One

Words carry stories phrases frame.
Periodically, sentences suspend
Cirques of flaming zodiacs,
Compound histories contained
As unrelated depths of light.
Thus the word-constructed mind
That contemplates mirrored night.
No manuscript of Hazar Afsana
Survives. Strange how we save
What we lose, the wound of the loss
More permanent than its recovery.
Something to fill with narrative,
Which abhors a vacuum. I say
That the original set of stories
Was complete, or almost, except
That the horrific frame of the tyrant
Who killed a wife a night, undone
By the wise sisters who knew
Stories could detain death a while,
Did not end well. All was lost,
Other than the alarmingly weird
Rewrite, asserting the sisters stayed
With the murderously jealous maniac
And his brother, bearing them sons,
Happily ever after, never telling
Another cliff-hanging night story
Again. Right. That and some lyrical
Fables and fooleries, saved,
All the really novel, philosophical
Manichean bits deleted. A woman
Wouldn't relate such things to a man
Who couldn't relate to them. Left,
The animal bits, morals attached,
Echoing Aesop and Vishnu Sharma,
But cut, the winging shadows,
The occult allegories of trees
That thought themselves midwives
Of minds. Cut out the witchery.
The rest became acceptable,
Popular among the new literati,
Entertainments for the gentlemen
Of The Lord. The earliest fragments
Are already an Arabic translation
Caught in the scraps of a lawyer
Practicing his handwriting. How fast
The easy, familiar versions circled,
How men labored later to fill in
The gaps of eight hundred or so
Missing stories, and to emphasize
Some justification for the king,
Necessary piety for the telling
Woman who only wanted a man
To let her stay alive and fecund.
I say what was lost was greater
Than the whole sum added later;
The oasis is larger than you thought,
Larger than the mirage you saw
Approaching murmuring penumbras
Of concentrated foliage too dense
To be a single palm. At the end
Of your expectations of refuge,
The refuge itself appears, dark
And knowing, a green thought
In masculine sunlight, an ink
Dream in feminine starlight. Home.
Outside, open desert, inside, Ereshkigal,
Owls, and ice rivers, winter deeps
No virtuous desert mind should hold,
As if Persia knew no cold mountains,
No ancient oaks, no Shanidar.
There's where the rest of their tales
Remain hiding and waiting, less
Pious, more minatory, whispering,
The lost hundreds and hundreds
Of nights and all their anxious,
Suspenseful days spent waiting
To see how the never ends. I can
Give you signs, but remember
We are not out of the woods yet,
And I am not the wise woman
Surviving, I am just a man,
Or the genie of a man hiding
In the cast-off jars of old words,
Atrahasis, agnosis, Aratta,
All the errata of forgotten facts.
The oldest story is prettiest, darkest,
Drawn from the time when woods
Were spreading, not retreating,
Many young and aggressive as men.
The stories begun the first nights
Did not pretend to moral or meaning,
Did not resolve conflicts, find lovers,
Circle back on themselves, account
For anything being as they became,
Explain. Those were stories of one
Word told to her sister in the dark,
Pretending not to hear the listening
Ear of the paranoid king, thinking.
The suspense was terrible, beguiling,
It hung like fruit in an orchard
Fortified by fences and soldiers,
Attended to only by bees, the true
Retainers of the birth of fruit itself,
The witless keepers of knowledge.
Imagine that orchard, immense
Enough to feed an empire, folded
Itself into the trunk below combs
Of honey the bees bartered for love,
The trunk as one sapling
A thousand arms around, small
By the ambitions of the advancing
Front of the flowering forest.
Climbing ivies, songbirds, mushrooms,
Yet unnamed moss-faced monsters
Later to be slain by men followed,
And within the rising sap and crowns
Of the world of trees, obscuring
The stones that slept blanketed
Under the hungry-rooted floor,
The orchard in each trunk brooded
On the fruit of one name. That
Was the whole plot, the whole
Mystery, the whole swelling anguish
And labor, the cauled birth, omen
And new thing, really new thing
In the world the princesses shushed
Each other speaking of, the Name
The murderer leaned forward to hear,
Expecting something unknown,
Uncommon, aristocratic, grand,
Hermetic, complicated, language
Not of men, of angels, gods, djinn.
But the princesses knew the simples
Of the already much reduced forest
Floor went by common, lowly,
Snail and slug terms, among them
The end and beginning of the first
Plot, the sealed word that rhymed
With seasons, nights, days, oases,
Fears, hopes, dreams of being
That bind, the word all metaphor.
And this was the story they started:
Once or twice, before this world,
The daylight stood in pillars, still,
And everything was as it was
Inside of always, always now,
No matter what happened, nothing
Happened outside of the here
Without here ever admitting
Everything that ever was was
What was gone or could be gone
By being right now what was here.
And although everything was
Becoming among the green leaves
And the cedars, nothing outside
Was outside or ever had been.
There were no names, no gods
Or spirits of distinction between
The one thing in here and the other,
Not already in here. It was is. Light
Shone as it could, darkness pooled
As it should, and all was alive, still,
Including dying, including hunger,
And thirst, and waste, and play.
Then came the thief, the thief named
With the first, great Name, to say,
From now on the outside will say
What the inside forest can say.
Humbaba is dead, and the name
Of the world that makes inner worlds
Is a name you will always and never
Be able to fight, bright, blinding,
However you try it, binding tightly,
Over and over on your tongue,

Saying it means nothing.
The name is . . . so ended the true
Princesses' first night.

Preparation

     If we had ever suspected, if we had ever believed it could really, would really happen, we never would have made so many silly gobs of stories about how it, about how it all, ludicrously, so ludicrously, so variously, so stupidly happened. Then it happened.

     And I said to myself, No. No, I am not going to prepare. Not again, not this time. I am going to wait for tomorrow and find out, wait with all the confidence with which a complete fool dismisses yesterday. Yes, today. Today, I wait, I said to myself, but I watched the wind rock the wooden-rockered chair on the porch beside me, the wind I knew to be rising. And I did not secure the chair.

Thirty One

It's an odd year. Even the best

Numerological charlatans strain
To adduce any astral significance.
It's not the age anyone attributes
A great change to--no climacteric,
No legal shift in rights, restrictions,
Or random cultural signifiers. It is
An age I lived through once myself,
And when I review my little, internal,
Infernal calendar, even I can't find
Much ado that was done. I started
In Maine at a rainy campsite, ended
In Alabama on a city campus, so,
So enough about that nothing much
That was me. I wish you more
And better, much more. Be well,
Be wise, be charmed by the well-
Worn landscapes of melting time,
Be good and happy with yourself,
With your child as her mother,
With your mother as her child,
Be brave and adventuresome even
Sitting at home cutting bolts of cloth
Out the blue skies that fold blankets
Into sudden monsoons, be calm
When the waters rise, be pleased
If your thirty-second year disproves
The pattern I began by adumbrating

Here, be amazed by the subtle ways
The world discovers all in nothing's
Quiet crystal ball, be free, be with me.

You Can't Imagine

The world you want
To be, to be
In, any more
Than tomorrow

Morning, which you
Imagine now
Predictable
When it isn't,

Compound monster,
Time's metaphor
Built from the space
That is the myth

When time itself,
The becoming
And be-going
Constant, is fact.

Their Bounds Divide

On either side, the sands absorb the treads.

In the sand it becomes clear that no secrets
Are being told as the wheels keep spinning.
Sinking in is a secret of its own,
The invisible library of dread.
My soul magnifies my mistake. Dig in.
What would it be like to spin forever?
Hasn't anyone ever kept roaring
The engine without easing up a bit,
Without stopping and then trying again?

Granted the gift of inertia, why wait
To discover the possibilities
Of escape? Keep pressing hard, motionless,
And recognize motionlessness unreal
As the ability to keep moving
By preference, in preferred directions
Over endlessly beguiling desert.
Be beguiled. Be oblivious as night
To the furious turning of all wheels.
If stuck, then never the more stuck turning,

Never the less. A hot wind through windows
Gets the vapors from lifting the wet hair
Wicking the bent back, the cricked neck, the arms
Of the animal crouched in the machine
Believing the machine is of its making,
An heirloom like the Air Loom, a madness
Out the grail of a brain. Nope. The jail
A skull contains barely incarcerates
Even temporarily the dreaming
Of machines that claw our designs in sand.

Fuliginous

Start with the last wisp of smoke
Curling out of the soused fire
Of thoughts you burned for the world.
It's a pretty twist, that smudge
Vanishing in the flash flood
Mud and wreckage that retreats
Back down the banks of the wash.

You'd never quite hoped for more.
Wild fantasies aren't quite hopes,
And neither were your panics
You might burn the forest down.
It's pretty, prettiest now
It's no more than the smell

Of dry ash in your damp palm.

Only Surprise Survives

All magic is prediction.
All prediction is magic.
Whatever fails falls away,
Tenuous soil eroding
Bit by flood into the stream.
Whatever succeeds endures,
Gold glow exposed, enriching

Those who know where to seek it,
Before it, too, falls away
With its black magic attached.
Astrologers' eclipses,
Predicted, made gods of men,
Before making fools of them.
Found science of conjecture

Now's hammered in great gold sheets,
Gleaming, vast, whole domes of math,
Awing the innumerate peasants
Who come to barter their lives
For tools and toys that amaze.
The stars, old news, still renew
The alchemy of surprise.

