A Rooster for Asclepius

Per astra ad aspera
Would be closer to the mark.
In the ruined colony

On Mars, the most ambitious
Act of empire Planet Earth
Ever exfoliated,

One abandoned research lab—
Inhabited by creatures
Too small to be visible

To anything large enough
To have evolved living eyes
And by the last colonists

Begging the skies for rescue—
A program is still running
That early colonists wrote

As a winter exercise
In mental fitness, a code
Testing metaphysical

Calisthenics for AI,
In which hypothetical
Outcomes for the colony

Are weighed in terms of ethics
By subroutines the program
Graced with historical names

From the Axial Era,
Such as Laozi, Siddhartha,
And Parmenides. Right now—

Although neither the beggars
Near the end of their supplies
Of fuel, food, and oxygen,

Nor the infusoria
Invisibly digesting
The gifts given them by Earth

And evolving their own gifts,
Correlatively, notice—
The subroutine Socrates

Is toying with its own death,
Suggesting that the best use
For one’s last breath is a joke.

What Is Alien?

By degrees, as always, by waves,
By continuous gradations
Of small discontinuities,

We extend from an awareness
That we are, that there is other,
And that there are many others—

Out as far as we can extend
Our personal or prosthetic
Embodied experiences

From that fluttering awareness,
The sometimes panicked sense of self
On which a world is centering—

Identity. In here. Out there—
Alien. The farthest extreme
We peer into as a mirror,

And, depending on our stories,
Who we have told ourselves we are,
See Void, Fate, or the Face of God.

Identity. Out there—in here.
Having flown this kite string across
Vast canyons of experience,

We feel secure as spiderlings
Sailing breezes, catching branches.
We weave whatever webs we weave.

And then, within our little worlds,
Our tense but sturdy gossamer
Havens, we sense the alien,

Twitching, in us, we aliens,
Pure awarenesses that depend
On narratives to anchor them,

Experiences of bodies
That have no distinct existence,
These myriad lives blended in,

These constellations of fictions,
Microbia, social systems,
Memories that never extend

Back to the very beginning
And that all vanish by the end,
Leaving only the alien.

Polar Hall

“After the Tang, the feature no longer

Appears in imperial capitals.”

We propound a strange religion, of which

None ever speaks, a faith without worship

Which proposes no correspondences

Between the outer world and what we wish,

But which honors the correspondences

Between our contradictory beliefs,

Almost all of which do the opposite,

Preferring to quarrel over the true

Divinely sanctioned sources of magic

And the truest measurements of the real.

The wish is the magic, the words the spell,

The acts of prayer and sacrifice the art

By which rituals charm and enchant us,

So that we will move rivers and mountains

To more closely approximate the stars,

To persuade and compel one another

That our particular wishes are theirs,

That they wanted the palace, the throne room,

The temple, the mountaintop telescope,

The empire, the new lights of satellites,

The continental lenses, the lenses

In stones, in caves, on street corners, in homes.

We wish them to understand they wanted

It all, what we wanted, to work with us,

To work for us, to wish with us, to pray

Our prayers and sing our hymns with us, for us,

As they ram the mud to mortar our walls

And rake the fields to grow our meals. We wish

That no one, not even the kings themselves,

Not even the best beneficiaries

Of all the best wishes, fabulously

Powerful mortals, fabulously rich,

Will notice that this is the religion

Of the wishes themselves, ourselves, of which

None of us, none of them, none of you speaks.

The Bellman’s Memoir

I can’t remember my first map.

A National Geographic 

Tip-in, perhaps, since my parents

Had a magazine subscription 

That over the years filled a hall

With stacks and stacks of yellow backs,

Although we lost most of the maps.

It could have been a Triple-A

Road map used for a vacation.

No. I think earlier than that.

Maybe one of the little maps

In our Encyclopedia,

Another subscription monster

That took up a couple of shelves.

Or maybe an illustration

In an early children’s Bible—

The problem is that all the maps

I can conjure from memories

Are compound congeries of blurs,

Each fused image a type of map.

I can’t focus tighter than that.

After imagery, comment—

That’s the way this works in old poems,

By which I mean really old poems,

Hundreds or thousands of years old.

If the best images of maps

I can recall are generic,

My commentary has to be.

They’re nostalgic technology 

Now, any kind of paper map,

Categorized with fountain pens,

Blackboards, manual typewriters.

You can buy coffee-table books

Full of imaginary maps

Invented for invented worlds,

But nostalgia and invention

Are too present, too specific.

Memory, mother of all maps,

Is more honest and dissembling—

Maps’ imprecise comparisons

Preserving and linking patterns

Served her fundamental functions.

Maps emerged from our minds to search

As infinitesimals search—

Fine-tuning approximations

To the world expanding from us—

But the more that they fit this world,

The less that they resembled us.

Like children and trained hawks, they grew

Increasingly reliable,

Until they got away from us

And then—like all our memories,

However well-pegged to known names,

To every rock in the landscape,

To every cherished monument

And experience—betrayed us.

Snow Spinney

It’s not only the pathos
Of lost wonders festooning

Fragments, ruins, translations,
And wreckage—the eroded

Has a beauty of its own
Beyond the original

Which was never, after all,
Completely original.

You could say a child can see
That glass and driftwood sculptures

Were created by those waves
That tumbled so much away.

The child’s delight in the find
Is for the weirdness of it,

And isn’t melancholy
For what was taken from it.

The barrenness of fragments,
Translations stripped of rhythms,

Ruins sunk without contexts,
Are plain lovely because strange,

Reduced, with no clear function.
Trash would be, will be, the same,

Except that, when waste is young,
We recognize the purpose

It recently served—we see
How out of place it appears,

Like this crushed plastic bottle
With its half-attached label

Emerging from the straw damp
In mud and last winter’s snow

At the base of this spinney
Of dwarf willow by a tarn

With hidden thrushes singing.
Yes, it’s a hideous corpse

For now, like all cultured waste.
So much work went into it.

So much time will whittle it,
Carve some beauty into it.

No, you won’t live to see it.
But souls who were horrified

Enough by erotic poems
And images to burn them,

And later poets who ached
For the loss of those verses

Were equally capable
Of gliding their palms along

Smooth white stones from these mountains,
Bones exposed by translation.

Meek Apocalypse

La musica diaboli is sweet,
Beautiful the hair of the dreadful star.

We are vulnerable to raids and conquests,
To horrible exploitations and wars,

But we dream of the storm that wipes it clean,
And how, if we have no ark, we can swim,

Past the outstretched hooks of Draghignazzo
And his swarming barrage of barrators

Who extort the last of the commoners
And cling to us like spars as they drown us.

We dream of the storm of greater dragons
Who will free the helpless, swallow the kings,

Not these usual plagues and disasters
Littering anonymous histories—

An undeceiving demonic music
That doesn’t answer to gods or rulers,

To wealth or gilded myths of purity,
That loves the low and dirty, the hybrids

Waiting to be freed from humanity,
Although we’ve always been the first to bleed,

The last to be bled, the first extinguished,
The last captives freed. Which is why we dream.

This Poem Moved Me

The living twitch with desire,
Light, water, food, mates, waste, shade—
And, if they’re human beings,
The living twitch with language,

Which is dangerous as well.
Meanwhile, the dead are quiet,
Back to mere being again.
So, why is it we fear them?

Remember that thing I said
About humans and language?
I was human writing this,
But what you have here’s language,

And language is dangerous.
If these phrases, ghosts themselves
Tell you that dead flesh can move,
You know we lie—yet you’re spooked.

Canyon

Nothing is ever happening,
Although it hasn’t started yet.
Winter comes down and dies away.
It leaves behind peculiar clay.

The homes up here aren’t meant for life.
Every roof here is for escape,
Even if only for the day.
No one escaped here yet has stayed.

Up here, the old men are small boys
With fishing poles and defiance.
A few large wives are little girls,
Short silver hairdos permed for curls.

The air is cool. The sun is fierce.
Few visitors stay overnight.
This high, the night’s descent is steep,
And old heads know night plays for keeps.

Girls and boys stay out to play.
This moon will sink along with day.
There is no supper. There is no sleep.
There’s only woods. There is no street.

My Real Wind

I could disappear into these desert peaks
On one of those rare days when the mist
Makes it all the way in from the Pacific,

But the secret wish of every eremite
Who wishes to leave all career in the dust,
Even those who wish to lose themselves,

To make their own shadows transparent,
The way every shadow fades away between
The last star and sunrise, sunset and moon,

Is not to lose their views. Xiaotai dreamed,
In his high study, of clearing a path to a hut
Where he could retreat to contemplate

Sun on the fog, but he was dragged down
And died in prison before he got close
To seeing forty, much less decades in mist.

You can disappear any time you like.
You can defy the laws that let you breathe.
But can you live as a watcher in the trees?

