Periodicity
Governs where your wave breaks.

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

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

On the wet, empty street
With one amber streetlight.

Missing Hunts Itself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You Meant So Much More Than You Knew

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

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

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

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

Triumphal Old Couch on a Grey Morning

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

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

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

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

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

The Plan

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

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

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

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

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

The Swallowed Poem Meant for October 2nd

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

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

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

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

For something to mean something
It pays informational toll.

Thought Extruding Structure

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

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

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

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

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

The irreproducible
Suite of silk adaptations
That undergird spider myths,

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