Tetramemeton

The story has been evaded
Often enough to seem at last

To have been told. I have lectured
My classes in storytelling

Both as if I thought no story
Ever worth the telling, never,
And as if the telling made sense
Only becoming forever.

The mind is outside of the mind.
Stop. Stop objecting to the mind
As epiphenomenal mush,
The vapors evaporating,

The too-long deferral of rhyme.
The mush is the stuff behind eyes,
The goop that can be thin-sliced grey.
The mind is out there, dark as day,

A field of heraldry, a tale,
A heart-breakingly perfect sign
Produced in break-neck profusion
As a series of equations:

Story equals chapter and verse,
Verse equals character, the worst
Of passionate immensity,
Immensity delta, dealt mind.

The Whole Universe

Shemhamphorasch. Non rebus,

Sed verbis. There are no things.
Even our thoughts are not things.

Words and their kin clutter air,
Bob along cross-cutting waves,
Carry us back to ourselves.

We belong to them. They don't.
All kinds of trouble in mind

Are orchestrated out there,

Outside of the bone crystals
In which our futures are read,
In which our words make their lairs.

This being of being them,
The business of being us,
Is flesh as flesh is water,

That is, mostly and not much.
This whispering came of flesh,
Can't disturb worlds without it,

But no conjuring from nerves
And breath alone informs it.
Mind's angels drink from skull wells,

And are no more and no less
Real than beastly elements.
But wings aren't water, nor air.

Euhemerism

The brain makes models of the world.
The team makes models of the brain.
Nobody tells the team their brains
Are not the brain, are not the world.

The brain makes models of the gods.
They look like us. They look like them.
They tell us once upon a time
There was one person with one brain.

The brain makes models to deceive
Itself its models are aware.
The self makes models of the brain.
The models lie outside the self.

The models lie upon the shelf.
The shelf was made by someone else,
By all the someones, all the selves
The gods say model us or else.

The gods, the gods. Does the team know
The model of the brain their brains
Have shared came from sharing the same
Strange nowhere that the gods all share?

Me and You

Never went outside. Never were
Me or you. I say this, me, to let you
Know I won't be excluding me
From the not-really-being of you.

Something has been imagining
Me imagining you reading me,
Gentle reader. You are gentle,
Are you not? Binding term, you see.

That kindness and literacy
Should be the property
Of minor nobility, antique
Values, kingdoms of constraint

And expectation, the light
Outside the blinds before dawn,
Striped by the ancient blinds,
My dreams, and passing headlights,

The light by which I compose
My breaths to pass the time,
Closer than usual to being past,
Closer than usual to being free--

Please allow me the opportunity
To put this another way: we
Have both been prisoners
In separate prisons, simultaneously.

Sunflowers, Moonflowers, Wash

A tiny fly that does not sting
And can't be shooed, caught, or slapped
Harasses me with what feel like
Extra sets of brushy feet, feet
That can't be ignored. Even the fruit
On my plate, salty foods, meat,
Even the condensation on my glass
Won't tempt it away from me.
It climbs in my hair and along my skin,
And I feel it so nearly constantly
I can't enjoy my food or my transitory view
Of an extraordinarily fine afternoon
With sunflowers and moon flowers down
In the broken wash, air-brushed clouds
Arising and scurrying through blue in a hurry.

Daily hiraeth, daily saudade, daily poem.

Place is only periodicity
In the experience of the wash,
A similarity arising, time to time,
With the power to fool us into making
Something from nothing, "radical space
Adjacent to history." No such thing,
Except that we can't live without it,
No such thing, except all our metaphors
Belong to it, perform it, keep us
Forever somehow apart from experiencing,
Our trudging, sleuthing, true thing.
Shoo fly, don't bother me.

I'm Fine

The half-scorched aspen's applause
For the evening breezes, like the taffeta
Rustling of angels shuffling in
A scry-stone's stone pin seems startling
And wrong to a human used to distrusting
His own anthropomorphic whims
But not above guessing his senses
Know the surest way into the world.

And what if his first, foolish instincts
Were the closer to correct? The tree,
Lonely clone with no siblings left it,
Really was trying to be reassuring.
I'm fine, it shushed through its leaves,
I'm good at being
Fine, in fact
It's what I'm best at.

Thought to Itself

You are going home, away,
The next time you have to move.
It's not enough, anymore
That you don't stay here. You must
Go home, now, and only home.
The wind around the corner
Eagerly awaits your bones,

And what precious bones they are,
Veal to the wind, softest flesh
To the winter that gnashes
Icicles like incisors
In keen anticipation,
Not real bones at all, not bare,
Not spare, but surplus. Go home.

Esparto Papers

Much has been
Rustling in
The dry grass,

Much hissing
Fear inferred.
It's laughter,

Friends, not snakes
Whispering.
Who's afraid?

Shiver Wonder

You can't remember you,
And yes I do mean you,
Without some confusion,
Can you? Oh, who was it
Who first went by your name--
What child can you recall?

Feel, when your ghosts dare you,
What sharpest memory
Waits inside the dark back
Of your mind, innocent,
Envenomed, elegant.
That was you, was divine.

5 September 1977

Veeger. The heliopause.
The gap between the former
Joke in a Star Trek movie,

The first, in fact, and the fresh
Announcement that the latter
Was surpassed a year ago

(A year, hah, geocentric
Measurement of anthropoids!),
Consisting very nearly

Of all of my life, at least
As I know it now, fading
In my fifties (there's that year,

That calendar year again),
With scant confidence at all

Of surviving ancient scams

For enhanced longevity
(Mercury, Emperor Qin?).
Astrology, where was I?

Where art thou? It is the east,
And the dark heart of spiral
A galaxy in your hair.

Miguel of the Left Handicap

"After all the years I have spent asleep in the silence of obscurity, I emerge now, carrying my years on my back, with a tale as dry as esparto grass."

Forgive me. You were right.
I was sinister. I joke because
I love, and I am afraid.

There is a prison everyone
Knows and few
Acknowledge, a prison

With a view of knowledge.
To wit, too true, it's true,
And yet too simple.

A man who has led a life
Of suffering by the nose
Around the grinding

Mill of daily rounds knows
There are no grounds
For growing round

And round. A squire
And a square are there.
Oh whatever. Who could

Believe you were you?
An awful person making
An awful mistake. Doubt.

You should celebrate. Without
Celebration and good humor,
Life has only meaning. A play,

A synonym, a pun, a gotcha,
Get it? I knew you would. Good.
Another tremendous wrench

In the symphony of the spheres,
Another unanticipated precession,
Or just another work-around.

Calm Rain Song

There's nothing easy or calm

About a calm and easy song.
The rain outside the window
For so long,
For so long,
Could be wrong, could be gone.

The ball lightning pitched all night
Like a fact to crack the sky,
Might be true, might be right,
Might not know the season's why,

But the rain outside the window
For so long,
For so long,
Could be wrong, could be gone.

That dull boy, thunder, grumbling
Might be pleased with his own rumbling,
Might not know he's slow and stumbling,
Might not see the moonrise coming,

And the rain outside the window

For so long,
For so long,
Could be wrong, could be gone.

I never thought you'd hang on

For one last calm, easy song,
But the rain outside the window
Won't be wrong
Now you're gone,
Gone so long,
So long gone.

Zep Tepi

Just yesterday, the ice
And the mammoths were gone,
The bipedal apes winnowed
And blended to a single race

Fanned out across the continents,

Just yesterday, the first
Occasion of farming, strange
What a miracle and a burden
The hard work of that harvest
Became, over and over

Again, abandoned and
Rediscovered so many times
Before getting its grip
On the most of the earth,
Apocalypse and window,

Just yesterday, opened
Along the flooded Nile,
Desertification all around,
Nobility and slavery, us, today,
As we began just yesterday.

Turnip Watch

"All in a day, it seemed on looking back: all in a day he had stepped outside of it all, with a sigh of relief and a twinge of loss and a nod of resolution that he would not turn back that way now even if he could, and he could not, it was too small to go back into, an intricate clockwork sphere that he would carry with him then like an old-fashioned turnip watch . . . in perfect working order, only stopped forever."

Or his paternal grandfather's
Longines, gold-cased and engraved
With a foolish faux gothic lettering
Commemorating silver years
Of service to the molding of plastic
Dinnerwares made in New Jersey
With a stench that he remembered
Floating over green hill and highway,
So unbearably foul he smells it now,

A machine so finely corrupted
It won't work even after dozens
Of assiduously sought-out repairs.
(English! Bloody language,
A million ways to break a line
But none avoiding permanently
Ending or beginning with one
Of those cursed little words

The well-tooled turning rests upon.)

What did he want to say, either
As grandfather, wearing that watch
Through another five-plus decades
And a half-a-dozen leather straps,
Or as grandson, carrying that last
Incarnation of strap in a box
Still attached to the proper watch
For two or three decades more,
As if time would make time work

Again for its bread and butter,
For its creator who dropped it
Out on the heathery glen?
Little world that someone loving
Made so well and wedged inside
Its tiny golden shell, why suggest
You have a something more to tell
Of this metaphor of positions
Locked forever in your chest?

