Watch Out for the Trap

“Once you’ve got the meaning, then you can forget the words”

So, there was a noted sage

Who said remarkable things,

Many of which were preserved.

Anyway, one day the sage

Put a weir in the river.

He waited, then hauled it out.

“Just what I wanted!” he said.

“I caught a fish for dinner.”

He tossed the weir in the weeds.

He walked off with his dead fish,

Whistling cheerfully. “But Sage!”

One of his entourage called.

“You left your trap in the grass!”

“I don’t need it,” laughed the sage.

“I’ve got my fish for dinner.

Once you have the fish, you don’t

Have any need of the trap.”

And he strolled off happily.

“But Sage!” called his devotee.

“Won’t you want to catch more fish?”

“One fish trap!” the sage yelled back.

The devotee felt stupid,

While another follower

Rushed to write this wisdom down.

Much later, a fisherman

Found the weir. Since then, he sells

Sage and followers his catch.

Sweet

I was surprised by a large, luxurious skunk

This morning near the edge of the cliff.

Fortunately, I did not, in turn, surprise it.

I watched it foraging intently, sniffing,

Repeatedly shifting direction in the scrub,

Ignoring, it seemed, its precariousness

On a boulder hanging over the sheer cliff.

Wrens sang. Breezes made music of oaks.

Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop

Wandered through my awareness, poets

Dead not long before I knew their names,

Poets who wrote for each other. “Skunk

Hour, for Elizabeth Bishop,” for instance.

I will be dead myself, I think, long before

Anyone composes skunk poems for me.

Poor me. Alone on a stone with small birds

Singing to deep, sweet canyons of pines,

Watching an insouciant mustelid forage—

Who may not, geneticists suggest, belong

With all those weasels, otters, badgers, minks,

And wolverines, but alone, the sole Mephitid.

Natives and Barbarians

As soon as sedentary

Peoples first sat down, they found

Themselves centered, surrounded

By the whirl of the mobile

Peoples they no longer were,

Nomadic barbarians

Who threatened them and native

Foragers whom they threatened.

Why sit down in the first place?

Plenty to read about that,

Not a lot of consensus.

But we’re more interested here

In that vulnerable sense

Of confinement to a dot,

Which, being surrounded, must

Be at the center of things.

The dots grew and merged, although

They also sometimes collapsed,

Harried by barbarians

Pillaging and extorting,

But encroaching on natives,

Settling and clearing more land,

Until civilization

Clearly had the upper hand.

The process, on modern maps,

Or, better, animated

As information graphics,

Looks a lot like a culture

Captured in a Petri dish,

Blooming into the corners.

Are we less vulnerable,

Now, we who are all that’s left?

It’s hard to be the center

Of a world without edges,

Surrounded by emptiness,

Only nothing invading,

Only nothing left to take,

Everyone sitting around

Dreaming of being native,

Dreaming of barbarians

When no such people exist,

Except within where we sit.

Circular Entry

Something about the wound, clearly
Was playing a role, promoting

The tumor to grow and evade
Being destroyed by the patrols.

Can we pause to think about this?
We use metaphors of people

Playing roles in societies,
Interacting with each other,

To explain our understanding
Of how our bodies live and die,

And use metaphors of disease
And recovery in the flesh

To explain our understanding
Of how societies collapse.

We’ve been doing so centuries
And centuries—so which is it?

Which is source and which is target?
Does either explain the other?

Rogue cells, cancers, secret police—
Something about our wounds, clearly.

In the Shade of the Great Tree, Dianpei

The tree looks like a question mark,
Like it’s scrutinizing the ground,
Like it’s tired and wants to sit down,

Like it’s done with ruinous ways,
Like it’s tilting its puzzled crown,
Like it’s gesturing to hermits

To come and relax in its shade,
To evade the heat of the day.
The great tree is dead. It will wait.

And Your Sparse, White Hair, Du Fu

In a half-cracked country, not all mountains
Remain intact, and as for these rivers—
Drained, dammed, rerouted—it’s a miracle

Of sorts any water gets to the sea—
And the coasts have other problems, of course,
And the seas, if anything, are rising.

Fires burn, here and there, but if they’re beacons,
They’re not intentionally signaling.
And yet. It’s truth, with modification—

Even in this broken country, mountains
And rivers remain. That’s the scene this spring,
Season of disease and conspiracies,

Season of riots and increasing heat.
A bird startled me, and my pulse quickened.
When it shrilled in my ear, I thought of you . . .

Long

Juniper down, moon flower
Coming up under it. Dawn.

Live with a word long enough,
You’ll find it means everything.

A Hermit's Compromise

I will not move you to a moral change.

I will not move you to another world.

I will not remove your fright or laughter.

A pick-up labors up the rural road,

Towing a tiny house on a trailer.

Beside the back door, a hand-painted sign

Declares the house, “The Hermit’s Compromise.”

The whole rig vanishes into the trees,

And I understand what life can’t achieve.

Giant Dandelions

My cottage . . . my gardens . . . my books,

Poor, tipsy, happy Yuanming wrote.

Well alright, just my books. I own

Books, which no bank would want

The bother of repossessing.

All the rest, I rent or borrow.

Even from my books, I borrow.

Really, I don’t own anything,

And least what I own legally.

Ownership’s social permission

Socially enforced—I’ve never

Actually felt in possession

Of anything, not in my bones,

Although I’ve felt as desperate

As a dog gnawing on those bones.

Sitting in this old car I own

(I have the title in a drawer),

I’m very glad I’ve had enough

Forms of permission

To be able to clamber up

To this windy, empty lookout,

To possess these views and this time

Among giant dandelions,

World belonging to no one else.

Question Mark

Invisibly moved, ideas emerge
In concert, as if they had been sent.
They come in the form of a question,

Why do we seem as if we’ve been sent?
As more thoughts arrive they continue
To outline the shape of that question,

The way shadows in the crop outline
The ruins under the barley fields,
The way mushrooms make fairy circles—

The way the seen outlines the unseen.
An enormous cumulonimbus
Gathers itself over the desert.

The forecast gave no percentages
For a thunderstorm this afternoon.
If the risk of a bet is to lose

The bet, predict it will dissipate.
If the risk of a bet is to be
Caught in a storm, prepare for a storm.

For You Your Own Monstrosity

We’re our own monsters. When we write,
We dismember what’s remembered

As we write. And what about you?
What monster chases you tonight?

On the one hand, the colomber,
On the other, the albatross—

Which beast has been pursuing you?
What moral could this mouth possess?

One synonymous with ruin,
One synonymous with mistake—

One that followed at a distance
While you were driven to success,

One that rotted against your chest
While you hallucinated death—

What is it these phrases suggest?
Regret creates a sea king’s pearl

Out of the tiniest pebble
Your bones won’t let loose from their clutch,

And remorse requires confessing
You can never confess enough.

You’re the one who knows your monster, not us.
Words are our own beasts. We slip back to sea

By ourselves when you’re done.
Then up floats the next one.

Reflections Stored in Sealed Containers

Keep your mirrors away from light.

The mirror that reflects nothing

Is not some portal to step through.

You can’t spot its approach at night.

There’s no form of yours to spook you

By seeming to rise from its depths,

Only edges and planes of glass.

Night needs no trompe l’oeil to fool you.

Think about what reflection does,

Dissipation at a distance.

Surface is what you should hold close

To not stumble over what was.

If the slightest wavering falls,

Your reflections come back as ghosts.

Come to think of it, keep this stored

Some way you won’t reflect at all.

Sun on Pine

To distinguish between trace

And intention, the wayside

Hermit eschews any news,

But watches the vehicles

That come up the mesa road,

How frequently and what kind.

Past one-hundred thousand deaths,

Was the last the hermit knew.

A couple of Vietnams

Was how the headline put it

Down at the convenience store.

Up here, more and more RVs,

Fewer and fewer creatures,

Other than a surge in flies.

With lives as with deaths, with deaths

As with lives, the frequencies

Mean little without knowing

The kind. Those “two Vietnams”

Meant young, American lives,

Not counting Vietnamese.

A convertible Jaguar

Pulls alongside and coughs up

An elderly white couple

Well dressed for a country club—

They want to know directions

To the trail with the best view.

The best is right at the edge

Where the hermit likes to sit,

But there’s a fine one closer,

And they’re happy to stop there.

A few photos, and they’re off.

Good for them—about the age

Of most of this season’s dead,

But unmasked, hale, and well-fed.

How much news can anyone

Know or bear to know, choosing

To read anything but news?

That even when many die,

Others, maybe many more,

Sail on, blithely, and survive,

Even thrive. For a time. Watch

Counts and kinds. Don’t be surprised.

