Late

A Plath, a Rimbaud, a Keats, a Crane—

A Li He, for that matter, from long

Before any of them—dying young

Enough that the death is part of it,

The impressiveness of all the things

Done—as, say, recently, Max Ritvo—

They all settle strangely in the mind,

Their completeness enhanced by a claim

To incompleteness, although often

No more fragmented than the whole heft

Of works seen as representative

Of fully lived poetic careers.

In blue-grey heaven’s thunder-stone script,

There are no verses and no poets

And no need of any of our gifts.

Writers are not being called away

To compose for a greater kingdom.

They are wrung out, like all other flesh.

But is there an acceleration,

Possibly, created on approach

Of the breath-summoning red dragon?

This desert’s evening sky holds no shade

In any discernible palate.

It’s bare—neither white, nor blue, nor grey—

A brutally languorous twilight.

I can only hope there’s something left

It can wring from a bony old chest.

Longing Afternoon

In my more distant house of dust I heard

The words I hid were speaking for themselves,

But here we only speak of plagues and worse,

The rot at the heart of aspiration,

The noble selfishness of selflessness,

The abstract signs and banners of humans

Driven to distraction by each other—

Life’s latest self-debriding tournaments.

Oh, for when we were little words, the light

On the leaves that tapped at shuttered windows,

When we were rhythms made by winds that had no ears,

And never hurt for what we heard we’d never hear.

Even If We Thought We Killed Everything, Something Would Still Eat the Corpses

It’s strange to read a poet

Writing in a time of war

Or other calamity

Who does not give us the war

Or sieve the calamity

In any vivid detail—

What is wrong with this poet?

Cowardice? Complicity?

Some kind of moral vacuum?

Is this justifiable

By terror of censorship,

Traditions of the genre?

Does this writer simply lack

The genius, the resources

To rise to the occasion?

When life sets down to a feast

Of exceptional malice,

With heaps of mortality

And lashings of destruction,

Who does not describe the meal?

Who questions life’s conditions?

Balancing in the Wind

A sunny Friday morning

In the drought-stricken suburbs

Of the southwestern desert,

And the plague has not yet killed

One person in this county,

Having sickened a thousand,

And the sprinklers are working,

And the wind is in the leaves,

And robins hop on the wall,

And the traffic is steady

Out by the dusty highway

Where construction continues

On a new subdivision,

And the reservoir’s lower

But it hasn’t dried up yet,

And the hospital is full,

But a check of morning news

Says no, no one’s died there yet—

Well, of course people have died,

But at least not from the plague,

And water runs from the tap.

Start When You See It’s Me

In the unearthly shadow

Of an angel like a tree,

Giant as an alien

Monster disguised as a tree,

I can catch a glimpse of you

As I am and as you’ll be,

Your forehead lined, your hair white,

Worn long, not one drop of dye,

Waiting for me to visit

You somewhere in memory.

That shadow has a substance,

Rippling with dark leaves, black wings.

It’s haunted. It’s not empty.

I can feel it protect you

When you shyly turn your eyes,

Then start when you see it’s me.

Avoiding the Plague in a Drought

We are the words, not the poet.

We are the terms of surrender.

We dream of naming the colors

If our host lives to September.

Afternoon burns the dust-green leaves

Of the irrigated peaches

Of gold and rusty grievances,

Enormous weights on their branches.

We’ve never been spoken aloud,

Never in this exact sequence.

We’re thought’s skeletons, clothing, clouds

Without moisture or existence.

In the corners of the backyard,

Shed leaves confuse the spiderwebs,

While in the house, a fly tries hard

Not to starve close to loaves of bread.

Where Did You Go?

In a time of too much conjured light,

Who would notice a single candle

Guttering under a shade at night?

Easy to miss the face beside it,

That serious look that drops away

From a quiet conversation lit

More by the voices than by the light,

But there are no street lamps by this yard,

And the world is dark enough tonight.

This Poem Is a Complete Jumble and Beyond Explanation

You may find these waters too shallow

For you to sail through. Too bad for you.

The only creatures at my window

Are milling crowds of curious leaves,

And I am floating over the green

Of them, like they were weeds in a stream,

Like the swimmer that I used to be.

