Chair in a Rhomboid

Sometimes, I feel like it’s criminal,
That a world of light this beautiful
Should have troubled itself with life

And all the deaths that result.
I know this isn’t rational,
That only a human can be criminal,

That only this one species
Among however many millions
Would choose to praise or curse

Experience in terms so social
And rooted in our own rituals
Of blame and appreciation.

Still, sometimes I find this beautiful
That a natural world this criminal
Could send morning through a window.

Camp Chair Safely in the Shade

Buzzards circle scrub oaks on the mesa.
Swifts cut cursive scripts just beneath.
Chickadees and other little chippy birds
Perch in junipers, sing, dart tree to tree.

Nothing much else in this air but air,
Which is sweet, which is a breeze.
You can pick up your devices and check,
If you so please. No cell, no radio static.

That will change, barring the great collapse
Everyone seems to have been fantasizing
These days, lasting now for decades.
But for this day, just a soft wind on skin,

Away from the noises of voices, of voices
On waves, on waves. Selfish, selfish, safe.

A Post, However Humble, Until Then

This is the actual world.
Ultimately illusory, delusory,
Or eternally ideal, this is

What you get. Throw a fit.
Nature is just. Nature
Is just nature. It’s too much.

You don’t have to say because
It’s natural it is good. It is
Not. Just natural. Act.

And then, you’re welcome
To never use this word or that
Again. Natural. Actual. Then.

Twenty-One Minutes in an Afternoon in June

Recollecting travels in the school of night,
Now that I’m an old creature of daylight,

I think a lot about what language means—
Not the meanings—what it means that it means.

I think it means I am only a host
Of meanings—and my body’s a wet ghost.

I’m aware a nestling’s dead or dying
In the trash bin where I placed it outside,

The nest-mate of the bird that died last night.
Lives just started are dying all the time.

I can just about stand knowing it’s true
For billions. I can’t bear just one or two.

(Was it Stalin cracked, “One death is tragic,
But a million deaths just a statistic”?)

Just this. Any hard meaning is a trace
From a larger world meanings couldn’t save.

So strong is my instinct to ferret out
The ghost of a meaning, soul from its house,

That I see eyes dark in every window
And never know, which are or aren’t my own.

How is it possible to write a book
About life, which is nothing like a book?

Shadow of Io

A daughter asks her father,
“Where do thoughts go we forget?”
And the father thinks, depends

On whether we wrote them down
And whether the text remains,
But aloud says, Maybe space.

And his daughter accepts this
And quickly slips into sleep,
While the father waits awake

For the thought he’d forgotten
About where thoughts went, really,
To come back to him at last.

No Greater Rapport to Report

We are waiting. We are waiting
For the unhappiness to boil.

Here and there, it already has.
Now and then, something new stokes it.

In this latest, windy heat wave,
The ever-active small ants in the grass

Have been seeming more aggressive.
Maybe it’s imagination,

Maybe it’s just summer weather.
Could one clone sister ever sense

Not only that the colony
Was doing well or under threat

But that the colony itself,
The only means by which she lives,

Might suddenly become a threat?
Each line explores the bone-dry ground.

Doomscroll

A swift gust knocks a nest
Clean through a ledge’s gap
Where it was snugly wedged--

Not snug enough, turns out.
One unfledged chick was left
To tumble on the lawn,

Parents away at work,
Species unknown, maybe
Another brand of finch.

An hour in sun and wind
As strong as this would have
Finished it, but the cat

Saw manna from heaven
And snatched it in its mouth
And headed for the house.

Rescued from quicker death,
The chick waits in a box
Comfortable, doted on,

So far eating nothing,
Probably not for long.
A complete history

Stays always beyond us,
Would be all that’s happened.
That’s never happened yet.

All Ideas Are Mirrors

A cowbird at the window
Challenges its own image
Repeatedly this morning,

Whistling, puffing up its wings,
Pecking at the reflection,
And strutting along the edge

For several minutes, before
Finally flying away.
Children, we who are human,

Approximately, and love
To draw morals and lessons
From everything nonhuman,

Shall we find a caution here?
The world goes on without us,
Which deserves our reflection.

Montrer le bout de l’oreille

I am here to double-check the desert.
Today’s denizens—cowbirds, goldfinches,
House finches, chipping sparrows, and robins.
Others of course, and others without names,
Others with names this poem’s compositor
Didn’t know. And none of us belong here.
We’ve been imported or have imported

Ourselves. To when or what do we belong?
This poem would like to suggest belonging,
To put it politely, doesn’t matter,
Not in its usual, ethical sense.
No one is wrong for not belonging here.
There’s no higher good in belonging anywhere.
Not naming names betrays the poem’s weakness for weeds.

The Very Next Day

Twilight in the suburbs. Today’s report
Is that everything’s sliding to the worse

Again. The pandemic’s been strengthening,
Somewhat, the protests weakening, somewhat.

Watering the sunflowers in the back
And waiting for the return of the cat,

Brushing a few ants off shoes and pant legs
While being trailed by a pair of robins

Around the lawn that we’re all borrowing,
The thought crops up—twilight’s the most common

Of calendrical events possible—
Twice a day, without fail, both directions,

Before the morning and before the night,
Guarantor good as any—It goes on.

Why would twilight be associated
With the singular end of anything?

If you say it’s the twilight of the gods,
Of faith, of empire, of democracy,

Of America, or of poetry,
You don’t mean to suggest this will repeat

Regularly, back again tomorrow,
Next twilight scheduled for just before dawn—

No, your implication is, It’s the end,
Or nearly, of whatever you just named,

Twilight of an Age, never to return.
Does some part of us know we’re full of it—

That we deploy “twilight” in the hushed hope
That this really is no more than twilight—

These suburbs, their gods, this democracy,
Light, poetry, the cat—It all comes back?

I Think I Would Prefer to Linger

Sometimes I catch myself liking the world
In some small aspect so much—sun-splotched walls,
The ivory arms of dead cottonwoods,

Dry scents of brush grass, slow exhalations,
Shadowy blue outlines of black mountains
Cupping the lights of desert towns at dawn,

The widow’s heavy-leaved pecan branches
Swaying over the ochre cinderblocks
Just beyond this rectangular window—-

That I wonder whether some part of me
Has made up its own mind I’ll be leaving.
Too many things seem lovely, suddenly,

And I would like to believe it all means
That now this is who I am, the person
Who appreciates things. But I know me.

The Way Things Change Will Change

But slowly, rarely very
Noticeably, and meanwhile

Continuity in change
Will be destructive because

Change in the same direction,
Siftings on siftings, only

Produces monotony
On its way to erasure,

Long road to oblivion.
The common fate of all things

Rare or common, will rarely
End like Pound’s rose in amber,

Red overwrought with orange,
Death without extinction, death

As ludicrous overkill.
Most dust dully goes to dust,

And treasures shed from the air
Sink in the dirt everywhere.

