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.