Sacred Waste

The irretrievable tortures us.
Vacant and vain and vast and waste
Are all words grown from the same root,
Bearing fruit worthless and surplus.

Anything unconsumed is waste
Anything consumed beyond use
Is also waste. What we squander
And what destroys us, also: waste.

That which is empty is that which
Is lost and in which we get lost,
The vacant lot, the vacant stare,
Shell games, love in vain, bait and switch,

Such a waste, the rich life done soon,
The long and unaccomplished life,
Vast empty space, the black hole's maw,
The lost light of each waning moon.

Something in me is drawn to waste,
Much as I feel its repulsion,
The ruined, the toxic, the true,
The midden's trove, the hopeless case.

Little Drifter

What would it be like if you left you,
Advisor to the body,
Soft-spoken shadow?

Who would you be if you left you,
Even assuming you could leave
And were not glued to bone and marrow?

Where the Dirty Old Hermit Lives

I don't think it's true that he screams,
Nor that he keeps a loaded gun.
He's not as dirty as he seems.
He's unkempt. He lives in the sun.

His "cabin" is a double-wide
Abandoned before he found it.
He camps out there, untroubled by
Whose property rights surround it.

He likes being near the train tracks.
He spends hours at that little pond.
If you wave at him, he'll wave back,
Probably just a bit too long.

One passerby heard him lament,
"Love should be put into action!"
He swears his actual comment
Was, "No love is an infraction."

A Bar to Any Watch You Keep

Look away from everything that makes you,
Your complex, contradictory stories, 
Your profane and sacred explanations
Of differing versions of origins,
Your ceaseless, restless, useless scrutiny
Of the glittering shallows you can see
As you imagine those abyssal plains
Where great, heavy chains of causation drag,
Tangle, and scrape across the floor of things,
Forcing the invisible vortices,
Upwellings and cross-currents you christen
Time, a heaving inheritance, pushing
Against the shifting winds of each moment,
Producing, you insist, your existence,
Waves of embodiment, rolling under,
Giving rise to your spindrift consciousness,
All the wispy effervescent nonsense
You cherish, spray and spittle of your poems,
All this mist and fog of constant thinking,
Obscuring who you are when you aren't you.
Look away. Even science, even faith
Even composing poetry contracts
The view to squint-eyed, watery dazzle.
Let the rest of this day be no more than
Today. Tomorrow is another poem.

Chop Wood, Carry Water

Life is simplest on the days
When life gets complicated.
There's not much philosophy
Applicable to big trucks,
Loading docks, and tight schedules.
Country music is better 
Than Zen for this sort of thing.

Or maybe not. Assuming
Even Zen masters get stuck
Dealing with the mechanics
Of buying, hauling, and building
Mountains of monastic stuff,
A relaxed, alert focus
Might grant hectic satori.

Crates of old stuff, crates of new,
The ant-hill as memory
Of ant-actions, the midden
As extended phenotype,
The shell the tortoise
Labors to build and carry,
In order to feel secure.

It's not a human problem,
Everything that lives gathers,
Processes, incorporates,
Sheds, and regathers to live.
How do we get what we crave?
How do we get rid of it
Before it suffocates us?

Life's leftover junk riddles
The whole crust of the planet,
Rusty layers testify
To the age when oxygen
Itself was cumulative waste,
Limestone mountains, heaps of shells,
Carved up for human mansions,

Once piled on disregarded
Shelves of overstocked oceans.
So on. Whatever happens
To me and all my boxes
After today's adventures,
Leftovers will outlast me,
Others will sift my remains,

Be they people, wolves, or ants,
And mighty microbia,
Earth's first movers and shakers,
Tend all gardens in the end.
Peace and struggle, all the same.
I won't try to reason why.
Stuff is just to move or die.

Foolish Fire

What is an awareness? Favorite question
Of certain gurus, metaphysicians
And neuroscientists. The mandala
Of each moment of awareness enchants
And evades every questioner who turns in
The space of awareness, creating it.
By asking itself of itself, it is
Awareness itself, dog of consciousness
Spinning in pursuit of its vanishing.
Nothing can be known outside awareness.
It creates everything, but it controls
Nothing, is the cosmos self-creating,
And is an evanescent, blurry wisp
Glowing intermittently in the fens.

I Don't Want to Write a Poem Today with Her Voice in My Head

On her first mother's day
Sarah reads me a piece
In the local paper,
Not about mothering
But about a poet
Who's won a Guggenheim.

Back up. I've done nothing
To make today special
In the usual way--
No chocolates, no flowers,
No breakfast served in bed,
Not so much as a card.

A poem was all I'd planned,
One in this can-can line
Of interchangeable
High-kickers in knickers
I've written since Sarah
Dared me: "a poem a day!"

In meeting that challenge
I've rediscovered joys
I thought I'd lost for good,
Pleasures found composing
Freely, swiftly, lightly
To earn my daily verse.

And Sarah, good mother
To our one and only
Sequoia Athena,
Has also been mother
To many of the best
Phrases in this fun.

I wish I wrote more,
More better, more often,
That's all, just to thank her.

And then there's this poet,
This prize-winner who boasts
One good line takes a week.

The poetry machine
Loves her, apparently.
All her prizes prove it.
Now they've awarded her
Forty-thousand dollars
To finish five more poems.

Of course I'm envious.
Eight thousand bucks a poem!
We go to her website
To sample golden words:
"Kiss the brick," "compass rose,"
"An end to love." Oi vey.

A terrible snooty
Is born! Precise. . . . Diction. . . .
Her thickly perfected lines
Make my teeth hurt. I turn
To Sarah. "This is why
I gave up writing poems.

This is Writers' Workshop,
The New Yorker, the whole,
Inbred, kumquat shebang!"
"Oh relax," Sarah says
"Use the thing you just said
For a title."
                   I did.