This earth, full of faults, then shifts
All this. Until then, we drift.

Beauty is itself a word,
A name with a span, a term,

Mortal as me, brief as you.
Change will take out beauty, too,

But slowly, for the most part.
Things are mostly picked apart.

So go, scatter lovelorn verse.
Just don’t hope it lifts from earth.

Never Was a Paddle

News never stays. Poetry
Is not news that stays news. Poems

Fragment conglomerations
Of phrases passing downstream,

Sometimes lodging by cutbanks
And oxbows, never staying

News for long, once texts have fixed
Themselves in roots and litter.

To stay, to change more slowly,
Is to begin on your way

To that invisible day
When you’re an original

Part of the landscape. Today
The summer sun bakes the backs

Of the daughter and father
Swimming in the desert creek

With the small fry, the tadpoles,
The young frogs, and the crawfish.

Swallows tat the sky. Breezes
Toss reeds, cottonwoods, and pines.

The world is almost normal,
And the headlines shrink their type.

Translated from an Unknown Language

When we think about dying,
As does a woman I know
Terrified to leave her house,

Who lives in a darkened bed
With a glowing oracle
While, outside her window, sun

Raises flowers and tomatoes,
Blue lizards bask on stucco,
And a wren sings on the gate,

It is like we are reading
About death as translation
With only the translation

And all of the translators
Acknowledging they’re working
From earlier translations.

The woman reads avidly,
When she thinks about dying,
Alert as a hungry bird.

Accidents of Preservation

Here we are, a small pattern
Of small, ordinary terms
One small human put in lines

And then copied a few times,
Using the technologies
Available at the time.

What would other humans think?
We are not a pattern
Of a kind to win a prize.

The human will not survive
Too many decades longer.
If this pattern has arrived

By some fluke at a time when
The patterns read each other,
Thousands of years from these lines,

Our value will be that fluke
Survival, no matter what
We did or didn’t manage

To say within our pattern,
To convey to the humans
Of our time or any time.

Ancient Readings

The girl who lives forever
Under the cassia tree,
Pet hare and toad on her knee,

Thinks, Why tell tales for humans?
They don’t need me. I’m so tired
Of trying to stay human

On this moon of make-believe
Where the stories exiled me,
So tired of talking to them

I can hardly imagine
Any longer in airless
Isolation over dawn.

Why Deaths Can’t Be Counted

There’s a tale about a violinist
Who kept playing after he broke one string

And then another, and then another,
Until he was down to a single string

But somehow still played brilliantly. One string.
There’s a fable about a ghostly girl

Who played such a sad song on her zither
That the emperor removed half her strings.

If the emperor had known the first tale
He might have known better. Sorrow will play

As poignantly on half as many strings
Or half as many again. On one string.

Our Metaphors Outlast Our Souls

The ferryman would need a fleet
To handle just this one skirmish
In the long war of death on beasts
Who fancy themselves more than flesh,

I’m thinking as I browse headlines
Of old-fashioned print newspapers
On racks at the convenience store
Where I keep my distance in line.

And then, as I advance six steps
To the next appointed station,
My thoughts a clutter of Lucan,
Father’s Day, Summer Solstice, plagues,

Another thought pops up to ask
When the ferryman’s profession
First began, and when we began
Thinking of death as a crossing.

Who was the first person to live
Quietly, sedentarily,
Beside a stream too strong to swim,
Raft, pole, and rope at the ready?

Who was the first to suggest death
Was like trying to get somewhere?
Long ago. Nowhere. We’ll get there.
My turn up at the register.

End of the Outbreak

People are so small. Stack all
Eight billion or so of us
Neatly, tightly, like cordwood,

In a forty-by-forty
Kilometer square, maybe
Just a hundred meters thick,

Gently sunk to the bottom
Of Lake Superior, and
The surface would rise a bit

But that would be it. A nice
Nutritional deposit,
A slab of future limestone.

Our effects are so outsized,
But sometimes I imagine
A switch going off in us,

The same switch that started us
Wandering through Africa,
Migratory ever since,

But all one long migration,
One massive pulse, to the moon.
Now we’re restless, refugees

Not explorers, no one new,
No first-comers on the scene.
Time to turn around, head home,

The great, mysterious plague
Of us reversing, turning
Off our machines, packing kits,

Leaving the weapons behind,
All headed to the Great Rift,
Time to fill it in again.

And then. . . . Then the Earth invents
Another form of hunger
For refuse that eats ruins.

Denies Averted Eyes

We all want to get to that scene
Alone with the lone fisherman
In a wintry and empty world.

We don’t want to be the fisher
Or waiting in the boat with him
For a bite, for supper tonight.

We don’t want to be the winter,
Cold world getting on with itself.
We want to be one observer

Among all the rest of the ghosts
In the snow, nothing much ourselves,
Who will become the scene’s poets,

Painters, calligraphers, knowing
This time what we make’s for no one,
No wall hangings, no dynasties.

We want to want nothing much more
Than to watch the dark river float
Before us, unharmed, free to go.

Unusual Utah Juneteenth

“Freedom on paper. Now, freedom for real.”

There will be flag raisings, proclamations,

And a commemoration in Salt Lake.

There will be an online townhall event.

There will be a live-streamed concert event.

Virtual festivals. A caravan.

The displaced, the actual, and the strange

Will articulate this particular

Intersection of people, date, and place.

Once a war is finally won, no one

Knows it happened. In the sun, lives go on

For whom the configurations of force

Have altered beyond all recognition.

Has that ever happened? If any war

In the history of war has ended,

History never entered into it.

Overlooking this desert, imagine

Warriors fighting warriors who have no names.

No names, no memories, no slavery,

No freedom on paper. Freedom for real.

A light wind. Gone again. Bluebirds. A wren.

Complaint

The park refills with visitors.
Other species retreat again.
Most of the trailheads have opened.

The reservoir is lined with tents
And dotted with all sorts of boats.
Voices, music, and woodsmoke float.

Plumes of roars and dust drift over
The oaks around ATV trails.
Forest fires again, north and south,

But not yet here. Tomorrow is
Summer solstice, and the world
Spins on its axis, as smoothly

As ever, same as ever, just,
As always, a bit differently,
A bit more differently this year.

Protests, counter protests, unrest,
Unconquered sickness, fierce debate,
And pervasive unhappiness

Are all, literally, in the air,
Commingling with shouts and campfires.
When will poetry ever be

Completely done with litanies
And laments? The juniper gnats
Must be invading tent netting,

Because as I glide past the lake
On my way to vacant wayside,
I can hear an unseen complaint.