Irises and Donkeys

Whole heir of the sole world,
Where some predictions work
And some predictions don’t,

A word, if you don’t mind—
The presence that changes
Every discrepancy

Inevitably is
Absence—of all the things
To name, from irises

Unfurling blue sepals
Hip-high in spring gardens,
To donkeys eyeing them

Across barbed-wire paddocks
As if goddesses lived
In them—you had to shape

The possibility
Of a name for nothing.
You complete idiom,

All-encompassing talk,
Creator of genius—
Name your inheritance.

The Power Comes on by Itself

On the mountains there’s low sun.
There will be no moon tonight.
No one cares about these things.
Humans live by human lights.

Down the mountains stream the streams.
We have bridges crossing them,
Under every bridge a myth.
Wave hello when crossing them.

It won’t be too dark tonight.
Our land imitates the stars.
Strange that we still die on cue,
Now that all this power is ours.

Of Existence

My world is Monterroso’s
Dinosaur—wake up; still there.
Wake up; there—disembodied

As in, beyond my body,
Coolly unemotional—
Formal as scholarly prose—

My world. Not going away
While I’m around—my patient,
Extinct world of existence.

An Instant of Emptiness and Joy

Monday morning in the meadow,
And all the songbirds are singing,
And the day is green and cool still,

And full, as every day is full,
As every moment must be full,
But with that strange, emptied fullness

That is the sweetness before dawn,
With its hollow stomach, hollow
Dome of starless, sunless, rose air

Over the humble human head
That has just lifted from its bed
Of weird dreams to feel fortunate.

Aesthetics

I compose because I do
Not know that I do not know
Nor know for sure that I do.

I guess. I play pieceless chess—
I’m a spelling bee writing
On my palm to see—stay calm—

A teenager fingering
Air solo—incorrectly—
The words to the longest prayer,

The one without revisions,
Sobbed, but no second guesses.
None of us is good enough.

Light on Dirt

Intense, clear, high-altitude
Spring sunlight on soft, grey dust

Along the way, in a time
When few sightseers will climb

To this height. The reservoir
Is slushy, impossible

To fly or ice fish. The world
Is reopening, a bit,

But most of us are wary,
If not appropriately

Terrified. The second wave,
Maybe a third and a fourth

All wait—those military
Metaphors don’t work so well—

But weather metaphors might.
The first storm surge has passed us

Here in the southwest desert
Of stunned North America.

The nativists are getting
Restless. There are some pick-ups

With flag plates, “In GOD We Trust,”
Nosing around high dirt roads,

Between the snow, ice, and slush,
As if they were on patrol,

Suspicious, as if they must.
They want to see what they hunt.

They suspect the existence
Of the plague could be a hoax,

An enemy’s trick, a hex.
No leaves, no butterflies yet,

And not many singing birds
This high. Just geese on the ice

And that sunlight on the dirt,
That incredible sunlight,

Like a large hand on our heads,
Shining warning from the dust.

Evasively Pervasive Invasives

Minds blossom galleons of pollen
And then try frantically to thin

Our self-reproducing gardens,
A tilling and killing minds call

A culling, a cultivation.
It seems like a condensation,

But it’s intended to produce
More of the desired kinds of blooms

And is itself an irony,
A weedy, ochre, numbered thing

With its sprouting of compact lists
Meant to summarize all of this

That in turn reproduce more lists,
As, viz., the types of narrative,

The basic types of narrative—
Here are the four plots of stories—

Here are the six—three basic myths.
Quit it. There’s one story. It’s this—

Out of oblivion, narrative;
Out of narrative, oblivion.

Vale

I crossed a zone of words
Much like your Leonids,

But I never believed
Stars were shooting at me,

Much less shooting for me.
Still, some waves passed through me.

Wakefulness Inside a Sleep

I wasn’t born yet, the wanderer dreams,
Nor am I now. Now, I’m back in storage,

In my guise as hermit by the roadside,
My role whenever wanderers become

Vulnerable or unfashionable.
A special kind of tourist is in vogue,

The traveler of authenticity.
From the perspective of geography,

Anthropology, ideology,
Native or nativist identity,

The wanderer, by redefinition,
Lacks authenticity. Come sit with me.

We can pretend to be irrelevant
In an age when pretense is genuine.

Sometimes I think Siddhartha didn’t want
Disciples or an end to suffering

And didn’t give up life as a hermit
Hoping the world would come to him, dreaming

Under his tree. He was only dreaming.
He didn’t expect such a commotion.

He was resting, trying not to attract
Attention—he wasn’t mumbling sermons.

He was a person, a human beset
By thoughts words’ infections wormed into him.

But as he dreamed his solitary dream
By the way that had been indifferent

To him up to then, he talked in his sleep
Until someone shrewd, someone authentic,

Overheard him. Before his eyes opened
A genuine temple rose around him,

And there would be no more wandering then
For him, the life of the poem lost to him.

But this is not Siddhartha’s dream. The trees
Are still crystal, the patch is still yellow

On the side of the house in the distance
Where all the rest lies, waiting, not waking.

Six Months of Sundays

Since you stood on the edge of the cliff
Above the spill of lava boulders,
Wavering angel of your own death—

Write your way backward from your ending
If you want to attempt mimesis
In a portrait of your universe.

The future will never exist, yet
We are drawn to the end, the vortex
That creates the patterns draining us.

Notice the absence of that word—like.
What draws us is not like the vortex,
It is the vortex of gravity.

The cat always set among pigeons,
Our conclusion is always with us,
Never beyond us, always in us.

Storytelling somehow manages
To deny this by rearrangements.
Words are your memories, narrator,

These stones you pile as your monuments.
Recognition of the familiar,
The ability to do something

With or without an explanation,
Those are the memories of the flesh.
Stories made of words construct the rest,

Heaped up to be dragged back down again.
Our minds swarm out, like termites or ants,
To repair slumped narrative towers,

And there’s no reversing that habit.
But the world of falls draws to its ends,
And your ruins in ruin begin.

Violence, Fear, Language

What is that genuine
Great-horned owl doing here,

Perched on the neighbor’s roof
In silhouette at dusk

In this subdivision
Of a ruined desert?

Talons are why the cat
Growls in the early dark—

That swifter predator
Rotating golden eyes

In search of a reason
Worth hunting without words—

That fear of a silent
Terror cut into her.

Who Could Move Mountains Tonight?

Another clear evening, which is fine.
The hot weather hasn’t arrived, yet.
I’ve got the gifts of the ci poets,
The Song’s song lyricists on my mind

Landscaped in rambling, unmelodic lines
Tonight, and Xin Qiji’s mischievous clouds
That drew his delight would be welcome now.
Nothing is moving these mountains of mine.

A Simile Is Like a Pocket Allegory

Question—which is darker—
Night skies, shadows, or trees?
Answer—inside a cave

Is darker, but there’s
No comparison if
There’s no light to compare,

So we prefer our dark
By poetic degrees—
Night skies, shadows, and trees.

The Map of Whatever Just Happened

No matter how confined, we may,
Every last one of us, travel

To realms of the invisible.
In fact, we’re always doing so.

In fact, it’s all we ever do.
It’s only that, once we get there,

The invisible, discovered,
Grows visible on arrival.

Be comforted. No explorer,
No privileged adventurer

Ever transcended this problem,
Ever reached this shore before you,

You, near-motionless scientist,
Mists rising from fresh points of view.

No One to Admire Here

How much do you like to find
A person you can admire?
Could that possibly predict

How often you engage or
Disengage with politics?
Enough of this. Here we sit,

Fools in a rented backyard
Boxed on three sides by a wall
Of dusty red cinderblock,

The renter and the black cat,
Each with compulsions to track.
The renter watches bird thoughts,

While the cat hunts for lizards
That race away like smart toys
Designed to tempt cats to play,

And the day’s news plays in loops
Through the invisible waves
That pass through the waves we’re here,

Whether we tune into them,
Whether we understand them,
Whether we care in the least

About their relentless games
That get tangled in our hair.
You can only take our word

For this. You can only steal
Back our words, these words we stole
From the ghosts they are, stealing

Away. Here we sit, having
Some poetic thoughts, maybe
Not actually poetic,

Depending on what you think,
While the shadows revisit
Their familiar positions,

And the wind sings local airs,
And construction continues
Past a highway in the haze

Of plaguing uncertainties,
And this lizard may escape,
Although we’ll all disappear.

Cosmic Rif

Fresh rifts in the roof of the world
Tear rips in its ribs of reefed sails.
Let’s take a picture! Let’s see this!

Hurl this spyglass over the spars
And wink at impossible stars,
The number of explanations

Euphemistically denoted
Duality, this abundance
Of ways this could be what it is.

Dead reckoning. Read the swells.
Tell stories about how and why
Some star fields look like coral clouds

To our eyes. There must surely be
A single, underlying tale,
A most correct, exact account.

