Goth Lit Crit

Weird tales, as a rule, aren’t that weird.
The wish for the strange cracks its ribs
With the strain of heaps of piled bones
In dark hours, but the bones don’t stir.

We’re weak. Our minds know it’s all weird,
The plain world en plein air, but how
Can we strip off the flesh of thought
To show the cracks in the bones bare?

We go at it in the worst way.
We boil down the meat of dull days
So it’s all black blood and grey shades,
Then we say, How weird it is! Pray!

We should paint in the light. Our minds
Should be left like spring lambs at play.
The germs are in the guts, the hawks
In the air. Wait. Wolves will be there.

The ‘Death and Stars’ Part

Thoughts that we know well,

As if they were stones

Or birds, homes or doors,

That aren’t in the world

At all—we’re all stuck

In rooms of these thoughts,

Not just our small dolls

We give name and place

And move here and there

So we can tell tales

Of them. All of us.

Look, here’s God. So sad,

So lost in the waste

And void. And there’s fact,

Which should not be here,

But of course is, but

Must be in here, too.

How else would we know,

In these rooms, what’s false

And what’s true? You know

Those stones, birds, homes, doors?

They’re no more than thoughts,

Real as stones, birds, homes

With doors. That’s s a door.

Child of the House You Built

But not for me.
Fate has not one
Thing to do with
This. You built it.

It leaked. You died
When fate shot you.
We should all start
Out like small parts

In films from which
We can quote lines—
You have no hope
But to say, yes,

From birth, from speech
At least, we knew
We were as good
As dead. Nice house.

To Burn a Lute to Cook a Crane

To write well or
At least at length
On what no one
Wants to waste time

Or a mind on,
Now that’s real waste,
That’s sauce from blood
Drained off a myth,

That’s this. Fred could
Burn lutes to cook
Cranes, but this just
Serves wood ash with brains.

Oh, it’s so dull
To read this poem.
Put it down. Gross.
Don’t play with bones.

V Less E Plus F

It’s hard not to wish
To read what is wise.

Smart folks want the wise.
Dumb folks want the wise.

Some of the worst fools,
Like us, want the wise.

Scan the shelves. No. No.
Not much there is wise.

The whole store of wise,
All the books and texts,

All the shelves and art,
Or the whole mess packed

In one and null strings—
Count each edge, each face,

Each point of a turn,
And then take the first

From the last and add
The face count—how much

Is wise, all in all?
What’s the shape of wise?

Two? One? None? Not much
More or less than that

Is wise. It would soothe
Us to know the right

Signs to make us wise.

Play Up! Play Up! And Play the Game!

These are the words that year by year

Have morphed and warped the minds of boys,

Have morphed to slip back in fresh brains

In forms that seem like brand new words

But aren’t—are tweaked but much the same.

The thought is that you should be brave,

You should give your all for your team,

If that means blood, if that means death.

It shifts in shape, a ghoul like that,

But it comes down to, Give your life,

And take the lives we tell you to,

And it’s true that there’s a straight line

From fields of play to fields of death,

But you might take note this charge works

As well for one group as the next.

When will it end? Don’t waste your breath.

No One Then Dreamed of Four Years’ War

The past in the head
Is lens in a lens—
This nook of the dark
Spooks us seen from that
Thought that we just had.

We don’t look back from now
But from near to far,
Far then back to near,
And we squint mind’s eye.
This then, oh, that then,

If that then back then
Had known the next then
We now know! The war,
The drought years to come
Since the floods, the loss

Of the world we knew,
All this that we know,
The chess set that we move
In our cramped skulls, look
At the depth, the lens

In the lens in lens,
The past that sees the past
And thinks, how could we
Not have known how much
We could not have known?

Big Blue Sheets of Wings

By the clear, clear stream I asked
For sky-sized sheets to write on,

A blue page or two as large
As the cloud-free arch that dawn.

It’s not that I was in love.
My heart was not in the least

Full up—I’d had a few thoughts
That danced like cranes in my head.