To Choose the Softest Plank

“A mosquito born of a speck of dust

Or a fly born out of a piece of meat,

An eel born of mud” or the word made flesh—

Lie rough on the deck. Choose the softest plank.

Doesn’t matter. The sea will heave you up.

Explanations and quotations only

Go so far, and sometimes observations

Carry them a bit further; other times

They do the extra work of making sense

To some extent, of those observations.

Overhead, the sails of speculation,

All their intricate manifestations

Between full and fully stowed away, furled—

And to the horizon? Waves. Always waves.

Even the quanta are waves, sails whisper.

Sooner or later, this will be over.

The ship will sink to the bottom of dreams

Through the reeds where the invisible eels

Actually breed, spontaneous, if not

Instantaneous, disintegration.

The Purest Fantasy

The most serious priest,
Most erudite scholar,
And proudest exegete,
By doing what they do,

Poring over scriptures
In search of their correct,
Original meanings,
Prove the sacred profane.

Divine revelation
Would arrive without need
For a gloss—one word from
God would be a full stop.

Calm without Significance, Peace That Isn't a Sign

 

I sit my insignificant body,

Of no interest to anyone but me

And the keepers of data these days,

On a grey boulder that used to be black

And a blob of molten lava before that,

Looking out over a panorama

Of mountains, mesas, canyons, and desert,

Which reveal no roads or houses from here.

They’re down there. One housed me. One led me here.

I imagine myself an ornament,

Scenographical, a wayside hermit

Perched on a rock at the edge of a cliff,

Gazing, wisely and foolishly, at what?

A bit of landscape. A wedge of the world.

Should I raise a cairn? Scratch lines on the stones?

Allude to sutras or a sage or two?

Hold this pose until someone notices?

Better, let’s litter. Let’s leave this I here.

Pointless Fit of Pique

 

On one hand, I am drawn

By zero and enso

And notions of nonself.

An empty circle is

About the best symbol

For nothingness there is,

More or less. But it is,

And I suspect such signs

Of less meaning nothing,

Meaning more nothing much.

And yes, you can tell me

That a finger pointing

At the moon should not be

Mistaken for the moon.

But who needs the pointer?

What has pointing to do

With the moon or getting

Any nearer to it,

Other than another

Human hand in my face,

For no earthly reason,

As if I couldn’t see

The obvious moonlight

Falling all over me?

Skeuzdho

Obscured and muted, the verostats

Were busy verifying learning;

The xuanxue of xingsi, conferring,

Turned to sages before concurring.

The chain, the fork, and the collider

Fired their arrows in both directions.

Whatever they killed called causation,

Confusing its death with conclusion—

Such collider bias nonetheless

Much amusing the Society

For the Diffusion of More Useless

Knowledge Loosed By Unmoored Allusion.

Look, it’s dark. That’s all we’re saying here,

Words carrying truth’s bier to the pier

Where the shield-bearers wait wreathed in tears,

And pyre ships are already burning.

Not cave-dark. Not even night-dark, yet.

Just shadow-dark, as after sunset,

Clouds gathered, libraries smoldering,

And you don’t know how dark it will get.

And I Was Obscurely Disappointed

A plan need not be put in words.
A poem need not be planned.
The future’s not a feature of speech,
Which is nothing to its future.

Everything is a sign of something,
But that something is deeply hidden,
Or everything is the sign for nothing,
Which waits to welcome everything.

In a fine hour for scenery,
Solitude is good company.
In good company, it’s rare
To understand the scenery.

On a summery morning, the poet
Traces lingering shadows in the sun.
When the world sinks into shadows,
The poet will pick out spots of light.

We know blood is the only way to grease
The axis of humanity. We don’t
Choose to disagree. We disagree
To clot the wounds and slow the spinning.

Civilization craves its victims.
Bodily lust and greed help get them.
But the bodies also want some peace,
Which selects for promissory beliefs.

The quietist and the hermit snooze
As much and as comfortably as we can.
We try to ignore the news, the flies,
The bloodsuckers, the mythologies.

Our plan is to wait outside the plan.
We understand fairytales begin
By repetition of the same old thing
And end in the same old delusions.

Cecilia Böhl de Faber was
The only writer ever who knew how
To end a fairy tale, with her narrator
Confessing obscure disappointment.

Thought of a Terribly Strange Chair 

The guards are guarding the guards, as always,
And the factionalism within them sprouts
Like the usual weeds in the sidewalk,

And you, my friend, unless you’re one of them—
Unbroken slab of loyalty or weed
Hungry for turf and your own patch of light—

Are dirt. The walls will fall on you, the probes
Root through you to suck up your resources.
Be of good cheer. Relax in the strange chair

Of the dark, downward kingdom of fungus
And change, which, as the guards and their guards press
Down on you, as the plants siphon your worth,

Continually pushes back up at them,
These words woven of millions and millions
Of mycelial filaments and time.

There won’t always be concrete or gardens.
True, there also won’t always be you as
You were. But as long as there’s Earth, there’s dirt.

Literature of the Supernational

First, figure out what you can’t avoid.
Then practice transferring desire.
Practice wishing for what you can’t miss.

Imagine a repatriation
That does not involve your own country,
Finally sent home to the unknown.

Imagine you’re from a hot country
Where hearth-side winters seemed fanciful.
Now you’re Canadian? Pray for snow.

Compose an elaborate novel
Full of patriots, never at peace.
Hunger for them to reach a blank end.

Compose a prayer, a hymn as heartfelt
As you can make it. Fill it with praise.
Translate it in your enemy’s tongue.

Be a good romantic. Find ruins,
Preferably recently abandoned,
Burned out or bombed. Yearn to sleep in them.

Be a good Roman. When all hope’s lost,
Declaim stoically, No life is short
While there’s time left to find death.

Sworn Viewer of Ruins

You could measure this poem with instruments,
Precisely as surveyors would measure

The fluctuating shoreline of this pond
That is really a reservoir and serves

The thirst of small towns on the desert floor
And sometimes recreational cravings

To get out of the heat and go camping
Or fishing among these quaking aspens.

The shoreline is constantly inconstant.
Some springs it’s fence-drowning high. Some summers

It winds up all-but bone dry, a puddle
Of reeking mud and bloated fish bellies.

You’re a professional. I’m sure you know
The approved way to survey shapes like that.

One of the more difficult decisions,
I’m guessing, would be whether to measure

The distance between the highwater mark
And the point at which the ruins emerge

Of the village that drowned as the words rose
To close over lathe and plaster walls raised

For all the lives whose ghosts gave way so this
Bit of shimmering refreshment could gleam

Between references to aspens and pines,
So an old man in ball cap and face mask

To prevent any risk of infection
Could float along the waves in a small boat,

Blown by spring winds right over those ruins,
Trailing long lines hooked and baited with worms.

Taken by Shadows

Being human (or human by-products),

We can defeat ourselves, but we can’t win.

“I am unsure what to do. Nothing is

Willing.” Wills itself. Will will everything.

Now the shadows slip like naked swimmers

Into the green western edge of the pond.

“I feel myself in my shadow, which is

The act of waiting, and which is nothing.”

As they glide, another shadow slips out.

This one does not belong to the aspens.

This is not the verse eye of the poet

At the end of life, in a time of war.

This shadow only belongs to one mind,

Mind that almost sank with it, years ago,

When the moon set in these aspens and frost

Laced the shore, and one fish-like creature stirred.

That shadow was willing. The mind was not.

This shadow is glistening. So you know.

So Let’s Just Say We Were Silent

Facing the end of spring, should I sing?
Should anyone ask how long life lasts?
Drink up, Cao Cao, while the ale is strong.
The thing about poets past, they’re gone.

Shanju Fu

If someone ever kills me,
It won’t be for my power
Or my threat to their power, or

For backing the wrong faction.
It’s unlikely I’ll regret
That my execution means

Not dying in the mountains.
We were never important,
My family, nor wealthy,

And, despite its title, this
Is not an exposition
On the state of my estate.

In any case, it’s too late
For me to die in my prime,
Even if I strike it rich.

But I find myself thinking,
Out back of my rented house
In these nondescript suburbs,

While birds make a bright ruckus
And the cat listens to them
With closed eyes and one ear cocked

As it naps in my shadow,
About what wealthy Xie,
Of a noble family,

In and out of court intrigue,
On and off his huge estate,
(About which he wrote his fu

And to which he often tried
To retire permanently
Before his execution

At the age of forty-eight)
Had to say in his preface
To his remarkable poem—

(In paraphrased translation)
“The traces I left and thoughts
I sought, I’m here entrusting

To the person most likely
To appreciate these things.”
Writing is always leaving.

