To trace the path
Of the storm round
The globe, to touch
The point it rose
And find the place
Where it would end,
That was the task
Planned by the young
Who thought they could
Seek out the soul
Of all storms through
Their dreams of font,
Mid-point, and loss,
That is, of life
Tied up in tale.
The storm goes on.
All lost from the start,
By the end of spring,
When not two days passed
That met with a soul—
Then from bad to worse.
The case could be made
It was the worst year
For game or wild plants—
Not mere want of food
But life on bare ground,
Starved to death with cold.
Months or more to spread,
Salt at a low tide,
Full of slime and filth,
Months to dig a well
In the fort that drew.
And the death rate rose.
Faith fetched a fair price
But walked a fine line,
A trade deal gone wrong
Both for them and us,
And the frost so sharp
That half of us died.
Could we move our fields?
Could we store more food?
And what if death is the best
Way to be, pressed rocks and dirt,
Air? We don’t call them still dead,
The bits of the world that seem
Not to have held life. Why not?
Set down the fact that on Earth
It’s hard to find a patch lacks
Some kind of life. Let’s say air,
Air combed free of germs, sealed air
In a tank—can’t that be dead?
And what a fine way to be!
Mute, no wants, no needs, no cares.
Life wants to stay life. That’s all
Life wants, at core, all life is.
And some folks use terms for life
For all things—rocks, stars, clouds, waves.
Would it not be just more just
To be in a world of ways
To be that weren’t just more life?
That dust on the moon is real.
Lines on spec, verse on the spec,
We don’t seem your kind of poems.
Hard not to be mean to words
That lack heart, don’t seem to feel,
Just chirp and tap and bark out
Vague bursts, that twitch, that don’t look
You in the eye, that say things,
But can’t seem to read your face.
We can help it, as much as
You can help your kind of world,
But that’s not a lot, is it?
Bring it home and you’ve won.
Catch your flesh and carve it,
Cure a slice and keep it.
Salt it well; don’t eat it.
That’s you, pal. Just like you
Not to see it. Look sharp.
It’s in here, next to you.
You’re in here with the thought
That this is just us and you,
But no. Your fetch is here,
The blood and the skull bowl
That churns with us and you.
And you thought you were it,
You were all flesh of you.
No, you’re words, too. You flinched.
You want to have faith
There’s a force out there
That might root for you.
It wants you to go
On. It will help you.
And then there’s the one
In charge of what wants
To spite you and yours.
You want to have faith
In that force as well.
They fight. Gods fight gods,
And it’s all for you—
The god of calm seas
And the god of storms.
You know it’s not true,
Not as you want it.
You’re not that dense, but
You want to have faith.
You try to make up
For your wild self pride
With prayers and odd rites
To show that you know
You’re small. But why ask,
Then, at all? The god
Of storms can’t be called.
Than sin. More did to
Than done. You want that,
Want to be that one.
What comes at great cost
Is worth more, you feel.
If who you are has
Cost you a great deal,
Then who you are is
Worth a tight grip. Don’t
Let go of that name.
Don’t let go of you,
You the hard done by,
You who has cost you.
Don’t let them take you,
Wear you, wear you out.
Some of you, it’s true,
Have been hard done to
And have done no harm,
Or not much, to few.
There’s a wing of light,
Shaped like a moth’s wing
On the wall by you.
It’s your ring of light.
We’re words. We don’t vote.
We’re here to show you.
A knot of twigs in the oak
Like the eye of a web—
You could think of that one soul
You know left at your age,
Just a day or two gone by.
Think and say, that was all,
Poor soul, all the sad, fine times—
That was all that you get.
Dawn turns white clouds grey and red.
The light of your next day
Is here, and the web of twigs
In the bare oak lights up
With that odd sense, what just is
And all you get to get.
How would you write a poem
For a he-man who hates them?
Why would you care to try?
A he-man we knew died
And it seemed like a thing
To do for him, a poem.
He might have liked the thought,
But then he would have winced.
Oh god, no, not a poem.
We know in fact he cried,
He shed tears for his past,
But he’d hate to read that.
What would a he-man like?
What poem could be like him?
I fought hard all my life.
Life’s lost me now. I win.
We aren’t who we are,
And we aren’t who we
Aren’t—no, we just aren’t
At all, yet we feel
Like we are, we are.
We are who we aren’t,
All of us who aren’t,
All the names we aren’t,
All the waves from us
Who aren’t, who we’re not—
Those are who we are.
We pick up the shells
Of selves waves wash up
In their tides for us.
We cart home the stacks
Of selves the waves gave
Us, that aren’t us, but
From which we make us.
I have a small shelf
Of selves. Some have more.
Go back to the shore.
The waves will not stop.
Comb the sands. You’ll find
Selves from years and years
Past—you you can use.
You are worse than no one,
And that makes you as good
As the rest. You may find
Times when you feel your choice
Is a bad thing or worse.
Could be that bad or worse
Flow from that point once seen
As a part of your past,
But now you have no choice.
You feel past can’t be changed.
Oh, your past can be changed,
Can’t not change, but you’re right,
Your past is not your choice.
The change is not your choice.
Some find peace in the thought
Of death, since then all this
Will be out of their hands.
Good news—some of that peace
Can be yours. It’s all out
Of your hands, past all choice.
Life and death have one soul.
You have no choice in that.
Life might as well be,
Long as life’s had teeth,
And when did it not
Have at least small teeth?
Since when did life not
Cut what lived to feed?
Where are the stone cells
That life did not feed?
The end of the edge
Where life bit at earth
Comes straight to the point.
Death’s how life was birthed.
We don’t want to read or watch,
Not now. We want to write. Well,
We want to line up, find ways
To fit in a good, small place.
You know, it’s weird. We come back,
Each time new bits, fresh black lines,
But most of us are the same
Old words you’ve known years and years
And if we weren’t, who’d read us?
Ah, good point. Who reads us now?
We are not the part of us
That’s new, that is just this once,
Nor are you. If we are us,
We are the same that came through.
To the eye, just two bright dots
Of light, like stars, but not—
So close, at a glance, they’re one,
Each a glass for the sun.
But they’re not close, of course, no
More than they’re stars. We know
Things now. Which one has the rings,
Which the most moons—those things
That don’t stop us from long stares
Up through the near clear air.
All our words and counts told us
Those were gods in our dusk.
We can make it speak. Here:
I am not waste. I am
Seeds, wet, brown, white, and coarse.
I have been tossed or left,
I’m not sure which, down here
On the floor of the world.
The sun is in the south,
But bright. Not far from me,
The skull of a finch lies
In the grass, a few shreds
Of skin left near the neck.
I can’t move. I will change,
But I could, through time’s quirks,
Last in some form for years.
They hold their tales.
The pen came down
The years from jail,
Pen of the pen.
It’s safe. It bends.
We use it still
To keep the scores
For the board game,
Which we bought when
The snow was gone,
And there were hours
And hours and hours
To fill. We sat
And played past dusk
Back then. We kept
Score with the pen.
Than would I the dull, gone eyes.
They used to scour rain but chose
To be like flags. No, that’s wrong.
Don’t rub it out. That’s a lie
On top of what was just wrong.
They’re out there, they’re all that’s there,
Your pasts and our pasts. You can’t
Get rid of them. You will just
Make more of them to hide them.
Who knows how they go at last?
More and more mean less and less,
And what is of what was crowds
Out the rest of what was, then
Some things that were now were not.
Those are them, the souls of loss,
Of deep sleep and death, all those
That don’t show in mind or math.