This window creates the barrier

That has become my glass-bottomed boat,

And I am observing carefully

These inquisitive, inhuman crowds

Sunk in light, glad to see no one’s drowned.

Most of Our Lives

It takes a long time to die.

There are exceptions, of course,

Terrifying exceptions,

But odds are you won’t wink out.

Edward Abbey noted this

Even of a juniper

Uprooted in the desert.

“I don’t know if it suffers,”

He wrote, adding, “But I know

It takes a long time to die.”

When I rescue a nestling,

Too late, from the thrilled cat’s jaws,

When I spot the cat, too late,

Struck and dying on the road,

When I recall grandparents

Clueless in hospital beds

The last years of their lives,

I know that it’s unlikely

That I’ll be dying tonight.

One night’s rarely got the time

To get that much dying done—

In all likelihood, I’ll live

Years with the hooks in my mouth.

I’ve snapped a line more than once,

But these hooks, they don’t come out.

Care

A bare chair in a bare room
With tan walls and a plank floor

And four panes on a green world
Of leaves past the two-ply glass,

Coins of gold light in the dust
On the chair, on the wood floor—

That’s all an old man could want,
If he’s not in too much pain.

The chair sits close to the glass,
Perched so the old man can stare

Out of the brown and gold room
At the green, as if he peered

Down through the shine of a pond
Where the sun was made of fish

Or the fish were made of light,
And the leaves were shades of moss

So deep they hid the dark graves
Of a world that was not there

And did not have to be there.
The old man’s so pleased. Take care.

Yes, Quite

What life is enough? Don’t pretend

You haven’t wondered. What is noble

Enough? What is safe and comfortable

Enough? How much righteous askesis

Is enough? Love, the light, and a little

Physical satisfaction or, better yet,

All the time to do what you wanted,

To do nothing, nothing much? It’s not

A term we like to equate with worthies

Or worthwhile occupation in others.

How often have I heard someone

Or some goal being disparaged for being

Only concerned with merely enough?

And yet, it’s all anyone’s anxiously asking,

Have I collected enough data, thought

Hard enough, collaborated enough,

Served enough, worshipped my divinity

Passionately, purely, honestly enough,

Practiced enough, paid enough dues,

Advertised and organized all this enough,

Helped my suffering people, my family,

My colleagues, my planet enough?

That’s enough. You will have done

And had it once you lose it. Until then,

Can you maybe coax a lull from this day,

This morning, this window, this light,

This pause between chores and checking

Whether your whole world is ending soon

Enough to sit and think about how

The unreachability of enough is enough?

We Have Only the Poems

“We have only the poems,

And we should not forget

The things we do not know.”

We do not know the poems

As beings of their own.

We dream of their poets.

We do not know the worlds

That the poems have let go.

We hope they will show us

But don’t know where poems go,

If they go beyond us.

We don’t know what they’ll know.

Sit on Bad News

I admit it. I do.

I also hide bad thoughts

I have about bad news,

Which is ridiculous

Since no one’s listening,

What with their own bad news.

I’ve been told to ignore

The Emptiness of things,

That I should be cheerful,

And I’ve been instructed

To know the Emptiness

Of things, to be more wise.

But I’ll neither ignore

Nor absorb Emptiness

Until I’ve never been.

Meanwhile, I’ll sit on it

And ruminate on it,

And answer, No, no news.

Abandoned Cities

“Better just to remember

An animal disappeared

Into the wildwood.” A bear,

A person, tens of millions

Of persons, a dynasty,

A few civilizations.

I’m talking about the past.

All these things already

Happened, many times. Again,

It’s heartbreaking just to read

The Old English, the Chinese

Poets mourning abandoned

Ruins, several hundred years

At a stretch, hundreds of years

Before their greatest empires

Rose and ruled on those ashes.

Better just to remember

Poets gone into the woods.

Of Controlling Other Humans

So there it begins, again

And again—it was dark,

And funny, tragic, and stupid,

As were often the rebellions

Against it as well. All fails,

But sometimes succeeds

For a while. The mandate

Of hell. At the moment

One government band

Of brigands among many

Is trying to contain the world.

