Many Mini Feckless Comparisons

mene mene tekel upharsin

Contrails, long-haired comets of bald daylight,
Criss-cross the sky, white pick-up sticks, white straws
Scattered by pitchforks of technology,
White wakes of speedboats chasing across lakes.

These are my divine reassurances,
These, not rainbows, my promises from God.
These are my visitors, omens, angels,
Heavenly messengers who comfort me.

And why not? To be sure, they're just jet planes,
Peopled machines piloted by yet more
People and machines, none to do with me,
Nor I with them, and for most of my life

I've vaguely resented their trace in my skies,
Except when I was aboard one of them.
Today, their ubiquity consoles me,
And their meaningless anonymity 

Hints at everything true about this world,
As their indecipherable scribbling
That ever so slightly alters weather
Resembles the Hand, writing on the wall.

The Everything That Isn't

It is what it is.
Oh no, it is not.
It is what is not.

It is not what it is.
It is not what it was.
It won't be what it is.

It is nothing.
It is naught.
It is naughty.

It is knotty.
It is nothing.
It is knotted.

Stop telling it
what it is to discover
what it is, is not.

---

So we set out our plans
as we sit in the sun
out behind everything

we have to leave behind,
and we discuss travel,
parenting, and packing,

and we soak up the light,
we who don't sleep at night,
and we love each other,

renew our promises,
consider our options,
reconsider our plans,

and a raven chortles
in a cutting black glide
between us and the sun,

and a weird bumblebee
we've never seen before,
striped with blue not yellow,

bombards desert flowers
offering brave nosegays
to that which will wilt them,

and we revise our plans
as if our plans were ours
to propose and dispose,

and then our baby cries,
and we go back inside,
under that brief, black glide.

Just (a Place) as Well

A One . . .

A breeze stirs the baby green leaves
of a great grand cottonwood tree

so that the shadows dance
across the corrugated bark

and behind you the channeled creek
gurgles and whispers its newfound way

into the tiny, tiny reservoir
that serves this castled valley,

and you know, you admit
despite whatever fears you have,

you know that this right here,
this is good.

. . . And a Two

I suppose that more or less
every spot on earth is

equidistant from the center,
and granted that approximate fact,

there's no reason to prefer
one point as more exotic

than another, other than
human history and myth,

in which particulars this exotic
valley finds itself in short supply,

but what I wouldn't do,
mind you, entirely to be rid

of just that human history
and myth in all my selves

and in all of youse
as well.

Variations on a Theme Attributed to Galileo (with Apologies to Burns)

E pur si muove!

I

Still it
moves. Still

moving
and still

it moves.
It moves

and still
is still

and yet
it moves!

II

The past is not
because it's gone.

The future is not
because it hasn't.

And the present is not
because it can't sit still.

III

We came home to find
a giant-eared mouse,
desert indigene,
nesting in a drawer
nicely located

under the counters
near kitchen shelves
of dry goods mostly
open for taking--
a mouse paradise.

Blind, pink specks of pups
wriggled in their crib's
cozy nursery
of pink fibreglass
wall insulation.

Hard black seeds of turds
speckled the counter
by the cereal
boxes, and the couch
by the computer.

A big-eared shadow
flitted from kitchen,
over open floor,
to the firewood box
and back again, thrice,

once we'd disturbed them
by opening drawers
and spotting the nest.
She was wee, sleekit,
and timorous, but

she was not cowering.
She did not appear
to mourn best-laid schemes.
Opportunity
suggested she act,

and so she acted,
first by laying claim
to our empty house,
spectacular find,
immune to ravens,

immune to weather,
empty of other
mice of any kind,
with castles of food
and towers of drawers.

Then, when we prior
occupants returned
and surprised her nest,
she went back to work,
rearranging things.

By the next morning,
she dared a bold raid
on a dropped backpack
she'd smelled hid a bag
of almonds inside--

in blazing sunlight,
in the living room,
staring straight at us,
one insouciant ear
rotated our way.

Ah. "'Gang aft agley,'
my rosy red ass,"
she seemed to suggest,
as if daring us
to toss our own plans

and start something new,
without wringing hands
or writing dour poems
on crisis and fate.
We too have to move

from here in ten days,
drag our pink baby
to our makeshift nest.
We can and we will.
To move is to be.

IV

It moves, and everything is naught,
and yet it is, because naught moves.

Ariadne's Children Stop at Nothing

Somehow, we carry on,
Tatting our universe
With lace syllogisms,
Squinty-eyed, impoverished
Decorators of ways,

Embroiderers of paths
With fine webs of logic,
Too elegant for truth,
Sweetly as they outline
Limitations and lies:
Retracing our traces,

We're always en route.
We've always arrived.
We're just about here now,
And we've already passed.
We're barely out the door,
And already we're lost.

The Gods

     "most beautiful cosmos, heap of sweepings"
 
Can't control the details.
Can't manage the details.
Details are in control
And do the managing.
 
They're innumerable,
Everything, everywhere,
Whatever generates
That which regenerates,
 
Hidden in the background
Of even zero-point
Radiation, waving
And winking at all scales,
 
The creators of us,
Judges of every plan,
Jurors of our desires,
Parts greater than all sums,
 
Causes that slip the mesh
Of finest measurements,
Sink through atoms, become
Randomness, and vanish.
 
Details are the beauty
In places of decay,
The sirens of silence,
The fine-grained calm of pain,
 
The explanations seen
From out of the corner
Of hindsight's startled eye,
The faeries of the real.

Local Visitation

Right now, this is your afterlife.
Awareness is your ghost, pinned down
To a local habitation,
To a variety of names.

Wasn't it just last night you dreamed
Of falling straight down to your death,
Confronting the final quiet
As if diving into the lake?

Isn't it every night and nap
You vanish away completely
From yourself only to return
Again as slightly someone else?

Aren't you as conscious as any
Standard-order sentient being
And yet as helpless as any
Revenant haunting bare cupboards?

Afterlife is the only life
Any awareness ever knows,
Always a tick behind the real,
The no one who everyone feels.