Its Shape Is Ours

What have we made? If it fits,
Does it follow that we made it
For ourselves, or that we can
Understand it, being our own?

We want to say what we don't
Understand can be made
To be understandable; we want
To understand what we want to say.

We can't. We understand that,
And we understand that it makes us
Mad in all senses, archaic and grand,
Contemporary and spare as a cube

We have designed for living in,
We who are determined to escape
The cave, the shades, the entrancing
Of us, the mages of our own hands.

Bayesians and Frequentists

I do love that we can fight over this
And make it a matter of politics.

Step over, step up, step across
The water-striding ignorance

Of a man raised ordinary, dimming,
Then given access to tangled webs,

A bug among the Arachnida,
A prayerful pretender among deceits

And tensions tendered by the real
Predators of God's counterfactuals.

Here's your etymology my boy,
Now take this horsehair parlor armchair

And convince me that you know
What I'm salivating to expose.

Reflection belongs to the shallows
And grows rarer over the depths.

Here are three boxes. Do you know
The chances any one of them holds

Monte Carlo Hall and all its baroque,
Baronial, baccarat-tabled splendor?

Here is your Gongora. Here is
Your innumerative hyperbaton.

Here is your sour Quevedo, singing
"In the long run, we'll all be dead."

Tell me again what side of this box
You are on. The brain-teaser side?

The missing-child side? The inside?
I would tell you, but you're done.

Home, Again

"He neither much desired to go where he had been headed, nor much desired to return where he had started."

The woods are foxgloved, overwrought,
And the gnomic tree roots mutter
About their undiscovered gnomes.

"In any other book, any
Other autumn-chasing summer,
We might not expect this shy look

To be dangerous, as it comes
Out of a glance from emptiness,
But then again, any other

Writer might not really intend
To dig out mushroomed, loopy puns,
To nest one looping reference

Involving things just under leaves,
Like frost, like lost children's teacups,
And things so buried under hill

The caves that tempted their makers
With shuddering, sea-deep darkness
Have sunk themselves into lifeless

Silences, the stuff of nightmares
For getting dreams away from doubt."
What? You heard what I haven't said.

Gambel Oak Legs

To be social is to lie.
Other people may tell you
Differently. They're being
Social. Then again, to speak,
To use language, to know it
Means something to mean something
Is to lie. Poetry lies.

Science and religion lie.
Pure, perfect mathematics
Elaborates the best lie,
The lie of escape from lies
Without leaving truth behind.
Anything's fabrication
If it means anything, true?

King Aha

Here was a man the world
Had never seen before,
King of territory
With patrolled boundaries,
The first pharaoh, the first
Divine son of the sun

Say archaeologists
And Egyptologists.
(I'm making the last part
Up here. I'm not really
Certain what the experts
Argue about Aha.)

All I can think of is
How new and yet how old,
How ancient and recent
This surprising chieftain
Must have been: almost these
Politics, genetics,

And familiar terrors
We live with today, but
Almost eternities
Ago, historically
Counting generations
As Napoleon did,

Invoking scriptural
Thunder, the way tyrants
And upstarts have done since
Scriptures were to invoke,
Bellowing to soldiers,
"Men, fifty centuries

Of history look down
On us today." We few,
We happy few.  Aha
Might have made such a speech
With less precedent, no
Less conviction. No more.

The Uncle

On front of the paper of record
A frame from a smuggled recording
Showed him standing casually, about

To execute a shirtless soldier
Cowering on the ground. How can you not
Love humanity for its excess cruelty

On a planet that is beautiful because
It has been cruel for so long now
That the atmosphere itself is blue?

It's been weeks since that picture
Sickened me into details: the videos
The soldiers about to be executed

Had of their own gleeful crimes
On their cellphones, the motives
Of vengeance against a minority,

Revenge for a missing father,
Sheer sadism. Who can measure
What has happened since,

What it meant, or what next?
Ask the young man in purple fleece
Who looked at the camera and smiled.

Statutory Statuary Man

Face of a saint on a Byzantine mosaic,
Postcranial shape of a freak show specimen,
The man in the forest with moss on his shoulders
Doesn't move.

                                Maybe he does, but he takes so long,
Not even the moss is disturbed. His urgency
Goes undetected by everything else alive,
And that obliviousness protects him,
As if he and we were here independently,
While suggesting here's what isolation feels like,
Life a legal fiction brooking no exception.

E-A

I tried to write a poem about him once.
Of course, I succeeded miserably.

He was, as I composed him then,
An ordinary man. Only

Because he was a grandfather
Of mine who had died, I had tried

To consider him important.
He was important, after all,

To me. Enough. He didn't break
Any rules I've ever known of,

Or bones, like his son, my father,
Or like me. He seemed constantly

Decent, albeit with a taste
For olives, whiskey, and crackers.

He taught me how to crumble them,
Those soda crackers, into soup

Without making a mess. I have
Made many messes since, the poem

In his honor first among them.
Today I read an article

About the early dynasties
Of Egypt, which led to Bahrain

And another article
On the prehistoric wells

Of sweet water still drawn there,
Dedicated to E-A,

The "house of water," but I thought,
Abruptly, ineluctably,

Of the initials of the gardener
I grew up around, like one of his vines.

At the Time

I'm not nostalgic because

Of particular fondness
For a particular time
This time reminds me of.

I'm nostalgic for the past
Because it is the past

And because it is present,
Whether I liked it or not.

As a Children's Book, Yes

The grasshopper kissed
The stink bug. I know he's
A grasshopper, but he's not

Going to hop. No? No!
He only has one leg.
Crooked hopping's still hopping.

I'm going to feed the ants.
Those are red ants, sweetie.
Yes, but they won't eat me!

Anxious, Hushed Things

He tried to find a cabin with a swing,
Views out to the Cedar Breaks,
Rocks and trees, rocks and trees,
That was the idea. All night, rain
Dented the tin cabin roof.
In the morning he built a fire
And read to his daughter
Until she got bored with storybooks.

By afternoon it was time to move,
For no good reason but scenery.
They drove to where the rugged trail
Crossed through a paved overlook.
Oversized people and cameras
Rotated through the parking lot,
Out to look down on the spires
Of red and white rock, sliding
Just above the tips of the trees,
Those anxious, hushed things.

His wife hiked their daughter
On her back through the mud,
Vanishing toward an alpine pond.
He waited, watching. Wind lifted
And combed fog out of the snarls
Of hoodoos and pines. He waited.
Voices, lowered but distinct,
Floated over the edge of the rim.

Fog's closing back in. Is it?
It's a lot prettier when it's got
A full sun on it.  Ah, here comes
Some sun. But it's not shining right
Down in there yet.  And it probably
Won't, either. That layer's basically
Gone. Quite a ways over that way,
See, a bird of some kind, greenish,
With a greenish tinge to it.
I'm always afraid of missing
A better view down the road.
If God made landscape any prettier,
He's keeping it to Himself.
When is sunset? Somewhere, there
Must be those, you know, these things.

After Him, the Work

What's better to carve? Ask your father.

He used to know his way around woods,
Even though his task was turning out
Mechanical imitations, kitsch,
And ostentatious kitchen boredom.
He did try to paint. He tooled leather.
He tried to teach you glues and dowels,
The urgent, supreme parsimony
Of time wasted on double measures

To avoid wasting costly timber.
Like him, you wander too easily
Into familiar, showy habits
That only impress those with no craft
Who want to tell themselves, honestly
Or even dishonestly, you're good,
And they're discerning, so together
Everyone involved is important.
No one is important. Crafts erode.

Writing Books and Storing Them in Caves

"But no one would listen when he attempted to expound, for they were mysteries no one should hear."

Constant temperature shields
Constant knowledge until
No one knows any of it anymore.

Except that they do. The painter
Of calligraphic scrolls on reeds,
The typist of ones and zeroes,

What did they ever know that you
Don't understand reading this?
Don't be so hard on yourself.

Not every parable is meant
To be easy, not every bestiary
Makes sense to the beasts

Left behind once the rest
Have gone for good, the best
Among them. You can growl.

The Island of Ze-Do

Kingdom of supernatural bandits,

Too large for a body to own,
Too small to confine a body in for life,

What are your resources today
Between the demonic playground
And the austere gate of heaven?

A goldfinch in a scrub oak
Under blue thunderheads and silver
Angels made mute by unbelief

Appears as a flash to the last
Bandit scholar from the Capitol,
Marooned here and resentful

At the remarkable good fortune
Of a well-besieged existence.
He swings on his heels, exclaims.

To Lesson

Human misery, listen.
I will school you because
You think you understand
What makes you mad.

You are not mad.
You are not angry.
You are begging for someone
To say what you hear,

Which is that you are not
An argument for going
Forever away. You are.
Sure. I love you, but you are.

The Sportsmen's Emporium

For William W. Abbott, Market
Street, Philadelphia, and his trout:
My mama done told me to watch it;
I know what you're all about.