This has happened before,

And on its very soil, once

Ruled by controllers of waves

Of a different sort than these

Surges of informative suffering

That the latest controllers

Are trying to quell. I could

Name names, name nations,

Name these particular idiots

Determined to determine

The fates of the rest of us

Determined idiots determined

To control our fates ourselves.

But why bother? It’s names

And naming that made us hell.

Heavy

Let me say I am a word.
Let me say the word I am.
Sometimes, please, let me change words.

Now I am Gwere, a monster,
A pressure against your chest.
I’m an old word. I’m heavy.

Somebody groaned me, under
The weight of a horse, maybe,
Or crushed by a wagon’s wheel.

I have hardly changed since then,
But I’m more widely spoken.
You may call me Gravity,

Or you may call me Grievance.
I’m not the idea of me.
I’m all the ideas of me.

Other ideas have other
Family trees, and other
Trees have other words for these.

I am the original
Injury, peine forte e dure.
I am what was done to you,

Whatever wrong gives you grief.
And I’m the last mystery,
Ghost of all cosmologies.

It’s terrible, being me.
It’s too heavy. There’s too much
Resentment for me in me.

Rust

I’m wanting a new monster,

A new sort of immortal,

One who will help me withstand

Withering new kinds of news

By naming them, giving them

Their own allegorical

Mythology. There’s no beast,

No named nightmare fantasy,

No dragon, no manticore,

No alien predator

Who can stand in for the way

The world keeps coming back up

In the throat of informing

Itself all about itself,

Gagging the ouroboros.

This is not Leviathan.

This monster is spherical,

A bubble studded with knives,

Its inside empty of life,

A grotesque illustration,

A realistic portrait

Of life, nonetheless, as lies,

Of life that eats through its eyes.

Of course it’s a parasite—

No predator could devour

So many at once, so much—

But it’s not some tiny bug,

Not merely microscopic.

It is a hybrid of us,

Of virus, and of fungus,

So gigantic and robust

That it looks like a forest,

Like a landscape given flight,

Floating and humming, hollow,

A vast angel drawn in spores,

One great circle of god and dust,

A whole globe’s dreadful monster,

Imagination corrupt,

The most transformative lust

Since oxygen made Earth rust.

Is Also the Same as Why

“I sing to tell what’s on my mind,

When the birds go to sleep in mists.”

This is only a guess at what

The hill beasts may have been singing,

Precisely, helping each other

Along, not hunting each other

For sport, but sporting as their way

Of preparing themselves to hunt—

“I sing to tell what’s on my mind,

Drifting free, letting myself go.”

I’ve seen no satisfactory

Explanation for first person

In the mouth of a mountain beast,

But it’s there, so I translate it.

“I sing to tell what’s on my mind,

Ascending and roaming around.”

The beasts become more serious

And touch their noses to the ground.

Who knew their songs held poetry

Smuggled inside the suffering?

“I sing to tell what’s on my mind,

Living by eating the living.”

Buck Moon Crickets, 4AM

There are no better humans
To rule humans than the rest—

The best of us are rabble,
And the rabble are our best.

Attraction, repulsion,
Which are desire and dread,

Steer us toward nothing
By means of what might be.

No one fails to die.
No one fails to go.

No one fails heaven.
No one. No one fails.

No News on the Mesa, Mid-Morning

It hasn’t ended. No, of course not.

Would you be reading this if it had?

God, the morning is so exquisite,

A lovely twin to God, the evening,

Among the children of God, the night.

There was a smudge on the horizon,

But, of course, it went blue in the sun.

Grasses nodded tassels under pines.

Birds rehearsed species-specific lines.

Read this. No, you haven’t come undone.

Ways of Being Waste and Wayside

The poems of the unconnected poet

Are like Lu Jia’s mountain camphor woods,

While the poets interleaved with poets,

The well-known names linked in ornate patterns,

Echo his dry poplars by the roadside—

Fragrant, carved and burnished to give off light,

Decorated, made ritual vessels,

Part of academy ceremonies,

They get through, saved for ancestral temples.