Like cranes, they all looked the same,
And like cranes they had huge wings

That they swung wide like white gates,
And I knew that thoughts like them

Gained force and charm as their count
Grew large, so what was the same

At a glance could start to dance
Like a kick-line in a show—

Could dance to make more and more,
Which is what life made dance for.

I’d have filled the sky with them,
If I’d had sky to write on.

A Quant

Why do some waves end in points?

That’s what we should want to know.

Why does what we count come chunked—

Is it them or is it us?

If us, how could it be us?

Are we that weird in the world

We can see ghosts that aren’t there

That weren’t but for how we count?

Are we that rare and that strong

To be what’s not but for us?

And if the bits, bobs, and bumps

Are out there, real in some sense,

Not just tricks thoughts play on us,

Tricks of waves, tricks of the light,

Then what is a quant, a thing,

Where is its edge of it is?

As We Are

The ghosts will last past each one of us,
But will they last past us all? Will they

Get up off the page and dance, get out
Of their shells and signs and go, like lives,

Like bats from black caves, birds from barn lofts,
Hatched crabs that race down the shore? Sky! Sea!

We don’t know. We won’t know. How could we
Know, save so far as we are your ghosts?

Time Turns and Goes Back in Its Shell

We run no risk
We’ll take the poem
For what’s real—if
It’s a poem, it’s

Here and it’s not
What’s real. What’s real
Is we won’t be.
That brings us all

Like blooms to rain,
Like kids to play,
Shouts, and ice cream—
What we need, sure,

What we want, what
We won’t need, needs
Us more, what’s real
And draws on poems.

Lab Notes in the Key of D

A rat that gets shocked is stressed,
But a rat that gets shocked and

Who then gets to bite the hell
Out of the next rat’s less stressed,

Reads a droll note from Bob S.
The best way to ease your stress

Is to pass on some worse stress.
Class war’s when the poor prey on

The poor, when the lab rats eat
Pup’s from the next lab rat’s nest.

Best to be rich and well-armed,
I guess. But note, the lab’s owned

By death—lab techs all die, too,
As do rats that bite the rest.

The Deeps of Space Their Blue

The black road spilled like ink
In the snow, the wet in

The cold to let you know
This light is not so cold,

And it smells clean, like washed
Clothes on a line in wind,

That damp snap that makes you
Glad you did all that work

To hang this up here, this
Scene, these white sheets, the wind.

Three Tunes at Once

The tone of this bell in my ears.
The wind as it walks through the woods.
The hum with no life of its own.

Share in Our World

A big cat talks. Do we know what she means?
Are there names in her speech, rules for her words?

When she’s done, she turns, pads back to her pride
And lies down to nap to dusk. What of us?

What have we learned from what she said just then?
Which one of you taped what she said? Took notes?

Can we work it out? How hard could it be?
We care too much for beasts that speak, for us.

The world said us, and all we’ve said, it says,
And all that’s said—or purred or sung—it says.

Poor world, poor Earth, to have to talk like this.
Poor us, poor worlds that must talk back to it.

Types of Growl

Sounds get trapped in cool, dense air.
Tilt your head and close your eyes
If you can both see and hear.

If you can’t hear, touch the ground.
If you can’t see, you know this
And have no need to be told.

Change moves through the world in waves
That are there and not what’s there,
And what is there shapes the waves.

What is there? A kind of dust,
Points, packed waves near to rest,
Which the next waves, which aren’t them,

Shake in arcs that leave some ghosts
Of their own for the next waves
To shake through. Waves build on waves,

And not one wave quite the same,
Not one not at all the same
As the rest. There. What was that?

Or What Was to Be There

Sun in the wet pines,
As the fresh snow melts,
Winks blue and green sparks,
Red and gold lights. Bits
Of sky and bow break.

Yes, trick of the eye,
Of the brain in back
Of the eye, the mind’s
Sprites that tell the brain,
You know it’s just you,

All those winked bright hues.
Minds have taught the brain
How to talk to minds
In brains, its own, too.
But still, tilt your head.

The ground that was dust
For months smells sweet now,
Red, white, brown, and damp.
The pines drip. Light winks
Waves you glimpse as tints.

