Owl Project

Muslims wearing black sit with Hindus wearing orange
When the pagan of the grey but shining eyes lifts up

A thought about why seafaring peoples like hers
Could fail at promulgating lasting orthodoxies.

Watch out, my pir, priests, sadhus, abbots, and assorted
Holy men, assembling as Etta James warned you would--

The goddess with spear in hand and owl on her shoulder
Is no more ancient than any other cattle queen,

But she's unique among the mess you've made of your rules.
She doesn't exist anymore. That makes her wicked

Powerful in a way that only a deity
Lacking any gospel spouters to keep her temples

Sacred and polish her altars can be. She doesn't
Exist. Chew on that bit of prayer before you pretend

To know what she's going to say next. Her hypothesis
Is that wanderers' lies light what believers believe.

The Ants Are Giant Worlds with Stars Inside Them

Every mirror
In the long haul
Through the arched, green
Tunnel of trees

Down the mineshaft
Through the mountain
Where the answers
Never alter

Says the same thing:
Beware what's here.
Try to be kind
To what can't be.

Where Does My Attention Lie?

The garden in the woods
That grows beyond itself, grows out
Of the damp soil that sprouts

So many other, finer things,
Such as the shade-giving,

Snow-shedding, rain-dissuading spruce.

They mat the ground with spines
That, when green, made air from the sun

But now only lie there

In heaps of preventive measures
Fanned out to guard against
This very possibility.

Something will find a way
To send a runner to the light,
Calling it, called by it

To respond to the difficult
Question of what is not
Itself, blossoming, everything.

Ego Flora

"There is no present moment, only present movement."

A man grows old and indolent
Or gardens crammed with squash and yams
Or bookshelves thick with spiderwebs
Or other things that men may grow
The day they cease to grow themselves.

The rhythm is relentless. Age
Consists of every thing that youth
Attempts to do in disregard
Of aging. Those surviving long
Enough to feel embarrassment

Apologize to everyone
For being present anymore
At all, or grumble no one cares
To learn the lesson of their years.
I'm hoping to throw out my books,

And unlike father, grandfather,
Or other males of my humble,
Anonymous line, I can't grow
A damn weed, much less a garden.
I can't fish, cook, paint by numbers,

Or spend decades painstakingly
Labeling the branches of trees
With my other irrelevant
Ancestral trivialities,
And I'm already indolent.

Who knows what I'll grow before
I give up trying to keep time
On the beat I set out for it
And can't manage to keep myself,
But I've grown awful fond of now.

The Fury Tree

Those who can't forget the past are condemned to repeat it.
Memories are the only ghosts declarative poets
Will ever know. They grow in the soil in the far garden
Not far from the fury tree, whose roots have found the compost,

Long worms, old middens, mushrooms, forgiveness, sorrows and all.
There was a time when bears would have snuffled through this debris,
When Ratatosk the chattering squirrel would have dug gossip
And carried it out of the teeth of decaying dragons

To scamper up the high branches and natter at eagles
In that curiously cheeky way of well-evolved prey.
But now the best stuff is picked, the rest hardly more than duff.
Even the fungi and slime molds have fruited and blown on.

I'm so far from equilibrium, it's a miracle
Anything could be precariously alive as me,
Patch of dirt so deep in the woods, only the long roots
Of the tree that was never supposed to be can reach me.

Even the warm, decomposing narrative bits I was
Are so small now they don't depend on hope of consumption.
I'm so alive now, so buried, so little left to tell,
Tap-root rotted at last, nothing fine snails could buy or sell.

Pavant Pavane

"It's wrong to view a samovar with an eye to making it pound nails . . . or to write books so they will make a hotter fire." -V. Shklovsky

Another hesitation step,
Proceeding down the corridor
In the shadow of mining camps,

Each effort to absorb what is
Becoming a pause in what was,
So we gradually go on.

The Spaniards proceeded near here
On some defunct mission to save
The dancing souls of the pagans

From Lord knows what conveniences
Life in these rocks once provided.
Jesuits, Mormons, and Baptists

Hold the keys to eternities
Like the suites of cheap motel rooms
With adjoining locked, bolted doors

To be had for a song not far
From this hesitant, resistant
Wilderness ready to be dust

Again to everyone. Humans
Don't really belong in Utah.
Not one stone here was carved for us.

There, There Then

Words, we say, are the worst way
To apprehend the world. Words
At best are fingers pointing
At the moon, at worst mislead us.

Words take us away from being
In the fullness of the present.
They lack the truth-telling rigor
Of well-applied abstract math.

They distract us from the universal
Power of pictures, the primal
Sublime emotional thrum of music.
Words don't even really mean

Anything: when serious they're just
Semantics, and we name their purest
Play nonsense verse. Words,
We words say, are the worst.