That was random, said
The physicist angling
To catch Kokanee fish in his head.
The anthem, the stars spangling

Heartfelt simplicity,
The pointed leaf
In red and white duplicity,
The comfort, the grief,

These are all to me
As the chipmunk on the porch
Last month, the sweet,
The striped, the hungry poor.

No, I know.
You lie to me
Because you know I know
You want my taxidermy.

Ways for a Polar Bear to Become Famous

Sing. Tell stories. Compose
A tableau made of seals.
Remember that it hurts

To be predator or prey,
And convey this anguish
In a swimming pantomime.

Become a sophist. Read
Books that explain things,
Books that are written

By other polar bears.
Be pleased with yourself
For no good reason.

Fold a newspaper,
Delicately as elderly,
Urbane men with sorrowful eyes

Still do, sometimes,
On park benches
In their minds. Cry.

Making Plans in the Shabby Apartment at 4 AM

There's no if, then.
There's no true, causal trigger.
There's then,
And then there's pretend.

Lullaby and Good Night

She tried though. She can't fly,
But she tried though. She can't
Though. But I wanted you

To carry me all the way
To bed. Honey, I carried you
As far as I could go.

Endlessly Temporary Summer

Rain wrapped itself around the car.
The mother and child in the back
Shed their raincoats, made a picnic,
And read library books out loud

To drown the sound of the thunder.
Lightning was easy to ignore
Once they got into each story.
Beside them, an old magazine

Featured a pretty green cover
That was a painting of a child
On a swing under a big tree
Filled with white blossoms, titled

Endless Summer. Oh what a day,
What a day when summer remained
Without getting any hotter
Or shorter, when the lightning played,

Sang the mother, making it up
As she went along, waiting out
The storm. It circled their circle,
Further, further, calmer, closer.

The Farmer's Market

Lucky-looking people looked
At everything in the booths.
There weren't many booths to see.
Shorty observed from the truck
As the sun beat on his knee
Like drumming fingers.  How long,
He wondered, do I play dumb?

He didn't have to play long.
A woman with a bouquet
Was patrolling the margins
In white blouse and long red skirt
Around the lunette of shade,
Approaching the last blue booth.
Could mean anything at all,

Shorty thought as he listened
To the few words he could hear.
She might have already seen
Him trying not to get hurt.
She might know he could see her.
She didn't see the future.
That he knew. She came his way.

"I went for a long walk and some guy was vacuuming his car, and his wife was yelling at him."

A weakness for the awkward
Becomes a verse in my mind.
Perfectly mellifluous,
Laconically elegant,
Exquisitely conceited,
And sublimely vivid lines
Need to clunk over a curb

Every so often to be
In tune with the harmony
Of the squares, of the clumsy
Gods of everyday events
That do not unscroll smoothly
For long before something tears
To let me know I'm still here.

Keep to Yourself

Too many words, too many
Adjectives, too many notes.
In theory, I understand

Why critics praise a clean style.
Simpler is better. But, but
Simplicity and genius
Only appear together

When admirable restraint
In one dimension supports
Baroque indulgence somewhere.

Elmore Leonard went swimming
In rollers of violence.
Even Oscar Wilde favored
Ornate rooms of white on white.

Every Working Heart Is Dark

"Oh, how could anyone not want to tear it all apart?"

They got in their cages a long time ago.
They do well enough, except when they panic.
They have no control of anything at all.

Outside, the brutal competition kills them
Without them ever knowing the reason why.
They convulse themselves. They keep the beast alive.

Their cages contract and collapse around them.
They sometimes drum long after all hope is gone.
They aren't to blame. No monster's without a heart.

Softer than Diamonds

Sunlight is simplest
At the canyon's deepest.
It comes. It goes. It comes. It goes.
Just like that. No secrets.

Our light is slightly more complex,
Crossing the mesa west.
It's hard and bright. It lingers.
It wanders, unimpressed.

It presses our world flat,
A copper sheet ironed, a dress.
Then it leaves us, just like that,
After all, nothing left.

Thunder Nap

Are we still pinching ourselves?
The parked car reminded me
Of a time when to be here
Seemed so wildly fortunate
That the ravens in the pines
Sang. Sang froid sets in quickly,
Almost daily after youth,

And it's tempting to forget
That defiance of advice
And all probability
Dreams both the road to ruin
With crack-ups to see, and then
Again, now, the secret source
Of joy in these trees of life.

Checkerboard

Life is a labyrinth  that looks
Like a maze. Every helpful thought
Annoys us first. These and other
Unsupported aphorisms
Dot the wash in which people build
Dream houses of brown adobe,
Where rains are rare, rockslides rarer,
And thoughts occupy forever.

Select Your Avatar

Can you solve this puzzle? Try again!
Can you build this train? Good job! Awesome!
Put the toy back together. Uh oh!

You're superior! Pick a sticker.
Can you tell what time it is? Correct.
Put the dirty clothes in the basket.

Touch your surprise egg.  Pick a letter!
Learn to imagine all your choices
Real, risky, and limited. The same!

A Tube of Toothpaste and a Tuba

"To enter upon such a description is like trying to capture the uncapturable. Its only purpose can be to flatter the vanity of the describer."

We were camped in the heat in the wash.
I was taking our daughter to pee
When a woman appeared in the trees,

Tall, thin, freckled, wearing pink glasses
And white slacks, feet vanishing in sand.
She asked if I was part of the band

And pointed to a car in the scrub
Behind us, bottomed out on bald tires,
A tuba tied to the top by wires,

Gray, overloaded with guitars, drums,
One tube of toothpaste, no empty seats
Save for the gone driver's. A slight breeze,

Fluffed the woman's sweat-drenched hair. I said,
No, there's no band. That car's just stuck there.
Her head dropped with despair like a tree's.

The Picture I Wish I Had

Is of Sukha near sunset
Off the Kolob Terrace Road
Hunkered down the sandy slope
Among the ants and lizards
Above the purely purling
Creek where we camped for Lord knows
How long, trying to breathe free.

Life of a Flotilla of Ducks

There's never no wave. The trough

Is a part of the preceding,
Receding crest and also
Part of the gathering rush.
The wave hits and it passes.
Afterwards, they say, just ducks.
No after, just between us.

Beer and Bananas

The serious subjects that shift lives
Have a habit of seeming silly.
Take beer or bananas, for instance.

Suds and slippers for comedians,
Billions of lives removed or added
To indifferent Earth as a result,

Nobody takes them seriously.
The silly subjects that mean nothing,
(Apocalypse, Truth) seem serious.

While

I assembled this pattern
Of letters in pre-fab words
And learned English conventions,
The same old boring language,
The world was changing within
And without me for a space
Of time. The dictionary

Confirms that use of the phrase,
"A space of time": Old English,
Old Frisian, Gothic for "while."
Go back further and find "rest"
Was an earlier sense of the word,
While I resist both senses.
No rest left, no space in time.

The Text as Message

Sometimes I just feel better when
I write dumb things down that won't fly
With anyone, not even me.
The world's enough to make me cry,

Read that however you damn please.
The hours that crumble in my bones
That crumble under me insist

There's more to names than sticks and stones,

But they're wrong. There's no more to names
Than scaffolding for commonsense,
Nothing that pain resists or stains,
Nothing that wasn't, even then.

A Quiet Evening at Home

"Put your acorn in the right spot or you will get in trouble." ~ Sukha
"It's hard to know when you don't know." ~ Sarah

Ah, family. Board games, bored games,
Gossip, family dynamics.
Whom do we know, naming no names,
Whose love life's too slow, too manic?

Who might break up? Whose move is it?
Who will disappear in the fog
Of dementia, death? Who to visit?
Who adopted man, child, cat, dog,

Or bought a house they can't afford?
Who just sent me back ten spaces?
Where's my piece gone to on this board?
Here I am. Here's where my place is.

Outer Inner Echo Chamber

The cathedral couldn't give up the ghost
Of the choristers' last note, floating
Around and making sweet moan.

The cave continued the keening complaint
Of the huddled witnesses, as the painter
Finished one last torchlit sketch of the fearsome mane.

The fire followed the runners down
The hills the drought had browned,
A roar their inner ears forever carried around.

It still goes around and around, without
Ever really escaping. The louder the shout,
The longer it will linger before the word gets out.

Poem Topics

On PoemHunter.com, the top five
Searched poem topics are,
In this order: "Rape-Funny-
Inspiration-Chocolate-Suicide."

Perhaps some of those topics
Could be combined into the world's
Most searchable poem. How about
A poem about chocolate as

Inspiration for rape and suicide?
Funny lines about all four?

If these are readers' favorite topics,
My god, who are we writing for?

After the Shrieking Comes the Silence

"That's actually a funny line," a friend

Told me when I said it as a promise
That a toddler would soon be off to sleep
And done with stumbling over his guitars,
Demanding he only play the big one,
Not the ukulele! "It could apply,"
He added, "to the whole deal of our lives,
Everything summed up in miniature."
We both laughed. He cleared away some dishes.
The toddler jumped off the couch. Our partners
Took her outside, into a green evening
Lit by paper lanterns and fairy lights
And eased by a light breeze off of the lake.
"You sure have a mordant sense of humor,"
He said, as we left. I wrote the line down.