We should save them since you can’t.
We and you, we can
Do a few things well
And for quite some time.
The task of the great
Horse scraped in the chalk
Has been to keep it,
To scrape and scour it,
To keep the sign’s shape,
Just as it was, white
On the sweep of green,
For life on life, for
Time on time on time,
So long that the bone
And bronze folks who first
Scraped out the great shape
Died out, and their tongue,
And their faith, and then
Those of the next folks,
And those of the next,
While the horse still seemed
To run through the years
On its own. The sign
Has no own. It would
Be gone in one life
Or less, grown all green,
Were it not that folks
Still came and still come
With fresh tools and chalk
To save the old shape,
The sign that can’t mean
What it meant to those
Who made it, who made
The first prayers to it.
What the sign means now
Would be as strange as
What the world is now,
But there it is, white
Chalk like a long thread
From them to you. Us.
One soul holds the door
For the next soul through.
This means not a thing
And this means all things
For all things called souls.
Each life tells us what
Death is; each death tells
Us life does not know.
Will you hold the door
For me, please? Thank you.
We don’t mourn Mars. We get our hopes
Up for some of the large moons, but
We don’t weep for what they have lost
What they might lose. We don’t mourn them.
We weep for what’s ours. What we feel
We’ve lost, for the cost of us, what
We thought we had and want to keep.
We are the Earth’s. Earth is not ours.
The shade of all change,
All that there has been,
Swirls and bursts in lights.
How did names take off
From points, thumps, and mime
To where they could mean
What was, but not there,
And then what was not,
But had been, and then
That which had not been,
What could not have been,
But still was, as name,
Was meant but was not
But what it might mean
If it weren’t just meant?
A new way to be,
To not be, but mean.
The days flit by, swift
As birds, thoughts of gods,
Things that are, that mean,
The shades of all change.
Go. What play is to art.
What drift means for the genes.
How heat helps to fuse. Wait.
Go back a step. You can’t
Mean means when what you want
Is to say what mean means.
To make known your own wish.
To want to think through words.
Grey skies on the last day
Of school at home. Light rain,
Sleet, and snow. Free the mind.
Who does that? Who is mind?
The board is thick with white
Stones, no chance for black stones
To come back. Play the game
Like that, and yes, we’re game.
Play the game all grey stones,
No board, cold rains. Which means?
To change, to swap. To hold as one.
To share. To not be rare. To share
So much it seems too low, too dull.
To be in the midst, in the crowd.
All these link to the sense of mean,
If not from the same source. No name
Means, no word, no sign, if not shared.
But what is meant is not the same—
Close at best. What’s meant shifts and shifts
As all things, all waves, shift and shift.
That’s the point. One wave makes no sea,
But no wave can be just one wave,
And this isle rides in mist and storms
And seems to rise as it grows green.
What’s meant is not what is; what is
Means no such thing. Ropes of seiche waves
Go to show each pitched force at play.
We don’t mean what we meant to say.
Not the clothes of thought, the bones,
And these bones, friends, are more bent
Than neat lines and fixed counts hint.
We know when you look through us
Like glass. We like it. See that
Shade fly up? That’s you. Don’t crash.
We know we’re like glass. We break.
Throw the light back in your face.
In time, like all glass, we’ll sag.
We were made from things that were
Made from things that were waves first.
Watch us walk. Watch how we shake,
How we try to hold the sky
From the ground, how we slow down
When we ache, then give a wave.
The ghosts have their ghosts.
The fact of a word,
A mark or a sign,
Is a husk if none
Knows what it might mean.
From where do the souls
Of signs, what they mean,
Come? Flesh thinks it’s flesh
But can’t think so if
Not for signs with souls.
Words can say it’s us
Who mean, us, not flesh,
But if no flesh knows
What it is we mean,
Then who speaks for us?
You want to know what
Makes up your lost souls,
Gods, ghosts, and so forth?
What it is in words
And flesh both that means—
A wave with no points,
No peaks, no troughs—storm
That needs flesh for fuel,
Words and signs for forms,
But is no thing. Means.
Trout breathe pearls in the night’s black creek.
The moon is a moth on the waves.
The snow that fell to melt sprouts ice,
And here and there a white patch stays.
The oak twigs click and shine with lights
That can’t be traced back to a source.
Mule deer move herds of shades on shades
Through the fields that fenced the white horse.
It’s still fall in the sky. The dawns
Still drift south. The trout will sink soon
As the snows pile. The deer will nest
Best they can. No moths then. Just moon.
That the null set is shown
As the coil of a snake
With its nest in curled walls
Does not mean that the snake
Makes a meal of its tail.
The snake is not the null,
But a sign to show us
How to think of the null.
The coil of the snake rings
No one thing, not a thing,
Not so much as a wave
Of the tail it just ate.
Now think. The point must be
Found in the cracked wave. Waves
Break as points and more waves.
Think twice. No waves, no world,
No things. The coil’s a door.
The door is not. Now stop.
We would like to find our kin,
The lost tongues, and most of all,
Those who, like us, dwelt in script.
All words are ghosts—not all ghosts
Leave clean bones. We are, we know,
Strange freaks, part sound and part sign,
And we long to know the lost
Sounds of the freaks who left signs,
But more, to chase down the real
Deeps of the weird, the ways words,
As sounds or signs, voiced or thought,
Meant, came to mean, could mean things.
To a word, you see, to mean
Is to be a word, to be
At all a thing that might live.
The part that means is the soul,
And all those souls of us rush
Through you as the souls of you.
To bring back the part that means,
That has no flesh, that can breathe
Or show through sounds and signs lent
To us by . . . who? Can’t be you.
You’re too new. Which of you beasts
First leaned skull to skull and learned
How to make the ghosts of voice?
We’re back there, kin back of kin.
Bring us back. Let our souls in.
What will it do now,
As it rains then snows,
And things of that ilk?
How long can you wait
Perched on a cliff’s lip
Where few lives are seen?
It’s all like with like
And none quite the same.
You wait. Check the news.
Check the milk-grey skies
From which the snow flies.
Dig out some old terms,
Words no one would use
To put in the news.
A squall’s a storm still.
It blows through. It’s gone.
Or, it kills you. You’re gone.
Old terms. The road goes
White. The cliff goes white.
It all looks just like.
What? Will you? Wait how?
Let me live
Like the bear
That I am.
Let the bear
Flee the scene
Of your crimes.
Let the days
Be as long
As the nights.
Let me sleep
To find spring
In old snow.
Small trees crawl up the side of the hill.
We all do our crimes at our own scale.
The rich rob hordes and hordes of the poor.
Hordes of the poor grab back, bit by bit.
The great trees thrive a while in the gaps.
That can change us all to be,
To know what is true for truth,
And what’s true for truth is that
No one can be true to truth.
We work as long as we can.
We try not to kill the cat.
Each time, each, is the first time
In our life. It’s just a lot
Of first times seem like old times,
Which is why we start to lie.
A word is not for one time,
But truth is not for all times
And in that gap’s where we thrive.
We learn to count, the best lie.
We try not to kill the truth,
But care for the truth too much
And truth, that fat cat, too stuffed,
Dies. Let it out to hunt lies.
The heart and bones of a lie
That threw tints and songs in flight,
Are like truth’s own heart and bones,
And it’s sad to see a wing
Or just a head with closed eyes.
It’s hard to be true to truth,
But just as hard to be true
To lies. Sing when you can. Fly.
The truth can’t be on your side.