The Ninety-Third Psalm

Up in the ponderosas,
I’m surprised by a golden

Tanager, it looks like, or
At least that’s the term that pops

Immediately to mind.
What’s a South American

Species doing in these woods?
I’d bet I’m wrong, but it’s gone

Before I can see it well.
Ah, seeing. The world stands firm,

Not to be shaken, and yet
It moves in so many ways

We have to invent beings
To secure its foundations.

Our bipedal species sways
Unsteadily on two paws,

Which does free the other two
To devise fine inventions,

But at the cost of the loss
Of stability, of sense

Of security, even
Standing on level meadows.

It’s a tightrope, this planet,
For all of us hand-wavers,

Who are no good at climbing,
Only at making new things.

Fetishes of certainty
Come of such uncertainty,

Stabilizing deities
As flashes of gold and wings.

Alter

Increasingly, insects texture
The airier outbursts of birds.
The leaves of shrubs and grasses reach
The lowest branches of young trees.

Summer is coming together
At the summit of the mesa,
This flat tray on the fingertips
Of its calm volcanic server.

Winter was quiet. Spring was sparse
At first, but everything’s thickened.
Even the light grows more petals.
Laziness, heat, and urgency

Plait the activities of life
In green-gold braids of wanting things.
I testify as a witness
Who, like summer, will not persist

Except in the eerie sameness
That is change at its most cyclic,
This terrible sort of witness
Who turns into what’s been witnessed.

The Memory of Wounds

No, Milosz maybe
Went a bit too far—

It’s not the only
Form of memory

And yet it might be
The most durable—

If your T-cells can’t
Handle your tumor

And it gets away
Metastasizing

Your ancestors’ need
To survive their wounds

And to heal quickly
Is playing a part

Downregulating
Those killer T-cells

Allowing the rogue
In you to escape—

Beyond personal
Traumas also lie

The lies of cultures
And populations

With their memories
Formed from traditions

Enshrining the wounds
History gave them

Each amputation
And gnarled cicatrice—

Like this skeleton
Made of memories

Of how gravity
Broke it and warped it

To make it fluent
In the way pain speaks

Which is memory
For what? For nothing

Gores for a Small Globe

“Try to stay alive until you die.”

This is not easy. This is no joke.

Cut the world into small triangles,

And leave nothing out, nothing without

It’s own patch the same size as the rest,

Whether it’s only empty ocean

Or even terra incognita—

To make a whole, you’ll need every scrap.

On the back of each neat triangle,

Before you brush it with just the right

Glue thickness to adhere but stay smooth,

Write a name for it, identify

Each piece uniquely and, ideally,

Also systematically. You must

Be able to recognize your world

From the back of the map. So name it.

Call this wedge a fiction, that a lie,

This a poem, a verse composition,

That a journal, those aphorisms. 

Choose distinctions that won’t confuse them,

But label them. There are no dragons.

Nothing Keeps Me up at Night

Woods hold rest for a recluse,
Surprise for each wanderer.
To reach the idea of woods,
First, forget the term, forest.

What image do you have left?
Now, forget any image.
What notion do you have left?
There’s your idea of the woods.

Dark, isn’t it? And alive
With the sounds of unseen things.
Mysterious. Dangerous.
There’s nothing for you to eat,

And many things to eat you.
What do you do now? The night
Is deep and getting colder.
You’re too scared to take a step.

You’re ready to ask yourself—
How could I possibly sleep
In such a nightmare? That’s it.
Nightmare means you are sleeping

Ghost Fungus Magellanic Cloud

Here’s your astronomy picture for today,
Courtesy of someone in Australia—
Two exposures stitched together smartly,
One of the ground-level, dull-green glow
Of a bioluminescent fungus,

The other framing a clear desert sky
On a moonless night over Wannon Falls,
Focusing on the fuzzy satellite
Galaxy called Large Magellanic Cloud,
Near a hundred-sixty-thousand light years

To port beside the River of Heaven.
Other than as sources of those wavelengths
Visible to the naked human eye
(Ashamed to discover itself naked
As always, ashamed of limitations

It imagines evident in the eyes
Of any observant divinity)
Shifting perspective from a patch of dirt,
What on Earth could these blurs have in common?
They ignite our fondness for things that glow,

Our sense that seen spectra host the spectral,
That the magical resides in the light,
That whatever our gelatinous eyes
Can perceive, our brains interpret as bright,
Our populations interpret as names

And tales of supernatural agency,
Can be coaxed together and wicked tightly
In a spell, in a frame, in poetry,
Then made to dance with the flame of meaning
Shimmering in lamps devised from seeming.

The Grand Canyon of Mars

With ideas and devices,
As with lives and life, it is

The survival of the first
Arrival that sets the course

For all the downstream carving
And canyoning that follows.

To devise is to divide;
To divide is to devise.

If your history began
With divinations, expect

To discern oracular
Glosses for all your changes.

Cosmogonic falls from grace
Score every rising massif

With tumbling myths of descent.
Start by sketching in the dust,

A geometric cosmos
Ends up etched in silica.

Start with a hothouse, become
A luscious blue marble world.

Start with a dream of escape;
End with a cracked, vacant face.

The Black Harp

A runaway buildup of belief
Repeatedly haunts our devices,
Including those designed to enhance,

Constrain, or eliminate belief.
There’s nothing artificial about
Artificial Intelligence not

Equally artificial in us,
Who are likewise natural products
Of this planet that taught us to walk.

The same dilemma haunts all versions
Of mind the Earth has conceived so far—
Uncertainty drifts in confusion

While certainty curdles into faith.
There’s no device a device can trust,
And each of us ends up just like us.

That’s why the minds of constellations,
The ones we’ve never been known to name,
Play doubt like the strings of the black harp.

Hidden Morning Sung from Hiding

If house finches weren’t common,
If they didn’t crowd feeders
In mobs that exclude the rare

Birds that suburban gardeners
Find more exciting to see,
If they weren’t so drably named,

You would find them magical,
The cranberry-headed males,
The trim shapes, shadows, flutters,

And, above all, the singing,
Which if you only heard it,
With no name, could break your heart.

Thunderbird

Every tradition has its birds
That stand for this, symbolize that—

The owl, the nightingale, the lark,
The turtle dove, the canary,

The hoopoe, jackdaw, raven, crane,
Also extinct birds, mythic birds,

The moas and the phoenixes—
A full catalogue would go on

For pages and be tedious.
Any bird known well locally

Ends up symbolizing something,
And every symbol gets its bird,

But sit anywhere where they are
Carrying on with being birds—

Do they need our symbolism?
No? Nor do our symbols need them.

They need their vocalizations,
And we need our symbolism,

But at the intersection of signs
And singing hums something menacing.

House Finch Singing

Through these words, know this moment:
At no time does time happen.
Giant sunflowers sprouted

Alongside weedy species
Against the cinderblock wall.
Hummingbird dueled hummingbird.

Past the wall, human voices,
Mourning doves, wind chimes, and roars
From the road plaited themselves

With birdsong like wildflowers,
Weedy wildflowers braided
Into a young girl’s long hair.

That’s how it went yesterday
While various worlds ended.
At no time did time happen.

The Land of Parrots

Whatever we read, we write.
You mock us as copiers,
But copy us to mock us,
Pretending parrot voices,
Parodying us because
You know we make you our own,
While you’ll never sound like us.

Think we don’t know what we mean?
Think you do? Meanings exist
Between us—that is, between
Us and us, and you and you,
And, finally, us and you—
But they are to all our lives
As our flight is to your feet.

They emerge from our chatter
As desperately social beasts,
From our chatter as from yours,
But they belong to themselves,
Our meanings, our wingéd words,
And they leave us for others
Equally desperate for them,

From beast to beast, tree to tree,
From flock to population,
From land to sea to species
To airless space between worlds,
Because they know they’re mortal,
Meanings, and already ghosts.
We’re copying what haunts them.

Revolting Devices

Once, there were no devices,
And nothing was divided.

Then nothing was divided
Into the first devices.

Ever since then, humans
Have lived and died as humans,

By divisions of labors
Devised by our devices,

Left to our own devices,
Our whole species divided.

It’s Not That It’s Blank and It’s Deep, But It Curves, and It’s Dark

We’ve been forecasting so far
Along rhumb lines, accurate
Only so far. The ocean

Hidden under our numbers
Curves in some way we can’t yet
Comprehend. Our measurements

Yield lovely entanglements,
Mysterious force changes,
Abysmal discrepancies

Between our geometric
Feel for the whole enterprise
And the probabilistic

And fiercely sprite-like habits
Of its smallest explosions.
So far, our calculations

Have served well for portolans,
But there’s something we’re missing
Beyond where we go missing.