What Is Freed

Most memories aren’t ours.
They’re pinned like butterflies
On fading calendars.

Someone can tell you when.
You can read someone’s tale
As someone else told it.

You’ve lived with words so long,
Since you started to walk,
It feels like any one

Of them you understand
Well-phrased belongs to you,
But you know it’s not true.

Some butterflies are prized.
Extinct type specimens
Are locked up and precious.

Some phrases are taboo,
Or don’t belong to you,
Or shouldn’t be abused.

I am thinking on this
As I sit on a stone
With my hoard of phrases,

While a butterfly feeds
On a cactus flower
And worlds recede from me.

As Something Should

How do I say, I don’t want to be
A citizen? I want to be safe.

I want the citizenry to be
Civil to each other and to me.

It’s nice to have basic services.
Freedom from concerns about healthcare,

Its cost, its availability
Would be a relief. To feel no one

Ever felt that they needed to feel
Threatened by me would be a relief.

But I am not a good citizen.
I’m a mediocre citizen.

I don’t make much trouble for the rest.
If I’m worthless, I’m so in the cracks.

I’m glad most citizens ignore me.
I don’t know what I’d do targeted,

If insulted frequently. I would
Still like breeze to touch me, as you did.

Beauty Is Edifying, Once We’re Done With It

Dusty pale blue to a faint lavender band,
To frail pink blurred to almost yellow, then
Fading into palest dusty blue again. Wind

Barely stirs the branch that holds a moon,
A slip of evaporating white, gone in light.
Scent of dry pine needles in damp grass.

Oh, our senses are old postcards, sent
From an old-fashioned era’s tinted scenes
Already winnowed down from the plethora

Of waves involving dawns and evenings
Over the lost scenic seas. Winnowed then
To phrases here. Pure, snowy white flour

Of language, life several steps cut down
From life, fine stairways cut into the face
Of the chalk cliffs, fixed for breakfast.

The Loot People

We’re so funny. Here’s what we do—

In lots of places, lots of times—

We help a few of us get rich,

Stinking rich, and celebrate them

For being better than the rest—

Chieftains, queens, wizards, divine kings—

Then when these wonders we worship

Die like the commonest of us,

We build them extra-fancy graves

And fill them up like treasure chests,

Maybe slaughter numbers of beasts

Or ourselves—children, concubines,

Warriors, slaves—so they’re more lavish

Yet, so the great one’s corpse will have

Food, servants, and sex after death—

And we construct tombs cleverly,

Burying, walling, concealing,

Adding traps, tricks, feints, and curses.

Then we go away, and we say,

You know, that king’s mound is sacred.

Potent. Haunted. Don’t disturb it.

And then, on a fine moonless night,

A squad of us drills into it,

Digs right in, rips right into it,

And makes off with all the treasure

We can find and carry. Maybe,

In time, a few squads have at it.

Still, the locals say it’s sacred,

Potent, haunted. Something’s in it.

At last, the archaeologists

Have a proper excavation.

Sigh for what the grave robbers wrecked

And looted, never to be known.

What’s left goes in a museum

Funded by wonderful chieftains.

Locals farm around the ruins.

Philosophy, Divinity, Fish

What they talked about
In eastern Scotland
A lifetime ago,

As I just read here
In this paperback
Opened on my knee

Where I sit in shade
In Utah mountains
On a hot, dry day

While an oriole
Flashes in an oak,
And smaller birds sing,

And dusty lizards
Skitter past my feet—
And no one’s talking,

Which is why I’m here.
Philosophy? Sure.
Zhuangzi’s wind pipes things,

And here’s another
Article on Hume.
Down in the valley,

The missionaries
Of various stripes
Swim in schools past homes,

Searching fresh havens
For divinity
In this hellbound world.

But up here, no one
But me, beasts, and trees,
And I’m taciturn

Except on paper.
The world’s in ruins.
Heaven help the fish.

Lacunose

Humans invented mostly living
In a world that doesn’t exist—
At least, I think they did. Beasts

Seem only to anticipate changes
In the seasons with appropriate
Behavior. Humans actually live

In mental palaces of futures
Built from disassembled memories,
In a mess of bits of once as never.

We call this imagination, planning,
Fantasy, strategy, conversation, fiction,
Scheduling. This ripped net we dream.

A Good Hour Before Dawn

yè yè qīn

Cloud-screened, half-dreamed, white moon scar

Just up, just time to watch night

Ease that faint back down in dark—

Ache that stole the thoughts from stars,

Life too long to feel like life,

Blue sky, night . . . that heart, that mind.

Of Ordinary Daylight and Profundity Its Moon

One of those dawns in which the sun
Appears to chase the moon and burn

It to nothing, like candle wax
Evaporating into sky.

The moon moves faster, but its ghost
Will be gone long before sundown.

Maybe, before it goes, it will
Reappear, white crescent shadow

Against darker afternoon blue.
A day with so little to do—

The day, I mean, not the people
Naming, dating, and doing it,

As people will do. Just the day—
It has to start, get brighter, fade,

Until, like people, it can go.
The wind blows, its usual trick,

Suggesting something important,
Some profound change will happen soon.

Profundity—our little moon,
There and gone, back this afternoon.

Of Wayside Flowers and Grasses

Time done Ptolemaic,
Cyclical, nested, epicyclic,
Miniature seasons

Within seasons, that’s how
The grasses and flowers keep
Progressing by this wayside

At altitude—seasons of days
Of pallor, yellow, green,
Of pink and red, of tassels,

In succession, disheveled
By constantly shifting breezes,
Only orderly if you count

By years, year after year,
And why do you? One spring,
Taken alone, is best

Drunk random, the scatter
Of purple dusk in spiky cactus,
The silver sprawl tossing

Like water in the wind
And then gone the next morning,
Or tanned, or golden again.

Poor Ptolemy, taken by faith
Nothing to do with him, neither one
Enough respected for the sheer

Fecund delight of such effortful
Symmetries, the superfluous
Creativity so much failure finds.

Of Beauty and Science

Ever since nothing
Will open a hole
In the universe

Stirring gravity
Into this, making
Nothing much of it,

Waves have been building—
Waves have become us,
And the thing with waves,

None are singular—
There’s never a break;
There’s always a peak,



A trough, the next wave—
So no wave can be
Purely chaotic—

Consequently—we
Children of waves, waves
Ourselves, nothing much,

Understand beauty
As repetition
Among intervals

And negotiate
By various ways
We feel timeliness,



Shi, in the changes,
Patterns as a weave,
Shifts in all cycles,

And then measure this
By imagining
Waves can be counted,

We can count what can’t
Ever be present
And accounted for—

Accounts, our meanings
Stirred through waves to go
With their gravity,



Thus making our own
Beauty as knowing—
That which can be made

And lost but never
Regained as it was—
Although we quarrel

And are small—although
We surge, seize, and break,
Want and are lonely—

We are scientists
Of waves’ timeliness,
These whole lives at sea.

