Let There Be Effort

Life was a pump. Not a fire,
Not a vortex, surely not
An architect's library,

But a pump with a filter,
Priming the iterations
Of hunger and preference,

Of selection and symbol
And arguments about life.
A pump that squeezed energy

Out of its hiding places
In boring clusters of things,
That hauled in and then spit out

What before had only burned,
Blown, or tumbled to a stop.
Not, first, the word. First, a pump.

Conspiratorial Siesta

Birds, streams, and breezes
Weave the tapestry
Of green concealment
Through their differences.

No one sleeping tree
Can twitch the story
Draping all at once,
The billowing tent,

The wolf settling down
To investigate
Its own bed, circling
Sleep before dreaming.

The birds sing cycles
Of how songs began
With a breath, a spring
Chasing each other,

Catching something else 
They used to catch more,
And lost, caught, forgot
To leave the forest.

Another Dawn

Try again. Don't veer off
Into abstractions, dark
Implications. Stay here

Where the bedroom curtain
Sails inward from morning
Arrangements of orange

And blue ephemera
Already dissolving
In roostering noises,

A child's squawk here, a jay's
Over there, a dog's bark
At a far car's whisper,

Everything singular
With enough space to be
Revealed for the moment

Crisp as nearly clean sheets
Sweet as the desert air
Arriving and going

Clearly at the same time,
Always at the same time.
Quit it. Get out of bed.

Four Million Switches for Twenty Thousand Lights

One entanglement creates another, 

Lives, meadows, forests, cities, circuitry 

All derived from the same mess of wires spooled 

Out of the furnaces of attraction. 

In sleep, the thing that is not me dreams 

Until I rouse myself to mistake it 

For some sidereal commentary 

On an existence that it only rings. 

And what it dreams of, recently, begins 

In a mansion of innumerable rooms-- 

Could be a king's palace, could be a tree-- 

Where there is never enough light to see 

But every cavernous wall is covered 

From dark floor bottom to dark ceiling join 

With bank upon bank of dials and switches 

That modulate the flickering story 

Fluttering down from a roof that might be 

A planetarium or actual 

Stars too far away to be convincing. 

And any one switch could turn off the lights.

Home

It has, at the least, a mind of its own,
Always to be found within it, never
To be found in any one part of it.

It grows as it rots to shade its own thoughts
Working with and against that downward pull
That organizes all variation

Into expansive horizontal bands,
Vertically convoluted and constrained.
Some years it flourishes. Some years it burns.

It is wholly lacking in character
And surfeit with fragmentary selves,
The most elaborate form of boredom

An inventive universe could devise,
Trackless, redundant, wild, flawless
Hideout for all things adapted to the twilight,

The most domesticated emptiness,
The beyond that keeps everything inside,
The rain on the leaves that never hits ground.

Yesterday, I Think, Whenever

I won't remember this day,
Not as clearly as others.
It passed in a serene haze
Made of the odd mindfulness,
Glee, and mild anxiety
That accompanies childcare,
In and out of sun and house.

What we did in the morning
And repeated at evening
We did in the afternoon:
Wake up, eat, play, change, clean up,
Toys, bath, books, toilet, dishes,
Find the ball, find the shade, sing,
Console, shout no, laugh, explain,

Or try to explain, all things
Easy and taxing to do,
Requiring strict attention
Alternating with dreaming
At the speed of a toddler,
For whom one day is many
None, now, and forever, gone.

Alumnus

You can't leave anything alone in here.
Without outside influences, it will grow
Into a creeping vine, a mushroom ring,
Whatever shapes an unconstrained thing takes,

Becoming so little like what entered
The woods all alone one fine summer day
That any contact with its former self
Would not only transform it but kill it.

Even unpeopled locations run wild.
Here is a red-brick suburban campus
Someone spent years rebuilding in the trees.
It was a matter-of-fact, present place

With daily updates, once upon a time.
Students and teachers with heads of their own
And, presumably, wilderness inside,
Wandered around and scuffed the moss off things.

But that was a great many nights ago.
Nothing but dreams have troubled the pathways.
They're overgrown, dark, and glowing at once,
Grottoes for frail species that don't need eyes.