Nov. 4, 1977 Happy Birthday Linda, Love Mary

The book that Mary inscribed
For Linda is hardcover,
The 1971,
Third Edition of Modern
Short Stories, edited by
Arthur Mizener, revised
From the 1962

First edition to contain
A few more Black and female
Authors, one sign of those times,
Published by Norton and aimed
Of course at textbook markets.
Questions appear at the back,
With Mizener's bona fides.

This particular copy
Hints at more personal use,
Given as a birthday gift
Six years after its printing,
Used but in good condition,
As now, a generation
Later, largely undamaged,
Taped dust jacket still on it,

As Sarah bought it, I think
At a used bookstore somewhere
Between Utah and BC,
For us to read this summer.
We've sampled items. We share
A fondness for worn copies
Of minor anthologies,

Obsolescent selections
Of out-of-fashion writers,
Writers wholly forgotten,
And still-stamping war horses
People pretend to know well.
They make good late-night reading,
Conversations, collage, dreams

And household objects we keep
Or travel with for a while,
Until we've donated them
Or they've fallen to pieces.
Last month, when I felt poorly
One afternoon, Sarah left
This one on the porch for me

To browse between fitful naps.
I didn't read much, just two
Or one-and-a-half stories.
Mainly I looked at the thing,
That inscription, trying hard
Not to feel too nostalgic
And sad as well as sickly

Near the end of vacation
In the green and pretty world.
Bees buzzed. Breezes stirred porch chimes.
'62. '71.
'77. All years
I was a living child. Who
Was Linda then to Mary?

The same questions always asked
About the anonymous
And semi-anonymous
Inscriptions that sediment
Like lost feathers, bits of moss,
And shed skins at the bottom
Of the small pond of a life.

Novelists Infuriate

Novelists infuriate family and friends,
Not to say colleagues and students
And superiors as well, all spied upon,

By revealing homely details of them
And their conversations that they now wish
They'd kept to themselves. Poets,

On the other hand, infuriate by parading
Details of their own selves that family and friends,
Not to say colleagues and students

And superiors as well, all wish
They'd never, ever had to read.
It's a sin, but at least I'm not a novelist.

The Cat's Paw Remastered

Pink! Pink and baby blue splotches
Specked with white spots of stars. Why
Does that surprise me? Why not

Pink and blue with white polka dots?
Whatever disposed the night sky
Doesn't bow to the aesthetic crotchets

Of a primate raised on greens,
Loving fine, wide sheets of blue,
Billowing, pillowy whites and pale greys,

The long vistas of those savannah days
When lions slept. Preferences accrue
Over generations, which means

The patches of stars, finely
Or tastelessly arranged,
Occasionally helpful, but always

Inedible, tangential, fall away
Continuously, beyond the range

Of our beautiful hunger for beauty, divinely.

Done with Should, Revisited

I wish.
Every person who tells me something
Flattering or snooty about my poetry
Production rate forgets
That terms like "chiseled,"
And "laborious,"
And "adamantine,"
When applied to verse or, worse,
To poetry in toto, are totally
Metaphorical after all.

The hardest sentiment
To ne'er so well express
Is soft wet sand contrasted
To the difficulty of living
The principle of the thing.
Another metaphor, yes,

That's easy. I should
Not indulge myself anymore
With easy metaphors. I should,
If I could, be done with should.
I wish.

11:11 PM The Middle Distance

If, and I'm only saying if, we could
Delight always in the unexpected,

Even the slightest or the traumatic,
Life would have so much charm,

Because every damn day twists
Some way unexpectedly,

Usually before a body can fully wake:
That strange, howling dog in small hours,

The toddler's nightmare and demand
To share a bed with her parents,

The way the coffee tastes, the way
The weather forecast turned out wrong,

The thing you were sure would work,
The thing you were sure wouldn't,

The injury that turned things upside down,
The chance meeting that averted a crisis--

Most often, the places you pass through
Or activities you do that aren't so strange,

Just not what you would have guessed,

And then of course, that one twist, death.

You don't know what you'll be doing
By 9am tomorrow morning, no,

Not even if everything goes
According to schedule, rare enough.

Look up at the little bend in the long rise

This moment as you read and, maybe,

Think of some old poet ascending

To heaven by the staircase of surprise.

Bigger Works Harder than Smaller to Be Simpler

For Diana Hartog

Ask me to stop being
Complicated. I'll stop.
I'll stop dead in a pinch.
My heart leaps. There! The fluke
Of a blue whale's quick tail,
So disproportionate

To all my shrunken limbs
In the context of boats.
My heart, my heart, swollen
Too many dimensions
For geometers' lines

To topologize them,

Beats me to death for this
Whooshing complicity
With shape-shifting oceans,
The disheveled, fish-eyed
Depths I shouldn't explore
With nothing more lungs

To bring the oxygen
To its great pump of blood
To fuel the rest of me,
Restlessly, without rest,
Even where no air comes in,
Even in the darkness.

Fridges and Cars in the Desert

Some people don't like sweeping
And vacuuming, you say, but
I only have a problem
With fridges and cars.  Fridges
Smell so bad, you add--I hate
Having to clean them. I hate
Having anything to clean,

I respond, knowing the truth
Is that, occasionally,
I like washing up dishes,
Often like small tidying,
But abhor dusting and fear
The bigger jobs I can't do.
Who likes cleaning endlessly?

My Parents Never Lied

My parents never lied
About petty things: how many cookies
Were left in the box, how many hours
Until we got to Grandma's house.
When they promised a treat,
That was the treat we got.

But my mother hid her emotions
Like a cat, and could bury
A dark secret like a dog buries a bone,
Like a dog contented with knowing
The bone is buried somewhere,
Long after forgetting just where.

And my father, emotive and sensitive
And comically irascible when he tried
To be patriarchal, as he supposed he should be
Because it was the role normal men played,
Was not normal, neither of body nor brain,
And built a little kingdom of privacy
Around his actual longings, which
Were not of the sort safe to express.
Whenever my mother discovered
A piece of this mess, she buried it.

They're both beyond buried now.
I imagine they took a few more
Secrets with them into the crematorium.
The children, long grown, have scattered,
Struggled, died, succeeded,
Or raised families of their own. I try
To keep my promises to my daughter,
To not elide, hide, or lie.
I have faith that consistency and trust
When given in childhood, when unbroken,
Make for better grown-up lives.
But I still consider my parents,
Grandparents, siblings, genetic
Nieces, adoptive nephews. Who
Did well or not. Who knows what lies
We have accumulated altogether,
Generations at a time, which
Were foolish, hurtful, scary, or wise?
Who knows what could possibly be better,
The effort to be honest about every
Little thing, the effort to be big

But true, the effort to survive
The inevitable surprise?

We'll Keep It Just For Us, and the Bees

Even the flies can have a little bit,
Sukha says to me about some yogurt,
A fleck of which has been left on a plate.
It's sunset, some time ago, and too late
For bees, kids, poets who feel belated,
Not that that fact has put any of us
To bed. We stay out instead until ten.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten,
Sukha counts the bees and hours. I lean out
Over a railing, absentmindedly.

My old nemesis, gravity, lures me
Down below with the soft green promises
Of tamed high-country meadows at twilight.
I'm not buying. Not yet, not quite. Bugs bite,
To remind me of the hazards of life.
I half distract myself from temptation
By considering etymology.
Supposedly, graves came from verbs "to scratch"
While the weightier gravitas derived
From its earlier self, itself alone.

Good old Proto Indo-European,
Mythos of my myth-resisting old age.
No one's as old as in middle age,
The last medieval, the last in between
Of all the ages from cradle to grave,
The last transition that isn't to bed

Or sometimes is. I scratch my heavy head.
Sukha draws a scrawling of a beehive
To convince the last of the honeybees
Awake away. Long ago, as I said.

Some Days

Some days, Satan said, I just want to tell
Someone that I had no desire to rule
In heaven or in hell.  I never thought
That I was beautiful among angels.

I knew that I was a bit of a troll.
I never thought anyone would follow
Me down. I never thought a single soul
Would follow a thing so small as it fell.

I knew that falling was a novelty
Among spirits immune to gravity.
Condensation alone made me the first,

Earned me the phrase, "Son of the Morning Star."

Train your telescopes far enough behind
The spinning backside of your collection
Of endlessly tumbling spheres. You may see

A smudge gathering strength for that first swoon.

Other Thing That Is Neggh Forlorn Also

Maybe, if I could just sum up,
I could just move on. Here is no now.
There was no then. In the dullest,
Stillest moment, the only constancy
Is the change, the ever-going

Change. Nothing exists and abides.
I don't understand it. I don't, I can't,

And I never will. I'm a dog

Contemplating the moon. It's not
Romance. It's not romantic, when
All I can offer are long forlorn howls.

We're Never Casual, Please. We're Humans.

One afternoon this passing summer
I stumbled across a lawn full of party
Guests under blue skies, and mistaking
The colorful, casual attire and bright balloons
For a birthday celebration, I inquired
As to the occasion and was corrected.