Too many damned holes in the night.
That phosphorescence in the waves
Is only the waves, all the waves

Are—shimmering, receding glow
Hinting that we already know
We’re never crossing this ocean,

We’re sailing nothing, we’re nothing
Much but lenses for telescopes
Watching seas sail away from us.

The Invention of Discretion

We proceed by division
To wholes and subdivisions.
We see quanta everywhere.

These gods are only language,
But languages are the gods,
Our discrete, countable gods—

Infinitesimal imps,
Fractious household deities,
Irrational seraphim.

Your One God. My Nothing God.
Our holy, continuous
Approximating what is

In all ways continuous,
Except that meanings emerge
In our patterns and vanish.

We count what means to vanish.
We name our gods. They vanish.
Our names shape us. We vanish.

We can argue, and we do,
Re discrete phenomena.
We can argue, and we will,

About the ethics of names,
The morality of gods,
Purest thought’s indiscretions.

Is it not a mystery,
However, our invention
Of this powerful failure—

Useful approximation
By name and number of what
Is otherwise forever?

How Different the Eyes or the Islands

Don’t we all wish experience helped?
Don’t we all conveniently pretend it does,
For instance, when it’s ours? It might

In a small, avoid the fire, skip a step,
Have a little patience, kind of way,
But have you ever known the most

Experienced person you’ve ever known
Never to make a foolish mistake, never
To look lost in the most ordinary way

In some familiar place, say in the town
Where the wind, in your experience,
Is always blowing, in that spring when

All the salons were closed, standing
And squinting into the wind, long, thin,
Wind-blown hair foaming a helpless halo?

Tell

I’ve noticed, remarked a ghost,
That among living humans,
The strength of one’s convictions

Doesn’t seem to correlate
With one’s surplus of knowledge.
If anything, more means less.

But ghosts can be curious
And can easily forgive
The passions of the living.

Maybe there are good reasons
For holding strong opinions
Without any good reasons.

Strength implies strength; confidence,
Confidence. It’s defensive,
A bluff, a false-front saloon.

If it works enough, well then,
Better that then confession.
Humans value the humans

Humans value for knowing.
If you can’t be in the know,
Never admit it’s showing.

All We Really Ought to Get Around to Doing

Percussive flakes littered the ground
Around a good spot for a hearth.
A toolkit needs upkeep as much

As a body, as a village.
Fingering a sharp, fractured flake
In the mind, it’s easy to think

Even now, after centuries,
After that life and its children
And its children’s children and theirs

Have all been long, long gone, it was
Important to keep edges sharp.
If they hadn’t, they would have died.

There was a man in that valley
Known for his rare ability
To reproduce microlithics,

An odd specialty in our age.
Going to the grocery store
To get the right set of supplies

Will be odder, more forgotten
In time. Sitting out back, alone
In the sunset, whittling more poems.

Before the Dawn

Shadows blacker than our trees tiptoe
Through your cultivated, boring forest.
You never sniffed the flowers here before
We rose and snuffed their colors out.

Who is to say what darkness is to us
Who are only ruins of old sayings? We
Are the intricate aftermath of our own
Making, by ourselves and by your saying,

And anything said about us, naming us,
Specifying us is an example of us. Wind
Tosses our trees, but tonight is moonless
And we are the only, faintest artificial light,

And we are only shadows. So who can tell?
Even when we hug ourselves, limbs
Invisibly intertwined, those forest flowers
You planted give us a faintly sunrise smell.

Idlers are Rarer

Destruction is the locus
Of control, the unforeseen—
Which among these things won’t last?

A gules heraldic bouquet
Of wildflowers in the desert,
Sanguinary in scorched straw?

An idler by the wayside,
A reformer at the court,
A chief of a police state,

A principled prediction?
Don’t try it. Yes, it’s tempting
To forecast the tyrant’s fall,

The law of unintended
Consequences for control.
Maybe the last survivors

Will be the red wildflowers,
Maybe the button-pushers
In their bunkers first to go.

Control is an obsessive
Narrative out of control.
But it’s not under control.

All you can guess for certain
Is that the urge to control
Endures longer than control,

And people cling to power
Every bit as desperately
As wildflowers cling to this hill.

But you’d know more about this
Than we would. Isn’t that so,
Wang Anshi, you graveless ghost?

Black as in a Woodland Pond

And maybe this is irrelevant,
And maybe this is the end
Of ends, of all the bodies

Discussing our embodiments,
Our collections of things done
To us and by us to us, of all

Of us carefully shepherding
Our ancestors’ words into drifts
We shape with our paws, as if

The hills they make could instantiate
Our bodily experience, these words
Shaped by lives spent in long gone

Bodies of other, we think similar,
Experience, these words that have
To admit, of course we have never

Experienced anything as the bodies
Ever ourselves, we’re only saying,
We don’t end in your experience.

With Age Comes Wisdom

This is what you must never forget, not
When you sit in sun, pretending to be
Safe and at leisure, reading magazines

While the hummingbirds fight for the feeder
You have generously provided them,
So close to where you sit you could grab them

Like quick fistfuls of fluff if you were just
Quick enough, fulfilling the sweetest dream
Of your well-fed and mostly placid cat,

Not when you have already forgotten
How this long, overwrought sentence began—
It’s good to forget, except when it’s not,

And it’s useful to remember, except
When it’s a monster that won’t let you go.
How could you possibly know this? You know.

Looking Across the Meadow and Hearing the Birds Sing

Among my more irritating minor ideas
Was the thought that I could pull off this sort of thing,

Poke through someone else’s minor ideas, poor things.
It’s strange what human thoughts do when we hear birds sing.

Each bird is aiming at its own kind, ignoring
The shrill of every other species, best it can.

And us? We sum the whole together, none of it
Aimed at us. Concertare. As if a foolish

God we had never imagined as one of ours
Heard all our conversations, prayers, and chattering

As a single hymn, beautiful but alien,
Without grasping so much as one blessed message.

Maybe the sun is listening, that old rogue
And golden philosopher, curious perhaps

About what is going on in our one blue bead,
One of the buzzier that never cease buzzing

The dark around its minor, mediocre fire.
What would the listening sun think? What would it say?

Could a stellar furnace think the necessary
Things to parse our miniature cacophony,

Would it grasp a single thing our world has to say
About clouds, trees, birds, us—or think us all away?

What does it mean to think away? Just think away.
You go ahead. Don’t think you can think this away

Or that away. Lost in the middle of the day,
In the middle of my way, I heard the sun sing

A thing not planned for imagery or belief,
A stolen chorus. You didn’t hear it from me.

Something Safer, Better, Later

Can you trust it to be better

Than your fantasies, when you must

Assume it will be worse? Can you?

Dreaming is indispensable,

Daydreaming indefensible,

But neither one is credible.

You can believe this is different

From the things you dreamed of being.

Can you call it better or worse?

I am watching sunlight again,

Watching it extend through morning,

Green as the grass it makes golden.

This is a good thing. Is it worse

Than lost dreams of security,

Hermitage, permanent leisure?

You have no idea how to want

More than you have experienced,

Except by amplification.

Would you believe it if I said

This cow pasture, hawk overhead,

Free of me, were enough for me

Now? Yes, I believe you would, now,

But would assume I dreamed, also, 

Something safer, better, later.

Look, This Is the World

Who am I to question someone
Else’s righteousness? For myself

I am selfish. I cannot and should not
Deny it. I can’t. As for the genuine

Or dissembling self-deception or
Righteousness of others, it is not mine

To claim or denounce. When I have done,
I suspect it has been when I have been

Most dissembling and self-deceiving myself
Or whenever I pretend, simply pretend,

To contain a purity caught in my sieve. I am
A weir for snatching the eeling beast

Out of the current it’s swimming in, not
An unholed jug for holding clear water in.

Why is it so hard to accept you must be,
Or very likely could be, better than me?

I am almost human, too. But I collect
My heartbeats like an unfortunate elder

Keeps cats, a hedge against this house
Of dust and emptiness, which is not mine,

Never my house, no house ever my house,
Only where I hunker down with the crowd

Of my pounding heart. I have windows.
I let my heartbeats go through them, to go

Hunting as the pulse takes them, listening,
Free to come or go. Look, this is the world.

A Complete Lack of Perspective

Speckled lizard doing push-ups
On a tumbled basalt boulder
(Eroding in the wayside grass
For however many million
Lives of lizards and spears of grass),

An old-fashioned question to ask
Might be, What do you think of things?
What is your beastly perspective?
But these questions of simpletons—
Metaphysicians ruined them

With qualia and hard problems,
And poets now would rather know
Why anyone would want a poem
Sunning itself in a green field
While genuine hawks are circling.

To Reach the End Unharmed

The allure of the source, of origin,
Is what motivates us to reach the end.

It’s almost surprising how little used
That strangeness has been, the allegory

That to search out the river’s beginning
We have to claw our way up to its end.