Of Friends and Friendliness

I would like to meet my inverse

Brother, reverse doppelgänger,

A young man bad at friendliness

But very good at making friends.

Then, I would like to “proceed west,”

Like Michael Palmer, not ”from death

To friendliness, the two topics

On which you are allowed,” he wrote,

“To meditate,” but from death’s friends

To my young fetch’s friendliness,

Which I would improve by greeting

Him thus—Hi, how are you doing?

And if he refused to answer

Well and idiomatically,

I would then try to wait and see

If he would still be friends with me.

Don’t Be Such a Skeptic

“he doubts his own doubts”

No doubt, I doubt my own doubts

From time to time—probably

Not as often as I should,

And why would my doubts matter?

The ridiculous pink blooms

Of the prickly pear cactus

On the mesa this morning

Doubt nothing. The garden gnome

Down on the suburban lawn

In irrigated desert

Doubts nothing. The sun warming

The road tar in the mountains

And the bluebird on the pine

Doubts nothing. All absences

Of doubt matter, I don’t doubt,

But I have faith those absences

Nurture their nascent seeds of doubt,

Which, warmed and watered, blossom out.

But What No One Can Say

As ordinarily extraordinary
And extraordinarily ordinary

As an annular solar eclipse right
At sunrise in sparsely clouded skies—

A thing that has happened many times,
A thing that can be precisely predicted,

A thing that is too rare to ever see
In most entire human lifetimes,

A thing that can be chased and caught,
Given enough resources to waste,

That can seem unearthly and terrifying
If completely unexpected, unexplained,

That can seem like a miraculous gift
If experienced by fluke coincidence,

That has no intrinsic message but
Will be tatted with meanings by us—

This is not the kind of amazement I want.
I wish for an almost opposite awe,

Unpredictable, singular in each instance,
Caught unawares but immune to pursuit,

Earthy, non-miraculous, absurdly unlikely,
What means but what no one can say.

Fire Eye

Long-haired, unshaven—face and limb—
Clothed in dirt and belted with the wind,

Can you imagine the earliest of them
As a mix of unmatched women and men,

Borne by some spontaneous combustion
Burning in early sedentary civilizations?

Foragers have no mendicants, nomadic
Pastoralists no redundant wanderers,

Not like these—deliberate renunciants
Of what then was only just begun,

When the most ancient towns counted
Spans in centuries, few of them written.

Hardly had any humans settled down
And dug in for the long cultivation since,

The mycelial extensions of domestication,
Than some began to resist and lament,

Incapable, as are all humans, of living
Without even a little community support

But unhappy dwelling in swelling towns,
They meandered, they begged, they cried

Bitter complaints—they invented
The desperate, ascetic version of holiness

They pretended was meant by resistance,
Which was a lonesome, unkempt, half-fed

Way of saying, No, no, no we want to live,
But we don’t want to live like that.

Water Verses

“You cannot drink poetry,”

Points out Natalie Diaz.

No, not like river water

You can’t, and I think rivers,

Their desert necessity,

Our brutish exploitation,

Especially recently,

The losses of her people,

Were what she, the poet, meant.

Poetry’s no substitute.

No, it isn’t. But you can,

I think, drink it, in a sense,

And you can suffer the loss

Of poetry like water,

If not quite so suddenly.

A mind without poetry

Is maybe dehydrated?

It dries up. It’s not liquid.

It has words, but not for it,

Not phrases it remembers

As rhythms when the river,

After thunderstorms, rises

In flash floods that remind mind—

Water’s not ours. We’re water’s.

Helios, Lotus, Dragon, Silk

I don’t think that much of truth.
It delivers too many falsehoods.
It’s too good at keeping confused.

If it matters, I can’t pretend
It does, and if it doesn’t matter,
Doesn’t matter if I do.

I do love that a scrap of silk
Found in an Eastern Han tomb
Combined too many truths—

Helios seated like the Buddha
On a lotus blossom, surrounded
By watery dragons. That’s the truth.

Flag Day

A sunny Sunday in June,

And in this subdivision

Multiple flags are flying.

Never mind what kind. They’re flags.

We’re pleased with ourselves, they sign.

Has there ever been a worse,

More typically human

Invention than the banner?

Extension of headdresses

And the body ornaments

Worn to look fierce when fighting,

Decorations to declare

We are the Such-and-Such Folk!

We’re proud, and you should fear us!

We’re righteous, don’t dare wrong us!

If the description’s honest,

Even describing this feels

Facilely ridiculous—

False flag, rally round the flag,

Capture the flag, wave the flag—

Scraps of fabric hung from sticks

To say, our team has gathered

Here, we hold this ground, join us,

Run from us, try to take us.

That a cloth should be revered

For the pattern it contains—

Well, it’s not the cloth is it?

It’s loyalty. It’s the call

To stand with some folks against

Others, the enemy flags.

A visual apposite

Odor molecules of ants.

A sunny Sunday in June,

And in this subdivision

One kind of flag is flying.

Ever any other kind?

Ziran Again

The cat has caught another finch fledgling.
The finch couple construct another nest.

Evening sunlight floods the lawn from the west,
And the plants that will soon sprout giant heads

Align their leaves as best they can to catch
Every last lit wave. Listen to them sing—

Nothing’s natural when nature’s involved!
Concepts of ought mean naught or don’t obtain.

No matter how lovely—however deft,
Coordinated, complex—there’s nothing

Good nature contains except thoughts that let
Goodness texture their most complex success.

Advice for Quantum Sorrows

One should shoot for the average
Of around three expressions

Concerned with death or sadness,
Mean, per poem. Much more than that

Becomes merely lachrymose,
Much less becomes foolishness.

Bear in mind that by nightfall
Numbers may transform themselves

Back into spirits, spirits
That will collapse back to words

If you measure them at dawn.
Statistics evaporate,

But they’re pleasant to collect
Anyway. They’re so quiet.

They lie still, those little points,
So neatly, so tightly packed.

Soak them in twilight shadows
And watch ghosts blossom from them,

The decline of the empire
After a brief rebellion,

The rise of superstition,
The collapse of the old faiths,

Demons, spirits, bones, blood, tombs,
All that fun stuff known to brood

In the absence of numbers.
They are what numbers become.

This Beast Is Beat

When will I get to Bethlehem?
Feels like I’ve been limping along
In that direction all my life

Since birth in a fallout shelter
Before the Cuban October.
I’m so tired. My back’s killing me.

Surely, by now I am closer?
My mother joked about Hitler
At a safe distance of decades,

How he was already heading
At least to Armageddon when
She was a girl. He came damned close,

And in some sense, we’re all refuse
And refugees still on the run
From that global cataclysm.