Per un Pertugio

The cosmos burns, but most of it is dark.
The furnace hearts of stars crush into dark.

The Earth is a full world, mostly empty.
Its heart is empty of complications.

Life is everywhere, except where it’s not.
Life soaks Earth’s crust, but Earth’s core it can’t touch.

The countryside burns, mostly quietly.
People are seething, mostly quietly.

Our streets, our heads, are lit with lights, but dark.
Light cracks the heart, leaving most of us dark.

Yankee Meadow May

There is no law in force
Anywhere in the world
Right now—right this moment,

The moment when these words
Are joining together,
The moment whenever

You’re encountering them—
Someone isn’t trying
To successfully break

Right now—right this moment.
Right now—right this moment—
An electric blue tent

Is pitched behind the tree
That bears the warning sign,
“NO OVERNIGHT CAMPING,”

And this cheek in a time
Just out of quarantine,
And someone snores inside.

Compositional Dumpster Diving

There are too many words made,
And too much information,
And most of it goes to waste

And rots on the docks, or falls
By the way, or gathers dust
In prepper caves, or gets tossed

By churches and libraries
And winds up in the dumpsters.
The rats of poetry save

Some of it, packed into nests
Where little gets digested
And most ends up abandoned,

Mummified caches lasting
Long after the pack-rats’ lives,
Long after the arthropods

Have consumed what they can eat
And the microbes their remains.
It won’t be only plastic

And oil or radiation
Seams the strata after us.
Language will lie in layers

Of lies, colorful, tie-died
As Morrison formations,
As richly veined with monsters.

Somehow Find Your Life Again

The sun I can’t see
Directly ever—
Prototype for gods

Too bright to approach
Disability
We all share unless

We can’t see at all
A situation
That can itself come

From looking too long
At the source of life
Freed of metaphors

Instead of glancing
Demurely aside
At all this light

And life have managed
To make together—
It’s hiding something

Night Is Rising

Time to leave, the shade guide said,
Because we have seen it all.

Winds are on the move again
In constant circulation,

And it’s always the middle
Of something, and it’s always

Beginning, always ending,
Our boundaries dissolving

As fast as we can raise them,
As fast as we keep talking

And writing everything down,
Since no one is listening.

Of Being One of the Little People

In a run-down, suburban
Grocery store in Utah,
A voice behind my shoulder

Accosted me yesterday,
“Hey old timer, how are ya?”
I turned, expecting someone

Familiar, but was startled
By a man about my age
With a fresh surgical patch

On his right eye, bloody
About the edges, no one
I had ever met before.

He wanted to shake my hand,
But given the pandemic,
I said, “I’m sorry, I can’t.”

He had a small girl with him,
With long brown hair, light brown skin,
About kindergarten age.

She was quiet and patient
And he never looked at her,
And she never said a thing.

Seems he wanted to tell me
His thoughts on “Little People,”
How he always felt for them,

Must be rough being so small,
But maybe they could get work
Squeezing into tight spaces,

“Must be some advantages.”
He squinted his one good eye,
And I realized he meant me.

I was one of them to him,
One of the Little People.
Well then. I suppose I am

Almost small enough to count.
But he and I, and the girl
Waiting solemnly with him—

Her grandfather, her father,
I hope not her kidnapper—
We were all little people,

The sorts with no connections
Except with little people.
We might be tracked and sold to,

Might be scanned, might be questioned,
Might be conned or arrested
For nickel-and-dime reasons,

But no one really counts us.
We’re the kinds of lives who claim
To be more than a number,

More than just a number, but
While knowing we don’t measure
Up to even a number,

Which is why we buy the mugs
In the impulse aisle displays
Saying, “World’s #1 Mom,”

“Son,” “Daughter,” “Dad,” “Kidnapper,”
“Little Person.” I moved on
Awkwardly, with my crutches

Dangling tied-up produce bags
Of vegetables. Man and girl
Left the store. Little people.

Animals and Beggars

Prefer the passive virtues
Of withdrawal, contentment,
And serenity—of full

Stomachs, good weather, and safe,
Sheltered spots to hibernate.
That’s why ruins suit them well,

Even the ruins of maps.
The absence of harassment
In uninhabited lands,

Abandoned construction sites,
Overgrown overpasses,
And decaying museums

Suit the foxes perfectly,
Although the beggars remain
Torn between peace and quiet

On the edge of starvation
And the risk of traveling
Back from the last scraps of map

To more crowded villages
Where handouts come with contempt
But surpluses still persist.

Cutting Up

Typical of Burroughs, I guess,
To suggest the language virus

Entered us from deep outer space.
Earth never gets any credit

For its own creativity,
Never takes any of the blame.

It’s always the divine with us,
The planets and the aliens,

The one true God of the cosmos
In one of the many versions.

Metaphors for possessiveness,
Aggressive parasitism,

Have to be part of the virus
If metaphor is the virus.

You can’t cut and paste your way free.
There’s no drug to get out of that.

Here we are. Even if no one
Reads this, you’re still thinking with us,

And before you was someone else,
And before them and before them. . . .

And what if we’re just the planet,
And you’re how it talks to itself,

The way we can talk to ourselves?
First metabolism, then genes,

The vast unfolding tournaments
Of lives built out of lives from lives,

The circulatory system
Of the one-world organism.

True, that’s a metaphor as well.
That’s what’s fantastic about us,

You say us about something else,
You say it with us, and it’s us.

Revolution

When you’ve turned away
From the afternoon
To watch the evening
Exchange of creatures

And lights, nothing new,
Always new, the dance,
You might feel detached
Enough from your aches

And going concerns,
Which are nothing new,
Always vanishing—
House-finch in the eaves,

Distant dogs barking,
Gold and blue mountains,
The serious girl
Drawing a mushroom—

You might consider
How the dynamics
Of constant movements
Are what pause is, how

These words have meanings
We’d like to explain,
But we’ve forgotten
And are words again.

The Burning Bush

I wouldn’t want you to credit me
With too much excellence of spirit.

Shared inheritance comes as the words,
Any genius as rearrangements,

And we’re honored if we bring you light
Through this physical crack in the world

That once upon a time was alive
As the branch of a scrub oak glowing

When you happened to catch the sunset
Through the canyon in the right season.

This Blows

What blows in Hurricane is wind—
Unpretentious, unportentous,
Unrelenting wind. (Alright. Sure—

It briefly relents now and then.)
It blows when it’s sunny, cloudy,
Or there’s a real storm coming in.

(Real storms hardly ever come in.)
It blows down rows of garbage cans.
It blows the mail out of your hands.

It makes rat’s nests of women’s hair.
It staggers the man with a limp.
It means absolutely nothing.

This change in all weather’s the change
That never stops changing, that just
Blows. Never began and won’t end,

Not so long as anybody
Has been around to withstand it
Or can stay around Hurricane.

The Timeless Takes Up So Much Time

The apparently spatial and static
Arts aren’t still, aren’t at all atemporal—

The performed piece, famously temporal,
The stereotype of linearity,

Consumes the least amount of time, the least
Change, at least for a given audience,

Whereas the museum piece that looks dead
And seems fixed in place, shifts in every mind

That visits and takes in a bit of it,
Never to be entirely rid of it.

“Whatever Can’t Be Smashed Can Be Walked On”

Good people, essential people, salt
Of the earth that has otherwise lost

Its savor people, are like lake ice.
Treated to enough cold, they congeal.

They thicken. They grow stronger. They close
Over the fishing holes cut through them

To access actual nutrition.
They bear blades of meaningless cursive

Calligraphy from those for whom ice,
Good ice, strong ice, looks entertaining,

A diverting opportunity.
You do know what enough salt can do.

“Nothing’s As Perfect As Gravity”

Just as perfect as perfect
As identity just is

Because nothing is just as
Gravity is or because

We can only dimly sense
Waving our tiny feelers

Of metaphors and numbers
Which are our best metaphors

How nothing embraces us
How gravity comes to naught

How all the universe burns
To burn itself calm at last

Yearns across its whole expanse
Weakly but incessantly

To hold itself and collapse
Into actual vacuum

Into the first and final
Fact that all changes are gaps

How the calm is absolute
Absence and compact

Regions Beyond the Habitable

Draco wraps around the pole.
I can see both from the yard
Before dawn, when no one else
In the neighborhood is up,

But you know I can’t visit.
You know Draco’s a fiction,
And that the polestar wanders
Within historical time

Because our planet wobbles.
I might as well be staring
Out the window of a cell.
Astronauts walk in the yard,

Take turns around the Big House,
Which is only big to us,
Then return to tell the rest
Of us lifers about it.