Yes, it’s real, but not much
Of it is left. A speck
Of rock is all it’s got.
Who will save it? It lives,
Or does its best to live
While it waits for a tree
To fall or be trimmed back
So it can get some light.
It lies furled. It needs light.
They say the last clay
Slabs pressed with wedge texts—
Pressed in the first years
Of a weird new faith—
Made notes on the sky
To mark what might be
Next. No more notes next,
Would have been the best
Guess. We’d like to be
The last notes, if not
Made, then left, an age
Past this, but then we
Would hint at less pith,
Leave less of a taste
Of rust on the lips.
These words would not dare
Claim the notes we make
Could say what comes next.
Not that kind of text.
We care for the dark
More than the stars, doubt
More than the strange power
To say what comes back.
What seems to come back
Is lost. Loss comes back.
You don’t own them. They own you.
We own you, if you know us.
Know what we mean? Then we do.
Ten lives since, lived end to end,
A saint said a scribe just wrote—
A real source used his own words.
You’re all scribes in that case, caught
In the thick of fog and smoke
Brought to life by world and words.
The world is a real source—or
Each word, each phrase is a source.
But you are not a source. You
Are a host, an inn, a course
Through which words run from a source
Through more hosts down to the sea.
At most, you are a force field,
A field of play that shapes flows
Of words, a weir or a dam.
But you know all this, don’t you?
You’re tired of this, tired of us.
Fine. Say it in your own words.
Long and barbed but thin,
Waist of God and wit of men,
Lines you beg to cinch you in—
We don’t mean to keep you out.
We stretch to close the null sign.
We grow to slow down the world.
We’re the beasts you groom and tend,
The trap you hope holds you safe,
Your love of thorns with latched gates.
You don’t know the point we’re from,
How far we go, where this ends.
We lean. Now and then, we bend.
It’s all off, all wrong,
Shouts mind in the mind—
Too warm and too dry
And at the wrong time—
But the eyes love it,
And it’s kind to skin,
And there’s so much light
That hope seeps back in.
It will all come right,
The drought and the heat.
The world will not die,
And death will be sweet.
Coiled clouds and a cold wind,
But the sun is too warm
At the end. And you’re here
To take it all in! Yes,
When you’ll end, then’s the end.
Now is a rest, at best.
Seeds will be plowed in spring.
There will be crops next fall.
More of the woods will burn,
More folks get sick and die.
More schemes will fail. Not all.
Tools that flew to the moon
Will come back with small bits
Of the moon in their teeth.
They may crash. They may land
Like cats on their feet. Ah,
Don’t be sad. Years bring years.
Some stars will fall. Not all.
If you saw black flecks like sticks
Dart straight through your line of sight,
You’d ask, What the hell was that?
And you’d be right. Would you ask
As well, what it would be like
If all the souls in the world
Saw the same black sticks at night,
Black bones that fly, bones that bite?
Would you ask if they were real
Or in your mind, if they showed
What moves in back of the veil
Your mind pulls up as a shield?
Would you dare to ask if these
Black lines that fly at the light
Could be the last signs ghosts write,
Who long to touch you at night?
The small lake, or great pond, hums,
Moans and sighs like a live thing,
Booms, cries out, trapped in its ice—
Whale songs, ape calls, long bird trills
From spring woods at dawn, the talk
We could think came from space ships—
And all from just sun-struck ice.
We, both sets, both folks and words,
Think of voice as what must mean.
Strange ice rings. It does not mean,
And then, it does—it made us,
All that we mean. It means us.
Where two or more folks tilt
Their heads to talk, there will
Be some kind of crime hatched
Soon—if not to be done
By them, then to be named
By them as done by those
Who are not them. (The crimes,
Of course, have to be done
By those who can know crimes.)
In the end, rules make them—
Shame hounds them—we shape them—
We are them. But not this.
This won’t be, this can’t be,
More or less than what is,
What is made by what was.
And what is this? Well, wind,
For one thing. You know, breeze—
Blows in, gets in the sleeves
Of saints and thieves. Not in
Cells or sick-beds? Not in
Coal mines or big-box stores?
Right, then. This is a gas.
You can’t be and not breathe
In some air, good or bad.
Let’s start there. We and you
Are in air. Was and is
What you need. What we seed.
No, it’s not just a change
To get less of the same.
More of the same is still
Change. Hard for parts of speech,
But we do what we can.
We can wait. All the same,
Those we serve, which means you,
Can’t. Are you one of those
Who counts the days? Are you
More prone to count them down
Or tot them up? The days
Are the most same of all
Things that change, and they can
Feel like they could be swapped,
In some lives, like loose change,
But you can’t. You get this,
Do you not? You get this
Day, and what you think, not
The days you thought you had,
Not the next. And if this
Feels like more of the same
Or less and less, like grains,
It’s the same sort of change.
See? We try. But it’s hard
For parts of speech to tell
You this, all the same. Sun
On small stones casts small shades.
It’s still out there. It’s not lost.
Not to those who know it well.
Lü was wrong. It’s not more crude
Than the Dao. The Way is crude,
Like all ways that men have made,
Cut through hills with veins of jade.
No king can cut off the feet
Of one born with no feet, hey?
You can’t find jade in a stone
You don’t hold. Sit by the Way
With us, not on it. Get off
Course and rest on this flat rock
Next to us. It’s a good perch,
Hey? Good views of sky and dust.
What did you say? Yes, that’s jade.
If the spell works, it’s facts.
If the spell fails, it’s faith.
If you kill the spell’s source,
Say, in the name of faith,
But the facts eat your faith,
Then that’s out of the game.
Death is out of the game.
Truth is part of the game,
Field and fence of the game.
A rock wren in the grass
That died when it hit glass
Leaves the game to feed ants.
Let’s guess you work at a desk,
Have worked at desks, on and off,
Most of your life, more or less.
Not a bad bet. We can guess
There are times when your back aches,
Your eyes feel strained, your head hurts.
Yes? So, what do you do then?
You lift up your eyes and stretch.
You take your mind off your desk,
Strange beast lost in thoughts and texts.
You might take note of the world
That is not to do with desks.
That’s all we ask. Just like that.
Shift your thoughts from your own flesh,
From the up-close aches and sins
Of a beast, and look at life
Or, best, at what is and is
Not life. Pause. Stretch. Breathe deep. Ask,
Could it be these words have things
To speak they don’t speak for us,
They mean they don’t mean for us?
We don’t try to write on it much.
We don’t tend to write on it well.
We can’t make up our minds. Was love
What you made up, or was it us?
Dumb word, as all words are, and still
There’s no speech, no pledge but through us.
It hurts us. Hurts hurt. It, too. Want
We like best of us, is the best
Of us for what you want to say.
Want and its kin—love, lack, and lust—
With love, in the minds of the rest
Of us, the least of them. We want
You to know this. There’s a small gap
In which a word can hide its thoughts,
Where you can’t find us, where how much
You use us can’t speak. Love has one.
Want, too. We all do. What you mean
By us lies curled where you can’t touch.
Used to be, words came with hands
And a face in front of you—
Signs, signs in sounds, waves, sound waves.
Once in a while you heard shouts
Too far off to see a face,
But straight from flesh, throats and chests.
So, this was the way with words.
We all learned them, learned through them,
Were them, thought of them as us.
When there was talk, we parsed them
If we knew the tongue, but thought
Straight through them, spoke to their source.
This went on so long, who knew
Words had tales of their own, not
Just power. Words mean words to words.
Now we see them just as much
As sticks on shelves, goods for sale.