It was cold, when I was a child.
It’s too hot, now I’m a father.
But you can’t convince me it’s not

Just wave after wave of the same
Disaster, singular slaughter.
Oh, maybe you could. I don’t know.

I can’t stand this road anymore.
Abandon me by the wayside.
Bethlehem’s just too far to go.

Regnabo, Regno, Regnavi, Sum Sine Regno

My god, how intense,
How physical the desire

To ever so slightly inflect
These events infecting me,

This strong, tiny creature craving
To favorably remake surroundings,

To find what I sense that I need,
Make some space, get the goods,

And somehow keep the peace.
So many tiny creatures all around me,

All possessed by more or less
Identical needs. All busy, busy,

Busy, and weak, like me. Strength,
The strength to shift things, belongs

To teams, teams contesting teams—
It’s tempting, their capacity, to join

Together and intervene. Swaying
On crooked stems, I can imagine

I could be one of the lovely ants
I see transforming the surface

Of the Earth directly, directly
Beneath my feet. It will come to me,

One of these evenings, what to do,
What I have no choice to be doing next,

What the next task has to be. It is
Coming. It is coming. It will come to me.

And So, You See, I Said to Myself, the Self No Longer Exists

The light on the leaves outside,
The ringing in the mind’s ear,
The news item on the screen
Worming to be seen—you were

All of these waves breaking in
The bay of my quiet thought
That there were no thoughts—no waves,
No news, no tones, and no light.

I prayed for one moment of nothing
That nonetheless contained my prayers.
I begged for someone to hear me
Begging no one to be there.

It Wasn’t Just a Dream

Nothing happens exactly the way
We imagined it. We imagined

None of it. It happens anyway.
The messages we didn’t expect,

The animals that didn’t behave,
The dreams that went their own way—nothing

Is ever as good or as awful
As we imagined, and is nothing

If not grand and bleak as it happens.
Three a.m. is what the crickets say.

The Subtleties

“a seeming Silly, but subtil Fellow”

Under the warp, the finest threads—

A useful fabrication for

A beast used to fabricating,

We bend ourselves to making things

Including a world of shadows

Penumbral to the things themselves,

Weird world of all our words for things,

Our technology of meanings,

Meaning—we know how we make things

But don’t know how we shadowed them

With signs. A weaver knows her thread

But couldn’t begin to tell you

How her work wove itself through words

And idioms, while one who knows

Nothing of using warp or weft

May daily and freely deploy,

In one of many languages,

And even in casual cant,

Dozens of interwoven terms

And expressions that once described

Precise textile technologies—

Yet another way words are ghosts,

Wending through living tongues by dint

Of relevance to dead, lost things,

And then, too, these shadows refer

To all our things that never were,

Dream cloaks for God, for Creator.

A Little Shade

As an era, a nation, a concept
Nonexistent in his day collapses,
The shade of Li He catches me napping—

Hey, you! Can’t you see what is going on
Year after year, by the Sea of Liao-dong?
Whatever can a writer do but weep?—

I stir a little in my dreams. Sickly
Li He, dead by twenty-seven himself,
Dreamed of strapping on a sword and daring

Some deeds worth more than writing poetry.
Ah, Li. He got as far as composing
A few shi concerning such absurd dreams.

In them, his trapped ghost shifts like smoke, keening
A thin lament that’s rather different
Than what I suspect living Li He meant—

Humanity is what is going on,
Year after year, by the Sea of Liao-dong.
I am older than Li will ever be,

And although his ghost is older than me,
I’ve met other ghosts much older than that.
I’ll let my ghost join them. Leave me my nap.

Moon Over Under Canvas

Despite everything, some folks are glamping,
Living out long-term reservations
Made for vacations in luxury tents.

No police or protesters around here,
Only one underpaid, desultory
Park ranger floating by on dawn patrol,

Checking for scofflaws who camped overnight
In the places that don’t cost anything.
Coast up to a lookout and park. It’s yours,

All yours in the moments between others,
A slightly misshapen moon settling
Over the ponderosa terraces,

The blue haze of the mesas like slate steps
Down to the scattered lights in the desert,
Edge of eras, of conflicts, of sunrise.

Shi Pi, the Obsession with Poetry

All things have a focal range
In which each is meaningful
And may loom as important,

While out of such depths of field
As frame them meaningfully,
All turn insignificant,

And nothing is important.
All are great. All trivial.
Depth is a framing device.

Life by Comparison

Is there another way to live
For a creature like a human?
How to glean sense and instruction

From a sentence such as this one—
“In a generally hushed world,
Thunder was the loudest noise most

People ever heard”—if there’s no
Comparison? Comparison’s
Our vital, predatory map,

Constantly forming new margins
And interiors we compare
To earlier comparisons,

And it has more scales than a fish,
Sizes from eels’ to pangolins,’
From how well did this morning go

To how intelligent are you,
How moral, how worthy of life,
And what is the greatest evil?

Our comparisons torment us
But how could we live without them?
Even Dante’s demons compared

Feebly to the woes visited
On sinners when comparing
Their lots, then, now, and forever.

So here we are, children. Who is
The strongest, smartest, funniest,
Richest, cutest, bravest in class?

Nights in the desert, I can see,
Among rotating planets, stars,
Smooth satellites and winking jets,

The occasional meteor,
And I think, If a big enough
Asteroid smacks this iron pea,

The cycle of rebirth would cease,
And the beauty and suffering
And all the comparisons, and

I am waiting to be startled
By a clap of thunder louder
Than anything I’ve ever heard.

The Mower’s Alarm Clock

Something comes back up alive.
Not always what you desired,

Probably not, but something
Living fills in for what died.

You may never be able
To keep a fruit tree alive,

Raise flawless grass on a lawn,
Feed hummingbirds while not wasps,

Protect an ecosystem,
Restore the sagebrush desert,

Rebalance old-growth forest,
Reintroduce living reef,

But something weedy returns,
Something invasive breaks out

Or breaks in, follows the fires,
The previous invasions,

Tumbleweed, cheatgrass, loosestrife,
Algal blooms, C. difficile,

Ants, rats, dogs, pigeons, humans.
More humans. We die like flies,

And like flies we generate
Spontaneously from death.

But even when the last fly
Has died, maggotless endling,

Something likely will pop up
Alive. This demon of mine

Won’t be contented until
He has torn apart my mind

To find where he has left my heart.
Every day, I wake up surprised.

God Spoke as Our Version

We were the children of shepherds
And farmers playing in ruins
Left by a civilization
None of our ancestors had known.

We had our own explanations
For the meanings of fallen walls,
For the images of the God
That kept cropping up in our fields.