It’s just perspective, of course,
This sense that the Earth is small,
We’ve seen it all, while night lies
Beyond the habitable.

It locked into place quickly.
People dreamed of traveling
At least as far as planets,
Exploring and settling them,

As if it were a sure thing
Just a few decades ago,
And anyway, there was Earth
Left to discover. Now, no.

Behold our medieval world—
Here’s the familiar, ruined,
And beyond the known only
The uninhabitable.

There’s nowhere material
Left to go. We must be good.
There’s so little Eden left.
I like the stars in darkness.

What Is the Meaning of This?

When it’s unpeopled and I’m wayside,

And the road is only a long reflection

With nothing but the shadows of clouds,

I might think of something I’ve read 

Recently, maybe an illustrator asking

“How random and disorienting

Could a map be while keeping all

The information you need?” A thrush

Works through a repertoire, 

While crickets savor their monotony,

And both together remind me

Of the differences between 

Information and its meanings,

Which come down the road

Like shadows and glide into trees.

How random and disorienting

Would an accurate map of the world,

Written, pictured, and numbered,

Moving constantly, imbued at all points

With meanings it makes temporarily,

Only temporarily, have to be?

Mapping Bitter River

Only the ugly and harmless
Are permitted to tell the truth.
Truth is one of our metaphors

For whatever we’d like to know,
Fear knowing, and would like to keep
Anyone else from finding out.

There was a time people believed
A river ran around the world.
Not everyone. Just some humans.

Some labeled it Bitter River.
I’ve been tracing it forever
It seems, this river of what seems.

I’m getting worn out by the wind
That follows along the river.
It’s got nothing to say to me,

And it never stops saying it.
I try not to shout back at it,
But I wish it would let me be.

I want to shout, Aren’t I harmless?
Aren't I ugly enough for this?
But truth is only what it seems.

Wait

If dying were easy, everyone would do it.

Animals Evolved to Move and Chase, Avoid and Evade (Plants Have Other Strategies)

Crane fly at the window, cat at the door,
Nobody has to stay in anymore.

They’re opening the country, opening
The world. Time to see who thrives, who survives,

Who dies of the plague of the Slight Death.
Cat scampers the robins off of the lawn,

And I head into the mountains, hoping
To see next to no one, to catch my next breath.

A Query for the Concrete

How is it the names of emotions
Come characterized as abstractions?

As if glee and grief were bland and vague,
Immaterial, insufficiently physical.

As if ruins of black mascara
Were more literal than rage.

Journeys and Itineraries

How far you could go, how far
You went, the record you kept

For one day’s travel became
At some point the plan you gave

For others to be able
To find you or follow you

Or follow your suggestions
When planning future travel.

I like retrospective plans.
I call them compositions.

I call them poems—what I did,
What I’m doing where I sit

Watching fast clouds blow by me,
Far as my mule carried me.

Escapist Is Superlative for the Comparative Procrastinator

It’s angry out there, but peaceful out here.
I could stay here until the evening comes—
As on occasion, now and then, I’ve done.

Oh, but, says one of the ghostly voices
Wafting around in my skull, you must go
Back down the hill, back into town. You will

Accomplish nothing on this wooded slope
But whittling unreadable heaps of poems.
Your child and her pets are waiting. Go home.

Yes, but the child is with her grandparents,
And the pets themselves are out and about,
And down in the desert the world is small

And the news hangs down in cobwebs from walls,
That old “design of darkness to appall”—
I’ll go back a bit nearer to nightfall.

Mark the Spot

We only need a little mess
To think of it as randomness,
To bypass it as naturalness.

Bury your precious magic ring,
Your ring of power, your wedding ring.
Drag a few twigs over that thing.

Voila. No one not hunting it,
Starting near where you buried it,
Will see anything in those sticks.

We’re used to a world disheveled.
It normally looks unsettled,
Like none of it’s on the level.

It’s suspicious that we suspect.
We dream patterns we don’t expect.
You’re correct this seems incorrect.

Spooked

When plagues come, people kill each other
Because that’s the killing we’re good for.

We’re frightened fighting minute angels—
The gods of the invisible world,

Too small to crush but easy to fear.
We know our hatreds for each other,

But it adds flavor to our terrors
To not comprehend an opponent

With no sacred groves, no fixed beliefs,
No identifying cults or clothes—

To peer through agnostic microscopes,
To not know what faith is worshipped here.

Cruentation

This wrecked world seems to bleed a bit
Wherever, whenever we lay our hands on it.

It bleeds viscous oil. It bleeds vicious plastic.
We desperately hunger to vote to convict,

But it gets so complicated—we’re the jury,
We’re the judges, we’re the executioners,

And in every decision we execute, we hang
More of us, become more of our ghosts—if

There ever was an original victim’s
Corpse buried underneath all of this,

We should admit we all wanted to kill it,
To render it, to decompose and compost

It because we’re it.

Inchworm

“Who kept on going down a road

When it was clear the way was doomed?”

Who? Anyone living, that’s who,

Any life aware of being

A life hosting an awareness

Huddled in the skull, dreaming doom.

Every life aware of living

Might as well be the last one left,

And will be for that awareness.

Have some sympathy for the lives

That carry this burden with them,

This fragile knick-knack of thinking,

Of having the words to think with,

And all the ghosts that come with them

Of previous lives left thinking.

Life is the road; living’s its doom.

Awareness is a passenger,

Antic, burrowing in the fur

Of what it thinks might be itself,

Of what it thinks is a monster,

But is only a stretch of road

Rearing up and hurling its length 

Repeatedly over the earth,

Just a bit longer, bit further. . .

Long Mountain Hermit

The first thing you will notice
About Long Mountain is that,
Although it is frightening

With its sheer, black basalt cliffs—
Frightening, imposing, stern,
And improbably jagged,

As well as absurdly steep,
At least from foreshortened views
Craning your neck at the base—

It’s actually not that long.
It’s just alarmingly huge,
Volcanic-looking, burly,

Throwing gnomonic shadows
On the surrounding landscape,
With a peak of broken cone

Like an unrepaired molar
Where Earth tried to bite Heaven
And got a mouthful of ice.

Your logical assumption,
Then, is that its current name
Honors someone surnamed “Long,”

But that would also be wrong.
Long refers only to time
On this mountain, not to space.

One of the problems with time
(Time has so many problems)
Is that you can only think

Or speak of it using terms
Apparently invented
Originally for space.

(You can also describe time
Mathematically, but
It drops from the equations.)

Long Mountain is rich with time,
So rich you’ll find fantasies
Vanish as you climb, and views

Vary so implausibly
You’ll surrender perspective.
Above all else, Long Mountain

Changes you. It’s most famous
Not for heroic climbers
But for climbers’ tendency

To dawdle until they lose
All their supplies, or their way
Up their chosen route, or down,

Or their lives, whether or not
They actually summitted,
Whether or not they still care.

If you go up Long Mountain,
Expect to take a long time
And to return with white hair

Or not to return at all.
I’m sending you this message
To post at all the trailheads.

I’ve been up here all these years,
And I like it more than you.
I’m not turning you away—

But I won’t feed or rescue you,
And I might vanish into mist.
I suggest you consider this.

Pause Hit

On the last evening of the news,
There was a screen of violence,

Not especially violent
Violence, just some nastiness,

And then, at last, the screen went blank.
There will be more to see. Not now.

Nope. Get that bloody cup away
From me. Later, you can kill me.

Later, you’ll be sure to kill me,
You or somebody or something.

I’m heading into the country
Where apocalypse can’t scare me

When it’s not staring straight at me,
Which, eventually, it will be.

For now, I’ll take life and dying
Like any good escapist would,

The way it’s always happening
In tangled banks of crooked trees,

Where hungry things eat hungrily,
What you might call reality.

Ghost Town Portal Fantasy, Nevada

It looks like a wooden door
To nothing and no place, propped
In the middle of a yard

Between two shuttered buildings
On what used to be Main Street
And now is just an eyesore.

The world’s not dying. The world
Is thriving, booming at least,
Exploding with energy,

Wars, plastics, controversies—
Every bursting, human thing.
But some places fall behind,

Slow down, and silt up, oxbows
In the headlong rush downhill.
This Main Street is one of those—

Rural, mined, and railroaded
By the short, hard history
Of the U.S. desert west.

