Home Again, Home Again, Market Is Done

How is this not that?
Yes, stupid question,
I know. I know. But,
How? Two weeks ago
I wrote a poem here,

Not actually wrote,
Not with a pencil
A sheaf of foolscap
And a furrowed brow,
But wrote, more or less,

A poem, more or less.
Now I'm here again,
Having gone away
With wife and daughter
To visit in-laws

In the big city,
Contemplate winter,
Celebrate Christmas,
Be in the present,
Open my presents,

Present my presents
To others present.
What the hell was that?
Whatever it was,
It isn't, nor this.

Please Use the Revolving Door

The great hunter, the great spider,
Her starry egg-sac in her thighs,
Climbs in the south of northern skies.

I see her. I know her. I know
She is more real than I can be
And only a figment of me,

Getting close to the end again,
The miracle of calendars,
The brilliant insight, the cycle.

Ragged, imprecise orreries
Spin brass-wheeled table-top marbles
Representing these lurching spheres.

Damn us that we should have to know
That everything both ends and then,
But differently, begins again.

Hell's Half Acre

Stories can only lie
So much before we give
Them up for dead and crawl
In other directions,
Locusts leaving bare fields,
Nothing left but locusts

And indigestible
Truth, all that sweet fiction
Chewed down to dirt. We thrive
On story's inherent
Nonsense, the myth of plot,
Beginning, middle, end,

The plot of myths. Oh yes,
We argue over facts,
But we rarely notice
That the whole arrangement
Of plot is fictitious.
Stories lie by being

Stories, framing the world
In ways we know are false
But irresistibly 
Tasty, as close to true
As honey to flowers,
Fruit to soil, soul to brain,

All that we devour, but
None gone too far from truth,
Lies gnawed close to the bone
Where the meat is sweetest,
Enabling us to eat
Our world as narrative.

To refuel on beliefs,
Digest them with deceits.
We love to fool ourselves.
We live to fool ourselves.
We overrun the earth
Because we fool ourselves.

Pencredo

Were one to worship
At any true church
It might be the church
Of brilliant sunlight
On common objects.

More than one painter
Received communion
And enlightenment
From life's still altars:
Plates, chairs, fruit in sun.

It's worth desert heat
Or stinging sea air
To be close to light
That turns surfaces
Almost to angels--

A cracked stucco wall,
A leafless aspen,
Old clothes on a line,
Moss scorched on a roof,
A broken sheep skull,

Revived by that light
Like a soundless voice
With no signs to show,
And no other means
To mean but to glow.

Neh?

When my daughter makes a noise,
I try to guess what it means,
And, if it means, if she knows
That it means and what it means.
I catch myself and wonder,
What do I mean, "what it means"?
What sort of thing is meaning?

As if I were first to ask,
As if there were no answers
Instead of way too many:
This sequence of sounds goes with
This or that sequence of things.
Goes with? Associates with?
Indicates? References?

Is there any better term
For the way words mean than "means"?
Never mind words that mean words
Or words for forms of grammar,
For naming "the stuff of thought."
How does a sound, a symbol
Mean, stand for, anything else?

The link must be in the brain,
Chemical, a thing itself,
Though at bottom are no things
Unless we call patterns things,
And we're trapped. What does "thing" mean,
Anyway, if not pattern?
One is tempted to defer

Like a French philosopher
Or poststructuralist critic,
Call the labyrinth a maze
With no way out, supposing
The maze itself is something,
A metaphor with meaning,
Word for word where we began.

Insomnesia

A delirium of ghosts and orphans
Dances around my ordinary dreams,
A masquerade I reel through all night long,
A life in which I am even more lost
Than I am by day when it's forgotten.

Happy Merry

It's a large holiday,
Bigger than religion,
International, weird.
It commandeers fortunes.
It requires conviction 
Not to celebrate it.

It evaluates you,
Makes or breaks your business,
Redefines romances,
Loneliness, families,
Sentiments, happiness,
Nostalgia, the weather.

It can measure status,
Ideology, age.
It can track a person
To the ends of the earth,
To hovels and mansions,
Alleyways and atolls.

It's lyrical epic,
Not a fragment of faith
But a mythology
Of itself, accruing
Story upon story,
Rite upon ritual,

Its own ecosystem.
Supposedly, Romans
Used to hold holidays
Half the days of the year.
Maybe they needed them.
We don't. We have Christmas.