Third-Hand Anecdote of a Poem of an Anecdote of a Third-Rate Movie

A fan of puzzle poems once read
A poem exactly opposite
The nature of its creator.
It was a bad but honest poem
By a good, dishonest woman.
It was, like so many bad poems,
Part memory, part confession,
Yearning to attain to wisdom.

It set a scene of the poet
Relaxing at somebody's farm
On a sleepy, hot afternoon,
Reevaluating her life,
And concluding it was wasted,
Then deciding she didn't care.
Defiance triggered memory
Of a movie seen in childhood

Which the poet then proceeded
To explain in useless detail
Lingering lovingly over,
The precise terminology,
The facts, and the actors' real names.
It was just a kid's movie aimed
At the pangs of adolescence
And the triumph of underdogs.

It seems that the crux of the film,
Involved lead actor Bill Murray
As the childlike adult-in-charge ,
Rallying the underdog kids
With a speech before the big game
That he was allowed to ad-lib
As an anti-rallying chant,
With mildly anarchic results:

"It just doesn't matter! It just
Doesn't matter! It just doesn't
Matter!" went the climactic cry.
Of course, this being Hollywood,
Even not caring for results
Only helped the underdogs win.
But down the decades, the poet
Became nostalgic for that scene.

She acknowledged its silliness 
But wrote that for her it meant
The truth: "It just doesn't matter!
It just doesn't matter! It just
Doesn't matter!" Then she returned
To the theme of life on the farm,
Trying to tie a lazy day
Into knots of philosophy.

Me, I suspect that she wanted
Relief from the constant burden
Of calling herself a failure.
Truth was that everything mattered
Very much, to her, after all.

Kenning

The honest solipsist admits,
Although he is the world entire,
That nothing is to do with him
Nor happens as he might desire.

A Green Thought in a Green Shade

High up in the oak
And aspen slopes at evening

Out of the plagued house
Out of the hot valley haze

At some risk to life, limb
And undercarriage

Next to a cold stream
By a pond near the road's end

We perch for an hour
And listen to the frogs

And I notice one oak 
All black gnarl and orange lichen

And am seized by the wish
To not be a cowering mammal

But something statelier
More like a sentient rock

A haunted tombstone maybe
That could remain here

In all weathers all the year
Watching how that oak holds up

Waxing Crescent

All day I had in mind
Something convoluted
I wanted to tackle

A bit of drollery
About solipsism
That the moon rerouted

With the slenderest wand
Of reflected starlight
The uncanny pallor

Neither silver nor white
Found only in the glow 
Of poems about the moon

In the eyes of poets
Falling out of their boats
To kiss the faint mirror

The last echo of light
That started out as fire
And ended up as night

No Pinyon Thoughts, No Juniper Dreams

Life fights itself; I don't know why.
Collectively, life is ruthless,
Unstoppable and immortal,
Hurling countless forms at the world
And each other, a tournament
Perpetuating tournaments.
Lives are not the ends but the means
To no end but continuing.

"All nature is at war," opened
Darwin and Wallace's gambit,
But war's a narrow metaphor,
However apt, to carry through.
Life is matter motivated
To motivate matters further
By thwarting the motivations
Of more matter to do the same.

Life is hungry; I don't know why.
All life consumes, churns, and excretes,
And this must somehow be decreed
By physical laws that won't let
Matter enjoy being unless
In competition for that joy.
Life is fierce, frail, and strange--to me,
To living things. I don't know why.

This Is Getting Old

Mutters one corner
Of my muzzy brain
As I drag myself,
Aching, out of bed
To face the morning

And find I'm facing
A wall of crawling
Grasshoppers as well.
So they've invaded
The bedroom now. Great.

A couple of hours
Later, my karma
Is wrecked forever
By the massacre
Of a hundred bugs,

But I've decided
A few short lifetimes
As a bug myself
Can't be worse than
One covered in them.

By the time we leave
The house, the outer
Walls are on the march
And I head the car
Into the mountains.

We picnic below
Geyser Pass, above
Spanish Valley, where
Juniper-pinyon
Reassert themselves,

As do the lizards,
Bobbing their shoulders
At us in their shade,
But mercifully
It's grasshopper free.

Under a giant
Spiraled juniper,
We relax, we lean
And loaf at our ease,
Observing the breeze.

The high, dry country,
The warm late spring sun
The sweet company
Rhymes in memory
With a long, fond day

Some decades ago
Glowing down the years,
And it startles me
That moments, all brief,
Are no briefer now.

Above the Humming House

Surrounded by a popping,
Hissing mess of grasshoppers,
I think of Stevens' "one thing
Remaining," "no greater than
A cricket's horn," and wonder
Once more, why is this world this,
And why can we imagine

It might be any other,
When we can't imagine what
That other could be, whether
Real or no, conjectural
Or final. This world depends
On nothing I can affirm
Yet seethes, as it is, as is.