Nature of Tragedy

I.

We get so excited
By our quarrels, squabbles,
Face-offs over access
To space and resources,
Who deserves what, when, how,
Us, them, I, me, mine, now.

I suppose it matters,
Given lives are at stake
And the winners' offspring
Inherit the scorched earth.
We're all here as offspring
Of quarrels and squabbles

Won thousands and thousands
Of times, generations
Ago--little wonder
We all think we're winners,
All derived from those same
Old bloody combatants.

Involuntarily,
Our paltry glands excrete
Plenty of spit and hate.
Our little brains debate
Imaginary selves
In lonely beds all night.

When we win, winners hug,
Feeling righteous and smug.
When we lose we fight on,
Tearing our minds apart,
Chewing dead arguments,
Horrifically hungry.

We know we've won nothing,
But means to keep fighting,
Lost nothing but the need
To keep what others won.
Still the hint of a fight
On the breeze stirs our rage.

II.

And the result of so much loss
Is gain, life burned on the pyre
Of lives burned on the pyre
Of lives burned on the pyre
Of life. Down the torn road

From the humongous pit mine
Crawling with monstrous trucks
Fueled by compressed, extracted,
Redistilled remains of extinctions,
Piloted by stubble-jawed men
Peering out from under worn visors,

Raising rolling clouds of gritted dust,
The waves of the glaucous lake,
Spin mist in the wind around
The rippling stalks of winter marshes
That appear not to compete
For any tomorrow at all,

Being only here, rooted and sere
In the midst of all this dust
As if they floated on the rough
Water and were not sucking it
From the rich and seething mud.

Neither ever only savage, nor
Ever truly servile, the things
That live, as these grasses live,
As drivers of the greasy big rigs live,
Hunkered down, all the same,
All gripping for an edge,
Nourish each others' need.

There is peace in the valley
Of the shadows of life,
There is peace in the shadows
Of the valley for me, this day.

III.

All the great and minor characters,
The playwright and the players, 
The musicians in the orchestra,
The owners of the theater,
The builders of the stage,
The president in the balcony,
The assassin in the wings,
And all their plots and faults
Are gone, long gone, good and dead.

We brush off their fossils,
Brought back to light, we pick 
At the hard parts with trowels.
We want to know what happened 
Here, we want a story for how
These storytellers fell, we want
To make it part of us, we want
To make it ours. We don't 
Know why we want it so,
Or how it could possibly help us,
But we want it, that we know.

Around the salvage operation,
Where we make a new past 
Of the past, orderly orchards
Grow in their rows, leaves brushed
With the dust from the big digs
Up the road, and fruit farmers
By ones and twos, in pick-ups, troll
For any sign the lovers of the past
Might be expanding the excavation
Onto more productive land. 

A slight tinge of hostility,
Mingled with curiosity, always hangs
In the air around here. The ancestors
Of the farmers may have, after all,
Slaughtered the storytellers buried
Here, whose ghosts may rise up
For vengeance in the form 
Of a new story, displacing 
The farmers and their heroics
From the land God gave unto them,
Chosen for the just, just for growing
Cherries and apples, rewards
For deserving, hardworking piety 
Making use of a bountiful land.
There's always that chance.

The diggers in the dirt, the dirt,
The drivers of the trucks, the grass,
The hills cut up for the trucks,
The lake sloshing over the graves
Of other storytellers from other
Imaginary pasts, the fruit trees
Of the eternally ephemeral gardens,
The farmers, the fossils, the stories,
However awkwardly woven
To make a dignified shroud for it all,

Are us, not ours, no more
Than flocks of angels singing
Noisily in the grass are ours,
No matter how well we can
Imagine them. Look around.
Look at all these words if you must.
We will inherit none of this.
This is what we are.

The Has Been

Some Mondays, driving to work
I wonder whether what haunts us
Is our sense of object permanence.

The past is ever present, the past
Is everything, including the present,
Including the future (nothing, like us).

And we are everything past
That is present, but we're convinced
There's always something happening

Outside of our awareness, outside
Of the past in front of us that is
Us, an absence that isn't passing

By us. We believe a world
Exists where we can't see it,
Big, fixed, permanent, important.

Although we realize we experience
Only what we experience, we think
We're missing something, the sun

Gone under the hill, still burning
Somewhere we cannot feel.
So we imagine the return of what

Kept going, beyond us, after 
It passed out of our experience,
When all we will ever be consists

Of curating what we have, the was
That is always changing, always
Is the was, nothing us without us.