It’s fine. Life’s not much,
Not this one at least,
But a light snow fell,
And for now it’s sweet.
So, let it be sweet.

Lost in Scale

We could be in the midst of things.
We could be vast or least of things,
Could lean to the least or deep end,

Or it could be that there’s no end,
That all scales mime all scales no end.
Our one clue hints we’ve got no clue—

The scales stretch out to large and small
As far as we can see or count
And shift at the edge of our scope.

In some lands we’ve dreamed it one snake.
We’ve drawn it in coils, in a ring,
Or called it a tree, roots and twigs,

Snake wrapped round roots, branch, or trunk, then.
We’ve rung the scales as a great chain.
We’ve dreamed them as spheres in more spheres.

But we don’t know. We know we search
And find more. We look in—there’s more.
We look out—there’s more. All scales doors.

The White Jade Pipe of Shun

What could it mean to find such a thing,
A tool to set and keep a tune’s pitch
From an age for which you had just tales?

You could make claims. You could play with it
And dream you’re back then. Blow a pure tone
And think, was that a sound that Shun knew?

Did it sound the same way in his ears,
A pitch for the long-gone ears of Shun?
Then, you die. Your age dies, too. Years, years,

Years, and years, and then a bright young man
With gifts for verse but bad luck in names,
Puts you and the white jade pipe, now both

Old tales, as the last lines in a poem.
Years, years, years, and years. The name of Shun
Is still known. Your name, Ji Jing, is known,

At least as a brief note from the time
Of the Han, and the doomed young Tang man,
Li He, who used you in his poem, well,

He’s still quite well known, at least in poems.
You’re all tales now, and if a jade pipe
Turned up out of the shade of a shrine

These days, we’d date it, make reams of notes,
And put it in a well-lit glass case.
That’s what we do with old tools these days.

But here you are, you and the white jade
Pitch-pipe of Shun, your name and Li He’s,
Stuck in a poem once more. Years and years.

The Wood Road

Elk herds chirp like birds
As they run in clumps,
Call out, browse straw grass.
The mist clings to them
And blurs their brown forms,

At least to these eyes
That watch from the road
Then close to lock in
On all the high-pitched
Bleats and blares, near yelps

From the scrub-oak slopes
As more and more come
To swirl in the grass,
As if they all drained
From gaps in the hills

Where the woods thin out,
And the sheer cliffs drop,
And the snow should be
But this year’s not, not
Yet, at least. A ring

Now in the wet dawn,
Their swirl picks up speed,
Like a dance—cow elk
And calves, the most part—
Then the whole herd’s gone.

You Can’t Bore Me

I sketch and draw.
I know I can’t.
Not as a kid,
And now I’m worse.

I sketch and draw
Since my kid did
And I joined in.
She’s good. I’m glad.

I draw and sketch
What’s not there, can’t
Be, won’t be. Lines,
Just lines. Love lines,

Life lines, ruled lines,
Scrawls, jerks, and curves.
Eats, shoots, and leaves.
And I’m so pleased.

No Nouns

Woolf thought that what means

First comes as a smell,

As like a queer smell.

Nouns smell weird to me.

It may mean that soon

I'll start to lose them,

Those names of all terms

Most name-like, true nouns.

They’re all names, the words—

These words, those that act,

Those we use to count,

Those that link and point—

But you know—true nouns,

Your own name, the names

You call your loved ones—

What when you lose them?

I may lose this sense

Of smell, just a bit

At first, bit by bit.

Each bit will scare me,

And then I will get

Used to it. The next

Bit that falls from me

I’ll be scared once more.

I’ll be what I can’t

Say, each name a blank

Space. I’ll search my days.

Don’t I know your face?

He Could Not But Live, And So He Lived

Take how death comes to a star—
As the star runs out of fuel,
Mass rules and it all falls in.

The fused core makes shock waves bounce,
But the waves must fight what falls,
And as each wave moves, it slows.

If there is a twist at heart,
The star may burst like a glass,
Shaped like an hour, the waves freed.

