The Poet's Stone

"Do not disturb me now. I have to extract
A creature with its eggs between the words."
- WS Graham

Late afternoons, late in the calendar, early
In the icy winter, I want more than ever
To write something stupid and call it poetry,

To write something foolish that transforms poetry
By being the first such foolish thing to be called
A poem, redeeming another generation

From learned belatedness and popular verse.
How's that for nonsense? Every day we wear our clothes,
Changing them unless too poor, too sick, or too dead,

And the fact of being ornamented beings
Impresses us with ourselves, aesthetic species,
But it's only the habit of changing our clothes

That matters, that has anything to do with life.
Houses are clothes, paintings are clothes, temples are clothes,
The supernatural beings there worshipped are clothes,

And poems, too, are clothes, ornaments at least, tattoos.
It's not that we make them, it's that we make new ones
That tells us we have our way of being alive.

The horses painted in the caves were important,
The horned figures pecked out of the cliffs were as well,
The gothic cathedrals, the renaissance frescoes,

The zen haiku composed at the moment of death,
All also, but not so much because they were done,
But because one day we forgot them and moved on.

Bring Being

"In life aboard ship, boredom is an ever-present problem."

It's us. We generate it.
But it's wholly alien,
And we control none of it.
We are composers with wands
And podia, conducting
Orchestras that can't hear us.
It's our own noise ignores us.

Talking to each other helps.
Including each other's worlds
Generously, grudgingly,
The way we include partners,
Offspring, poorly chosen words,
And so forth, each quid pro quo
A mutual forgiveness,

Also helps in the short run,
But never satisfies us.
Truth tempts us to ignore it,
There being nothing human
To it except what others
Bring as the truth of others,
Having none to bring ourselves.

The Whole Six Yards

"People are drawn to colorful etymologies. But they are almost always wrong."

There's a kink in the way our brains work
That shows up in the collective mind
Of culture contemplating itself.

Our love for pure prosody is crossed
By our yearning for a good story,
So the latter obscures the former.

It's not just the world we want to work
Within preferred narrative frameworks,
We can't believe ourselves without them.

How is it story feels rewarding
When it's so bad at explaining things,
Even our own fondness for a phrase?

We have this all-purpose telling tool
That helps us remember the wrong thing,
The wronger, the better remembered.

My head hurts to clamber up this slope
Where reasons are at odds with fables,
And we know it, and crave knowing, but

Crave the fables all waltzing away
From the knowing more than the knowing.
Whose fires are we fueling if not ours?

The Parable of the Cat

A feral cat forages
Where you live. It gets things done.
It solves problems in feeding,
Keeping warm through bitter nights,
Narrowly avoiding death
In the jaws of cars and dogs.
It survives at the thin end

Of long continuity
Shared with its competitors
And prey, with humans and rats,
Coyotes, fleas, fish, and grass.
The great world won't far revolve,
Fondly or maliciously,
Around one grey, feral cat.

The cat's not irrelevant,
Nor without impact. It's small.
It gets some of what it wants.
Everything else gets the rest.
The world does not dislike cats.
There's more to the world than cats,
Less than cats desire. That's all.

The Stocking Stuffer

"Marc le marque-page adore le poids des pages..."

A small, blue flat man with my name
Stands upright on his plastic feet.
He belongs in a book. He holds
Ones place in bricks of printed sheets.

He has a cheeky cartoon grin.
He came taped to French instructions.
In a hand's span he links whimsy,
Marketing, anachronism,

Global industrial complex,
And marginal utility.
He smiles at me on backward feet.
Light snow fills the picture window.

I will not keep him in a book.
I will give him to my daughter,
And we will imagine him lost
In our doll and beast haunted woods.

News of the Old

There's a carousel in Paris
Older than any human being.
Rilke was enraptured by it.
Wars and invasions have spared it.

Why does this feel significant?
An arrangement of wood and steel,
Nineteenth-century novelty,
Rotating, hand-cranked nostalgia,

It's just there, like anything else,
And just as undefinable
Around the edges where it joins
Everything by a different name.

A contraption can last forever,
Like a Galapagos tortoise
Or a Utah aspen cluster,
As long as the nouns stick to it,

However nouns are coats of paint,
And languages pass overhead
Like fast weather. White elephants
Grey. Allez, les enfants, allez!

Above Thy Deep and Dreamless Sleep

We pass through the tail of this comet,
Always missing the comet itself,
Always counting the silent squibs
We get all worked up about, bright pins

Expressing the fine scrollwork of right now
As a thin quickness. Blink, we say,
And you'll miss it, although we miss few
Due to inopportune nictation or tears

And most just sitting inside, tightly focused
On human things. Some such years
We miss the showers altogether,
Swanning through the Southern Hemisphere

Through pearl and marble clouded nights,
Palmy, muggy afternoons annoyed by flies,
And the peculiar phenomena of a cold culture
Flourishing in a balmy, tattooed trompe l'oeil.

Some years, we stay far out in the desert
And warm ourselves by the frequency
Of the rotating cold calligraphy, the signatures
Of inevitable coincidence, warm omens

Of the meaning of everything
Inscribed on the backs of our eyes,
On the backs of thoughts about the inexhaustible
Beauty of the infinitely inhuman night,

The kindness of inhuman divinity,
Each quick careful stroke
At the edge of our rituals
Kissing us so well we could cry.