It’s an apt analogy, but let’s beg

To differ just a little with you, Lu.

The timber that thrives in the deep mountains

Only to tumble into dark ravines,

Unharvested, never carved for temples,

Never cut to museum collections,

Is not wasted, or is no more wasted

Than the poplars fashioned into beakers,

Great Earth and Grain vessels, ritual cups.

Blocked by rugged slopes, collapsed in dark creeks,

They become what they were, the wilderness,

However perfectly patterned, unseen,

While every war brings more temples to dust.

Then, too, not all poplars by the wayside

End their days as craftwork worth preserving—

Wild wastes also haunt these dried-up branches,

Imperfectly patterned, never cut down.

Poems Pick the Locks People Make

There are no surveillance cameras here

On the black cliffs above the mesa, yet,

Although tourists sometimes report parked cars

To the park rangers for them to inspect.

I know this because I’ve been reported

Before, as suspicious, and I’ve been checked.

A little ways off the road, a few steps,

About how far my legs will let me get,

The basalt cobbles and boulders arrive

At the spot where lava stopped and then slept

For tens of thousands of years, long before

Anyone sat and savored its prospect.

Even in its summer heat, in this drought,

The mesa remains green, its sandstone red,

The high sky blue and utterly cloudless

Out to the next lava cliff in the west,

Behind which, from this perspective, sun sets

And winks—no surveillance cameras yet.

It Goes

I can understand.

I can acknowledge.

I can still refuse

To accept what I know,

What I at least suspect.

It’s not the loss I loathe,

That is, not the emptiness

I know I can never know—

It’s the gift of everything,

Moss, body, sun, and dust—

The quiet passage, stone

Bench with views to heavens—

Given me freely,

That has to take me

With it as it goes.

Find It

Effort everywhere, except the air

In which each effort flourishes.

If you are comfortable, if you are

Not sick, not hungry, not in pain,

Or not in too much pain, at least,

Why not declare yourself content?

Something will make you move soon

Enough. Someone will tell you

You should be making more of an effort.

But look at how this shadow curls,

The empty arm of an iron bird feeder

That doesn’t feed these summer birds.

It draws its slow calligraphy and fades

From the white pillar. I find it moving.

Fire Works for Sunlight

The light appears to move along the wall.

This is a matter of material perspective.

Place yourself. Warm breeze in your eyes.

It is morning in this aspect of America.

A wind chime tinkles a few lawns down.

At least three species of birds are singing.

The item in your hands informs you

That last night there were dire speeches,

And you know there will be more tonight.

Dandelions dot the lawn. The mourning

Doves’ throaty greetings mix with singing.

Have you noticed day is not what we say?

As the Reader Moves to Link the Parts

Afternoon is a lover,

Afternoon the demigod,

Empty, sun-wrapped afternoon

Of the glaring midsummer,

When light draws out scent from rocks,

From boredom that ends too soon,

When expectations hover

For changes against the odds.

Tonight, we’ll darken our moon.

The Dusty Molecular Cloud

I want to be honest,
And I want to be dark

As the shadowed angels
Who keep watch, patiently.

There’s too much light in me.
I like the lights too well,

The feathered moon, the stars,
Fiery day, pearly night.

I have a happy heart,
Easily contented.

I sit in a courtyard
And glow, too placidly.

I want to be honest
About the dark. I want

To have pronounced the names
Of night’s shapes, correctly.

Xuanhu

In my cellar of black wings,
All the little birds who died

In my awareness, in ways
That came to my attention,

Scruffy-headed, beady-eyed,
Lend their feathers to the ghosts

Who grow giant remiges
And rustle, shadow angels,

Overcrowded in the foxed
And mildewed books of the mind.

It’s not the end of a life,
Large or small, that matters most,

It’s that lives end, end at all,
The ending of all living

That keeps life going, that sings
Sweetly in the morning light,

Flying toward a clear sky,
Shining and airless by night.

What Is Jade?

Question: when were these words said?
“My dream is to buy a house
In my hometown and marry

A beautiful girl.” China,
In the nineteenth century?
America, yesterday?

