Allergic Reaction

You don’t know it yet, but you

Live in a cosmos of lace

Where the gaps exceed the threads,

Where acknowledging as much

Would put you within danger

Of tumbling through a portal,

Now that you know there’s nothing

Much but portals in your world.

You’re the Great Central Station

Of a universe of gaps,

With no sure way of guessing

Which loop in the lace leads on

To world-building adventures

Of the quiet kind, which leads

To fantasies and sf,

Which leads to some rare, real hell

Or another, and which is

The portal to being free.

What should you do to be free?

Clutch the world delicately.

Inhale deeply. Ready? Sneeze!

Doubleday

Two days are always
Becoming themselves,
Accumulating

Fresh daytime stories
On separate tracks
That run parallel—

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

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

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

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

As well as whether
Anything belongs
To a single tale

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

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

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

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

She’s up in the Grotto Again

Muse of exile,

Mother of the road

What if it had been you and not

Your son driven out, made outcast,

You wandering off, all three boys

Left to shift for themselves back home?

Mythology would have given

Them some kind of magical wife

Or wives, some twist ex machina

To keep their creation going,

But what would there have been for you?

I like the idea of your tale better,

Eve, free at last, meandering,

Really pulling it off and not

Just burdened with too much knowledge.

Eve, the proper taxonomist,

Capable of understanding

The Darwinian behaviors

Of a planet abundantly

Prone to good and evil.

Let us know when you discover

How to live outside these old myths.

Miles from Any End to Them

In either twilight,
Those milestones are ghosts
Of rectangular

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

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

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

To commemorate
Measurements’ sorrows.

Completer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trick Answer

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

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

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

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

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

In the Woods You’ve Shielded All These Years

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sun’s Joy

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

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

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

Cubic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Into Strange Thousands

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe Not Before Leaving a Poem

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

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

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

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

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

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

Body by a Comet Going Gone

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

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

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

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

To be considered at all
By a body going gone?