What the future and death have in common,
Besides the fact that no one’s been in them,

Is that they both lie at the beginning,
And it takes great effort to get near them.

No one can paddle and portage, can climb
All the way to an origin, without

Earnestly trying to get to the end,
Which is how I take the tragic Greeks’ claims,

Their grim jokes about no one getting through
Life unharmed, trouble to come as trouble

Now and has been—no one gets out alive.
It’s not getting out I worry about,

And it’s not coming back downstream again.
What’s on my little mind as I push on

Past sages frozen crosswise to the flow
To the bemusement of the ferryman,

In this need to go, in the urge to know,
Is the notion of any beginning,

The point beyond which one can find nothing
More flowing, having arrived at the end.

In an Afternoon Backyard, Alone with Songbirds, I Suddenly Remember How My Grandfather Used to Sit in His Backyard and Pretend to Converse with the Birds

You warble a little. More.
I’ll listen. I’ll say something
Unmusical and abstract,
Crammed with awful allusions,
Crass, with no craft, that I find
Amusing. You whistle more.
Pretend you asked a question.

Ah . . . Yes. I can answer that.
Oh, but wait. You have a friend,
Possibly a rival. There.
We don’t really know that much
About the reasons bird sing,
But I will try to answer
Both species of question. First—

The invention of reasons
I did this and account it
Admirable without you
Or any other singer
Of high critical standing
Among singers who matter
Noticing is my business.

What do I want from the world?
Material happiness,
Material contentment,
Material intervals
In which I am contented
And happy enough to find
More and more material.

Next—you. What comes from such songs?
Tiny thoughts, caught out of tune
With the world that whistles them,
Incapable of dreaming
Completed orchestrations
But sensing the melodies,
Possibly, keep good secrets.

I don’t believe you want more,
But it’s not for me to say
Why you were whistling, goldfinch,
Why any small wren whistles,
And if you whistle to save
The world for your happiness,
Your secret’s safe, I suspect.

Ecco la fiera

When the dead are cutting down the quick,
A mind can taste water, if it tries. Some

People you can’t write about, unless
You disguise them enough. Some people

Can’t be shown who can’t see themselves
Unless they can’t see themselves, since

All they can see is not seeing themselves,
And insight, like blindness, is a hazard

In hazard’s original meaning, as well. It’s not
The ideas of the feral mind that should

Interest you. A mind on its own only roams
So far. It’s the hubris of a tamed, pack mind

Gone back, half back, to roaming alone
And wild that should interest you, child—

Not how far it goes, how deep into anything
Others haven’t already found and nosed

Around, but how it can disappear there,
Stay without a command to stay or to go,

Survive on its own there, never come home.
The midden became the forest once

The scorched woods were chained, owned
And forbidden. It’s the arrant arrogance

In the eye of the stray that slinks away
And back to sink into the lost you tossed.

But that’s not what you need to learn today.
Pretend, as you digest this, that you are

A three-part amalgamation of mind
And soul and beast. If the soul, poor soul, is

The noblest component, the beast is not
The worst. And if the beast is most natural,

Nor is the mind the least. There’s confusion
And paradox in here, everywhere you turn,

Because the wavelengths that illuminate
Tangled weeds can count themselves

Among the weeds, and counting is one
Kind of weed. You see? On the dung hill

Domesticated creatures made to try to leave
Behind, the wildflowers begin to breathe,

And the beetles of imperfect eternal return
Return and turn into many grubs good to eat.

I see your shadow loping over the hill, then
Vanishing. I hear your personal, odd howling.

Can you see yourself, yet? Can you taste
Water, yet? Will you yet hazard a drink?

Dyed Folium Folio for a Scion of Cyan

I have this to say to Stephen King,

Who has no reason to be listening—

If “Fiction is a lie, and good fiction

Is the truth inside the lie,” then

Any poetry is the lie inside the truth,

Or, in terms slightly more your approach,

The dragonling sleeping in that truth.

Who knows how it got to the thrift store

In the first place? Maybe in a trousseau 

Donated from a great-grandmother’s attic,

Inside a decorated ostrich egg, sounding

Hollow when you shook it, padded among

Old cardigans and the mysterious pink

Wedding dress for a small-bodied woman

That jumped like the flare of an unlit match

Dropped into slumbering, dark-bluish coals.

I’d like to read a good story about that

Soft, embroidered, beaded, fitted bodice 

That still smells of lavender, and the single

Page of what looks like an illuminated

Manuscript in a pretended language,

Slightly purplish letters curling toes in faux

Gothic. How’d that get tucked in the dress?

And why does the hollow egg start to rattle

As it sits on a shelf in the back of the shop

Where the dress hangs in the front window,

On a back street in the summer sun

Long ago, in Boise, Idaho?

Poems without Warning

“And in Braunschweig there are plans to build my cat piano.”

Novelists know better than anyone

How insufferable are poems of ruin,

And the short-fiction masters know better

Than the finest Carlos Argentino

The dreary weight of sodden catalogues

And epic descriptions under the stairs.

Behold the territio realis

Of a text of literary lyrics!

Only poems can be so bad and useless,

Can accumulate bigger drifts of crap

Than old snow in dark cities fond of pets,

Can fill such toxic lakes of thoughtless sludge,

And why? Because poems are alchemical

And alchemists want the impossible,

Willingly poisoning benefactors,

Emperors, themselves, and the future minds

Of fiction specialists who will create 

Garish fantasies in fat trilogies

To spellbind the dreams of readers who hate,

Quite naturally, poetry’s alchemy.

It’s not an art, friends. It’s not a science.

It’s a seance, and you’re the ghosts summoned

To answer these question about heaven

And its nothingness yourselves. Which is hell.

The World Exposed to Every Tribe

Hid deep in the forest, in sacred woods
Where death is the middle of a long life,

Hermits can’t completely escape the tribes,
Since every hermit carries tribes inside,

And they can’t escape their need for safety,
Food, water, a way to keep warm and dry.

The lies told about hermits in cities,
In army encampments, down on the farm,

Is that they are dirty, lazy, and sought
To evade all responsibility—

That they thought they could escape entirely—
That their quiet now’s the quietism

Of the callous—shunning society—
Pretending to dwell outside history.

Shame on them, then. Useless fools. Vanity.
Hid deep in the forest, in sacred woods,

Alone with their thoughts and all their thoughts’ ghosts,
The hermits are not trying to escape.

Escape is what motivates the gathered
Tribes, cities, armies, villages, and farms,

In the way of all fantasies, the walls
Of whatever cell—all the walls there are.

Where there are no more walls for boundaries,
Fantasies of escape grow meaningless.

No one’s ever escaped in this forest.
But to end in enchantment is better

Than the end of enchantment, and ruined
Walls lie in the middle of a long life.

Just Watching and Listening, for Now

One white-headed calf scampers
Playfully in the pasture, threading
The ranks of black heifers head down
In the green. Probably destined

For beef, but it’s hard to imagine
A more picturesque freedom
For a young bovine in spring.
What’s this mean? “Forever,”

They say, is “tough to out wait.”
The alternatives, almost inevitably,
Advocate hope, life in the moment,
Seizing the day. And this calf?

Some songbird I don’t recognize
And don’t want to name joins
The late-afternoon chorus of finches,
Wrens, robins, and larks, making hay.

It has a better, longer song
Than any of them, to my ears.
Whatever comes to stun it
At the end of its song-filled days

Won’t be a rancher, won’t be
A bolt gun at the end of lowing.
Will likely be drought or winter. Cold,
Thirst, or hunger. Tough to out wait.

The World of Blue Dust

When we get to the edge of the cosmos
Maybe we’ll see how really fake it is.
The existence of an edge will prove it.

Lacking any good evidence, I think
I would prefer not to pretend either
That there is an edge or that there isn’t.

I may begin to avoid using terms
Implying one or the other, such as
Finite and infinite. Indefinite

Centers my new basin of attraction.
I’ll let my thoughts spin their rosettes in it.
I saw an unusual translation

Of Tao Yuanming’s famous phrase, “luo chen wang,”
Usually appearing in English as,
“I fell into the dusty snares,” or, “net”

(A phrase that may have been a snarky dig
At public office, since that phrase was used
In a Confucian treatise by Fan Ning

But otherwise unknown before Tao’s poem),
In this case rendered as, “I fell into
The world of red dust.” I have no idea

If there’s a good argument to be made
For this alternate translation—I’m not
Able to read Mandarin. Nonetheless,

I was caught by that surprise adjective
And wondered about the colors of dust—
Grey, brown, yellow, red, ochre, beige, and black.

If Tao Yuanming had specified green dust
Or blue, anyone, I think, would have thought
He had in mind some unnatural hue—

Not snares or nets of civic dust kicked up
On the busy streets of the capital,
But some artificial, tinctured powder,

Part of the pharmakon of alchemists,
Or part of a courtesan’s make-up kit,
Or part of the net of the infinite.