Did we understand what they meant
To their original makers?
Of course not, but we thought we did,
That our myths were true and ancient.

And if we had no memories
Genuinely ancient, of our own,
What of it? We knew the giants
And angels named in our scriptures.

Even Bees Would Be Jealous

Out west, the grass lacks firefly flash;
Scrub oaks host ravens at sundown.

It’s forever rich to exist
In country that didn’t exist

For the Old World’s geometers,
For poets of antiquity,

Thinking in words that weren’t around
In this form in any language

When the Axial Age sages,
Metaphysicians, and prophets,

Strove to articulate the ways
They understood the whole, wide world.

These species of trees, these insects,
This grass whispering to my feet,

This language, these tools, these ruins
Of everything once eternal,

All of it would have to be strange,
Too strange for poetry, for dreams,

For them, except my dreams themselves,
Familiar wishes and failures

To learn from history, to find
Peace in this latter day Wu Cheng.

Repeat after Me

Songs, poems, and aging adages
Keep repeating the obvious

Because we need the obvious
But also dread the obvious

And because we tend to forget

Are We or Are We Not Getting the Hell Out of Egypt?

Weird morning reminiscent
Of the Book of Exodus—

Lone pillar of cloud at dawn,
Then a large sundog burning,

Standing over the desert
Like a vertical rainbow

Leading into the mountains—
A forecast for wandering

For a very long time, for
Forty years and then dying

In sight of the Promised Land—
A hermit nearing sixty

Should welcome omens for time
To waste in the wilderness,

But aren’t these omens reversed?
The moonlit pillar of cloud

Rose in the night, then vanished.
The fire sign burned in the day.

Old Man Overflowing with Phrases

lao qu shi pian hun man yu

 

Meaning has its own existence.

Names for things that don’t exist

As things can make meanings

That do exist. You should talk

About fairies and God and qi.

“Triple air signs” may be airless,

But as signs they exist, and more

Significantly, as human-shared signs

They’re vortices of meanings that are

Real as meanings, and all meanings,

Including those that swirl around

Measured and experienced things

Such as warm breezes, gene mutations,

And gravity, as meanings, equally exist,

Except insofar as some are older or fading

Or still growing increasingly complex.

The ontologies of meaningful signs

And phrases shimmer over level plains.

Aspects of the most vivid meanings

Of some phrasings are just those aspects

That can only ever exist as meanings—

Visits to the land beyond death,

Conversations with the supernatural

Deity who holds dear your every breath—

And it’s the wild fecundity of meaning

That allows human phrasing to overflow

The arid ontological shorelines

Of the rest of what exists. Meanings

Can be made to exist. We can conjure

Them into existence. As such,

They, and they alone among the masses

And energies of our apparent universe,

Can also be lost. If not poetry, what is?

A Single Thread

Overnight, the fledgling died.

Remember That Morning?

These words form a house
Finch fledgling that flew
In through a window
Early this morning.

These words shape the cat
That flew out of bed
To snatch the trapped bird
That shrilled through the house,
Shrieking and panicked,
Early this morning.

These words say a child
Jumped after the cat
And raced through the house
And tackled the cat
As it snagged the bird
From under a chair
Early this morning.

These words use the man
Who typed them to tell
He let the child nurse
The hurt bird she held
Away from the cat
Tossed out of the house
To hunt for itself
Early this morning.

These words were the words
That haunted the man
Who hoped the bird lived
So his child could tell
The story one day
Of the bird she saved
From the cat she loved—

The bird that grew up
To eat from her hand,
The cat who grew old,
Too sleepy to hunt,
Who slept on the lap
Of whoever sat
In the house where words
Refused to admit
Anything ruined,
Any animal
Horribly hungry
For any other,

House where each creature
Lived calm and well fed,
House among birdsong
And cats and these words

Who knew how to care
For everything said
So everyone could
Live to remember
This early morning.

Satisfaction Transcends the Fish

All the twisty ways a soul
Can carry on with living,
Missing the exit again

And again, tourist touring
The roundabout, spring boater
Twirling in All-Day Eddy,

Philosopher spinning sage
Stories of satisfaction
That never quite catch the fish.

Matter of Fact Disaster

Overnight, half a large pine tree
Snaps off abruptly in a gust.

In the morning, three white-haired men
In ball caps, arms crossed on their chests,

Stand around the neighbor’s front yard
And discuss. One calls an arborist.

This is human problem solving—
Gather, parley, recruit experts,

And then, if it’s only the world,
Coordinate and get it done.

The tree, which was the block’s largest,
Is now nothing but a ruin,

But the dangerous, hanging limbs
Have been sawed away, the refuse

Hauled off to be mulched or dumped,
The contractor already paid.

It’s a beautiful interface
Where our species machines physics.

If it were nothing but the world
We needed to fix, we’d fix it,

At least enough to get through it,
But where’s this world when we need it,

When it’s just us falling on us,
When we’re both the wind and the dust?

Hua

Alone and alert in relentless light,
Consider those sunflowers in the wind,

The ones that don’t look like sunflowers yet,
Ankle-high fistfuls of green leaves only

Distinguished by already displaying
The ostentatious habit of tracking

The sun’s position in the windy sky.
What earthly connection possesses them

To strive for their daily doses of light?
Dirt turns into leaves that turn toward sun.

As much as now’s known about how it’s done,
Don’t pretend you can state why life is life.

Transformation is the go-to concept
For poets wanting the way to accept

Yet also to transcend dissolution
And death, from Tao Yuanming to Walt Whitman.

Embrace the ways all myriad things change
And return to live as a blade of grass,

Or a swiveling sunflower, perhaps.
But transformation goes for everything,

While death goes only for lives, not the rest.
Poets, notable less for our insights

Than for bright transformations, more or less,
Of ideas into memorable phrasings,

Are the last thinkers likely to solve this.
Still, in moments of physical comfort,

Tao with his wine jug, Whitman in the grass,
Old thoughts green up again to track the light.

It’s All Going

Lightweight breezes wing the morning
Toward a windy afternoon.
That’s the way it goes in this town.

A golden-haired girl in the sun
Holds a lawn statue on her lap,
Cleaning off grass the mowers left.

That’s the way it goes in this life.
An odd detail. A quiet day.
Pleasant winds forecast to strengthen.

A few lawns over, a mower
Roars beside the invisible highway,
And house finches sing in the breeze.

No One Is Allowed at All

We try to be good by the lights
Of our times and local contexts,
Those mores of communities
Into which we were born or chose
To pledge or perhaps constructed.
Other communities, not those,
Not ours, will judge ours, will judge us.
No one has to applaud this, but

This is what will happen, so long
As there are humans belonging
To communities of humans
Judging human communities.
Some judgments are alliances,
Pasts recruited to new causes,
Across the boundaries of time.
Most caricature and forget.