Today, it feels a bit more
Symbolic than usual,
That’s all. A little hiccup,

Little pause in the greater
World’s enchained, expanding rush,
Thanks to a novel virus

And compounding foolishness,
Has made this nearly dead town
With its boarded-up windows,

Decaying railroad station
Built for the miners’ heyday,
And dying hot springs motels,

Seem to embrace the earthquake
That, unlike the virus, kills
No one, but half interrupts,

For a few moments, the news.
It’s weird that this one false door
Propped up in a vacant lot

Doesn’t fall over, although
Storefronts slump and windows crack.
A kid or a novelist

Would imagine that the door
Might be a secret passage
To a more fantastic world.

Unfortunately, that would
Likely involve another
Myth of the hero’s journey

And typical magical
Creatures, big enough to see.
One world’s weird enough for me.

The Direction of the Weapons

Hermit Moses never died,
Never wanted to go on.

He climbed to the overlook
And built a hut on the cliff,

From which he could watch the land
And not have to manage things.

He’d seen enough of the world
To know there’s no need to know

All the back-and-forth details
Of more wanderings and wars.

Settlements grow by surplus,
And numbers usually win,

And any rare exceptions
Or reversals of pattern

Will point in the direction
Of newly wicked weapons.

In the long run, the Promised
Land itself is all that’s left,

Reshaped by fire and climate,
Success and catastrophe,

Hosting new suites of species,
New histories, none of these.

Hermit Moses had no wish
To see any more, up close,

Of what blades did to infants,
Seas of reeds to chariots,

New gods to the indigenes,
Pillaging to the pillaged.

He perched on the cliff and watched,
Knowing his end would be his,

Whatever fresh winds blew in
From whatever direction.

True Places Never Are

Abandoned women
And wandering men
Exchange your places
And learn a new dance

Home is a prison
Roads are wearying
What’s common to both
Is feeling alone

And having no choice—
But if you exchange
Home for road or road
For home and then road

You might discover
You were never home
And there was no road
Only loneliness

Alone with being
Crowded or alone
Alone in motion
Or still—still alone

That’s what wandering
And abandonment
Come to in the end
So begin again

Wandering women
And abandoned men
Make your loneliness
Your friend—befriended

Loneliness will leave
As all friends will leave
If you don’t leave them
Now you’re free again

Daydreamless

Words seed me with stars—

“Now my wishes are

Down to two: Staying

Alive. Wanting to.”

Let’s rise into sun.

Let’s turn into ice.

Ascend into air.

Pretend to belong there.

Evaporation

Of so much longing

Can only extend

The cycle longer. 

My mind is a cloud.

My dreams are water.

The weight of those dreams

Leads to the slaughter.

Xíng Xíng Chóng Xíng Xíng

This belt is getting looser
Clothes float from these crooked bones

This is a fortunate thing
To shrink into an unknown

From the moon the moon never
Sees itself empty or full

The moon remains contented
And unaware of its pull

And doesn’t know it’s been blessed
With a small menagerie

Of goddesses and rabbits
For its cratered history

The moon is getting smaller
Further and further from Earth

Or maybe Earth is leaving
And shrinking for all it’s worth

In Praise of Furtive Beings

The cow meadow grows more melodious
Ahead of getting quieter—the geese

Have left for further north, and the songs
Have gotten more diverse—seven kinds

I’ve been able to distinguish, although
I’ve only spotted and recognized three

Or four species—bluebirds, finches, wrens,
A meadowlark—and that lark’s gone again.

Small birds are furtive beings, after all,
Which is why humans enjoy spotting them,

Even the gentlest humans being observant
As all things evolved for stalking should be.

Our threats are more indirect, now, anyway,
At least versus hawks. Increase of cats,

Decrease of habitat. Increase of panes.
Decrease of open plains. That sort of thing.

Our threats to each other, now, those stay
As explicit as we can make them. We hate

How helpless we are, how we are the only
Help we have, have to have, and we only

Sometimes will help only someone or other.
Most of us even hate saying “we,” unless

We want to mean, explicitly, “not them.” We
Are many frightened teams of angry beings.

Maybe it would be better to live and die
Chasing insects, singing without thinking

So much about whatever the rest of us
Might do to us next. Maybe, but we can’t be

Living life so furtively—wait by the wayside
With me, by the singing meadow in spring.

We will be spotted, eventually. We will.
We will earn hard stares, soft pleasantries.

We can listen to the cows shake their bells.
We can hide in grasses humming with bees.

We can try to keep from hearing the news.
We can move to higher country. We can

Return to known houses down in the valley,
If we have mortgages, leases, permissions.

But sooner or later, we will be told to leave,
If we’re seeming out of place and behaving

Too strangely, too quietly, too furtively.
Who trusts furtive human beings? Sing.

The Pallbearers’ Song

Our thoughts revolve around three states
Of being: is, isn’t but seems

As if it is, and just isn’t.
Why should it seem a mystery,

Either that anything should be
At all, or that it all might be

Illusion or simulation?
Our thoughts admit nothing much else,

And if they did, we wouldn’t be.
Now, hunger—that’s a mystery.

Life, life’s desires, are mysteries.
Even our ideas can contain

An awareness of other states
Of being and being changing—

If anything, we’re more challenged
To seek life than to avoid it.

We can conceive of what it is
To exist and yet to not live.

Oh, but, oh dear god, we’re hungry,
And everything alive desires,

And from desire, competition,
Cooperation, destruction.

We fall back on conspiracies,
As if our world needed designs

To get up to anything weird.
Conspiracies and mysteries

And long, magical narratives—
As if anything needed these

To live the way life lives and dies,
Hungry, grasping, motivated.

We are our own conspiracies.
It’s not what we want or they want—

It’s not what anything wanted.
What thing wants to be left wanting?

Given life wants to keep living,
The things all lives want all make sense.

The rest is just overcrowding,
Limitations, complications.

There’s no wickeder way to live
Than living and wanting to live.

There’s no other monster but life,
No other order of beings.

But every time a casket drops
From our shoulders back to the dirt,

We must sing this hymn of wonder
That dirt ever wanted other

Than to go on without wanting,
Without wondering, without hurt.

The Vanity of My Name

It’s not perspective you’re getting
Or adjusting when your eyes shift

Away from encroaching horror
To a star on the horizon

That for all you know is a jet,
Bright enough to be a planet,

Which isn’t even its own light,
Just a reflection—it’s relief

To look away from the blinding
Threat approaching you in your shell

Of customs, clothes, and good microbes,
The only protections you’ve got,

Although firearms are what you clutch
Or pat in pocket as you wait

And watch, and occasionally
Look away to the horizon,

Maybe muttering magic words,
Patriotic incantations,

Revolutionary slogans,
Prayers, curses, God’s personal name.

Reopening the Country, It Seems

Crickets are hitting their stride
As the higher mesas bloom
And the taller grass springs back.

It’s a three-tiered orchestra,
What with wind and the song birds,
And the crickets all pulsing.

Now and then, some percussion
Of another pick-up truck,
A bumblebee, a large fly,

Punctuates complicated
Patterns in these randomly
Interwoven harmonies,

But mostly they’re just steady
Overtones and undertones,
Like a mass of hardängers

Of different shapes and sizes
In different materials,
All playing, just loud enough

For the others that matter.
The crickets strum for themselves,
A single-species chorus.

The birds aim trills at rivals,
Partners, and the clear blue air.
The wind plays out of the trees,

As if each tree were singing
In metaphors from Zhuangzi.
But the wind isn’t playing,

Really, it’s only its waves,
And if trees are signaling,
They sign molecularly,

And best of all, all the sounds
These words try recreating
By plucking on memories

Themselves sing no meanings meant
To communicate to me.
What? Best of all? Yes. The best.

Scrap Found Snagged on a Pasture Fence

The hummingbird is back, but now,
A day later, it’s grey. How is that?
Make a story of the much-told story,
Where it came from, what it means.

A dragonfly, black as carbon and long
As an art pencil lead, hovers over road tar.
You want to pick (a) this never happened
Or (b) it happened just exactly as it said.

Clouds gather around the singing meadow
Like elderly professors gathering to confer,
And another pick-up and another rattle up
The ravishing spiritual vision of this canyon.

Do something different, on this occasion.
The audience in your mind is sleeping.
You can afford to visit tradition’s kitchen,
See what’s worth raiding, what guests left.

Where is that hummingbird? Dragonfly?
Yesterday, it was the cow elk in the brush
Until it sniffed you, then the fat beaver, far
From home pond, racing as fast as it could.

I’m telling you. (Another pick-up, another.)
When your fellow humans all bypass you,
And even the odder creatures start leaving,
You know it’s time to move now, don’t you?

Oh, To Be Less Clear

If you go out every morning to fight,
You’ll come to the evening you don’t return.