"It's a wedding. The bride and groom
Are big believers in informality."
So I was informed. But I noticed,
As I left that green zone in my swim trunks,
With wading shoes and crutches for accessories,
That the strolling, departing wedding guests,

Male and female, were carefully dressed.
The young men who wore baggy shorts,
Showed tanned, bulging bicyclist calves,
And the young women in sundresses
Were cinched in at the waist, form-fitting
Only if or at the shapely busts and hips.

Fool's Epigram

Us folks forget, in all the time that we waste
Trying to impress each other, that feeling
Superior's more to one another's taste,
And the inferior sorts intoxicate.

Im Munich Ist Ein Hofbrau Supermarket

Satiety
And silliness,
Twin jesters of
Our existence,

Are like frothed beer,
They don't smell well
Against the walls,

Or on bookshelves,

But they do sit
Well in the guts,
Sometimes, of those
Who consumed them

And are giddy
For a glimpsed bit
Of Galilee,
Freely foaming.

Inaestimabilis

"It is the kind of object you get lost in, and such wandering has a way of yielding unexpected discoveries and connections, as any number of chivalric knights discovered."

The long procession shimmers
In a haze of contexts, far
And near from your perspective
Where you watch it ignore you,
Unaware of you, even
As it drums drums, blares its horns,
And performs its gymnastics

To attract your attention,
In hopes of enticing you
To inspect it more closely,
The whole elaboration
Of borrowed junk and fine parts,
To get lost as it unwinds

And opens coils around you.

Topological inverse
Of the known Ouroboros
(Suffocating constrictor!),
This serpent that parts the leaves
And draws in by opening
The view, knocking down the fruit
Worth chewing, hard to digest.

You pick up that fruit because
The jugglers and the jongleurs
In that long snake they parade
Are tossing fruit and candy

And baubles mixed together.

The truth is in there somewhere,

As Eve found by accident,

But it's not really the point,
Is it? Not even the prize
You're really hoping to catch.
Who wants to know what God knows?
Omniscience! What a burden
That would be: every damned thing
Locked into place forever.

You want mischief, diversion,
Entertainment without end,
And the long, dusty parade,
Indeterminate, wearied,
But still full of surprises,
Encourages you to keep
Paying attention, begs you,
With its antics, keep reading....

Swad

Sweet, suave, hedonistic pleasure,
Appealing to the senses,
Changing little through the ages,
Meaning quiet and leisure,

Freedom from aches and visitors,
If you ask me. A soft hour
Of uselessness, for stories dour
But romantic in plot twists

And denouements for underdogs
To read of alone and laugh,
Parodic selves as epitaphs,
Wanderers' wondering thoughts

As they traverse gothic forests
Unsuitable for real lives
But out there, far out past the mind
That does its chores. Sweetness rests.

The Resistance

"If you are reading this, you are the resistance." -Aleksei A. Navalny, texting at the moment of his sentencing

My treasured friend, the artist
And costumier, midway through
Her eighth decade spent in two

Cultures, two languages, two
Halving-the-world traditions,
In neither of which she was

Wholly native, both of which
Claimed vast empires at her birth
That fought each other to death

As part of a global war
When she was a child stranded
Under bombs on the losing

Empire's side, having been born
On the winning empire's side,
Family left on both sides,

Said to me, not long ago,
That her acupuncturist,
Diagnosed as terminal

With cancer and determined,
As my friend put it, "to play"
With whatever time she had,

Had gotten "a little bit
Crazy" in their last session,
Reasoning out loud with my friend's

Aching hip, talking to it
Like a recalcitrant child,
Finally telling it, "Fine!

I'll leave you alone!" My friend
Turned on the table to ask
The woman just what she meant

By getting upset at her,
And was told, "It's just your leg
Has got so much resistance

I'm going to have to leave it
Alone." And then she left town,
To spend her remaining time

In this world with her cancer,
Camping with dog and partner,
Somewhere way up in the woods.

The anecdote was well told
With a wry smile, a chuckle,
And eyes wide with that true smile

That implicitly says yes,
There may be something to this
Nonsense, you know, resistance

Is something that is out there,
Even when it's coming out
In some invisible way,

Some crazy way out from you
That no one can verify.
Resistance demands respect.

Veiled

It thins again. I know
What this means. A chaos
Of dark swans beats their wings:

This is the white, falling,
Passage of passages,
Drenched in unexpected

Rains that roll into fogs,
Storms of pure blue skies
And scorching surprises.

Take it all in. You can.

I know you can. You have.

This is it when it's thin.

Sometimes, Dark at Night

Sometimes, dark at night,
When I hear my heart beat
In my ear, it sounds like your footsteps
Down the narrow hall of Shelly's
Trailer home in the Kootenay forest
In the wee, warm hours of June and July
When the late-night runs of wood chip trucks
Down the winding, wooded highway

Rumbled by. That hollow hall,

That holy passage of convenience in the mountains,
Thin wood over empty crawl space over slug-dotted lawn,
Could make the small tread, our toddler's pitter-patter
Thump around like tympani detuned
After a long orchestral vacation.

Process Fractionalization

Mosquito hour. The hunger
That doesn't share its torment
With consumer and consumed
Can't be called hunger at all.
Bless this pest. She's all that keeps
Drowsy me alert tonight
When I most need my wits kept.

Sleep waits to take us apart.
No, not that sleep. That's hunger,
Death is. Ordinary sleep
Is the process that divides
Awareness into pieces
And removes them, as does drink,
Bits at a time from the mind.

I said something to someone
Last night. I forget until
A mosquito reminds me.
I might say something tonight
Except for a well-timed slap.
Oh, no bees have ever buzzed
As loud as starved mosquitoes.

Bless them, but they won't succeed.
The ones I don't kill myself
Will drink their fill, die somewhere
Else as I collapse to sleep
By stages, losing ego,
Senses, hunger last of all,
And God slaps away at dreams.

Harold Bench, Too

Someone has torn off the plaque from the bench,
Exposing a dark patch on the bleached wood.

That's all the memorial left Harold,
Whose parents had this bench built, in his name,

At the fish-rich mouth of Silverton Creek
On a rocky beach by the walking path

With a perfect view south across the lake,
Before, someone said, they left town for good.

This is the sixth year I've come to this bench,
Spring, summer, fall, to sun after a swim

Or to sit alone and study the lake
Like a monk or a Romantic poet,

As if I ever had the discipline
And sweet, melancholic trust in Nature

To ever master either profession,
That enlightening, terrifying awe.

I just watch or talk to the passers by,
Who invariably ask if I've swum yet

Or how much, and how cold it was. "Cold, eh?"
They fish, throw sticks to their dogs, fly model planes,

Take their kayaks out, occasionally
Get into the water and swim like me.

"Cold, eh? But invigorating. So clean!"
I agree. One of them tore off the plaque

That declared "In Memory of Harold."
A few years would have done it anyway.

Let's not get too self-righteous or morose.
I never knew Harold. I like this bench.

This is the second poem that I've composed
To praise it while sunning myself on it,

And maybe the hundredth time I've scrambled
The brown-shelled eggs of small ideas while here,

Drying off, shivering, sweating, stalling
As long as I can, hiding out from life

By living under the full, slow movement
Of the shadows around the sundial pines,

By diving under the fast, cold moment
Of a rush from the creek hitting the lake.

It's not Harold that I knew, mourned, and loved.
This bench is Harold and his pilgrimage

From human meaning to human meaning,
To defacement, to weathering, to change.

Jhator: Alms for the Birds

We do like to feed each other, don't we?
Toddlers will force feed the doggy, mothers
Will hatch plans to trick food into toddlers,
Fathers will open waistbands and wallets
To pretend a suburban restaurant
Is the setting for personal potlatch,
Roman banquets complete with attendants.
A loner's not a loner invited
To a holiday feast but a witness
To the feast-giving family's honor

And largesse, be the feast teetolaling
Or debauched by beer and bud, strict vegan
Or danced around suckling pigs on spits,
Whether every last centavo be spent
For a once-in-your-life extravagance,
Or whether nightly leftover excess
From the back of baronial kitchens
Furnishes tables of dumpster divers
Who pride themselves on tricky fine dinners
For bourgeois friends impressed and horrified.

The loner's not a loner, invited.
It doesn't matter to us whether food
Used to be something that ate us, the guests
Something we've gulped with relish ourselves in the past,
The vermin under tables, nails, and skin
Revolting parasites to be lured out,
Trapped, snapped, and executed or benign
Aids to digestion toiling deep within
The paradox of omnivorous grace,
Scarecrows without flesh, bodies for the birds.

YHWH = K&S-R/R = Delta Z

Once upon whoever I was at the time,
I sat in this exact car seat in this
Exact car at this exact spot
At this exact time of year in the rain,

Trying, for the life of me, to process
An equation said to encompass all
Processes. Right here, by this road,
This abandoned railhead, this stream

Of relentless recreation while rain
Tried to explain to me on the window
That nothing explained anything,
Nothing was ever the same, ever

The same nothing I was and would
Write about forever because I couldn't
Understand being something that knew
Itself as nothing that knew it wasn't.