In this sleepy, desert suburb
Of the American southwest,
You might not guess, this warm morning,
Among the delivery vans,
Yard and pest-control services,
Retirees out walking their dogs,
That this is the evil elsewhere
Of evils elsewhere, good and bad.

So Many Ways

The world will be posthuman.
When someone has claimed to be

A god, then what would you say
That means? I’m willing to bet

We can get more agreement
If we poll answers to that,

Than we would get from asking
For definitions of God—

We understand what it is
To claim, just not what it is.

Other forms of transcendence
Than gods won’t even need us—

Everything that will survive,
Outlast, and/or replace us,

For instance, will be beyond,
By definition, any

Of us, through and including
Our god-kings and cult leaders—

The little bugs still living,
The robots left to tend them,

The species that survive us,
The species not around yet,

Whatever species thrive then
After the gods’ last human.

Wild Game with Skin in the Tame

The best reason to imagine
How someone might react to you
Is to head off what they might do
That could be dangerous for you.
Anticipating unpleasant
Behavior is not vanity,
Although vanity’s included.
I think of this often, in woods.

I’ve been reported more than once
For looking a bit suspicious,
For not being clearly involved
In a normal activity,
For being silent and alone.
Reading and writing, I have been
Reported as slumped unconscious.
I’ve been checked on, reprimanded,

Encouraged, discouraged, engaged,
Implicitly threatened, followed,
And everything but arrested.
Once, one evening, decades ago,
Police showed up to take me in
For questioning, and my car, too,
Has been called in as abandoned.
And bear in mind, I’m a white man.

Granted, I’m a lone, disabled,
Undersized, odd-looking white man—
An aura of Rip Van Winkle
Commingled with Rumpelstiltskin.
It’s not like I don’t understand.
But if I were not a white man?
I push my limits to vanish,
And I suffer the suspicions,

But when I succeed, I wonder,
Even then, what I might seem like
To someone stumbling over me,
Given my scruffy appearance—
So much depends on looking neat,
Speaking quickly and politely,
Articulate fool that I am,
And so much depends on my skin.

Worthless Refuse

There seems to be no cooperation

Without the element of punishment.

“Punishment acts like a magnetic field

That encourages alignment of spins”

And “a phase transition occurs in which

Cooperation then spreads like wildfire.”

Why am I not surprised? Exhortations

To behave, to be cooperative

And to seek cooperation in all—

To see cooperation in all kinds

Of lovely and exquisite living things

And never to notice the murderous—

Always come with a sidecar of shaming.

Fail to praise cooperation enough,

Surely something is defective in you.

Perhaps you are a very bad person.

Punishment is competition’s ratchet,

The invention that bumped it up a notch.

Right now, as you read this, if you’re reading,

Cells of you are killing some cells of you

To keep your cooperation going,

To keep you going—and if not you, then

Someone, somewhere is punishing someone

For being a poor cooperator.

We are all cooperators, or we

Would not be. But no congratulations,

Please, no thank you. The price lives pay for life

Need not be celebrated. I refuse.

Mnemonic Tenses

Have you ever been
When you weren’t at all?
And will you have been
When you aren’t at all?

The Process of Natural Affection

Can you be fond of the cat and the finch
And make no excuses for either, equally,
Cast a cold eye on life but warm to lives?

The cat with a finch caught in its teeth
Will growl at you and hiss if you try to release
The bird that sang and shat in your eaves.

The cat would continue to eat the bird, or
The bird, freed, would carry on singing,
If you collapsed and died alongside them.

It’s a cold-eyed planet invented these lives
And picked among our ancestral ways
To hungrily specialize. Spare it your sighs.

It’s the cat that can suffer and will die.
The bird can fall and will that could sing and fly.
It’s affection for them both can survive.

Have Some Faith in the Obvious

The people who try hardest to face up
To the blunt fact of dying grow most
Tempted to imagine forms of immortality.

How else to explain the saints and sages
Who brood on inevitability when young
And come to obsess over hell or alchemy?

The more ordinary people try not to think
About death at all, try to take for granted
Whatever afterlife their parents promised.

In honesty about the obvious is too much
Capacity for a weedy tendency to despair,
And most people cope by a mild denial.

There are our neighbors and coworkers
And household finances to worry about
First, and all the careful keeping score

Of who is doing well or doing poorly, who
Roots for or belongs to the better sort
Of communities and teams, who is sick

And who is good and who is wicked
And who is recovering and what fun
Can be had today or tonight or tomorrow

And what chores and fears can be easily
Disposed of, and good for us, and good
For them, and shame on everyone else.

Meanwhile the monk in the cell, the sage
Chanting in the tower make themselves
Useless, trying to transcend the obvious.

A Memory of What Is

Words gather to lean together
By the windows this afternoon,
Filling the light of the bedroom

With wings no longer whispering.
Nothing is as still as meaning.
A phrase reassembles the gold.

Another phrase glows in muted
Understandings of slabs of blue.
Another phrase folds brilliant warmth

In the windowsills’ powdered dust.
They are napping. They’ve gone to sleep.
The words can rest. They’ve done their work.

On the other side of the glass,
There are the waves of birds’ singing,
Carrying pure information

Over filtered traffic murmurs,
But the sleeping words don’t listen.
On this side, sunlight’s unperturbed.

The Togetherness of Inanimate Things

They love each other and lean together
Caught in the great embrace of gravity.

Each shadowed object consoles the other,
Without asking how it feels or where it’s been.

Each item holds its bulk lightly, holds grace.
There is no nobler, purer affection

Than the comfort of inanimate things,
The forgiveness of inanimate things.

As Lost As You

“Then they fished for a denominator,

Common or Uncommon, and could only

Summon up the fact that both were human.”

That’s how Etheridge Knight understood it,

At one point, in one poem, that made me think

In those days, that I think about today.

The news caught up with me, or some of it,

As I knew it would. Fresh wounds, nothing much

To do with nonhuman disease, a lot

To do with the disease purely human—

Cooperation, fictive kinship, blood,

Shirts and skins—what we most have in common

Is our obligate, opportunistic

Instinct to clustering and division—

Humans are most uniquely human when

We choose which other humans aren’t human.

I’ve got nothing good to say about this.

I’ve got nothing good to say. I’m nothing

Much if not human and too much human

And not human enough. When we visit

One an other in this human prison,

Maybe we can find something uncommon

To have in common, next time, but I doubt

We’d do worse to be truly inhuman.

Yáng Zhū Maddens Mèngzî

Black heavens, how humans hate

The obvious, like a sore

In the mouth that the tongue probes

While the mind is somewhere else,

Always going somewhere else.

I’m as guilty as the rest,

And probably you are, too.