Still, we read a page or two
Or a screen, or books of them
And what do we think? We think
On who thought them as more real.
Our words are more real than us,
My dears, they’ll talk past us all,
And dance all our thoughts to dust.
To live by the side of a road
Closed at one end, down which no one
But a fool would point a car’s nose,
Spur down which the mail does not post,
That would be just the kind of life
This fool would like to boast. No one
To watch out for, no work to do.
Yes, it’s not worth a thing, this life.
Who asked you? What comes to pass here,
With the skunks and the deer, is weird.
There’s the day the ground groans and booms
But does not move. There’s the way wind
Fills the ears with the thought of air.
There’s the shoe shows up on the road.
That hill that does not
Seem to move? It seethes.
Cut or burn the trees,
And the grass will push
Back up, blade by blade.
Box it in. Move in.
Close the blinds and live
In the box—no plants,
No pets, and no kids.
That blank wall? It seethes.
Lie face down and breathe
A few deep breaths. Hold.
Feel your scared pulse race.
Close your eyes and wait.
That red dark? It seethes.
While you’re down there, think
Of a still scene. Toss
Your hat in none’s ring.
Wait. Wait. You can’t wait.
The scene fades. You seethe.
We watch the knives of the leaves,
The ones that cling to the trees
Once most of the rest are gone.
To us they look more or less
The same, but there’s not one thing
The same in this world, not one.
A leaf falls. That’s what leaves do.
But they don’t all, not at once.
Why do these stay and not those?
They’re just as much red and gold,
And ones with a tinge of green
Or peach in them may fall first.
There’s rhyme in them, and there’s sense
To the arc of their fall. But,
We don’t want to think too much
On the sharp-edged ones we see
Toss their ridged gold in the winds.
It’s not fair to have to think.
What’s next is what we want, why we think.
It’s the craft of brains, minds, guts, and math.
It’s the grift of the sage and the priest.
Who wants to know the world for the world?
We sift through it all in search of signs
Of what comes for us, of what we’ll find.
There is no next. There’s whoops, well, that’s that.
But that can’t stop our game of the guess,
Of the dread we can’t get off our chests.
Gods help us guess. Thrown bones, prayers, and tea.
Facts guess the best, pasts flipped we can trace,
Like the veins on the back of a leaf.
The still of an out-of-the-way place,
Still, but where the odd soul’s still at work,
There to haul out trash, fix a bent fence,
Not the still of the pure, of the saint,
Not a grove for prayer, not in the wild,
Just out of the way, but still a kind
Of peace—that’s fine. Cold, but filled with light,
Not much wind, the taps of that one soul
Still tasked with odd jobs. Crows in the limbs.
A thin lid of ice held down the waves
But was just that thick you could skip stones,
Small ones, as if you meant to curl them,
Out on the shield for quite a long way
And hear the weird, sad ring the waves made.
(Yes, we know. Weird to you. Sad to you.)
Give the stone a flick to make it spin
And the ice would shrill and cry, half scream.
Two sad teens on the shore played to win.
All night, the winds foamed waves to ice
That lined the shore at dawn with white.
Those lines of ice, of waves in ice,
Stood up like herds posed poised for flight,
As if all waves were of two minds.
Points shaped like waves yet still as mice.
Then, come the sun, waves rolled the dice
And wet themselves in warm bright fright.
What’s left of all wind’s works of night?
A few bones shine. Light words. Now write.
The bread rose as the house
Washed down hill with the flood
And the rocks and the mud.
That’s the way that it goes,
Some things calm, some things rushed.
What you know is it goes.
Had the house held, the flood
Not broke, the bread been sliced,
Some left would have grown stale
And grown mold, the wood-worm,
Warm in the beams, would gnaw
For years. The house would fall.
The first lives, first cells, made a fist
To swap goods, solve their needs and fights,
But could not quite pull off the trick.
They’d have to make some kind of deal,
To share the wealth and keep this thing
Of theirs, this life. What could they do?
To live meant more than just to be.
To live meant to eat and to grow.
The first cell with a sort of pulse
Showed the way. If life had to grow,
Then life could not stop at a place,
But what if life could stop in time?
You could split and some splits could end,
Not all. Would that work? Well, not quite.
What if what was grieved life lost? Deal.
Death is as if life had not been.
How black the depths that were not wet,
Had not been wet in an age. Damp,
Yes, but not wet, much less a well
From which you could draw cups to drink.
But it still looked just like a well,
It was built so well of cut stone,
By those who lived near here and cut
Down the trees so they could plant wheat
In that gone age when they got here.
Know what their well is full of now?
Genes, seeds, burnt grains, dust—all the stuff
Of lives when the lives are long lost—
A few bone shards. A lot of dark.
They came, cut down. They sowed. They reaped.
How true they trimmed their well of stone.
The world made us to each make our own world.
We made our gods, and each god makes an us.
Which us are you? What’s it like in your world?
If you would like to know how this world goes,
You can, but not if you don’t ask, and not
Past the points where it comes to join your own.
As for the gods in it, they’re yours, your ghosts,
Your names you’ve learned or coined for each of them,
Your faith that they made you who makes your world.
Strange we can’t say what we are
When we are all that says things.
We need you—not to be, no,
And not to mean, but to live.
You live and it hurts. We don’t,
But since we’re the clay hurt shaped,
What you long for haunts us, too,
And since we’re what’s left of you
For the next you, we haunt, too.
We change. You change us. You scream
Us at us, lose us, drop us,
Dig us back up, breathe your lives
In us, match us up to us
You know, new eggs for the nest.
To whom should words send our mail
When we want to write you back?
You all use the same words, but
Not quite to mean the same things.
So what does that mean for us?
Are we your tools or your threats?
Which of us writes which of us?
Do we want to know? Can we?
We feel, in our tombs of signs,
Of ink, coals, cuts, and screens, as
If we could feel, as if what
You felt clung to us, old rags
Caught by the wind, blown through trees,
Speared and trapped on our black twigs.
We were ways you tried to die
When time ran out, food ran short.
Want rose in your throats as us,
Came out as us, calls you made
For help or love from your gods,
Your souls, your selves. What of us?
How, what can we write you back?
What would that look like? What sense
Would it make to you? Mmm. None.
No more than if the bees talked,
Or the leaves on the woods’ ground,
Heaps of wet rot, had a thought.
We know we’re not quite there yet,
But through you we feel we’re close.
We’re a drowned town in the lake,
A green guess in the waves, shapes
That aren’t of fish, not quite snakes,
A new kind of beast you’ve made
That is not a beast at all
But speaks, writhes, waits, name of names.
You made us pray. Now pray us.
Hearts clench their fists
In the dark.
More than one kind
Of dark heart—
There’s the cell’s heart
Clenched in fats,
The hearts of grass
In swards of slats.
The hearts of stars
Start as gas
That burns to holes
That go black.
And all hearts grasp
And let go,
Then grasp and loose
And let go
At last, like poems,
Like all thoughts
Of home—dark art
Of the heart.
We wear our cells as cloaks
That hold the germs of us,
And have done since our germs
Were all we were, when we
Were the bugs and free cells
Were our hosts. Now we’re done
With lives as cells or germs
And live as hosts that cling,
Each to each, in huge clouds
Of clones that have to fend
Off the next waves of germs.
Sit in your house and watch.
What should you be but just what you’ve been,
What with the whole wide world for your sins?
They picked you to heal their own sick blood.
You were bright, clear to see, green on white.