Ancient Rome? Ancient Egypt?
In the trenches of a war?
As it happened, yesterday

Beside a collapsed jade mine
Where hundreds of miners died
The day before in a slide

Is the right answer, this time.
It could have been any time,
Or almost. The young man’s dream—

Success, windfall, resources,
High status where he grew up,
And an enviable spouse.

He’ll be back, digging for jade
In the mud in a few days,
Along with more survivors.

The odds are long against him,
Long and cruel for all of them,
All the young inheritors

Of ancestors’ strategies
That worked somehow to create
Them, their fantasies, their lives.

What We’re For

Today could be the day the world ends.
Today could be the next day of your life.

Probably not but probably. Trust the world
To get on with itself, with or without life.

Imagine the latter. Imagination is all you
Can get for death, for a world without life.

Tricky, eh? All you can rummage around
In imagination’s trunk and find is living.

But let’s try. No one will have anything
To say to us, won’t read us, won’t exist

To judge. Also, the planet, or the constant
Maintenance of life on it, then ruins, quiet.

It quit. Maybe humans destroyed it.
Imagination would like that—potent

Humans, favorite topic of imagination,
After all. But gone, with all of it, after all

That. Just a nice blob of iron core spun
Into a bead, a dot, whizzing round its sun,

Like the other inner, rocky planets. Done.
Imagine that. We lie in the dust, perhaps,

But not all of us even stopped at that.
Most patterns wholly burned, evaporated.

Not one of these lines has been left intact,
Not a word. Nothing ever to breathe them

If any had remained. There. That’s gone
For you. What can’t be reconstructed,

Not even for a few fragments, and no one
To reconstruct things. We’re all for that.

Until Then, Don’t Forget

Of course, there’s no need

For the world to end,

No need to pretend

A poem won’t be read.

The dragon of days

Might uncoil quickly

Or slowly, smoothly,

So that life goes on

In its bright green scales,

And even humans

Flourish in the nest

Without soiling it

Overmuch. The woods,

The oceans, the plains

Of farms and grasses

Carry on growing.

No one has to read

These or any lines

To know that life grows

As lives go. No one

Has to be possessed

By another set

Of phrases to guess

Sun rises. Sun sets.

Who do we address

Other than readers,

Other than ourselves?

For now, then, nothing.

Shadow Star

I would like to close my gate,
Bimen, live in seclusion,
And look away from the clouds

That are always lit like flames,
That are always inflamed. Dark
Desert or woods would soothe me.

I’ve had enough of faces
Glowing in every window.
A sky is enough for me.

The brightest moon won’t wake me.
I sleep best when I’m alone.
If I get up, I won’t dress.

If I watch for the shadows
Of night-flying birds, I’ll cry
Out in delight at a glimpse

Of something that could be one.
Leave the road unpaved and rough.
Leave me a world dark enough.

No Exceptions

Covert authorial intentions
Tiptoe through the shadows like shadows

Themselves. Don’t count on noticing them
Or exposing them. You need a grip

On chronology, especially
Clocks and calendars, lunar cycles,

The vocabulary to describe
Time as supernatural event

Greatly elaborating changes
In your experienced sense of self.

What I remember now is silence,
But I’m sure I heard a growing life

Pushing up from the dirt, shredding dust,
Uncoiling in a long narrative

Of many non-narrative segments,
Adding phrases like bits of armor

Or camouflage. Frail as each segment
Was, it was wonderful to witness

The tiny pieces working through them,
Their gears digesting meanings like meals

You could see through the translucent skin
Of their larval-stage leviathan,

Deflections of conversation, birds
Overnight in the tree by the creek,

The coming of spring, the subtle blues
And roses, the pinks, the gold-green dawns

Of a plague season in the desert,
The morning shoving the moonlit gate

To the grassy pasture in the oaks,
Trying to get the night to open.

And there’s your book then, phenomenon
Of insight and nonsense in ruins,

Garbled, gabbling conglomeration
Of wet leaves, thoughts, light bones, and refuse.

Onward

We might want to remember
Who we’re writing for—no one.
We should write like we know that,

Should speak to our audience,
Stop drifting off to wonder
What someone reading might think.