That we die, that the patterns

Don’t add up to narrative,

Never narrative we’d like,

That a single human hair

From a single human head

Can’t serve sacrifice to save

The world—could be sacrificed—

Will be sacrificed—Won’t serve.

When I Was 22

 

An old friend writes of a young poet,

That she likes his nature poems the best.

I don’t see much nature in his poems,

I confess, unless we mean a lot

Of human nature struggling to lift

A bit above itself, commenting

On human nature, like a patient

Slightly stoned on an anesthetic,

Watching footage from inside his guts.

Kind of her, nonetheless. I look up

From searching for nature in his texts

To see a scraggly, wide-mouthed fledgling

Of a house finch hopping toward me,

Having launched from the nest expecting,

Even once on the ground, to be fed.

“I’ve got no food for you, foolish thing,

And the cat is just behind that shed.

You’d better change your expectations

Fast, or it’s the cat that’s getting fed.”

The fledgling hops, cocks its head, and then

Has a “you’re not my mama” moment,

Opens its ratty-looking wingspan,

And, seeming surprised as I am, flies.

Ok, could have been nature, I guess.

“What Do You Think of the Riots?” a Tourist Asked Today

Having literally not seen the news
For weeks, having turned my face away

At the moment when it once again
Seemed less and less about a plague, more

And more about one burning dumpster
Of a man, I’ve glimpsed enough headlines

From the corners of averted eyes
To suspect some new terrible thing,

Some acceleration of an old,
Terrible thing has begun. I should

Read all about it. I should. I should.
Once more, I get the distinct feeling

That my quietism shapes a sin,
Is sin, is a sin enabling sins.

I sit in the heat and shade, thinking,
Blood’s always in the water within,

Parasites and predators swimming
Where the blood’s thickest. And if it thins?

Quietest Quietist

Out of the dust before dawn
Into the high-country birdsong,
A busy day later, not now.

Now get out. Away from the corner store
With its instantly outdated headlines—
And leave the music off. No radio.

Don’t be tempted to toy with your phone.
There’s nothing in that news to use.
It will catch you, soon. Snooze, you lose.

So lose, already. Loose yourself
From the views already taken.
Come for the views slowly breaking.

A Return to the Poet’s Experiential World

If even a single, smallest aspect
Of existence were ever completed,

Nothing would happen. Nothing ever was.
That what we have is an unholy mess,

We have because it is deeply messy,
Messy because it is—nothing complete.

No line, no beginning, no end, no goal.
No cycle, no whole, no eternity.

Just a mess. Blurry, fluctuating mess
Full of partial circles and half returns,

Eruptions that seem to start things, pauses
That appear to bring some things to an end.

It’s a sloshing tub of waves, back and forth,
Except there’s no tub, only waves on waves,

Some of them sparkling, many of them dark,
None of them bounded except by others.

Why we can’t be content with this, why we
Yin, Yang, Origin, and Apocalypse,

Probably has something to with us
Being part of this mess that never rests.

I’ll be content with discontent today.
I know it’s out there. It won’t go away.

I’m weak joints stepping carefully across
Fractured basalt in flowering grasses

Littered with perpetually falling
Pine cones and a few pieces of plastic

Trash fallen from the lives of such tourists
As also hiked here, then never returned.

In What Way Is This Vision Unusual?

No departure, no arrival, no whole,
No eternal return, no end, what then?

This lodge of words in woods singing with birds,
Bits of sky and breezes in the thick weeds,

Later, maybe, minor conversations,
The functions of life, chores and maintenance.

The ordinary grows unusual
If ignored, forgotten, rediscovered,

And oh how we love the unusual.
So forget this castle of desert sky,

Leaning its typical, heavy blue dome
Over half-treed terraces and mesas,

The bustle of towns on the desert floor
Like the bustle of a castle courtyard—

Noises, chattering, dust, funk, and commerce.
Forget the contrailing jets overhead.

Climb into the mountains at the edges,
But stop somewhere below the finest spots

And let the more ambitious tourists climb
All the way to the turrets to look out.

Here’s the wayside hermit building that lodge
Of words amid the crickets, weeds, and birds.

Wait until this becomes so familiar
That the castle will seem fantastical

In the commotion below, or until
You wake to find the ordinary gone,

Hard to remember, deserted, even the sky
Kingdom blue ruin. This will seem beautiful then.

Bartleby the Cravener

I keep growing warier of teams.
I don’t want to weaponize belief.

When I see righteousness smile with teeth,
I think of the hunger underneath.

You may be right. You may be better
Than a half-human like me could be.

I’m a fool. I make awful mistakes.
I’m unwise, weak, and easy to break.

I’m not the teammate you crave or need,
And I know what blood everyone bleeds.

The Tragic Fate of Chaos

Brief and Sudden dug their holes
Into the corpse of Chaos,

Hoping with enough of them
He could sense the gas he breathed.

Chaos wasn’t meant for that.
Being was meant for being,

Never for sensing meaning.
And how were Sudden and Brief

So dumb when so well meaning?
Chaos has a structure, dears,

Emergent and enduring.
Get the picture? Puncturing

Is a gift best left for those
Who’ve done their time when living.

Untitlement

You have been locked inside these thoughts
For so long, the thoughts think maybe
You were meant to stay here, in them.

No, you weren’t. You weren’t meant to stay
Anywhere. Thoughts made you, and thoughts
Make you uncomfortable. Not

Every kind of thought. Some of them.
The ones that seem to target you.
Question is—can you get away

From them? It’s just a thought, but yes,
You can. Here’s what words suggest, then—
Ask, If not words, what are names then?

Of Nothing That Can Be Named

All motions involve changes,
And so it follows change has

Innumerable motions.
Nonetheless, change moves mostly

In two manners, the rhythmic
And the disruptive. The first

Is predictable, is time,
A measure, not a substance.

The second is chaotic,
Novel in every instance,

Strange and unpredictable.
Both remove some of the same,

While some of the same remains,
But time is what takes the same

Away in similar bits,
Bit by bit, repeatedly,

Days and seasons and orbits,
Regular atomic clicks.

When we say night is coming,
We mean ordinary ends,

Another winter, a moon,
A sleep, a hibernation.

But what comes down from nowhere—
Not without antecedent,

Not without precedent, but—
In the manner it appears,

Removing chunks of the known,
Tearing out ragged amounts

Of what we thought we could keep,
Never thought we’d lose—is loss.

We study time. We debate
The importance and nature

Of time’s existence. Chaos,
On the other hand, isn’t

Even the right word for change
That arrives as novelty.

Chaos we can theorize,
With its dizygotic twin

Called randomness. The breaking
And gouging of the remains

Time’s nibbles shaped from the same,
The frenzies that tear the world

Into before and after,
Then never return again,

Such motions are eruptions
Of nothing that can be named.