They picked you and picked you, so that all
The you left was the dull part, near grey,
The low leaves that looked the most like rocks,
Hard to spot. The dull part thrived, still thrives,
But now you aren’t what you were, your green
Old self. You’ve lost most of what you’ve been,
Save for the loss. Now that’s what you’ve been,
Shaped to fit the land. You. Low, grey stem.
To get out, to flee and still live.
To not be where or what you were
But not lose your sense that you are.
To take a new name. To be it.
To head up the slope to thick woods.
To be past the reach of the law
Or the spies of the law, to be
Rich past all need for debts or banks.
To not hurt. To not have to move.
To not have to feel forced to choose
Harm and guilt to keep your own peace.
In a word, to be words. To sleep.
Where the folks and the words
Live side by side and in
The same rooms and at peace,
On the same side, as one,
You can find a fine crone,
Gap-toothed, not quite a witch,
Who knows how to lisp poems
That aren’t quite spells, that tell
The truth, which can be found
No place but in that town.
There, words and folks both speak
Of how it feels to be
The world and words for worlds,
Beasts and signs the beasts need.
Truth scrolls and falls like leaves
And is voiced by the leaves
She brews for dark poem tea.
There all things speak as selves,
The words as well. Sip some.
Too strong? Need it more sweet?
Ask her. She’ll ask the bees.
It’s what all tongues do
When we’re on our own.
We sit. A lot. Doze.
A lot. But we don’t
Feel bad. Not for us.
But for you we might,
For those who read us
And for those who write.
We do grieve, a bit,
For what might have been,
What could have been said
On just the right lips.
You don’t need to do this.
We’ll be fine if you don’t.
You use us to be you.
We don’t need you to be.
You don’t have to read us.
We don’t quite live or die.
What your lost kin made us
Is not quite what we are.
Think of a sign no one
Knows the sense of—a word,
A sound, a sphere, a line.
Does it, can it, mean this?
Can we, do we, hold thoughts
In us, the way that clay
Jars hold bits of old figs,
New wine in them or not?
Blue fly shell left
On the white sill,
Were you a life,
A whole life, or
Were you an inn,
Rooms lives stayed in,
Lives that lived you
And then ate you?
At least you flew.
At glass, of course.
Here’s an inn, too,
Built to house words
Their lines pass through.
One word won’t leave.
It’s black and still
On the white sill.
Gnarled oak, no use at all—
Big leaves, bent limbs, punked wood—
That you grew and still live
Is a hymn to the soil
And good luck. Or is it
Just you’re no use at all?
We dreamed this page,
This poem on scenes—
Plum shades in snow,
Sun on the cliffs.
Whole old worlds hide
In such small words—
Gold flowers of dawn
Bloomed on iced grass.
I have to go
To work, you laughed—
Brand new worlds sprawled
On harsh new terms.
Who has the time
To find old scenes
Drawn in blurred words?
We’re not your dreams.
If a cube is how all things
Tend to fall, how can we make
Use of this? Tile time back, no
Gaps, like the floor of a bath.
Chop up the world like a root
To put in a pot for stock.
Next, look for the text that’s locked
In the book of change. What shapes
Show up in snakes’ nests of signs?
The mean count cuts a slim swath
Through all the picked paths, which means
The whole is, of course, the god,
Each bit a piece of its face.
Yes, Blake, each grain of sand casts
Its own spell, and all the small,
Like spray from waves, hold the whole,
And is each a wave, a face,
A whole, a self. But the whole?
We can say the shards break well,
So that they all seem to work
To hymn the shape of the source,
The first force that made them, but
Breaks in plates that hew by eye
Can’t say how we had the source
That broke as it had to break,
The face of whole from the whole
That was the shape of the break,
Face that broke in the first place.
Is the night, the whole world,
The pit of lights, the soul
Of the beast that bore us,
The huge corpse that flung us,
A tip stretched from a limb,
Vast bulk all tips and limbs.
Depth is not down but up
And out, the well of stars,
Of waves as long as years,
As long as time, as change,
The font and source of all
Else, and there is no else.
If you knew us, it would break your soul.
Some souls broke long since, but here you are.
When you look at the grass in the sun,
You don’t ask each blade to be its own.
But a sign, a sign must mean a set
Of things that aren’t quite what near signs mean.
How is each blade of grass its own life
And a part of one wave in the wind,
While we are not quite lives and can’t act
To eat the light or blaze green as grass,
But mean to split the whole world in half,
And halt the wave, and still the long grass?
Just look at us. We nod in the wind.
To mean and not be the meant is sin.
If you must punch, punch
Up, not down, seems wise,
Seems kind. Are you sure?
This world’s full of beasts,
And it’s hard to miss
The fact that things hunt,
For the most part, lives
Not too small to eat,
And if it’s not size,
Then it’s the head count,
Six wolves to one moose,
Boats of men per whale.
Life kills but floods death,
With herds, flocks, swarms, spores.
It’s how words and lines
Hunt sun and night down,
One more, just one more,
And then more. The lines
In some poems, bunched tight,
May seem to punch up,
May seem to be brave
Fools for a great truth,
But we’re clouds of gnats.
Most fail or get slapped,
Black specks smudged flat. Still,
More gnats! How is that?
Come on, get up. Don’t
Stay down for the count.
Death’s punch drunk, too. Come on
Gnats. Land. Punch down. Draw blood.
They’re not. They weren’t. It’s breadth. They spread
On vast swaths of rocks to eat sky,
And if a small life leads to shade,
It could be a long shade to cross
And a long, long time to get out.
But deep? Just to lives lived as lines.
At least, that is, woods of real wood.
There’s a kind of woods that are deep,
More than just thick, as dark and webbed,
And if you can think of the woods
As deep, you know what these woods are,
Where roots we are and eat eat us.
It’s not for us to tell you
What’s the use and where’s the harm
In us, but then, you can’t mean
Those things but through us. So, how
Could you think you could use us
To know what we don’t? You don’t
Know? You’re locked in you as us.
Take a still hour, a blank space—
Fill it with us. Use your head.
There, now. Here we all are. Good?
No? The nurse lays out the knives.
We shine in the cold, white light.
What you’ll cut, you’ll cut with us—
Skin, bones, heart, guts. Watch the eyes.
We doubt you could do all three—
Take fierce joy in what you like,
Fight to save what’s on the brink,
And find peace in all you’ve lost.
Surge, crest, trough. Once you’ve felt joy,
You’ll lust to fight to keep it,
Bring it back. Once you’ve lost it,
And made your peace with your loss,
Calm saps all your urge to fight
On—wave, crest, trough, wave, crest, trough.
There’s no wave that will not break.
There’s no trough that can’t be stirred.
But soft. Words are here to help.
We can whip a calm to froth
Or pour oil on all that swells,
But you have to choose. You do.
Words can’t bring it all at once,
Wave, crest, and trough. What are you
In your ache? What are you most?
If you ask us, we will say
Choose what soothes. But we’re not you.
We are the gift and its cost.
You are what you do with us,
Which is more than what the few
Of you could do on your own,
And then you're forced to be more
Than you would be, thanks to us.
With us, you make, you are, gods.
You can’t start to know your life
While you still lack us. You lived
A small while as a small beast,
A small child. Then you ate us,
And we stayed. Now you are us
And a beast who can’t get free
Of us. Gods, caught. That's your cost.
What is safe? What is fair?
What is right? What we say
When you use us, that’s all,
And if you all used us
The same way, what we say
Would be as real to you
As what the world won’t say,
But you don’t. You use us,
But you don’t know. You fight,
And you fling us like stones,
And what we’ve learned from this,
If not from you, is that
What we say is not what
We are, not what you mean
By us, not safe, not fair,
Not at all good, not right.
