Too Far from Music, Too Far from Dance

"Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance...."

Somewhere inside a cold day
Under the big, cold mountains
Professors gather to debate
The world going on without them,

And successfully, strenuously
Reach no actionable conclusion,
But to anxiously, contentiously
Frame their own debate as delusion 

And adjourn for the rest of the year
Amid laughter, consolations, tension
And the usual professorial fears
Mixed of desolation and self-deprecation.

Returning to classes, offices, homes,
They carry out internal revisions
Of the one common human poem,
The verse of eternal decision 

That writhes in the coiled neocortex
Reversing, turning, counter-turning,
Never to rest or stand. At her desk,
The dance professor sits, relearning

Where her agile body fits her mind.
In the stairwell the psychologist
Whistles an effortful, grunting rhyme
As he ascends and gravity resists,

While the elderly archaeologist
Quarrels with a memory 
Written on one wrist
In spidery ball-point summary

Detailing something insightful
About the origin of sin
In the Pleistocene symbols
From which all nonsense stems.

The mountains grow dark.
The campus, muttering, splatters light
In a broken, moon-shaped arc
Around the drowning lake of night.

Night Dreaming Dawn on the Colorado

Day breaks creation
Over and over again

And the wreckage of all
Days' creation becomes 

The landscape it litters
With us and litters

Us with, and us, 
The ones who keep

Shifting and recollecting this
Rubble in hopes of filling

A box we have labeled
"That Which Is Both

Beautiful and True," although
We feel small and disappointed

When we notice the box is not 
Filling, remains empty, mostly,

And tempts us to include
The most abundantly beautiful

But false, or more rarely,
In fits of pique and defiance,

The unbeautiful, to our minds,
But thumpingly true, because

In being so wonderfully
Wrong and persistent we are

Pure, typical parts of this world
Ever striving to improve,

In more hunger and crumbling
Destruction, creation.

Flee, Muse

The ghost that rattles 
At the bottom of the well
And cries out to me all night

Has escaped.
All I have now is a fading wail
Across an unwalled world.

Agency, Choice, & Concentration

"Read words on large billboards.
Drive a car on an empty road.
Find a strong move in chess
(If you are a chess master). . . .

All these mental events
Belong with the angry woman--"
Experience tells us. And why is it 
We mock the experienced drunk,

For, precisely, the fact
Of experience, when
We would never so mock
The experienced triathlete,

Or mathematician,
Or lover, or poet,
Or tenured academic philosopher,
Even given we know nothing

About the self-gratification
And self-sacrifice in teetering,
Roller-coastering imbalances
Any of these experiences take?

But I'm far now from system
One, automaton, and doing 
A poor job impersonating
System two, The Thinker.

Start again, and this time
From monastic sobriety,
That state, which is to awareness
What organic labels are to produce:

I am not learning. I know.
And by that misfortune I learn, 
To my regret, where it is that I, 
Like  you, like us all, in going, go.

The Wonderful Things Mr. Brown Can Do

Damned weird sometimes to still be here,
At least as far as here is here

Still, when it's always somewhere else,
And I'm always somebody else,

At sunset, between house and porch,
Spying on the birds on the porch,

Fond black-headed juncos that stuff
Themselves on scattered seeds and stuff,

Overhearing Sarah reading
To Sequoia, also reading,

That is, by turning the pages,
As I've been turning for ages.

The Music of Themselves

You have to get near the water
Running freely in its own bed
Deep into twilight promising
A dark, starlit, inhuman night
You'll never get out of your head

If you want to hear them clearly,
If you want to believe they're there,
Themselves, not stories about them.
Let the wind die down around you.
Let the last whispers comb your hair.

This world is not for living things.
However rapaciously life
Craves and consumes it, in the end
Stars, rocks, and water are immune,
While bloodied life eats bloodied life,

And you are among the living
And can never belong, not quite,
To leisurely infinity.
You howl, and coyotes howl back,
Organized predators at night.

Genes, Words, Us

The evolution of life
Cannot be comprehended
By change in gene frequencies.
Life is not that meaningful.
If the measure of success 
Were truly taken by genes,
Life would be data, unhusked.

Genes encode meanings, themselves
Inert and too unselfish
To be the source for so much
Unbridled motivation,
The relentless hungering
To keep going and going
And going that defines life.

Because genes are meaningful,
We like them. We decode them,
Enjoy their cryptography,
Order them, count them, name them,
Chart evolution by them,
Measure life's incremental
Degrees of separation

Mutation by mutation,
And working backwards believe
That, mutatis mutandis,
We can arrive at the source
Commands of all living things,
Perhaps to reorder them
More to taste, lively prospect.

There's little doubt we'll manage
To do some clever damage,
And in so doing we'll be
Executing one more turn
In the spiral of desire
Through carbon and oxygen,
Data and catalysis

That shows no sign of ending,
Inventing death and meaning,
Sex, war, and altruism,
Ruthlessness and compassion,
Waste, consumption, and science,
Means to more means without end,
That which keeps going going.

Products of life, we value
Life for its products, but life
Roars through its products as fire
Roars through the bonds of atoms,
Fire in reverse, making more
And more of what it consumes:
Genes, words, us--these bonds life's fire makes.