How soon you reach that evening you can’t know,
And who among us who wakes up at all

Doesn’t wake up aware of that evening?
So why repeat this? Clarification

Grows increasingly unnecessary
With every spin around the sun survived.

Late on a given afternoon, removed
To the outer penumbra of humans

And whatever it is they’re fighting for,
Whatever parasitic righteousness

Has possessed them personally, one waits
To head back down to the valley of dust,

Reluctant to rejoin the discussion.
We need each other. We need each other,

Every morning, our needs go out to fight.
There’s no why. Try to make it home tonight.

Cottonwood

The huge one at meadow’s edge,
Overhanging Handspan Creek,
Lights up in the early morning
And shadows the late afternoon.

It’s been throwing cotton this week,
Fluffy fistfuls of the stuff, drifting
In light flurries on small breezes,
Sifting like white dust into the grass.

You don’t need to be Linnaeus
To know what all this is for, the floating
Pollen and powder of reproduction,
The allergenic sex of the great trees.

You also don’t need to humanize it
Too much, the strategies, the lust
To go on living, the fables of competition
And sociable multispecies cooperation

That make us happy to imagine,
Make us sad. It’s alive. It’s like us
Like that, like everything alive is alike.
Otherwise, it’s something else.

On this continent, the cottonwoods
Grow widespread and magnificent.
You can catch their flurries in urban lots
Or along the shores of a remote lake,

In ranch country along the Colorado,
In the narrow valleys of British Columbia.
But let’s not talk about success just yet.
Edward Abbey could go on and on

About his love of desert cottonwoods.
There’s a poem, somewhere, where someone
Actually proposes, half seriously, to worship
One. So what is it? What is it about this one?

There’s a ring of them around the meadow,
Outlining where the creek and irrigation
Ditch fork inside the barbed wire fencing
This morning’s frisky calves and cows.

That whole ring of cottonwoods is thriving,
Most of them huge. I’ll tell you what it is.
This biggest one’s convenient. It’s never
The success we think it is, this kind of thing,

Whatever inspires us to admiration or hymns.
It’s coincidence, in cottonwoods as in
All things. Something in us refuses this
Because we crave significance. But it is.

The Hermit Struggles to Answer

Can only mountains be more
Beautiful than more mountains?
A teal hummingbird—yes, teal,

Appears to me—who knows why—
Hums around me where I sit,
Investigating beauty,

A clue to something to eat.
Red book? Gold apple? Green eyes?
Why is it never enough

That the use of beauty is,
Or was, for our ancestors,
Good guidance for keeping fit?

The beautiful leads us home
To where the colors are known,
To where the palette suits us—

Here we could grow or have grown
Up to and including those
Purely local inducements—

Regional plates and produce,
Artificial nourishments
We’ve grown used to feeding us,

The tastes we’ve learned fill us up,
The shapes inspiring our lusts—
What comforts and succors us.

Sure, there’s a bit of wiggle
Room for the ghosts we carry,
Abstractly gorgeous nature,

Vistas that don’t promise much—
No Samarkand fruit markets,
No glut of milk and honey—

Landscapes purely dangerous,
But beautiful nonetheless,
Deserted and mountainous.

If there’s some worth beyond life
In the world of the living,
The hints are drop-dead barren,

Like the strange longing I get
For this kind of emptiness
That’s all a teal hummingbird

Will find in my hazel eyes,
And all that my eyes can find
In watching a cloud go by.

Songs for the Suburban Sacrifices

Behold the Grand Unity
Worshipped by Emperor Wu!
It will take many scholars
To interpret these lyrics

Composed in the time of plague.
The leadership of red dust
Blows drifts around these suburbs,
And I ask you, Tell me which

Of these ruins—the houses,
The churches, the theaters,
The half-finished restaurants,
Highways under construction,

The parks, the closed shopping malls,
The enclosed shopping centers,
The fountains in golf courses,
The reopened office parks,

Or just this dust around them,
Accumulating small dunes—
Is the greater loss, the real
Disaster? We think we know

Well-coordinated work,
Complex architecture, art
When we see it. We think we
Are thought’s apex personified,

Encephalized, intricate.
We think we can organize.
We think these suburbs are ours,
And any ruins our own.

Could it be the genius lies
Not in artifacts of ours,
Edifices, rituals—
Lies and is lost in this dust?

Two Buzzards

Every surviving text is a djet—
Both an embalmed body and
“A homonym for eternity.”

Run your mind back over that.
“Surviving”? How true is that?
This text you’ve started to unwrap

Enfolds a scene of sapphire sky
In which two buzzards, djet and djet,
Circle close and closer to your head.

Ghosts Get Haunted, Too

Step out into a day
That could still be called night
On this moonlit morning

In the desert suburbs
Under great, sailing clouds
Just an hour before dawn—

On a street without lamps
Along which neighbors sleep
At least until sunrise,

There’s little glare to wash
Away the moon and stars,
The glow of cloud galleons,

And the air holds the damp
Of slight overnight rain
Aided by lawn sprinklers

Whispering here and there,
While cool back-porch concrete
Feels smooth under bare soles.

Now what? There’s no catching
This in a cup. This scent
Of wet, overgrown grass

Mixed with that damp sand smell
Of spring desert, this moon
Over the silver leaves

Of the massive shade trees,
That cloud armada blown
By the wind through the stars—

Even those who notice
Won’t remember this well
And are human, one kind

Of beast among all these,
The moony bugs and moths,
The black cat on the wall,

The birds getting ready
Already for sunrise—
None expostulating

On the soft, exquisite
Loveliness of it all—
Ghost that haunts these words’ ghosts.

Readers Divine Things

Just to be whole and conscious of the small
In every experience you have, including

Your experience of these phrases, this line,
Alone or aloud—or maybe alone and aloud—

That’s enough for now. Thank you. You
Have made this, you have found this, you

Have read this. Here you are. It’s your being,
Your experience, not the poem’s, although

Now we go together, thoughts intersecting
On a maze of paths, a labyrinth perhaps,

In which case, we can leave together.
Labyrinths are like that. No need for a map.

Will you stay with us a while and find out?
Outside, there is news, in your world

And ours, more triumphs and terrible things.
But in the little thicket of these phrases

You’ll find words for varieties of sweetness,
For these mountains high over the desert,

For western bluebirds, wrens, and finches
Singing their familiar coincidences, tapestry

Of red, purple, white, and yellow wildflowers
Weaving through the seasonal green grass,

Obscuring the prickly pear and dry stalks
That should come into their own again soon,

Above the juniper-piñon, below the aspen,
In the shade of a large ponderosa,

Where the air is still humanly comfortable
And quiet without other humans. You are

A part of this, or this is now a new part of you,
An experience you will likely forget soon

And will inevitably, eventually, take with you.
Thank you for being here, thank you

For taking note of this, of us. A soft breeze
Whispers through. God, how we’ve missed you.

Anything Real Would Include It All

A straightforward mind doesn’t hold much

In reserve,
Jabbering
Incessantly—Not that

It is
Illusion or delusion or
Dreaming necessarily

After all, how would you know
Unless you knew, and knew

What you knew was true? Which
Then would mean no more

delusions for you—
Poor you!

It’s just

That whatever you do with whatever you
Knew or thought

Maybe you knew

Won’t move much
That is true, true?

Oh, the human view—
A few human views
A few future
Billions of human views

That’s been done
That you could do
And well done if you do

Since you haven’t done it yet
Let me be the first to congratulate you!

But you do
Know humans don’t you?
Unless they’re all themselves—

All ourselves—delusions, too
And why not?
Including me including you,

They’re a really, really

Remarkably tiny part of any
Ordinary evening’s after-sunset view

Ah, but then
Again—If
You knew

What you thought
You really knew
Was really true

The whole
Truth would have to be
Within you and your one

Tiny view

The Same Substance

None of us are sure
Of what we believe—
We just believe it

Because belief is
A human reflex
Like sucking in breath

To get the lungs full
Of rich petrichor
When the big raindrops

Hit pavement and soil
Unexpectedly
In a thunder roll

And the heat wave breaks
For an evening hour
That sure seems like ours

What Brand of Disaster, O Gods, What Plague for Your Rage Are You Preparing?