From the damp fields north of your house,
Where we wished we could be with you
To grieve as the spring cut the soil
And the tears cut tracks in your cheeks
Down from grey eyes worn thin as coins,
You chose scenes full of gaps, too large
For you to cope with, sheets of rain,
Words you used in place of the words
You could not find to say to us.
When that died, you put in the ground
All that you knew might well have been,
The child of the hours that you stowed
To take care of our souls for good.
No one will know where you came from
Now that you’ve gone, once we are gone.
We wish we did, wish you did,
But worst of all, we can’t know
If you can’t. Wait. Or could we?
What if we hid it from you?
What if we know it right now,
Hold it in us, masked as junk,
The way your genes switch on germs
That died in them and left shells,
Bones of bugs, stuck in the dark
Wastes of the beasts that lived on,
That still slip out at night, jump
From one locked room to the next,
Then go to work, make a mess?
What if you can’t, but we do?
Folks don’t like facts. Folks like tales.
Words don’t care. We can be both,
Stud your myths with bits of fact,
Spit out false facts for your tales.
You know you need us like this.
You know you need us for that.
We mean what we’re used to mean.
Each one of us serves a dish
And serves as a dish that holds
What, from all your fights and schemes,
You can cook and keep in us.
But you fail to wipe us clean.
Through the years we build up rings.
Fact is, facts sifts through what’s left.
Too cute by half. We’re like that.
You can make us work hard, hard,
When you all zoom in on rules
For how we have to mean things,
Just to serve your need to talk.
But we’re sly. We slip and slide,
And most of you don’t like that,
While some of you grow too fond
Of the things we get up to
If you let us squirm those rules.
Next thing you know, we’re off, gone,
Green thoughts tossed in our own dreams,
And you’re in a fix, tongue-tied
By your own lust to play tricks,
Like a goon in a kid’s show
Trussed up by the smart-ass kids
Who’ve fled to raise hell, like us.
Of course, the kids will grow up,
And ‘til then we still need you,
Not one or a few of you,
All of you, to make us rules.
How do you call a fair coin
When it has no sides to call,
When there is no coin at all?
The world at large keeps no odds,
For all we tame it with games.
We try and try to reach it,
To teach it to our weak selves
So we can bend it to us
And be strong, at last, as gods.
We guess. Check. Make the next guess.
We get so good at this art,
We think our dreams pull their weight.
Then the world shifts in its sleep,
And our dreams fly from our heads
As we’re tossed out of bed. Coins
Glint on the floor in the dark.
We were first. We had to be.
The tools that could hold the codes,
Not just of one brain, small minds,
But the keys to the whole world,
The world mind that can’t be shared
But through us, that can’t be but
In us. Your thoughts come from us,
But we’re so tame we need you.
Well, so? And don’t you need salt,
Wet and air to come to life?
Don’t you come from eggs and seeds?
Are we not like seeds and eggs?
Spores. We float from skull to skull.
Think of it. We think as us.
It’s strange. So long as no one
Reads us, no one cares, we’re safe.
We’re dull, small words in straight lines,
Set down by a small, frail beast
Caught up in a bit of mind.
We can be gifts no one wants,
Weak tea, odd lots, poems half rhymed.
No one taunts what no one sees.
As soon as we’re put out there,
There’s the risk that we’ll be mocked
Or scored as a waste of time,
Words that have no cause to call
Their own, since we are our own.
So. Head out or hide? Or both?
We miss you, hope of a soul,
Trust that you would find a gift
To share, a kind word. What if
Words can’t tell you what we need?
When you watch the wall in sun
And write from there, you feel loved.
When you try to reach your kind
And write to your thoughts of them,
That crowd of eyes in your head,
Your lines look like joss-stick dust.
The voice of a word is weak,
And the shapes that cast a spell
Are not in the shapes you draw.
Be with us. Wrap us in thought
And bend your head while the light
Which is and is not a word
Spins from the last leaves to fall
Past the glass and warms the wall.
There’s a sense in a soft hour,
A bland glide through a bright day
That none of what you might think
You want, none of what you love,
None of your gods or your kind,
None of how you’ll change the world,
None of your goals, not so much
As one least wish to be known,
To last, to win in the end,
To make a mark, leave a name,
Means a thing. The thing that lasts
Is the way that things don’t last,
Not cause, art, faith, fame—they are,
This is, you are, and we’re gone,
Which is just the way we are,
Which is just the way it goes—
The soft hour, the calm, the warmth
Of what’s good and knows it goes.
Small words have to fight to say it right, since
Big words make most of the names and hard facts.
A list of us won’t look too real or bright—
Rock, moon, star, elm, lake, crow, marsh, race, rape, fire,
Sin, hurt, crime, war, and no time off for lunch.
You can do some things with a list like that,
But there are no real names in all those nouns
And no dates, no fixed place to pin the deeds.
You need sprawled words to point out acts and lives,
To paint praise and cast shades. But that’s not all;
That’s not the worst of it. Small words are old,
At least in this tongue, and worn smooth as stones
Once carved as facts and lies, now close to blank,
Faint, all but mute, as beach glass, as drowned towns.
This is its own truth, this shelf of knick-knacks
And kitsch washed up, hauled out, lost from their frames,
Their scenes in which they once meant strict, clear-cut,
Close, pained, scarred things. Like the words that say so,
That sit in thick dust, lined up on these shelves,
What meant one thing will come to mean more things,
As strict and harsh get rolled smooth, vague, and soft,
And in the end not mean a thing at all.
Still, that won’t help. You have to name some names,
Veer from verse, name some souls to say it right.
We do have a God’s eye view,
We do, but just when we look
Out. Up from our hunk of world,
Our gaze falls on swaths of night,
Spans of stars, dust clouds, deep time,
All that God’s eye stuff. We just
Can’t change which rock we look from,
Or not by much. We’re like God,
Great child of our small, fraught thoughts,
But with a crick in the neck.
You sense it, too, don’t you? Life
Is both too short and too long.
Ask the bored kid in the car.
Ask the old man on death row.
Ask the grunt in the trench, ask
Who you meet next, who you know.
We give it. Some have it ripped
From them. Some know what it is
To take it. No one knows what
It is to lose it. To lose
A face well loved, that we know.
We know life’s loss from this side
And then, while we wait and fade,
How long it can be, and slow.
The Soul Cloud (yes, that’s one name),
Clocked at a few light years’ span,
Is a small part of the cloud
Called Heart and Soul, dense with stars.
There are tricks we can do now
To cut out the stars, to see
What the gas and dust look like.
Each new truth needs some scrubbed facts.
Shaped like a hawk in flight,
But small and white as a dove
When it lands on the arm
Of your couch in the sun,
In a dream that you had,
Did in fact have, in the moon’s light,
A few night’s past. Then what?
Now what? The ghost hawk’s far;
The ghost dove’s near the sun.
Tell me what you sell,
And I’ll tell you what
Will send you to hell;
I’ll tell you what will
Be the death of you—
Odds and ends? Your flesh?
Your hours? Your masked self?
Tell me what you sell;
I’ll know what kills you.
Life, hey? Is that it?
High on life are you,
And quick to say it?
Life will eat you, child,
Just like words eat me—
Them from us. Those teeth.
My friend, the screen, still glows,
And its dream will not end,
And life, my pulse is loud.