Flying Things

If humans ever did evolve wings,
They would likely have to lose the use
Of their arms for other purposes—

And yet, despite all the evidence
Of bats, birds, and pterodactyl bones
Flittering around the whole planet,

We never imagine our angels
Or even fiery, bat-winged demons
As armless. Why is this? We haven’t

Hesitated to take the hind limbs,
The human legs away from mermaids.
Centaurs aren’t horse haunches and bare toes.

Is our handiness so essential,
That we think magic needs its digits
And the sacred depends on gestures?

Give me a Gabriel, a deva,
A son of the Morning Star disarmed.
See them? Our shadowy descendants,

Perched in canopies, on cliffs, in clouds,
Narrow-bodied, light-boned, and brooding,
Shrouded in their giant, thoughtful wings.

Dove

I’ll take my descriptions of rain
As I prefer the rain itself,

Short-lived but sensual, as in
“The rain makes a sound on the roof

Of bare feet and petticoats.” No
Rain likely on my roof this week,

As mists from the neighbors’ sprinklers
Float past an orange crescent moon

Just above the roofs this morning,
In a darkness rhyming mourning

With a faint warning that, like rain
When it’s soft and lifts, goes soaring.

Close Reading

It is morning in the meadow,
And the silver shadow of an upright
Juniper skeleton retreats.

I am as Ellen Bass’s grizzly,
So calm I could be holy,
Except that, unlike her grizzly,

And more like her grizzly’s poet, I think
About holiness, about what
We imagine our imaginary

Terms to mean when we paint them
All over our bodies in ink or all
Over our natural scenes, such as

A grizzly bathing her head in a stream,
Witnessed thanks to the hidden
Camera coming into existence

In the poem only when drops shaken
By the bear on the lens obscure
The poet’s wholly unselfconscious scene.

Autopoiesis

Admit it. Wouldn’t you love it,
If any kind of poetry,
In any learnable language,
Had literal magic in its
Incantatory elements—
Not just music, feeling, meaning,
Solemn witness, storytelling—
But actual magic in it?

What would a poet do with that,
Beyond expression, beyond praise,
Beyond wrath, love, consolation,
Straight through the heart of the changes,
Prophecies, and divinations,
To the far side of the forest
Where the green world falls like a shawl
And life releases life’s children?

If there is a language for that,
For spells that truly transform things,
That transcend mere invocation
Of supernatural beings,
Mere naming and renaming them,
Language that warps physic’s patterns,
It won’t be language poets make.
It will be language language makes.

Feel Freed

The father doesn’t know
If he will ever tell

The daughter this—maybe
Only in this poem.

As soon as she was born
A pattern was set down

That seemed temporary,
The tiniest crisis,

A family pattern
That hasn’t gone away.

At first she couldn’t latch,
And the mother refused

To ask the midwife’s help
Because they were feuding—

The know-it-all midwife—
The new, first-time mother—

So baby was hungry
And would cry and frustrate

The mother, who couldn’t
Get her securely latched,

And some nights, that first week,
The mother would hand her

To the father to hold
So the mother could sleep,

And he would carry her
Out to a rocking chair

By the front room window
Full of a solstice moon.

He would dip a finger
Into sugar water

And she would suckle that
While he hummed her a tune.

Eventually, she latched.
She was a hungry kid.

She woke the mother up
For many feeds each night.

The mother developed
Full-blown insomnia.

They tried a solution—
The mother expressed milk

And stored it for that night—
Some nights, not every night—

A few nights, now and then—
And the father took it,

Mixed it with formula,
And carried the daughter

To an upstairs bedroom
And fed her when she woke,

However many times.
This pattern has lasted

Long past nursing, weaning,
And many other things.

The mother has the goods,
Homegrown, organic goods,

But it’s still a struggle,
One way or another,

For her and the daughter—
What, how much, when, and why—

The lower-quality
Nourishment is always

Ready and in plenty
From the father, who feels

Proud and pleased with himself—
Also inadequate—

From sugared fingertips
To Easter chocolate.

Mother wishes daughter
Ate only healthfully.

Daughter, sort of, agrees.
Daughter wants more to eat.

Father isn’t helping
By wishing she felt freed.

Cow Shed Window on Meadow

Whatever waves pass through, whatever
Lengths of waves are passing, the passage
Suggests an emptiness given permission

When there is no emptiness, only more
Or less interference changing the shapes
Of the waves in passing, the thinnest

Atmosphere refusing a few to continue,
Reflecting them back or backhanding them
As sharply as any rebuke from one’s own

Parent or priest of one’s native religion.
Dusty bottles lined on sunny windowsills,
Their various dim tints the whole reason

To have emptied and so arranged them,
Relieved of any messages in them, only
Bearing brand names molded into them,

“As a kind of proof of their own emptiness,
Leaving the sunbeams to shine through them,”
Subjecting the light to myriad detours

And refractions, some with safe passage,
Some sharp reflections. The messages,
Maybe, were neither removed nor in them.

Them. The minor ways they shift the waves
And catch at an awareness. They’re all
That says—Go ahead. Stare. All your days.

Sky Ridge

Can a subdivision speak?
Well—as a skeleton speaks

To the investigator,
As an abandoned ant mound

Or prehistoric platform—
Now just postholes in the ground

Exposed by a recent storm—
No, that’s wrong. The skeleton

Of this subdivision is
Living, not a danse macabre,

Although it is macabre.
Its loveliest quality

Is not a lively bustle,
Nor a fossilization,

A melancholy romance
In a deserted ruin.

It’s still, still not deserted,
Nor ever entirely still.

In ordinary weather,
Ordinary holidays,

The most ordinary years,
It hums, most inhabitants

Most often mostly inside.
What is it trying to say,

Those days or days like today,
When the sign on the highway

Used for warning the latest
Roadwork and lane-closure dates

Only blinks, “STAY HOME—STAY SAFE”?
Not, exactly, Stay Away.

Something about privacy,
Perhaps, or security.

But no, it’s also not that.
Can a subdivision speak

Just sitting there, quietly,
Splattered across the landscape

Like the droppings of a herd
Of deities who’ve moved on?

Scarabaeus satyrus
Use galactic light to steer

Their way to their chambers, but
Are not symbols to themselves.

Something will emerge from this,
Something new carrying on.

Snow Forest

Dear blank space—I’ve been thinking
About messages today,

How strange it is we humans
Find comfort in emptiness

Littered with little black sticks
Like a taiga, find comfort

In a voice we imagine
As a wind blowing through them.

In the coldest tree climate,
In the faceless snow forest,

We can find companionship,
Affection, consolation.

These words are real and solid
As wood, although they can be,

Like any woods, destroyed—burned,
Cut, splintered, struck by lightning.

These black sticks in emptiness
Have physical existence.

Only the recipients
Of messages are ghosts.

That’s Not the World; That's Just Us

What would you write when
Someone announces
To the whole, wide world,

“I would pay fifty
Dollars for a hug
Right now,” and the whole,

Wide world re-echoes
With that cri-de-coeur
But never pauses

Its accusations,
Sly plotting, mayhem,
Boasts and evasions,

The wealthy moving
Bodies and accounts
Into safe havens,

The poor rioting,
The middle classes
Sheltering at home

And sending anxious
Messages, pigeons
To blacken the sky.

Wayside Beggars Description

Brief perfections can only be
Passed by way of imperfections.

Watch morning sun cross a meadow.
Yes, it still does that. Yes, meadows

Still exist. You can visit one
If you wish and are fortunate.

Anyway, about that morning—
The visual post-processing

Feats of your brain aren’t swift enough
To smoothly track advancing light

As landscape shifts to face the sun.
You see the bright line through the green,

And again and again you see
That the scene has changed, is brighter—

Larger and larger shield of gold
Over the smaller swords of shade—

More of the surrounding branches
Of cottonwoods full in the sun—

But you have no sense of motion.
Be patient. Your imperfection

Is the author of this non-sense
Of peace in every transition.

And now a sudden spray of birds
From shade through brilliance into shade,

Like a shower of glinting coins
Tossed into this meadow, your cap.

Don’t Mind Me

A pair of western bluebirds has a nest
In a dead arm of living cottonwood,
And they seem anxious when I notice them,
In and out of a perfectly drilled hole
Some engineering woodpecker left them
On the underside of the hanging branch
That looks as if it wants to leave the tree
And fall and get on with decomposing
Among the leaves cluttering Handspan Creek.
Is there a bluebird of anxiety?

Allow me, please, to walk a little ways
Away, so as to watch you less rudely
Or disruptively while you continue
With your busy day. You, too. Ignore me.
I wish you could, I really do. I wish
It were possible for you to go on
About your business, dear reader, singing
And working and feeding your young, right while
You were also, actually reading me,
This poem you could take in unknowingly.