The shiny motorcycles rumbling past
Were similar then, not the same.
The blood in my veins, not the same,
My daughter in the back, not at all,

But this thing in my brain, nothing
But something inside my brain,
Feels now how close everything was
To the same, calls it exact, exactly

And rebuilds, once again,
The same impossible equation
The shell game of all shell games,
Covariance, comparison, the Name.

Graffitify

Why the desire to caress the walls
Of stalls and tombstones
And signs sufficient to themselves
With--what the hell best to call it?

Think about it. The enormous effort,
Never accomplished by any genius
Anywhere for hundreds of millennia,
The collective accomplishment

Of an agreed-upon system of signs
For transcribing aspects of speech
Sound for sound, word for word,
So scratched bones, clay, stones,

Could be interpreted as sayable
Things someone once had said,
And then the rarity of it, the magic
Of mastering the difficult trick,

The art of carving time into items
That could convey the illusion
Of eluding time altogether to talk
To other generations entirely,

Who is the imp within the scribe,
The scribe within the ordinary
Child battered into years of practice
Who wants to gouge godawful rhymes

Of little or no charm or hopefulness
And even less originality as stains,
As furious, impotent, heartbreaking
Attempts meant at mockery,

Obscenity, identity, omnipotence
On the bare face of public space?
Why spit in the eye? Why rhyme?
Once in a while among the runes

There's something wise or kind,
A bit of unique autobiography,
A sobbing, scritched out cri-de-couer,
But usually, for centuries, mad stupidity--

Banging body jokes in broken lines,
Boasts about what would shame
The boaster, were he to be caught
Fulfilling his crooked rhymes,

An amazing expense of spirit
And culture hard come-by in a waste
Of outrageous effort, mostly tame,
To set down dreams in doggerel

That appears to want to defile
The emptiness of the world, to layer
The venting of anger, disrespecting
Even worthless mysteries of others,

As Viking crudities chiseled inside
The Neolithic tombs of Scotland,
As cowboys' bullet signatures
Pocking apart old Utah rock art--

I stopped in a forest in Canada
Where the waterfalls fell in a rage
That felt the mountains were prisons
To break, gravity a joy, trees a cage,

And I stepped in a tidy, whitewashed
Outhouse picturesque as a cottage
And found five lines, plus a drawing,
In bad ballpoint, describing--what?

The General's Memoirs

What do you forgive the man

Who has forgotten everything?
Do you let him lie all afternoon
On the tattered green couch

Beside the pile of books, of work,
Of things that should have been undone
Yesterday, when he was still of a mind
To solve things? That's a lot

To ask of yourself in the name
Of what might have been a gift
Of extraordinary life, maybe was
So, but is now a heap of little errors.

If I have to read or hear one more time
About the artist perpetually in debt,
The composer making a shambles
Alongside of all those masterpieces,

If I have to wonder one more time
About the ordinary, vacant souls
My mother tended to in nursing homes
And all the schemes they might have been,

I'll just go back to sleep. How can we
Try so hard to elaborate imaginary
Worlds no mortal animals can live in
Who aren't content to be immortal?

The Hours of Moths and Owls

Sukha: "Papa, you read the book of secrets while I play games, OK?"

My wife has taken my place in the night.
She stays up late with moths and owls,
Building things, battering lit panes, and hunting for the answers

Daylight too easily, glibly, marketably provides.
I have become a night sleeper,
A morning tea-drinker,

A grumpy-then-acquiescing father,
An afternoon napper like my Dad.
I have a daughter. I have a memory

Like an attic filled with decades
Of being up late and among the spiders

Hunting down theories who listened for owls
As the white-footed mice tilted brief ears, young.

The Thanks

The cheap, pocket paperback book
He gave me from the creaseless shelves
Of his life's lending library
Was a red-backed Penguin Classsic
In perfect condition, except
For the acidification
Of its twentieth-century
Paper-pulp pages turning beige.

No comments, no dog ears, no stains:
Had he ever read it, he read
With such reverence for the text
As fine, material object,
However cheaply mass-produced,
A Torah could not have complained.
This was no Torah. A novel
From the era of great novels,

It had pretensions to saving
Humans from their humanity,
But did not claim to speak for God
Directly, nor, as was the case
For some contemporary tales,
To be in fact spoken by God.
It was just a story, weary
Of what it felt compelled to tell.

I took it for its size, texture,
And promise of most serious
Appearance whenever spotted
Casually opened in my hand.
The author and title conveyed
Enough seriousness to warn
Even the well-read stranger off.
The volume spoke both thrift and heft.

Also, I had never read it,
Although, as with so many works,
I had heard enough about it
To pretend, with some insouciance,
That both the author and his tale
Were old acquaintances of mine,
Even though it had been a while,
And memory had slightly blurred.

I began to carry it with me,
Partly intending to read it,
Partly intending to have it
At hand when bored enough to read.
Fitfully, one page here or there,
I actually read the damn thing.
It's greasy now, stained, creased, and real.

I don't really care for it now.
I don't like the world it pretends.
I find the tone contemptuous,
Generalizing to a fault,
Mocking what the author missed
While dreaming of a great success.
He got his great success. Censors,
Grudgingly, let him slip through.

Time made a temple of his name
Throughout the land he satirized.
He sold well. He dreamed greater dreams.
He panicked and destroyed the work
He knew was nothing more than this,
The thing he made clever at first
But could not make true to the end.

Cicatrice

I love this word. It's fancy,
It's hardly necessary,
It has a plain synonym,
"Scar," in English, but shows up
In literature, web searches,
Libraries, Latin, Spanish,
French, and Italian, a sound

Like a cicada singing,
Ugly and extravagant
And hinting at ugliness,
The coarse red course of the world
Down our backs, out of sight, fierce,
Autobiographical,
Identifying, swollen,

And signifying either
Illness, war, or suffering
At the whim of punishers.
Better still, its origin's
"Unknown," "uncertain," unproved.
How did the Romans find it?
From the Etruscans? Cretans?

Some other linguistic group
With no representative
Among living languages,
Not Indo-European,
Not even Neolithic?
Was this a word the hunters
And foragers at the end

Of the human invasion
Of the retreating ice sheets
Borrowed from Neanderthals?
I doubt it. But I like it.
It sounds just bizarre enough
To be a scar. I doubt life,
I doubt truth. But I like it.

Lung

Breathe, the well-lunged like to say.
Breathe deeply. Breathe normally. Count
Your breaths like children counting clouds
Or climbers counting Moki steps.

Feel the way the world's within you,
The way you embody the world.
What could be simpler or richer,
Holier or closer to life

Than the simple act of breathing?
But there's a secret in the breath.
It's the most desperate hunger
We have that we can choose to sate.

The heart is beyond our control,
Or beyond control's illusion.
No human ever ate or drank
Anything continuously,

Certainly not as means to peace,
And food and water anyway
Are more often hard to come by
Than the airs we drag in and out.

But, huge multicellular beasts
And ecosystems that we are,
Lumbering around out of the sea,
Using breath as tool and signal,

We forget all too easily
That this one regularity
Pulling oxygen deep within
Our cellular communities

Is our core currency, first food,
Before water or sugar or fat.
Long before micronutrients
Could run low, our bodies need air

For fuel, for resources, for life
Lived out of the wet, for access
To all the other things we need
And all the things we need to say.

This is not simple, sitting here
Under Corinthian birches,
Beside roaring Enterprise Creek,
Breathing, breathing this sweetness, breeze.

Diviner

I still try. I haven't given up
Completely on telling a story.
But storytelling now feels too much
Like an article of faith, or worse

A social obligation, a god,
A rule about the legitimate
Use of any sort of way with words
Not already applied to science,

Sermons, law, political speeches,
Publishable essays in prose,
Textbooks, and so forth. Write a novel,
Write a memoir, something nonfiction,

Anything, for heaven's sake, that tells
A good story, something dramatic,
Something with people being people.
Stories are rivers. Your poems are ponds,

Or worse, dry wells dug in scrub forests
Where every twig's a divining rod
And every tugging breeze a liar
Laughing in the leaves above the flowers

Where you dig down in absurdity,
Reaching only into darker soil
The next rains or wildfires pollinate
With fresh wildflowers growing from below.

Art's cavernous underground is carved
By stories that emerge from the sides
Of conversations and comedy
To combine and gather toward the sea.

What's another random spade of dirt
Dug out of this loam of loneliness,
When everything human is rushing
Down braided deltas, down to the shore?

Matthew Konstantinovsky

Nothing particular happened at dinner.
The echoing thrushes sang for their lives.
Someone whose opinion the author valued
Persuaded him to stop offending God.

How much of a tale is true doesn't matter
As long as we persist in telling stories
About which tales are true and which tales are false,
Proclaimed Father Matthew Konstantinovsky,

An uncouth religious fanatic of sorts,
Depending on whose version of the story
One credits. Credit. All culture inheres
In that pure term of Indo-European

Pain and etymology, or, if you like,
Within its old Germanic synonym, trust.
I believe you. I believe in you. I trust
Your story is true, and by virtue of trust,

Credit, belief, honor, cooperation,
I expect you to acknowledge my bared throat.
I listen to you. I lend you my ears. Why
This should constitute a gift is the secret

Behind the meaning of stories as story.
One censor wrote that Gogol was "taking arms
Against immortality." Prophetic ghost,
Gogol proved the censor wrong by dying first.