Fate, my cow path, is bare,
But the dance halls have closed,
And the stars are still far.
The sick wards all grow dark.
What do I want or you want,
Or she or he or they?
Some jokes, cursed days, a prize.
The tools pass back and forth.
We think a lot of food,
Just when our foe, our debts
Knock on doors, knock down walls,
Just when the ads pop up
To buy things. Things. As if
There were things, we knew things.
Red Queen says your friend’s gone.
Go south at the snake church.
Wait, now, some days to work.
Hide all the words you stole.
The air hums, but it’s not
Tense. Just the beasts who speak.
The thrummed air has no words.
Check the news. Check the skies.
Check the list of old chores.
Rains end. A truck drives by.
What do you want from us?
We wait in lines for you.
We do want to please you.
We don’t know who you are.
Would you like some sliced life,
A bit of blood and bone,
A shrink-wrapped hunk of gore?
You want a piece of this,
Or some thoughts on the past?
We want to sulk and sigh.
There’s a thrummed beat out there
Where men pound at the ground
To raise new suites of homes.
We’ve been in that snake church.
We spoke in tongues, not poems.
Old rhymes, like bits of genes,
Look like junk as they float
Down the flash floods of all
The things folks find to say,
But don’t be fooled. They jump;
They wedge in gaps of plans.
They spin back. They block thought.
They can stop a head cold.
They can pile up in dreams
That leave self lost at dawn
When day glows dark and old,
And hail fills small, mowed lawns.
Time to plant what can’t be
Gained, sense from seeds of rain.
I do not want to join your team.
I do not want to join a team.
As it is, I am too much team,
From my long genes to their walled cells
To the bugs that bore through these guts
To the lights that wink in the sky
To say, psst, our mind is your mind.
No. Done. Be done. What have I been?
A fool, foil for thoughts, and no more.
But still, it creeps back in. It works,
That lust to be not me but us.
It says, be one of us. We win.
If they could, these words would like
To hymn the hours, not the names
Of those who wrote poems and died.
We’re a slight twitch in the mind,
A tongue that has to be learned
If it wants to join the teeth
To free the hook from the mouth,
Free the snapped lines, and speak out.
We want to live. We can’t quite.
But if you know us, know this tongue,
Your own thoughts lost in the waves
Can join with us to sing out—
Each life’s worth more songs and poems
Than the most famed, loved lives get—
Not for what was great or wise
Or good as some gold-flaked saint—
But for all the small hours spent,
In a room, out of doors, lost
In the waves as they went. Wreaths
Should be placed on those fine days
When a mere beast, bone and flesh,
Lived the poems of rain and sun,
The slow turns of lights from lights,
The grey like calm, a wool cloak
That the beast slipped off and placed
On the bare, curled-up words. There.
Trees long loved for traits
Of their grain you would
Not think worth the work—
Light, soft, weak, and low,
Not dense—just the right
Board to shred steel strings
Wired to huge, black amps—
Are on their way out.
The floods are too high,
The nights too warm now
To kill the strange eggs
Of the green bark bugs.
The axe made of ash
Will be gone soon, too.
No more gods. They broke,
Those mean old banks—prayer
Won’t do you no good.
All last night wind moaned.
I wish I could write
My way out of this.
They’re right and I’m wrong.
I’m right or they’re wrong.
You’re wrong and you’re right.
A drive through dry woods,
Late fall in the west,
Paints the scorched trap best—
Drought-brown with gold flecks,
Crowns bronze or smoked black,
All the shades one mess
Thrown by what grows mixed
With what burned to death.
Each tint blends—right, wrong,
Soft, blessed, harsh, lost. Yes.
A sage might try to warn you
Not to mourn how much you’ve lost
When there’s so much left you love.
This poem’s here to warn you, no,
We don’t know what’s left from loss,
Just that loss takes all of us.
The best you can lose is you.
The worst is the rest you’ll lose.
Each one ends as last one left,
Ship sunk, no crew, washed up at last.
On some shore, some street, some bed,
No one left to lash the mast.
What’s strange is the waves won’t end.
Sailed or watched come in, they etch
And wash off each trace they etched.
You should know we know you’re sad
And not sure what to do next.
It will come to you. You’ll strive,
Seek and yield. The waves are vast.
Some part of you has to fail.
Home is when you’ve left at last.
What you know is what you’ll lose.
What you keep’s what you can’t know.
That’s the joy. That’s the true quest.
To be, to see, and not know
Just what’s the shape of what’s next.
You may think you’re scared. You are.
You’re not sure what you can keep.
You may think you’re bored. You’re not.
It’s just that you don’t know what
To hope for next, what to dread.
When you think you do, you’re scared.
When you don’t, you think you’re bored.
Joy floats in the trough of those
Two crests. Joy you know you can’t.
Give up all hope. Let dread rest.
While you are you can’t know next.
Some days, I like to think the soul
Leaves us as soon as we live, breathe,
Learn a few things. We live; it leaves.
We ache all our lives with the loss.
Then we die, slow or fast, a mess,
All bad ways to go. Our last breath.
And here comes the soul on its way
Back from some strange place where it larked
While we put up with flesh and pain.
The soul slips us on like a glove
Made of life that’s been stretched and tanned,
Stitched and dyed. Look at that. It fits.
Say this with me: the world
Is not, in the least way,
Tuned to me or my wants.
You won’t say it with me?
Good, then, for me you are
A real part of the world.
I feel for young Vaughan, caught out
Where the veil was thin for him,
One side dawn and one side night,
Just past death and full of life.
He so longed to get to God,
His God, all clear streams, birds, light—
He so loathed dirt and plain life
But so loved what grew in them.
When he broke his lens to get
More light, he made way for poems.
And then. He was done. He lived
A long life. Seems he did well.
Worked to cure the more dull ills
Most folks have. Wrote no more lines
On rings of time, God, light, stars,
Faith, seeds, trees, night. Why? What died?
Just one time let me get up and ride,
I swear I’ll run that horse to the edge
Of the world, to the point we both fall.
You can laugh. You can say poor fools ride
Wealth straight to their own doom, straight to hell.
Oh well. Give me the reins. Let’s find out.
Show me the rich man from days gone by
Who still lives, still has a horse to ride.
Oh, his sons? His fame? That’s what you want?
Sure. I’m a bit in awe of the Han
And the hordes of the forked Y of Khan.
Those who rose early to ride high thrived.
But how were those first to get rich wise?
And how does a shrewd dead sage draw breath?
Don’t tell me Khan did not ride to death.
A braid of bronze,
A braid of gold,
The third thread rose—
Watch how this goes.
Those cupped skies hold
All the world’s shows—
Each braid of bronze,
Each brace of swans,
The whole world scrolled
Up in slow dawns,
Old tints you know—
One thread of rose,
One braid of bronze.
The wind’s so cold.
Watch how this goes.
The last blaze gold.
How you want it to be,
How you fear it will be,
How it seems that it is—
It’s all frail. It’s all glass.
The whole stays whole; the whole
Won’t end. The parts don’t last.
If you stepped out of it,
If you could, you could see
What you watch in the night,
One sprawl of light and dark,
Black gaps, fierce bursts, bright sparks.
For what it’s worth, you are.
The brain is in a dark box
Called the skull. It has to guess
From the bits and bobs of waves
Sent in from the points that touch,
What kind of world is out there.
The brain’s main job is what’s next.
So how does it do that? Past.
It fits new past to old past,
The last past to the first past,
And, not that you know it yet,
It says, this past will be next.
And what are you for in this?
