The News This Afternoon

Part of the trouble with news
Is that once something happens
You start waiting for something

More to happen, something, please—
Penny, other shoe to drop,
Tense with anticipation,

When nothing much has happened
And nothing needs to happen.
The sun lights a stained table.

The Child Born Disabled Looks Back

Yes, I want a medal
For participation
As human in this life,

A ribbon, something bright
To wear before I die.
I lived a human life.

I played and I grew up,
More or less, albeit
Neither straight, strong, nor tall.

I joked, laughed, and goofed off.
I studied and I worked.
I taught and I professed.

I was diligent, daft,
Feckless, reckless, lazy,
Focused, and productive.

I breathed, ate, and got sick.
I fell and fell apart.
I more or less healed up.

I told the truth. I lied.
I was lucky in love
And unlucky in love.

I had a family,
Fell out with family,
And made a family.

I balanced my accounts,
Sometimes, and sometimes failed.
I tuned in and dropped out

And wormed my way back in
Again. I traveled some.
I stayed at home a lot.

I voted, protested,
And paid taxes, except
When I did not. I was

A person, behaviors,
Bacteria, ideas,
Doubts, convictions, the lot.

I pulled words out of books,
Out of my ears, thin air,
Paper bags, empty hats.

So. About that medal.
Gilt’s good enough for me.
And that’s enough of that.

Old man drowsing in the reddish motion
Of your uncoiling chestnut river, Ruin,

What will you dream of next, now
That your own dreams know themselves

That they’ve in whole or large part been
Long since stolen? Ladybug larvae

Are everywhere, on the sunny back porch
And up against the sunny wall.

Male goldfinches sing in suburban gardens,
Trilling, and the shade trees leaf out,

The nut trees all in blossom. A plague,
Of sorts, whispers around these houses,

Whisper that’s writing this spring’s history
Into the history books, oh yes, as if books

And histories were not more fragile
Than the species of plagues and insects

And nuts and songbirds and shade trees
That humans and histories threaten. Never

You mind, old man dozing in golden sun,
Plump with knowing in your scrawny bones

You will not live to see all this all ruined.
Rivers, you find yourself half dreaming,

Are not such good figures for time after all,
Never you mind, Kongzi and Heraclitus,

Buddha and all the rest. Downstream now,
The lot of you. Rivers are not as rhythmic

As clocks, not as cyclical as seasons,
Moons, or spring days just past equinox.

They’re too linear and too destructive,
And even when measured by nilometers

Are just erratic enough to remind us
The future is not some property just for us

To measure. Rivers stay dangerous, snaky,
And ruinous. So the sage steps into one

But never twice, mysterious. Old man,
Dozing in your quilt of stolen phrases,

Do you know where rivers really start?
In iron. Earth’s hard heart that generates

Auroras between the clouds sailing up
To dissipate as crystals called out and lost

To the sun—Earth’s secret heart of iron
Shields this atmosphere. The clouds

Fall back to ground, down, down, down.
The weaker Earth has won against the sun.

So the rivers swell and run. Life depends
On iron reining water in, on erosion

Into oceans, on minerals, on ruin. Enough
With that one word, silly old man smiling

In your sleep in your borrowed backyard
Near a black-walled gorge of lava scored

Down to sandstone where the Virgin River
Runs, ladybugs on your arm in spring sun.

And if you lost the composition
Of a minute, an hour, a day, a week,
Of an entire year or a lifetime,

What could you do to begin again
Other than to begin again?
The future holds nothing—no change

Waits, lurking, for its assigned time
To happen. Change is as it’s happened,
Happening, and should be so by definition.

The most trivial detail shows more details,
Blossoms with them, and they with more,
The more closely examined. Lines also.

But what was lost altogether was neither
Energy (conserved), nor mass (conserved),
Nor even information (claimed conserved).

It was the meaning of the thing, the thing
That was meaning itself, was itself meaning.
Meaning can join and leave existence.

Only meaning gives itself and vanishes,
And was never out there and will never be
Again. Funny little jot of nothing. Meaning.

We think it is discovered in the details,
As a child thinks the coin was discovered
By the magician, behind the child’s own ear.

Information’s discovered. Meaning must be
Made. And if it goes away, it goes, never
To return ever again, much less the same.

And that is what we mean when we name
Loss and ruin. New things keep happening,
New changes, new balances exchanged.

But the meaning made and erased remains
Erased. Only other meanings, related or not
But never the same, can take its place.

Meaning is the only actual magic, then,
Which is exactly what the term magic
Means. Out of nothing, like no other thing.