Is There Anyone Here Like Hordedef?

"Accept that death humbles us, accept that life exalts us, the house of death is for life."

Scribes have been scribbling verses
In praise of scribes and scribbling
For about as long as scribes
Have been scribbling anything,
Mostly to convince ourselves
That scribbling gives us power
Over the place of silence.

Funny that. Writing is not,
So far at least, a living
Being--the very reason
That, like fossilized footprints,
It can evade what living
Beings can't. Texts brick tiny
Pyramids for Pharaoh's scribes,

But despite what elegant
Sonnets still spell out for you,
They are no more immortal
Than wars' wordless monuments
Weathering into the sands,
Although to something alive
They hint something was alive.

Sword-Horn Sutra

I've never seen a monk
Without another monk
Or several or hundreds
Nearby. Plurality
And uniformity
Seem the nature of monks

As much as of armies
And police and so forth,
If not more so. It's strange,
Then, to read these verses
Translated from birch bark
Sheaves preserved in clay jars

For two millennia,
Collecting earlier,
Perhaps preliterate
Sayings centuries old,
Purportedly among
Buddhism's earliest,

Repeating the advice
To wander off alone,
Cutting family ties,
Abandoning offspring,
Lovers, and friends alike,
Consorting with no one

Except maybe someone
Even more unattached.
The verses link loosely.
Most make analogies
To noble animals
That shun society.

Browsing, one imagines
Humans surrendering,
En masse, human nature,
Everyone wandering
Off to enlightenment,
No one hoarding birch bark.

Making It Up As We Go Along

I have a small friend
Who's just beginning to pretend,
To have her toys act out small scenes
Such as night-night, wake up, and snoring in between.

She can cover a hundred sheets of paper
With frantic scribbles, wriggle out of any diaper
Accessible to her stubby fingers and run around
Announcing "I'm naked!" as she stomps the ground.

Being much older, I pretend to give the commands,
Make the decisions, keep the upper hand,
An elaborate improv I also play with my whole world
But never so contentedly as with this mighty little girl.

All Wounds

Where does it come from, this gift
For self-repair that means life?
The universe appears full
Of matter and energy
In endless, conjoined tango,
But the stars don't heal themselves.
Galaxies don't patch their gaps.

We know the consequences
Of the gift: competitions
That never end, extinctions,
Parasites and predators,
Marvelous adaptations,
Symbioses and stand-offs,
The whole mad beauty of Earth.

We know how the gift frames us.
Only what rebuilds itself
Can hunger, succeed, fail, die.
But the gift itself baffles.
A rock can't be infected.
A river can't nurse its wounds.
How did what makes rocks make us?

Rebirth, renewal are forms
Of the gift, our sexiness
And parenting extensions,
Expensive alternatives
To ordinary repairs
Of the flesh. We get better,
Or, to hedge our bets, divide.

In one sense, we're pure success.
Nothing alive around us
Has failed yet, continuous,
Unbroken back to the dawn
Of self-preserving habits,
Redundant, miraculous
Survival of survivors.

Thunderstorm and Fairy Tale

They're ill-shaped, those stories
About beasts and witches,
Children being eaten,
Poisoned, hacked to pieces,
And we don't really know
Why we even like them,

Nor why they were first liked,
Nor when they were first told,
By what sort of people
In what sort of village.
Presumably, campfires
Anchored early versions,

Assuming campfires came first,
Not narratable worlds.
Like symbolic squiggles,
Geometric patterns,
And ghostly hand stencils
On cliffs, caves, or bodies,

They're easiest to find
In remoter places
And as the handiwork
Of typical children
Who build their first stories
From daisy-chained events

Linking chunked memories
To startlingly gruesome
Disasters and triumphs.
Today in this village
A small boy is telling
A tale about thunder

That is entirely his
And composed of nothing
He hasn't been given.
There was a sick old man
Who was hunting a bear
Way high in the mountains

But when he shot the bear
It got really angry.
It was a magic bear,
And he was shooting it.
It kept getting bigger
And it roared the thunder

And then it ate him up,
But he was shooting it
From inside its stomach
And the lightning came out
And the bear roared and then
It exploded the rain.

Breeze

It's about time someone wrote
Something cheerful around here.
Swallowing existence whole
Just makes for acid grumblings
That ruin local picnics.
A birch rustles its leaves,
And ferns and daisies agree.

More Books To Throw Over the Railing

"I suspect that for her the world was more accidental than any book's plot. Twice I saw her so irritated by a mystery that she half rose from the shadow of her chair and flung the paperback over the railing into the sea."

News item from the accidental
World: avalanche kills
Nine hikers on Mt Blanc.
Assignment: draft a novel
About nine healthy Europeans,
All their hopes and dreams,
And bring them together
On a mountain. The end.

More news: thirty-nine Nepalese
Die in a bus accident.
Assignment: plot a mystery
About thirty-nine diverse
Peasants and merchants.
Get inside their heads and prayers.
Put them on a bus. The end.

The same week: ninety-five
Nigerians burn to death
Collecting spilled fuel
From a wrecked petrol truck.
Assignment: complete an epic
Romance about the intertwined
Lives of nearly a hundred people,
Each negotiating a private world.
Spill a fuel tanker on the road
And have them rush together
To gather free fuel. The end.