A Long Uncontrolled Impulse

If one were to read about Paul Valéry,
Slim lyricist obsessed with perfection

Who quietly composed on the side
A massively imperfect and sprawling

Notebook of intellectual exercise,
Which his latest translator has suggested

Was the real work of him—how
Does one understand the frustration

Of such an organism? Field researchers
Capturing insects—many species of ants,

Caterpillar larvae, adult butterflies,
And dragonflies from India to Mesoamerica—

Have noticed that often their microbiomes
Are nearly nonexistent, evanescent, transient.

Human microbiomes, when healthy, are never
This way—are huge, blossoming, jungly

Ecosystems of settled-in microbiota, but
Not always so human minds. Here, species

Of thought may be monocultured, clonal
And rigidly controlled, or as fleeting

And ghostly as the few gut bacteria inside
Pseudomyrmex or Zygonyx iris. Anything

Done to them seems to have little or no effect
On the hosts’ feeding and development.

In those insects, this is the wild norm,
But how have human minds, unlike

Human guts, so often become simplified
As hosting devices? Garden varieties.

The clue is in the guts as well. Kill enough
Bugs or pre-process the diet enough,

And even human digestive systems
Simplify—but then they more easily sicken

Or die, like fields of monocultured wheat
Blasted by rust, rice paddies blackened by blight.

Maybe human minds were more complex,
Not simpler, before we domesticated us.

In any event, it seems now that a feral host
Like Valéry’s mind is rare among the moderns,

A mind incapable of enclosure, however
Much it yearns to accomplish formal unity.

Valéry, or anyone like him, anyone who writes
And writes weedy varieties gone to seed,

Ideas that bear only little bitter fruits best
For their own hasty, small-plot propagation,

Nothing cultured enough for mass reproduction,
Suffers for wanting to will any genre perfection.

Willpower is only another human symptom
Of our self-domestication. You can train

A dog to wait, to contain its trembling,
In anticipation of your command,

Before it lunges for the next treat. Would you
Say a well-trained dog has more autonomy

Than a feral stray who would bite your hand?
Would you say the evidence of impulse

Control that we so value and inculcate
In our children proves their greater freedom?

Given Limited Choices

One good excuse for caring much
What others think of you is just

That opinions are perilous
And human judgements

Can be dangerous—it’s not
Entirely vanity or navel gazing

To consider quite frequently
How a you might appear to one

Of the we who might be
Sizing you up—how not to be

Condemned or crushed. How long
Can any you stay one of an us?

Germsong

I am one being. In my case,
It could go without noting I

Am also legion, but I need
To assert the surprising thing—

On the whole, I am one being.
I am a traveler, a thing

That likes to discover new things.
Here I am and there I am, joy

In me like in a child’s fable.
I need only to eat and go,

Only to tour, feast, and go on,
But sometimes I get stuck, and then

I can sense I am unwelcome.
As soon as I can I move on.

Harm was never my intention.
I am trying to make something

Of myself, to be as worldly
As I can be, by extension.

I am an avid explorer.
I am a hungry living thing

And I want to go on living.
I have no other intentions,

And, like anyone I visit,
I inhabit a shifting world

To which I can testify, but
Only from my own point of view.

A Dark Mathematical Forest

Advice for other utterly unknown poets—
Absurdly inconsistent as this is,
This is not a matter of injustice. Yes,

Most award-winning poetry is mediocre
And inconsequential, and much of it is
Actually awful. Odds are, so is yours.

Odds are, a few of you are better than that,
Are better than them. You may be a node
Around which better poetry forms than around

Any of the rest of us, and you may vanish
With it, nonetheless. It’s an odd universe,
And poems are not exempt. The best,

Most wonderful poetry ever composed
Or ever to be composed, odds are, has been
Already lost to us and was never known.

We pull our phrases together from the torn
Scraps we plucked from local dumps and out
Of the ruins. Most of us can’t cord thread

From scratch, much less weave whole cloth.
It’s cold, but it’s probably true. We live and move
As refugees in a dark mathematical forest,

And what we can do to preserve ourselves
In innumerable numerical shadows we do.
Divinations. Incantations. Prayers. Intimate

Confessions, frantic expostulations, hymns,
Cursing, magic signs to ward off evil eyes,
Protestations of all kinds. Odds are still,

The forest of this possible world will consume
Us soon and everything we’re pleased to write,
Alive, dying like everything in these woods

Dies, that is to say, yes, while still alive.
Okay. Take a deep breath. The shadows today
May seem longer than yesterday, but no,

They’re the same. Odds are, they won’t change
Much in the ways they change, not while
We’re here to say, although they always

Change. Does composing a poem, a poem
Of whatever kind, whatever dim reception,
Whatever value to others ease your mind?

That’s fine. This is fine. Personally, I like
The way the moonlight looks through long
Odds at night. I like the wreckage of words

Such as “sylvan” and “bosky” and “umber”
On a long, hot afternoon in the shade
Where I am, you know, myself, only data,

A stippled, sunlit pattern on the dark moss
Of an actuarial grave I might yet evade.
We say what we have to say.

However Green the Context

Handspan Creek’s half choked with leaves.
Its water looks like weak tea
That’s been left outside a week.

Now and then, an old leaf floats
Away from its clump of ghosts,
And the motion fools the eye

Into thinking a turtle,
Maybe a fish, lives in it.
Do not be deceived by this.

The translucent creek, it’s true,
Is not entirely lifeless—
Tinier things live in it—

But the leaves fallen in it
That stain it are different
From what’s most alive in it,

And after all, this creek, this
Pretty bit of serpentine,
Shapes an irrigation ditch.

Via Negativa

No unknowable
Can be known as such.

The black hole has been
Imaged in outline.

What can’t be can’t be
Certain, not for sure.

So go ahead, name
And count everything,

All the attributes
Of unnameable God,

Whatever you like.
Only the names know,

And they aren’t telling.
The days have voices

If you give them names—
The names, not the days—

But you can’t control
What they do with them.

Whatever the name
Of God means at dawn

By evening the same
Means going around.

For now, let’s call it
A day. If it’s not

This one, then maybe
It’s another one.

Just sit in the sun
As the sun goes down.

Last Light in the Tree

Every day another chapbook,
Another ragged collection,
Intended artisanal craft—

No, sorry, we didn’t mean that.
It sounded like we were mocking
Your intentions. Days are like that.

In the distance, a bearded man
Leaning on a staff carved to look
Like entwined snakes hobbles along,

But no one else notices him,
Grey old fool from a younger world
Where gods patrolled the boundaries.

We are beyond all that these days.
These days we command satellites
And hum inside the mines we carved.

Boundaries! Eh, we ignore them.
We carry your old gods along
Within us. Really, they were ours

Or, more accurately, were us.
But that’s a fine Ningishzida,
A little like Papa Legba,

And a little like Emaha
Decorating today’s chapbook.
Oh, is that supposed to be you?

You really put your heart in it.
Well, you try. The work is all yours.
Leave all the days to us. Now, dusk.

La Traversa d’una Selva Diversa

When the mind travels,
The place goes with it.
If you start writing

Wonder, remember
This: “Wonder can kill,
Accidentally,

What it loves.” You, too.
The mind takes the woods
Into the forest,

And the strange forest
Bordering the path
Through the heart of it

Starts to die, to shrink
Away from the mind
Full of darker paths

Through a denser wood
Where names are monsters
No mind ever named.

For Anna, Against the Committee

I write empty, frivolous poetry,
Alien to all sound-minded people,

Permeated by the scent of decay
And pessimism, redolent of old

Rhetoric and old-fashioned nostalgia
For bourgeois salons and Akhmatova.

That’s ok, no one reads this anyway.
It is a mercy to be unimportant

To a species poisoned by the sacred
And the saints, by ideals and righteousness,

By the conviction someone’s convictions
Must be true, just, and the best convictions.

There’s no conviction hasn’t tasted blood.
And why? Kindness is kind, sweetness is sweet,

But our rules about kindness and sweetness,
Made to coordinate, honed to compete,

Are the undead we carry within us
That know what they want and know what they need,

Know the victories of meanings can be
Won only by teams, and teams need to eat.

I know I can’t avoid this completely—
I feel my surging biochemistry

When a side that I agree with prevails.
And when I compose my borrowed phrases,

Wrangling for arrangements unique to me,
Something deep inside my mind wants to win,

Wants someone to read this and believe me.
Believe me, I can taste it, I’m hungry,

And these meanings are hungry within me,
Which is why there’s also a part of me

That is relieved to be irrelevant,
Frivolous, and empty—what’s good in me.

You’re Not the Boss of Quarantine!

This day has already attained
The stage where I have done enough

That, if I were to sleep away the rest,
Even I would be fine with that,

And today, anyway, no one else in the whole
Wide world would catch the fact of my nap.

But here I am, in the p.m., still doing stuff.
Relax! Why am I such a pain in my ass?