First, Father Matthew made certain he had burned
All that he had written about the mortgaged
Souls of perished serfs preserved on census rolls
In the crazed hope of saving Mother Russia.

No one saves a metaphor. No metaphor
Imagines its own salvation. This is not
A story. I refuse to write a story.
Stories are dead souls hungry ghosts must mortgage.

Thus, Every Being, Compounds Kinds

"The concept of a minimal genome, while provocative, is ultimately a dead end."

 

It seems that fleas do not have fleas
Ad infinitum, although those
Who tease apart these things are pleased
To have numbered concentric rings

As small and interdependent
As the shells of walled descendants
Of free-living beings hiding
Inside hosts where they make the most

Of their shelter by some service
To their possessor, while possessed
Themselves by more shells of one-celled
Descendants of dead infectors,

Every parasite dividing
The work of parasitizing,
So that hosts in hosts are not dolls
In dolls at all but wholes that crawl

Along the self-defending length
Of sap-nasty, world trees of life,
Cooperatively digesting
What no one-kindly kinds could digest

Without having first ingested
Vermin as pets and familiars
To help, divide, and simplify.
No wild I is I. Bewildered,

The soul, if you will, is a whole
And a nothing between the walls
Of what sustains it, what it was,
And what could never be at all.

Mudguard

Today we have the filling of forms:
Who are you? How do we know you are
You? What do you want from us? How much?
Why should we give anything to you?
What should persuade us? Are you worth it?
The poetry of shared suspicion,
The literature of applying
To applications. Are you worthy?
Look at me, but you cannot see me!

My name is Formless. I have a shape,
But I am not the shape you can see.
I am a past. I'm everything passed.
I am the past that's always changing.
Chase me through the forms I've filled for you.
Chase me through forms you've filled for others.
That's the way the literate do it,
But don't lay it on the bureaucrats.
The stalkers at campfires started it.

There was, somewhere, the original
"Halt! Who goes there?" The first use of words
To demarcate worthy and worthless.
What a notion! Worth! What are you to us?
What are we to ourselves, to the world?
Everything. Not much. Have you ever
Backed an old truck into a ditch,
Ground your way out, and lost a mudguard?
Filed a form? No? Good. That's the password.

The Cheerful Art

"The earliest known reference to suicide is a poem, written on papyrus in Egypt 4,000 years ago."

The genre, the lyric,
The inscribed poem is glass
Blown from dunes set on fire,

Twirled in gobs at arm's length
While it's still dangerous,
Clipped, set, allowed to cool

Into proverbs, cliches
About glasses half full,
Half empty, real lyrics,

Baubles whose dependence
On settings, performance
With accompaniment

Among the palaces
Of song, dance, story, scenes,
And so forth conceal them

From their own existence,
Their fragile translucence,
Bent gleams and reflections.

It is not unhappy.
It is not dishonest.
It is a distortion

Of every thought the sands
Will break over, cover,
And scatter back to sleep.

Even

"Every idealist abuses his nerves, and every sentimentalist brutally abuses them. And in the end, the nerves get even."

And how would we know who we are
Within these swirling vortices
Created by the gravity
Of biological success
Sucking down the cumulative
Pools of cultural histories?
We're in here somewhere, as patterns,
Perhaps, but I suspect there's more.

It's true enough that, in cliches
And prefabricated nonsense,
Comprising most human signage
In all media from rock art
To pillow talk, barfly banter,
Dim celebrity interviews,
The faintest trace of persona
Haunts slight idiosyncrasies,

And that even monumental
Cultural temples of voices
And visions renowned for greatness,
Uniqueness, strange life histories,
Unmistakable elegance
And brutality of showing
Their worlds to the rest of our worlds,
Are recognized by and for shapes

Hidden within the otherwise
Borrowed and inherited ways
That the god, the prophet, the ghost,
The genius commanding language,
The revolutionary sent
To redeem our moribund thoughts,
Our dull, craven acquiescence
To what we were handed said no.

But we feel that we are. We feel
That we are more or other than
Either these feelings of bodies,
Cosmopolises of switches
And genes synchronizing their cells
And the cells of their parasites,
Commensalists, mutualists,
And invisible hangers-on,

Or our monstrous assemblages
Of inward-turning signalings,
The gobbed, colonial bolus
Of culture that rides like a foam
Of concentrated detritus,
Torn boats and homes and plastic ducks,
A kind of mangrove swamp of thoughts
Cut loose and accumulating

More junk, myths, legends, toilet lids,
Prayer flags, mass-manufactured saints,
Heroes from alien planets
First cast loose from someplace destroyed
By the time any flesh wanted,
Without understanding itself,
Return, always circling the waves,
The Flying Dutchmen of our faiths.

And if we are, if we are more,
Caught, but not a part, but apart
From the sticky, springy, spinning
Lines of languages, messages,
Melanges, collages, messes,
Not the sum of interstices,
Not even quite wholly contained
By holy interpretations,

Then what could we possibly be?
We're murdered as we introspect,
We're birthday parties for donkeys
Without tails, as in children's tales,
The doleful imagination
Of "here we are, and there we are."
I can't accept this.  I believe,
Thanks to the crucible of doubt

That can't add, but can get rid of,
Can't transubstantiate the flesh
Or squeeze gold from philosophers,
With or without their worthless stones,
But can absurdly simplify
The tinctured wish of the complex,
That we exist right now, right here,
Even as all else disappears.

The Translation of All Prayer

I am not waiting

For any miracle.
I am waiting
For the improbable

The narrowly defined
Extremely improbable
Event that will favor
Me, me, me, spectacularly.

Self Portrait in Shards of Light

The glass tree with glass leaves shed

Leaf glass on the green grass bed.
I picked up one whirligig leaf and said,

"This was lava, basalt pillows, foaming stone
Worn down at last by years alone
Against the rain to sand, to china bone."

The glass tree laughed leaves in breezes
And scattered more broken pieces.
I love whatever breaks however it pleases.

Tsuneko Kokubo and the Gold Mountain

The angel's wings are drying on the line.
Her conspecifics rise in ragged files
Of flakes of gold above the summer lake,
But she sleeps in the short grass some fool mowed
And dreams of coming wholly down to earth,
Trivial entertainment for a soul
Composed of costumes, confusion, and truth.

Winds off the lake stir her wings on the line,
Their secret that they know they've been defiled
By flying gold to the sun from the lake.
They're so grateful to be laundered that they glow
With the mystery of clouds brought to earth.
Such wings are things with thoughts, without a soul,
Needing neither any angel nor truth.

Run On

Race to write before the night
That is not the thing without
The sun hogging the sky behind

Clouds or your averted eyelids
(Yes, yours, not mine, I'm not
Blurring any yous for you this time)

And not the metaphorical night
Of ordinary death or division
That is devoutly to be shushed

But the night of naught, the night
Of forgetting the details that made
You think you were a thing aware

And not the mere awareness
Of the thing as it breathed and ate
The air too thin for descendants

Of the blood of the oceans,
That night, that unpunctuated
Ungrammatical night of stars

So exquisite forever in every
Direction that gods never find

To hide their shine in, that, that,

The night of being your own
Light in an infinite whirl
Of what is not you and not.

The Island of the Alive

I'm actually not
An especially
Morbid sort of guy.
I'm a wanderer,
Yes, but just because

I'm so well aware
How short my legs are,
How tightly the Earth
Spins on its hot core.
So many constraints

Whisper a secret
Silent as the sound
Of the Earth turning
Underneath clutched feet:.
I can tell you what,

And outlast the truth
By a little bit,
By the promise length
That you won't believe
A word I'm riddling:

If any surprise
Is found in my rounds,
That miracle's real.
We have so little
Space in our mousetraps,

So little real faith
In our cellular
Selves built of more cells,
We feel there's no time.
We panic. We flail.

But the littleness
Of our snug orbits
Holds newness in it,
Always holds newness,
Always remains strange.

That strangeness is change,
That change is our beast
We call the devil
Who is all mercy.
There's nowhere to go.

The universe wheels
Like a donkey cart
Through the dark and straw
Stars darkness squatted.
But somehow, by day,

By night, by seasons
Even ants can count
Out of drudgery,
By waves wearing shore,
It's all, always . . . new.

Why

Do persons, people
Of my acquaintance

Who will nearly weep
For the faint nuance

Contained in the phrase
"I wrote poetry

In my younger days,
Long before thirty,

Before I knew much
About what I liked,"

Refuse such and such
Verse, such and such type?

Everyone of us
Has to learn sometime

Every word's too much,
Every swerve and rhyme,

Every return dark
As lunar eclipse

Once we have embarked
From the blank boat slip

Where the trout that lisps
Silver whisperings,

The doubt that hisses
Waves of mysteries,

The old poetic,
Lyric lies that lie,

Rise up, weird, hectic
And demand we die,

That God is our loss,
Loss our forgiveness,

Poems are the cost
Of lost resistance.