Commencement Advice for Another Lost Piece of the Puzzle

Go get 'em, kid. It's a big mess,
A big pile of look-alike shapes,
And it's hard to notice one gone,
But at least you know you're unique.

Hang on to that. It's your best bet.
You don't need to reshape yourself,
And you'd never fit anyway.
Trust old Polonius this once.

Know yourself, be true to yourself, 
And accept that being yourself
Is limiting, won't always work,
Won't always land you where you'd like,

And can't possibly allow you
To be both on the cutting edge
And at home in the mystery
That hides the pattern of the whole.

Oh, and one last thought. The puzzle
Has nothing to do with pieces.
We disappear on completion,
Nothing lost, nothing left over.

House of Bastet

Every day, even the dullest,
Drags its own terrors and rewards
Desultorily as a cat
Deposits prey on the doorstep,

And like a cat, predictably,
Maintains its bit of mystery,
Its scrawny bit of dignity,
That habitual secrecy

Native to the predators' world,
Of which we are either a part
Imagining we stand apart,
Or rats time tosses until bored.

Thought Turns off the World

The adoring corpse, snoring now and then,
Turns over, dreaming of daylight, thinking,

It's easier to be here, sun shining
On the dry grass, rocks, rooftops, and red sand,

Or to construct a story for myself
Reconnecting the stepping-stone dots here,

Or to lay my story down in the sand
Alongside other, more famous stories

And spend the afternoon comparing them
As if life were choosing stories to wear,

Or to fantasize more boring stories
In which everything is always the same

Because everything goes exactly as I want,
And what I want remains mostly the same,

Than it is to struggle to understand
How I, a part of a body, passing

Through the scene more swiftly than scenery
(Sun and so forth) that I note in passing,

Could make this dream, could dream this universe.
Why would I make what cannot care for me?

Things Change Prayer

Things don't change. Things aren't things to begin with. 
A thing just a thing would be like a day 
Without pain, a fragment of bone worn smooth
By rivers of words flash-flooding from clouds
Through permanent shapes and firm intentions:
In short, an idea, a philosophy,
And not at all just, in itself, a thing.

Humans have no things. Humans know no things.
What we know and have are philosophies
Of things (and, occasionally, poetry).
No matter what our station, each of us
Holds some philosophy, plus the desire
To share it with others like us, proudly,
As if desire ever changed anything.

It Goes By Itself

No shortage of mule deer, cops, or tourists
Around Moab this holiday weekend,

Despite three or four years of gloominess,
Far horizons churning with flashing storms,

All the usual bellwethers tolling
The decline and fall of America,

The world as we know it, markets, climate,
Civilization, the human species.

Ah, apocalypse, our favorite romance.
Well, perhaps. Pass the beer and leftovers.

The world has ended so many times now,
A prophet hardly knows where to begin.

This inland desert corner of the Earth
Holds its share of fragmentary remains:

Canyon ruins, cliff dwellings, granaries,
Enough to prove human systems can fail.

The world as we know it ended before
We knew it. The world as we don't know it

Remains immune to knowing, immortal.
There never was an empire that was ours.

Radio

With all the cheap technology
For storing and playing music
In brain-deceiving perfection,

I crave the sound of radio,
A broadcast playing late at night,
Something classical, through the hiss

That gives the composition depth
The composer never meant to,
A reminder of the distance

That notations, mass-printed sheets,
And the decades of recordings,
Remasterings, digitizings

Joined forces to annihilate
And failed, leaving more emptiness 
Than solace between song and us.

Crate Full of Mysteries

Who knows the dark trick that turns the crying of night,
The howl in the storm, sad sounds sighed in bed, 
Too grim to enjoy, into hard, sweet love
Dark cannot destroy must be a poet,

If not quite satanic, not quite a witch,
An engraver confusing blood for ink
And sharp-edged confession for precision
At least. That's what I used to think when young

And squirming to become such a pilgrim,
Not realizing prepositions redeem
More truth than propositions, dangerous
To forget when training to be a liar.

Words turn into other worlds inside things,
The details of which remain mysteries.
Worming inside a crate of poems I saw
That the lost years were good, the found better,

A gift within a gift within a box
Within a pile of forgotten papers
In an office within a library
Housed inside a glass-and-brick cube that stands

At the foot of a university
Within a sprawling suburbopolis
On the slope of a foothill just over
A long, flat lake just under the mountains

White with ice, sharp as knives slicing a sky
Grown feathery soft and thickened with smog
From pilgrimage, for which I am grateful.