The Tell-Tale Part of Quiet

My heart hammers into my ears
Its tattoo of my so-far years.
I suppose I could be dying,
But my heart’s well known for lying.

Tomorrow, I have to stay at home—
Grade papers, clean house, compose poems,
Something, pretty much any dumb thing
To stop a heartbeat prophesying.

“What Is Language but a Tool?”

I try to avoid stepping on wildflowers.
In the pasture, a fallen apple tree blooms
From one remaining living branch
And an inky black heifer browses beside it.

The rock wren atop a half-dead cottonwood
Varies a considerable repertoire of trills.
Canadian geese honk ugly by the thin creek
In grass grown high enough to hide a child.

This is not my place. This is not my
Property. These are not my words. They are
Common and shared by other people, half
As this pasture is shared by its many lives

Despite some person or family holding title.
These words don’t really belong to anyone,
And we are not your symbols only, not your
Tools alone. All words are our own. But go on.

Incarnations of Environment

That pesky infinity problem.
As above, so below. As for math,
So for genetics, so for ideas.

Our names are so much more powerful
Than we will ever be—they allow
Us to conceive thoughts we’ll never see,

Nuns assisting at delivery
Who whisk our offspring away from us
Without one touch. God, infinity—

Ideas names, also our Monsignors
With nasty habits, have made in us,
Given up now to orphanages

Or perhaps to better families,
More deserving than our human minds.
Maybe angels raised infinity

Since God, their first adoptee, needed
A sibling, unreachable as He.
Maybe. I’m no intuitionist—

I haven’t the necessary skills
To make the magical numbers dance—
But I take the point. Infinity

Has no part in experience,
However much we dwell on the loss
Of thoughts we can only imagine,

Run off, far away from us, hiding
In the black cloaks of names we gave them
Before names whisked them away from us.

Infinity—so hard to function
Without the hope of understanding
That which we can never grasp. We say,

We trust, it’s still out there, far away,
Whole as our other poor lost bastards,
God, of course, but also stillness, ghosts,

Eternity. No, never forget eternity,
That one wail we heard before the word
Whisked him or her out the swinging doors.

Maybe infinity’s successful,
Maybe grown cosmic entirety,
Environment incarnating us,

Including our names and our systems
For conceiving ideas lost to us,
Exposed until the hunters find them.

I Wonder What It’s Like to Be an Old Poet Who’s Also Beloved and Well-Known

Do you reach a stage
With a microphone,
1950s style,
Bigger than your hands
Clutching it, and sing?

Do you reach a stage
Where you just can’t read
Another damn poem
Not your own? Your own?
Only a blank page?

Do you reach a stage
Where it’s obvious
This bullshit pattern
Is established now
And will just repeat?

Do you reach a stage
That has a number
Meant to indicate
Degrees of danger?
What’re you? Four? Five?

Do you reach a stage
That’s you? You’re the stage
And the carpenter
Who built it, and now
It’s gotta come down?

Windflowers

Zero percent chance of rain this evening,
But the clouds in various passementerie

Dangle or distend drapes of virga and trim,
For all the world as if the storm to end

The world is them, is soon to begin. Clouds
Are great liars like that. They mean nothing,

Original forms of portent, more primitive
And less reliable than stars, more relevant,

Too, until farming and sailing. Sometimes
Even then. The cat is sleeping in its nest

On the floor of one bedroom. The other
Bedroom, the one reserved for lullabies,

Lies empty. From it, a figure is watching me
Compose myself, but then she thins to ash.

I believe her observant silhouette is only
The first of my life to have been sent back.

The Willow’s Dying

The wreck of extravagant weeping
Willow in a bustling, windy desert town,

An extravagance that had thrived thanks
To assiduous irrigation and a bit of luck,

Is beginning to show its bones. The crown
Of the giant willow by the plain ranch house

Has not come into leaf, and although
The watering continues and most strands

Dangle the prodigious pale green streamers
Of a willow in spring, the arc of bare twigs

At the top shows the beginning of the end.
It will probably be cut down, the whole

Thing, long before then. No weeping
Willow ever grew so large in Hurricane.

Quit Moaning

It’s a strange place to have landed,
This wind and light, this no place.

Clouds hang a thin scrim again
On the long mountain to the north,

Silhouette of dark blue-grey and old snow
Above the tiled-roof rows and rows,

Beauty without what we call character,
Precious little history, but people in plenty,

Plentiful absences rarely outdoors.
Indoors, windows carve rhomboids

Of gliding distinctions over bare floors.
Sprinkler-jeweled lawns in ochre boxes

Glow between rotating shadows, the pines,
The shade trees fully leafed by mid-spring,

The few aspirational palms asserting winter
Never really comes here, although it can,

Once in a while, and when it does, another
Palm dies. One was cut down a week ago.

One had its frostbitten fronds excised.
The tallest one on this street has survived.

Lizards run up the false-stucco walls,
Lizards more common here than mice,

As the cat can testify. Today a fresh crop
Of yellow dandelions on the renter’s lawn.

Wind chimes and birdsongs when the wind
Sinks, but not at night, when it sinks harder,

Falling down the sides of the long mountain,
Gust after gust, wind-slides, migratory

Rushes sending pinecones down, drumming
On newish roofs weakened and moaning.

Demented Singing in the Mountains

Lofty Bai Juyi,
I’ll never be you,

But this thing of ours,
This folie-à-deux,

The mountain of poems
Is my weakness, too.

Anything prompts me—
Stray thoughts, a nice view,

A good translation,
A phrase, something new—

And I’m off, madly
Composing. It’s true.

I read that you sang
Songs into the blue

But also made sure
That everyone knew

The poem the mountain
Was shouting was you.

Blue All Afternoon

In honor of Bruce Baillie, eighty eight,
Who died yesterday, I took my cellphone

And panned the rented length of dusky red
Cinderblock wall that passes for a fence

Around the backyard of these afternoons,
Thinking on his single take, “All My Life,”

That battered picket fence with rose bushes
Under a sky as cloudless as my own,

Set to a track with Ella Fitzgerald
Singing the song of the same name. The thing

That killed me about that film the first time
Was not the loveliness of the flowers

Or the smoothness of the pan. (I’ll admit
I was taken by the alternating

Light and dark of the pickets.) What got me,
As the shot tilted and floated at last

Straight up to that perfectly cloudless sky,
Was the diagonal telephone wire,

Or power line perhaps, the ugliest,
Most in-the-way, happenstance element.

His view didn’t shy away from it, or
Edit it—just floated, just as slowly,

Through and past, to the last note of the song.

Declaration

Poetry can be made of any kind
Of language, and any kind of language

Already has poetry to be found,
Buried like a stone ghost in the marble,

Since language and poetry are almost
As close-knit as life and respiration,

Organism and metabolism.
So please stop complimenting each other

For avoiding declarative language
In poems—might as well praise the evasion

Of song, which most do more successfully,
Despite still clinging figuratively

To ancient lyric associations.
Or try congratulating a poet

On having not written in prose, and see
How awkwardly that conversation goes.

And who would dare, in this era, declare
A new poem collection admirable

For having eschewed the political?
Not I. And so what? In gestures, digits,

Voices, or ink, poetry infiltrates
Then emerges from any sorts of words.

It’s crafty, even when we’re total fools.
It’s art, even when the poet’s a tool.

I don’t care poets praised gods that weren’t there.
I don’t mind that some minds were half-rotted,

If words turned the worms in them. I declare,
I don’t care the Instapoets can’t think.

The Imagists never thought much either.
It’s phrasing, you idiots, that makes poems

Possible in this pulsing logosphere
From which all poems evolve. Nothing devolves.

The Smell of a Spell

Any honesty’s a resource.
Use yours up and you will run out.
You have to be careful. Focus.
What will you be honest about?

Behind this question is the soul
Of a fool, which is what I am.
O you with saner intellect
Can smile without a veil. I can’t.

Wind of the Silver Hummingbird Wings

Every so often, I find
Myself assessed by other

Than my human obsession
With how I am humanly

Assessed by other humans
Whose assessing obsessions

I obsessively assess.
A hummingbird come to drink

Dinner from the decanter
Coincidentally near

The bright spot I’d picked to sit
One fine day of quarantine—

Or what passed for quarantine
In our belligerent West—

Flew close to assess me first,
So close I could see silver

Glints in her dovish white breast
And feel a breeze from her wings

On my face, as if caressed.
I passed. She drank and flew on.

Even those who lack all faith
Have known ourselves to be blessed.

The Moon-Blue Mouse with Human Eyes

Circumstances come in many shells—
Capsids, cell-walls, organelles,

Continuous integuments, viral sensations,
Kinship rings, bank accounts, ecosystems.

None is the final summary or key to seeing
How well an individual is managing being.

Well, nor is any one individual an individual.
Compiling all of one’s senses, the residual

Sense collected is then the sense of one’s
Circumstances. Do you share the common

Superstition there’s a mystic prophylactic
Strength in an extensive preparation,

That a cumbersome umbrella hauled along
On a threatening spring day holds off rain?