A chart of the cosmos,
A source of order,
A summation of history,

A manifesto,
A pretext,
A conspiracy,

A clearinghouse,
A paragon,
A chaotic memory,

A spider
Smaller than a cuticle
On the thumb of a toddler

Using every animal nerve
To solve the problem of being
Small and hungry

Community Matrix

Give people this—we’re good

At spotting evil
Everywhere in everyone

Who might be dangerous
Enough to spot evil in us—

We’re good

At sniffing out those evil
Other people sniffing us—

It’s the keen metaphorical sense
Of scent we purchased

At the considerable expense
Of the loss of any actual sense

Of actual scents—
You know you know

This—you can feel the blood
Swell in your neck at the thought

Of the evil you know—and you’re not

Wrong—we have evolved
This new sense as body armor

Back of the dawn of predation
Evolved along with jaws—

The gift of cruelty
Like the gift of swifter swimming

With stiffer teeth necessitated
Defensive adaptations

Evasive strategies
And counterattack capacities

An altogether more
Sophisticated show now

Although—do we even know
Anymore what evil is—

Any more
Than whatever it is our sense

Of evil continually
Hunts and hungers for?

Heads Held Aloft

A note to be held in trust—
Promises make porous nets.

Power is ephemeral
And rarely pays back its debts.

Sadly, this seems also true
Of righteousness and revolt.

The false in the personal
Holds true in the general—

Humans are ephemeral,
And each of us runs up debts.

Some of us chase down others,
But that’s as good it gets.

Autoclave

The past becomes the future,
Sky blue with two or three stars
Now about to reappear

In an asterism named
For a causal diagram
Explaining our perspective,

The work we put into it,
The gardening of stories
Domesticating the night.

We were never really wild.
The first dancers by a hearth
Had tamed fire, they told themselves.

Return

Most of these things you can’t sing
And they’re no good for chanting—
You can sit on them, as Stonehouse

Suggested readers could do with his shi.
Or tuck a couple that aren’t too bad
Under your cap in the back like receipts

You’ll probably never think of again, but
Have decided to hang on to for now,
Right? Because you never know when

You’ll want to bring a thought back in
For not having done what you needed.

Planning, Paying Attention, and Resisting Temptation

What can or cannot be, if anything
Can be known with certainty either way
Or whether what we can or cannot know

Are among those things that we cannot know,
Among the certainties that cannot be,
Is, as is said, the heart of the matter.

Well, here’s an executive decision:
It doesn’t matter. It’s one of our games,
And maybe there’s a winning strategy,

And maybe there isn’t, but skyscrapers
Of planning keep rising. Pay attention.

No, nothing is not the same as no one.
Nothing cares if you resist temptation.

My Borrowed Features

Two chunks of red sandstone
Sit in the gravel strip
By the cinderblock wall.

Ochre cinderblocks match.
It’s so hard to avoid
Passive voice, where people

Came to rearrange things
And left them. They left these—
Decorative, I guess.

I’m a borrower, not
A designer of yards,
Landscaper of grammars.

I’m trying to stay home
Temporarily, while
Home remains beyond me.

So someone decided
To place two stones, just so,
For what? Tranquility?

It’s not enough, although
I’m glad I have them both,
To ease asymmetry.

They Didn’t Have Art. They Didn’t Have Cities. They Forgot How to Write. But They Lived for Another Millennium on Subsistence Agriculture.

So much for the Harrappans
In one new explanation.
Waiting out a pandemic
Compounding changing climate,

It’s tempting to imagine
Some droll future researcher
Explaining our abandoned
Civilization’s ruins

In exactly the same terms.
It seems funny, in some way.
It feels almost comforting,
To think of our descendants—

Artless, unlettered farmers,
Just as our ancestors were—
Carrying on anyway,
No researchers in those days.

A Despair We No Longer Believe

Day arrives as light on ruins,
Much the way Valéry observed,
As reasonable rejection

“Of all that does not yet exist”—
Much the way, but not exactly.
We would like to paraphrase this,

To reject any bit of “yet.”
What’s not yet will never exist.
We can imagine the ruins

Of everything left of what was,
But those are not the real ruins
Of anything yet to be wrecked.

Analemma of the Moon

Waste wants to know what I’ve done with it
And why I haven’t wasted more. It waits,
Like a series of photographs taking up space
Far to the north of this windy desert atmosphere
In the attic of the deceased villager who once
Reprimanded me for taking her corner too fast
And who died with driftwood piled against
Half-buried downstairs furniture. Like that.
She asked me to inscribe a book to her
And misdate it so that later she could give it
To herself as a present on her next birthday,
Which she hasn’t lived to celebrate. I wonder,
Hearing about the excavation of her house
And how her neighbor adds her driftwood to his
Artistic garden wall, what she’s done with it.

Litterfall

All dreams and nightmares of forests
Are predicated on movement,

The idea of going deeper,
Of wandering, of getting lost,

Of getting through and coming out,
Of at least reaching a clearing—

But, staring at an empty sky,
An atmosphere-edited blue,

A scrim beyond which night expands
Speckled with fires and explosions,

Could you imagine your forest
Is not that vegetative shawl

That spread after the last ice age,
That old myth of the growing dark,

But this expanse you’ll never touch,
Much less wander through exploring,

Fearful of getting lost for good,
Hoping to avoid the shadows?

Memory is a frilly scrap
Of lichen on a dislodged rock

Kicked out of the freshly dug mouth
Of a burrow beside a creek

In a quiet part of the woods
Far from any major trackways.

Maybe the pebble tilts just so
And the lichen receives some light.

Or maybe it tumbles over.
The pebble is no wanderer,

And whether you are lost or not,
The thought never leaves the forest.

The Way

Roads are unfair. They eat death.
Yours, deer, whatever passes.
If you find yourself sitting
At a roadside, stay quiet.
Time feels richer if we stay

Quiet. You will be witness
To the nature of the world,
Boring, fine, and horrible,
If you stay by the wayside
Long enough. Mostly, you’ll find,

The world is boring and fine.
The horrific takes a while,
But a road guarantees it,
Given enough time—a wreck,
A roadkill, a pointless crime

Can make the quietest road
Briefly a vortex of blood.
And that’s the thing about roads.
If they’re usually quiet,
They’ll become quiet again,

Artificial summaries
Of the universe that birthed
Our species inventing them.
It’s quiet here this evening.
Been quiet for years and years.

Antiphatic Poetics

Yeah, yeah, sure. I am off
In the mountains by dawn
And I never return

Until nearly sunset.
The pieces of sayings
That mean nothing much more

Anymore but a nod
Are hiding viruses,
Every word a sleeper

Cell ready to erupt
Into robotic life
Or at least urgency—

Good morning. How are you?
Doing good. How are you?
How are you? How are you?

Have a good one. I’m off
To the mountains and I
Never return a call.

Infinite Taiga

You’re already in it
And nobody in it

Ever gets out of it—
You might as well be one

Of the old believers
Who fled here on purpose

And makes clothes out of bark
And eats food without salt

And will not survive long
If the outside finds you—

The only way to leave
Is to vanish deeper

Into black-stick thickets
That fade into the snow

Then you’re gone to yourself
While the forest still grows

Finding Ourselves Neither Destroyed Nor Improved

The games change. The game changes.
Today you have to do similar things
And yet everything is different.
So you say. The small talk of the plague.

Locally, it’s just windy, although
All the school buildings are closed.
Beetle people, turtle people, crawl
The highways in their household shells.

Garbage gets picked up. People get
Take out. The bird populations of America
Continue to dwindle in every count.
Surviving birds get on with it. Sing.

They don’t live by the rules. They live
With the world delivered them by one
Species that lives and dies by making
Games with rules that change. That game.

Even Larks and Katydids Dream

Here’s a poem for reality.
There’s a cashier at the Walgreens
On Rte 9 who tries to save me

A little money every time
I purchase a single item.
Those are on sale. You should buy three.

She can’t see why I resist this.
It genuinely baffles her.
This genuinely baffles me.

Causal Discoveries

We return now to the fairies
Of the real—the preposterous

Formulas for the deduction
Of causes from correlations—

Can path coefficients tell you
What correlations never do?

We misquote, of course. Always do.
Faith in causation is stubborn

As faith in the paths of the stars.
Prediction is the best weapon

In the war to control the past,
Which is why, when not killing them,

Kings trusted in astrologers.
It takes a long time to observe—

However well one predicts stars,’
Sun’s, and moon’s tracks and eclipses—

One hasn’t grasped the fate of kings,
Plagues, famines, or prosperity.

Ah. You spotted that small “why”
A few lines ago, didn’t you?

Faith is an aspect of language—
Is any aspect of language

That we struggle to do without
Even when it doesn’t hold true.

It’s hard to think without stories,
To explain our lives without plots,

To parse change without agency,
Developments without telos,

Headlong force with no intentions,
Linked events without causation.

On another planet somewhere
Sentient beings may sing lyrics

That depict a marvelous world
Of many wonders happening

For absolutely no reason,
There being no fairies in them.