Watch Closely

Absolute surrender corrupts
Absolution. The past is now,

The thisness of always, this sun
That the past lets me recollect

Without too much terror: I have
Pulled myself clear in time,

Where everything that happens means
Nothing ever happens again,

All gone and here because it's gone,
Clouds of dust by the gravel pit,

By the marshes, by the white lake,
By the mountains that were islands

When the lake was an ocean, when
Imagination was nowhere

To be seen: this afternoon, this
Sun, dust, grass, ice, this lake of was.

Home Is Freedom and Freedom Is Free

Everyone's got a slogan,
And everyone's brother's too busy
Making up a batch more.

Even the paltry poets coin
Their catch phrases, coy and sly,
In the pages of rare magazines,

And theology students
At mostly Mormon universities
Debate advantages of religious branding.

If it's not a slogan,
Then it's an acronym
Or an abbreviation someone's selling,

Sometimes a mere misspelling,
A copyrightable neologism,
Short on the neo, long on the gism.

Well, I can play, too,
Mock it and mimic it hopefully,
Sign all my emails with vague tag lines.

"Every day is strange in its own way."
"Today is the tomorrow scared you yesterday."
"It all goes away but the going away."

"Everything is nothing and nothing is everything."
"Life is a force that feeds on its forms."
"Now is the time for no time." Believe me.

Jackpot, Nevada, Center of the Universe

I dreamt I woke up in a world
Constrained by probability,
Where nothing was impossible,
And nothing was a miracle;
Where what was most predictable
Was what, predictably, happened,
So almost exactly always,
It might as well have been a law.

There were big prizes for living
In this dream world of statistics,
But in the nature of things there,
Only a few could win prizes,
The rest filled out the circumstance,
And if one found oneself to be
One of "the rest" from the get-go,
It was best to let go of hope.

Still, it was entertainment to watch
The rolling blue clouds and lightning
Of the extremely unlikely
Thundering on the horizon,
The great, blue-grey veils of virga,
Rain sweeping the edge of the dream,
Always present, always falling
Somewhere, but never arriving.

Someone's Got to Get Lucky

I'm one of those many things
Filled with intent to be lost.
Happiest when forgotten,
Set aside, mislaid, not missed,
Most myself when loneliest.
From whom or what I'm trying
To shake loose I'll never know.

All I know is that craving
To disappear completely
Without ceasing to observe,
A ridiculous idea
I know is ridiculous
But suspect is adaptive,
Like a mouse craving tunnels,

And, like the mouse's craving,
Also opportunity
For the world to set its traps.
Each night in our rural home,
Ramshackle, lovely to mice,
I set out tunnel-like traps,
Designed to capture, not kill.

In the morning, I check them.
Often there's a big-eared mouse
Caught in the snug box, ready
To be trekked far from the house,
The warm and abundant house,
Then dumped out into sagebrush,
So I can feel merciful.

My favorite spot to drop them
Is near the cemetery,
Disused, small, by the roadside,
Unkempt, more scrub than headstones.
Seems like a good hiding spot
For a cowering rodent,
Grassy, seedy ground cover.

But I know their odds are long.
Life's like that, a lottery.
The odds for any one mouse
Are atrocious, but the odds
Of many mice in the house,
Despite those I trap, are good.
Someone's got to get lucky.

Even the cleverest traps
Won't change mouse genetics soon.
Small holes and tunnels still work
Often enough to appeal
To further generations.
I wonder where my daughter
Will go to escape the world.

Another One

The cycles continue
Even as cycles change,
As cyclists come and go,
Small empires rise and fall.
Sarah goes for a run.
I watch Sequoia walk,

Staggering and plopping
Down, waddling up, plopping
Down, struggling back up,
Wobbling over to me
On the uneven planks
Of the sunny mud room.

There's a box on the floor
Holding a few items
My mother left at death
That my sister mailed me.
A Hummel now broken,
Bookends I made for her

As a boy in Dad's workshop,
One of those Christmases
When we economized
And made all our own presents.
The face of a small boy
Stares at me from the box.

Sequoia toddles by,
Investigates the box,
Pulls out wrapping paper,
The headless Hummel's head,
The bubble wrap that failed
To protect the tchotchkes,

One bookend with my face,
45 years ago,
Black and white, serious,
Cut with careful jigsaw
And glued to the cut pine,
Which she tosses aside.

The Lexicide's Shadow

What if I were
To drift away
From words--I, who
Am only words,

Am only I,
The word for self
Which is itself
A word for same.

You see the game,
Of course. You can't
See out of it,
Unless you're not

In it, and in
That case, you can't 
See it at all.
There are no words.

Ars Photographica

Perusing fine-art landscapes,
We don't usually savor
The photographic value
Of intervening power 
Lines in the composition,
Anymore than spiderwebs
Hanging across our windows.

They're not so unbeautiful 
In themselves, scalloped contours
At intervals, festooning
And inverting gravity's
Otherwise invisible,
Infinite, cursive rainbows 
That hold all landscapes tethered.

The problem's the camera's 
Honesty that we can't bear.
Our brains elide power lines
From the grandeur of the scene,
Seeing what we know we see,
Instead of everything there.
We'll Photoshop this later.