The Mirror Turned to Face the Wall

When the moments are unpeopled,
And the clock's tick competes
With the throaty vocalizations 
Of the ravens on the lawn,
And the sun sends polygons
Through the dusty windows

To light up bedraggled houseplants
And the swirls of dust motes
Part stove ash, part ephemera,
For the slow dance of glancing
That tempts us with angels,

Then it is just about possible
To remember being alive,
All the old days spent alone
With the odds and ends 
Of a world of lumber
Carpet, birdsong, sunlight,
Pepper plants, clocks, mousetraps,

The mirror turned to face the wall,
The numerable creaks of structure
Warming to itself, slowly,
Under the snowy spring mountains
To the bleating of the goats.

In the Brief Season of Plenty

Between the cold and the heat,
I can't help myself. I dream
Of a world with different rules
Melodious, mild, and kind,
In which happiness goes on
Indefinitely, without
Boredom or ingratitude.

I don't believe suffering
Necessary for sweetness
Except that's the way it is
In the only world I know.
Brevity grows infinite,
Joy and contentment deathless,
Elsewhere. I can't help myself.

Now and Then

One branch of the tree
Leans athwart the rest.
One bird startles up
From flocks on the lawn,
Lands on the branch and

Leaves when winds dies down
So that the air clears,
As sights, sounds, moments,
Scents and memories
All gain enough space

For each one almost
To appear as one,
Although there is none
Apart from the rest,
And each now is then.

Thought of a Long Walk

An old woman who had grown tired 
Of being old but not yet 
Tired of life set out one day
On foot to seek her fortune.

It was a miserable day
For anyone to walk in,
Late winter, cold and snowing
Small, icy flakes almost rain,

When the old woman began
From the home she and her man
Had built many years ago
By a remote mountain stream

In a neglected corner
Of thickly regrown forest
Where her sole winter neighbors
Were the hibernating bears.

Just to get to the village
Down in the valley bottom
Took a twenty-minute drive
In her truck in good weather,

And this day she was walking,
And it was not good weather,
And there were no warm houses
To visit along the way.

She well knew that she could die
Before making much progress,
Without anyone knowing
Or noticing for a week.

She wanted the adventure.
She had been around the world,
Married a few times, loved once,
Raised a child, outlived her man,

Been through wartime and peacetime,
Watched the great powers revolve
And fall like constellations
Passing over woods at night.

She was not interested
Anymore in what she'd done,
Those rare and ordinary
Details of death notices.

She wanted to walk into
The mystery of the woods
She'd imagined as a girl,
The hardship, dread and wonder,

Just to see what would happen,
Just to see what could happen
To a small, vulnerable self
Like a candle, caught outdoors.

She found strangeness soon enough,
Stranger for being nothing
Like what she had expected
Nor what she had idly dreamed.

Peering at the snow and trees
She recognized none of it
But felt relaxed and at ease.
She looked down and saw no path.

The woods had closed around her.
Everything was familiar
And yet nothing had a name.
The beauty was difficult,

Like a poem in a language
She had never heard before.
She walked a little further,
Then sat by a tree and thought.

When she looked up, a young man
Oddly dressed, foolish of face,
Slogged through the woods toward her.
She felt an urge to beg help.

"Young man! Young man! I think I'm lost.
Can you help me find my way home?"
"How can I help you? I am you,"
The oddly dressed young man replied.

"Then why am I out here, alone?"
"You just think you're alone," he said.
"But I'm cold and confused," she said.
"Well then, jump back inside my head."

The next thing the old woman knew,
She was warm and snug in the dark.
She even had some elbow room,
Given it was a young man's head.

She made herself comfortable,
And rode along for fifty years.
She watched the young man's adventures,
At least when they interested her.

Or she slept or met the others,
Initially few and boring
But sometimes conversational,
Inhabitants of memory.

One day, when he was out walking,
She woke up and knew he'd grown old.
She peered out through his bleary eyes
And saw something she recognized,

Her home as she remembered it
Well-built and snug in the deep woods,
No longer looking lonely
Nor too far out of the way,

Nor elderly, bored, and tired
But an enchanted cottage
She would never want to leave.
And she leapt out of the head

Of the now very old man,
Feeling a surge of delight,
Ran inside her cottage door
And never came out again.

Polypharmaceutical Delirium

Funny thing to rely on,
Memory--so elastic,
So creative, so plastic,
So confabulatory;
All, episodically,
That we know we feel we are,
And nothing we can count on

To save us if we forget--
And we will forget, forget
Everything we know before
Or, at latest, when, we die.
Take a few innocent pills
Over the counter and doze
Enough times to wake up lost.