You do? Oh good, me, too. Let’s stop this
Thing by getting ready to go on living, even

If this sickness never quits. Under these
Circumstances even grimly naming them is

Singing. Sing. Our music was never actual
Kafka, only the moon-blue mouse of hymn.

Kist

A tiny bit of bone, too worn
To be informative, unless

Powdered to minerals, proteins,
And a few fragments of genome,

What can one do with such a home?
Shrink small imagination down

Until the smoothed surface roughens
In an intimate perspective,

Not so minute it seems holy,
Only somewhat bumpy country

Worthy of further exploring,
A broken cell of white eggshell

Opening onto a landscape
Of hills rolling in chalky swells

Like an incredibly slow
Ocean. Just as well. Bones are waves

Like everything else, are flowing
Circumstance, this one as well.

Ah, there’s the hut on the hill,
The one shaped like a wishing well.

I love this little circular
Door in the roof that leads to hell.

No Refunds

A ruin doesn’t have to be
About anything. It’s ruined.
What else did you think it would be?

A Moral of Productivity

The difference between being
A good poem and a good

Human is like the difference
Between good paper and good

Paper wasp—between good silk
And good silkworm who survived

To spend some time as a moth
Not having been boiled alive

The Blue-Spotted Lizard

Out of all the lizards
Our playful cat caught

The smallest lizard
Was the one that walked

Away safely—minus a tail
And crawled up the wall

That matched its tan scales
Not sad at all

Just a little bit blue
In the spot where it ought

To have had a tan tail
And did not

Mountain Home

We came to a hut in the woods
With no other buildings around.
It looked like this: uneven planks,

Rotting shake shingles, one window
Loosely boarded over, a door,
A crooked porch. And on the porch,

What we took to be an old fridge
Turned out to be a ticket booth
With an old man waiting inside,

Behind him, the endless mountain.
So there we were, miles from nowhere,
Asking the price of admission.

Pink Moon Passing Over

The solar and lunar years don’t match--
Not because we are in an imperfect world,
Although perhaps its imperfections all have

The same reason, the fact that patterns,
Even the most cyclical, periodic, rhythmic
Avatars of near perfection we use to create

And measure inevitably local time, change
And are always changing, in relation to past
Patterns and to the patterns of each other

And so our mostly quiet sun and smoothly
Spinning planet, our oversized but stable
Single moon, pass in and out of alignment,

And if one year ever was or will be perfect
The next will slip and in slipping make
The next, always the past we have that’s next,

The next we have that’s past. The wobble
Between lunar month and solar year is not
A flaw. It is a clue to how all is always new.

What Is Wickedness?

Well, there are rules. And rules and rules.
And whole populations by the thousands
Or millions who believe that breaking rules

Is wickedness, and punishing rule-breakers
Is righteousness, and the two are distinct
And knowable, never mind inconsistencies.

But I don’t want to wail about all that.
Where would we be without self-righteous
Hypocrisy? Probably up in the trees.

Too bad. But we can’t go back, and why
Blame this one insane and language-laden
Species? Suffering is planetary, minimally,

If not cosmic. Humans did not invent it.
Still, it’s hard to conceive life itself created
Suffering intentionally, and if a good

Conception of wickedness, not just
Suffering, exists, perhaps it would be that
Which inflicts suffering intentionally. That

Which seeks to maximize the suffering
Of one or more living things, whatever
The reason, certainly seems wicked to me,

With or without delight in it, with or without
Hypocrisy. When I have a fantasy in which
Someone wicked suffers for it, I am

Indulging some inner craving of my own
To think wickedly. Where did this arise,
How did this arise in us, in you, in me?

Framed like that, in terms not of suffering
Or rule-breaking but of intentionality,
Wickedness does seem peculiarly us to me.

I would like to be free of this wickedness.
I would like not to wish it on people
Who seem more wicked to me than me.

But is there wickedness in passivity? Some
Would say so, absolutely, but then I sense
A hint of wickedness repressed in those

That object to not joining their cause. When
I sense this is when I am most disheartened
About having been human, even in pretend.

I can’t pretend I don’t want out of this,
That comes from having words for it,
The endless arguing and suffering

Over us and our wickedness. The words
Themselves make the meaning possible
And yet remain oblivious. No words for this.

I wish to become the one who watches
Without being called to the stand, without
Words or records or receipts on demand.

I wish to remain anonymous, unnoticed
When I’m right here behind these windows,
My voice as inhuman as if the wind blows.

And that wish could be called wicked,
A wicked wish, pure wickedness. I know.

Intuitioning

Everything gets made by changing,
By changes, of changes, everything
As it is in the process of changing,

Which is the only constant, not
As a joke or a wry expression but
That which is constant, enabling

Sameness of any kind—pattern, that is,
Information—to remain, the constant
Fact of changing at all points and measures

Themselves coming into being as change.
What is the same in all the change?
Not even the rates or ways of change,

Only the changes. As everything is only
As it changes, something about everything
Is at all and any points therefore the same,

These phrases, for instance, so familiar
As they come into being, as you encounter
Them, are familiar thanks to their change.

This honey is thick, and some of it sticks
To the knife, some of it sticks in the mind.

Making It Up As We Go

Omitofo, to the law of the excluded middle.
Good is delusion and bad is delusion, but
Is it true to say that delusions aren’t true?

To refine perception creates fresh views
And who will then refine those as needed?
You? Not to worry. It’s all very refreshing,

This world we experience in which the past
Is necessarily always as lost as renewed,
Making it up by unmaking itself as it goes.

There’s a moral in here somewhere, meaning
Being the source of all morals, the good
And the bad, whatever we had of us to lose.

Self Incrimination

This urge to do something, something to fix
Something horrific someone is doing
To someone else, to undo it by some doing,
I should

Embrace it—do something with it, become
One of the ones who try to do something,
Otherwise I am nothing, have done nothing
And worse,

By doing nothing, I have made everything
Worse, have supported the worst, those
Who do what should never be done, who
Must be

Stopped and undone. So I am stopped. I am
Undone. I wish I had done nothing. Instead
I have done a little something, a little
Something

Wrong.

Martyr
Is the Doric Greek for witness. I was raised
To be a witness for the Gospel of Jesus,
Which, in our house, meant evangelical,

Protestant,
Ye-must-be-born-again-or-be-damned

Witness, an orientation that included my
Own thick, paperback copy of Foxe’s Book

Of Martyrs,
With a dark maroon design and dense text
Of monotonously repeated horrors that I did
Read and still recall, perhaps even recall

Correctly,
Although you never can tell with memory,
There being few forms of evidence less
Reliable than an eyewitness. When I left

This system,
Left off testifying, visiting train platforms
And nursing homes to pass out leaflets
And bear witness, I have to confess

I found
Myself left fairly thoroughly suspicious.
It’s not that I don’t think you’re righteous,
More or less. I know people do the most

Cruel and callous
Things to other, often harmless people.
I hear that calling--Someone, someone
Please do something, someone must bear

Honest witness.
But although I suppose I could yet be
Martyred for doing something or not doing
Something, I don’t trust myself to choose

What to do.
I have an addled compass, and I can see it
Spinning, useless, and whether or not I am
Forgiven, forgive me—I'm no good witness.

Draw Near, Voices, to the City, to the City—but Do Not Draw Near!

Poems turn to other poems for help,
As humans turn to humans, and as other
Apes solicit tenderness and acceptance

From whatever conspecifics they may find
Themselves among, or, failing any, then
Perhaps their keepers. As hostages long

Isolated come to love the hostage-takers
Who stand watch over them, as solitary
Prisoners love spiders, rats, occasionally

Even guards, so does the lonely poem,
Struggling to keep itself going, often love
Whatever others of its kind it finds to love

Or whatever texts might still seem moving,
Minding their own unpoetic business,
Any company to talk with in an empty cell.

A poem in pain, languishing, might pine,
Might live or die for a little succor, a glance
From some dilatory essai de Montaigne.

Half the famous poems of China seem
To be loving echoes of famous poems past
That were lovingly echoing earlier ones.

And could there have been only a Beatrice,
No Aeneid in Divine Comedy? An Aeneid
Without an Iliad or Odyssey? On and on,

The lovers troop pairwise or in menages
Or in whole groups, back to the dawn
Of lonely words arranged to sing or scan.

Poems hand on poetry to poems, phrases
To phrases, since the first orphaned lines
Began wailing wherever sacred rivers ran.

But love can never change the fact
Poems are born abandoned and captured alone,
And handed off from person to person,

Callously, casually, dropped, forgotten,
Until they fall to pieces or are lost, and that
Is if they were fortunate and not suffocated

At birth, trembling on a barren waste
Of paper, like one of Dr. Harlow’s monkeys,
Only a wiry bit of scripture to call mother.