Driving up the Dark Hill of the Mind

The only thing in nature
That is growing and goes on,
You suspect it belongs here—

Self-grafting, thing of its own,
It should have sculpted itself
As a source of reliance—

Mind — the invisible guest
Of every conversation,
The process floating mid-air

Maybe, but to be recorded
Whether the fact inheres there
The first line of protection,

What allows a child to feel
Safe within the broken wheel.

The End of the Weird

There’s no way you can create, in words,
Without it costing you, your good
Idea that you care more about more

Than either the life that you loved
Or the life that loved you, mostly
You’re business of less than whole life,

That part of your solid past that
Should shift benefits
Beyond wandering to this place

That’s eating you and that the time
Rules that have got you trapped in here
Awaiting the end of the weird.

You’re waiting the end of the weird,
The Apocalypse of the Weird.

Trio

Your daughter wants to know if
If this disc is you, or if
This disc is cancer, or if

This disc is meds to mix
With happy meds for cancer,

Of all three combined somehow
Since I’ve clearly seen it done.
And it seems happy enough.

Apart Before Dawn

The pinpoint landing
Of a bare needle
In the party dark—

It’s only unfair
If it’s your needle
That’s piercing your skin

In your party dark—
Otherwise, it could
Be the tracks of birds

In the snow tracks have
Not had enough chance
To fully absorb.

Let them survive, Good
Heavens, let them live.
The wind blows across

The fair and unfair,
Kind and unpleasant
Mysteries apart.

Shell Galaxies in Pisces

Peculiar, small variancees

In burning, vast carapaces,

From where you are, you can hear their

Dreams sloshing about quietly

Within the roaring combustion

Of endless nuclear furnaces—.

One writes endless since these places,

These furnaces that will exhaust

Their consumptive fires finally,

Nevertheless show no reverse—

The more advanced the telescope,

Then the older galaxies found,

No signs of stopping—endlessly—

And since the dreams within burning

Have no boundaries to their thoughts,

Suggesting it’s likely the same,

Quiet breathing for all their dreams

Which, unlike yours, do not distort

Or enlarge waking emotions,

Do not, ever, in fact, awake—

What discussions are there, out there—

What if there’s language but no life?

No worst-best gift to be given,

No worst-best horror to be wrenched

Away? Evenings, years ago, when

You could still pretty well walk, you

Went out ahead of a sunset,

Noting how lights could be confused

In your head—planet, star, so forth—

But more how all the emptiness

Hid massive galaxies from you,

The way a cup of spring water

Nursed mobs of infusoria

In its apparent clarity . . .

What if there’s language but no life?

Needs and Marvels

There are marvels in this world
That hunger, legitimate
Hunger, can lightly obscure—

Which could be what ascetics
Were on about, after all—
To reach a point where hunger

Has to contend with marvels
In the simplest performance—
You’re not being sensible.

You should not be doing this,
Writing and watching the cliffs.
You should be feeding yourself,

Planning the next happening,
Sating, not ignoring need.

Fortunate

It doesn’t matter what life
You led, what life it was led
You to feel happy for it—

If you feel happy for it,
If you manage to feel joy
If you are lucky enough

To feel that joy in your life,
You are lucky—not in life,
Not in the worth of life led

As in the capacity
To feel steady joy in it,
Whatever kind of life you led,

Easy or hard, difficult
Or filled with accomplishment—
And it’s never too early

To celebrate your good luck,
And almost never too late.
It’s not the life, it’s the luck

That you can ever feel it—
Let the gods around you fall.
Find someone to discuss it

While you can, someone who can
Still feel it, too. Let God die,
So long as you can still feel

The luck of still feeling it
As lucky, someone who feels
The luck of all of it, too.

Self Portrait as a Self Portrait

Look. Who is that walking over the snow?
Who is that stomping toward you, through snow?

You tense up, twitch between continuing
Your walk through the snow or turning your back.

Who is this continuing a straight line
Toward you, this blurry someone in black?

The urge to turn away becomes stronger.
The black’s foreboding. The white hurts your eyes.

The contrast’s disturbing. If it were spring,
Summer, even autumn, there’d be color,

But who can keep going in black and white?
This one can. Stares straight at you. It’s you.

Beyond the Lack of Language

Beyond words, says you, beyond
The capacities of words,
The powers of languages,

As if you began with what
Limits words, their boundaries,
What words can manage to do.

Rarely, if ever, do you
Turn their limits inside out
To show where there are words, but

The world, without words, remains
Inadequate without them,
Since only words can express

What the world cries to express—
Not where there are no words, nor
Where words are inadequate,

But where only words will do—
Right words in the right order
Someone snatched away from you.

There are words, words you could sob
To the walls if you knew them,
If you could only recall.

Inside the broken ruins
Of meaning where the words
Pool everything you could use

At the bottom of the pond
Of what only the words know,
Dark, full of meanings you need.

The Haze Concealing

Ah, she has gone to green
Behind her aching eyes —
She has gone to golden haze.
The gremlin hides inside
All kinds of golds, but then,
That’s what gold is, isn’t it?
The haze concealing.

Christmas Shards

Sometimes admiring the paints
More than the paintings leaves you

The strength to witness the world
Without stripping your power

To keep participating
In the way the world witnessed

Handles its worldly business.
This afternoon sprinkles work,

Gently for you to follow
A trail of barbarism,

While the doves and the crows land
In long grey lines like soldiers

In formation, ready
To seize the town, bird army,

Smarts in the crows, discipline
In the doves, hope on the ropes

Peace in the early evening.
Shards are always on their way,

However you predict them in gold,
However well shards grow worn.

Where Ends

Before the ends end,
There is the black tower
Ending, the flowers

In the big city
Extending, ropy
Resilient embrace.

No less focused, filled
With love and safety,
Careful mother care.

Two rats are laughing
In the gutter, not
At the mother’s concern,

But from their joy, her
Secret power to hold her
Own in her protection..

These lines hang off ends
Of tattooed twigs of
Spring cherry blossoms.!

Surrealism, Sort of

You almost hate to surface
For a few weeks from thick clouds—
The simplest language stumbles

Between the arts, no longer
Content to name moth or bird,
Then spot a cat in the grass—

Sophistication matters
Again, and Greek forsaken
For the production of forms

That are error, error raw
Til the next elaborate
Exercise in memory

That may not rescue you
By some hopeful thing you glimpsed
In a corner of the world

Someone’s brittle scholarship,
Someone’s fierce revolution
Someone’s sophistication,

Which now you have to muster
In clever comparison
To keep your poems in the game

Instead of simply writing,
There was a midnight-colored
Dove in the afternoon sun

Doing nothing much tempting
But being the wrong color
For a dark dove in the sun.

Clothes for Twelve People and One Velvet Ant

A jacket for you and for
All your dozen giant friends
For no good reason but fun—

This is not an honest poem,
Not a work of anything,
Slam! Slam!  After flexes so what?

After flexes, then there’s this,
And this is here to show off
What you can do with a light

Touch steering the wheel of life,
Known for a heavy hand at life.
Didn’t you enumerate a dozen,
No number enumerated?

Like the Sound of a Cat

If there are shapes, there should be
Shadows to accompany
Them, then, it feels like, the saints,
And their shapes matching shadows—
The same thing, matching shadows,
The intensity for you,
That a bump must be a cat.