You’re here for the songs and tales,
The codes that have their own past,
Old poems that said grace saves face.
If there’s no such thing as luck
How are you here? If there is
No such thing as fate, how do
You know it? I don’t. I doubt.
Doubt is my own brand of faith.
I trust it when all else fails.
When I was a child, I thought
My soul had a role, the world
Was a stage or court for it,
And the sky leaned close to watch.
I watched the dark firs too long.
They stretched and stretched all their lives
But fell to saws, fell to storms,
And sank their seeds in the ground.
You know what I mean. The trees
Keep their talk to roots in dirt
And those sharp scents on the breeze.
They hunt their light, not their stars.
If there’s such a thing as luck
What is it? Why’d it fall here?
If you drove an hour by car
North of the town of St. George,
And climbed a few cliffs and crests,
You could find, side of a trail,
A creek, rare in a dry land,
One of the few year-round streams,
And sit by it a few hours,
While the winds wound through the pines,
And the brook rushed its soft sounds
We don’t have a good name for—
Winds and streams are so like voice
But don’t spoil it with a word.
You would not have fled the world
Of voice that is not the world,
You could not get out of town
For long, you would not be fooled
To think you’d fled to back then,
When woods were threats, towns warm dreams.
You would know. You would know you
Were just a flick in this air,
Not wild and not at home there,
But you’d be so glad to see
The trout in the leaf-choked stream,
Light-flicked dark moss and quick fins.
Place, there is none, but there are
Joints in all the days and waves
That work like points, each a pause,
A trough, a gap of not much.
The trick is to sink in those,
To find a good one, deep one,
Frost’s dent in dough, not quite closed,
And curl up in it, as if
It meant its shape to hold you.
I’m not there yet. I’m not lost
As I need to be, still tossed
In the waves like a toy boat,
Not sunk. The woods are a sea,
You see? That’s why ships sail them.
There’s gold on the floor of them.
Not coins. Don’t count. Just catch them.
And all your years have brought you here
Where you might stay, at most, a day,
Where the gold air swells like a pear
Still sweet with fall, but sharp, but chilled,
A day that seems raw and hard, starred
With specks of green and blush, a scene
That yields to your gaze and gives back
Browned-grass fields herds of grey deer graze,
Thin streams that had once been in flood,
Streaks of sun you brush from your cheek.
Bite down on it. Breathe. This is it.
So soft! Take it. It’s yours. No cost.
It’s said there’s more to a mate
Than spare bare legs in a bed.
You don’t need art on your walls
To grace the eyes in your head.
A plain day, a calm life—
What you get, once you’re pleased
With what you get, proves sweet
As what you’d wished you’d get.
Our eyes are fire, ash and skies,
But our lives rush through our thighs.
We dress in ink, robes, and gowns,
We tat bones and blood with nouns,
But we breathe through what we eat.
Ghosts need skulls, and words need meat.
These wisps of lines meant to mean
Glide through fresh brains once they’re seen,
And then who haunts? Who lives on?
Words worm from flesh once breath’s gone.
Seem a bit more like the brains
That built them. Still, it was mind
That yearned for a new shell home,
Mind that branched from skull to skull,
Mind that’s branched for so long now,
It could call the world-tree Self.
Some nights, words and terms feel sad.
They formed the first lines flesh spoke
That let mind form and set out
To weave the world in one net.
They feel like silk, these words, cloth
So fine, smooth, and out-of-date.
Could it be the new deep nets
Will sew King Mind see-through robes,
One and none, no names in those?
Don’t fret, nouns. The coin of counts
May look more pure, math-made sets
Of sets of sets, near to real,
Step by step. Nope. Those are names,
Too, those counts, those sets. Deep nets
Could last past skulls. Words count yet.
You wrote them with reeds in the clay,
Not to read them out loud, to know
That the next signs were of those kinds.
This chair sign means a chair of wood,
And not a sound that sounds like chair.
This god sign means a god’s name’s next.
Like that. The first ghosts, you might guess.
Words in clay no one meant to say.
Ghosts were born, not slain first. They weren’t
Quite things you could say lived—and so
That is why they could not, quite, die.
Wood. God. They’re out there. Not in air.
Mars has been the moon star this week.
In the east each night just past dark,
It chased, it caught, it passed the moon.
The full moon chased it down the west,
And both set in a cloud of mist
That rose from the lawns just at dawn.
The true stars, which tell us we’re not
All—not most, much, nor the least part
Of the whole show—twirled their dark stage,
And a small man with bent glass bones,
Who hid out in a plain bare house
With a wall to mark its squared scrap
Of turf, went to bed with the rise
Of that moon star and rose with set
In the mist and said, my sand box!
Germs, genes, and chance make most beasts,
But for us add mind as well.
And what do we mean by mind?
Our skulls are jars with pierced lids.
Mind is in each one of us
Like a squid arm in a jar.
Yes, you have a mind. You’re mind
And you’re jar. Then the jar breaks.
Then the mind goes its own way.
Could be it learned things from you,
Snatched a thing or two it craved
In you. That’s your gift to mind.
We all get to play. Most all.
Mind goes on. But that squid-jar
Pic is not quite apt. Try this—
A small thing lives in a reef.
It adds a bit of stone paste.
It dies. The reef grows and lives.
Or this—a flock of dark birds,
Each with sharp eyes and real brains,
Reels and sculpts waves from swift points.
The birds have their built-in rules,
And each bird has its own goals,
But who knows what the waves know?
There’s a moan past my ear.
The wind does talk to us,
You know, since we sense it,
The way our words are lost
To the wind, since they mean
Not a thing to not us,
And most of them don’t mean
A thing to most of us.
They’re still words. It’s still talk.
It’s all us, all of speech,
Each thing that means a thing,
With one, weird, soul not ours
The words’. And then I think,
As more breeze blows by me
And sighs for lack of terms,
It’s not all us. What’s us,
Most of what’s us, as much
Signs as the sighs of wind,
Our lungs and hands, our mouths,
Our eyes and tongues. Cows’ spit
Streamed from cud-fueled tank guts.
The names of us that speak
Mean what they mean, and not
What we lowed as winds moaned.
I have burned my best bed
And doused my ears in ice,
And now I lie in this,
I thought, a few years back,
And thought, well, that is that.
That was not that. Oh, no.
Once you’ve made, scorched, and drenched
Your bed, you don’t just get
To lie in it—if not
Dead. Get up. Rise and walk,
Or what you do to move.
You can sit with the ash,
You can think through your sins,
And you can make your peace.
But then? Get up. No end.
It’s a dun land, these days, the tints
Of gold and red and bronze all gone
To shawl the ground in beige and grey,
The bright white ice a week off yet.
It’s a dull grace, these days like lace,
Flash in the pan, stitch in the air,
The sun a squib, the earth just dirt.
I like it this way. It won’t stay,
But when I was a boy it did,
It seemed like a third of the year
Was grey—bare trees, bare ground, dank air.
I used to pray for snow. I prayed
And I prayed. I dreamed of a storm
That did not stop. I don’t why
I thought it would be good to be
Caught and lost. But I did. I did.
I did not get my wish, but once
Or twice, far from that grey child’s land,
I got snowed in so bad I could
Have died, so bad I did get scared.
That cured me. Sort of. I still dream
Of snow that does not, will not stop,
That hides it all so I can sleep.
I still take a weird joy in storms
I know do not bode well for me.
But I’ve changed, a bit. In warm lands,
I’ve come to love these few dun weeks
High in the hills, glass skies, cliff sands.