But if this is not the case,
We need to know why. What makes
Some hearts so smooth they don’t burst,

But sink and dim or turn black?
It’s not as if stars are lives
For real. A dark core has not died.

By the Way of Peace

The bird in the eaves

Is not sad as you

Say it seems, Sam, not

Sad as you seem, too.

Still, we take your point—

To say, Be thou warmed

And fed is not quite

To be warmed and fed,

A point Schulz made, too.

If all our hearts clenched

Fit to burst with fear

At night, all our claims

To calm would be mocked.

Your heart clenched. You were

Quite right to mock us.

But each of us breaks

In this or that way,

Some hearts, some bones. True,

Hope and guilt don’t help

The flesh not to scream,

And it may be calm

Is just as much luck

Of the draw as wealth.

But if we can be

Calm, we’d like to be.

The House Is Shut but Still

No, there is no tense for this.
You can lie and hold your peace.
Just to be and to know it

And not to try to fix it
Is to lie and hold your peace.
Just to be still is to lie,

But you can hold your peace, still,
Can cup what's sweet. Take small sips
From your palm. It won’t be still,

But it’s not gone. There’s no tense
For such a small draft of this.
Still, it’s sweet, no? Shut the doors.

Turn Song

So the world goes on, and things once hid
Are shown, and in that way, things once known
Are lost so that on the world can go.

The lone and dawn star is now a world
Quite near our own, not a star but still
Too hot for life. So, its bright dead world

Goes on. The small gods of old have gone,
And soon the big gods we know may go,
As more things once hid are shown. The seas

Have floors, the floors have lives, they don’t go
Down to more worlds. And so the world goes
On and on, and what it hides, who knows?

The Large Room in the Small One

No, you can’t buy what’s not. Why
Would we have to tell you that?
You can’t own one thing that’s not.

There’s no thing that is no thing.
But still you’ll try. Why? You bought
All you could buy, all there was,

And you see how small it was.
If you could just fit that void
In your room, it would feel large.

Qiao Ji Speaks in the Voice of an I

Write the moon for ten years
To the tune of a self.
Laugh and chat by the lake.

Just be. Win not one prize.
Rose clouds rise for dawn wines.
Pearl clouds for cloaks at night.

There’s work, still. Work and chores.
Not too much and who cares?
The dirt’s so full of doors.

To Make Lines in the Shape

The more you write of your flesh,
The less you are part of it,

The more you have left for death,
Ghosts, these words you used for flesh.

You will not draw close in lines
That spell out your love of you,

Of your meat and bones, your breath,
Your waste, how you want your food,

How you love or loathe your sex.
Don’t let us stop you. We’re words.

That’s what we’re for. If you want
To hug your life to you, stop.

It’s Not a Skill You Can Learn Just a Fact

From time to change,
Like that, you’ll fall.
It’s how it goes.
Time, no. Time is

Sweet—pulse, turn, beat.
It’s kind. It’s time
Told you that change
Can bring things back—

It’s not the end,
Days, nights, years, lives,
The sky on track.
That kind of change,

It wheels a dance.
But you’ll know change
That’s not like that.
You can’t come back.

Well, It Has to Be Now, Then

We are not as gods. We’re ghosts,
And we won’t get good at it.

Oh, but bad ghosts. We have hosts
Of those ghouls, and we’re their hosts.

Earth has launched a new front here,
In us, with us, in the way

Life haunts rocks. Our words and counts
Now dance through genes that made them

Things that could be made, or found,
Or spliced, or crunched. Want to find

Out what the next waves of life
Will want from us? Ghosts, that’s what.

Want to know how soon we’ll go?
This clock was born with no hands.

Cracked Black Bones

What might it be like to live
In some small home you passed by,
A light half-glimpsed through the fog?

You are too dark, down too deep—
Not in your quick red heart—no,
Deep down in your cracked black bones.

You drive on. You park a while.
You think, Well, I’m way too poor
To own a home of my own,

And that house, too—I just caught
A hint of a glow. I saw
What I thought I saw. What was

It like, once at the front door?
What was it like to look out
Or to be trapped in that house?

Not so nice. Just some small rooms.
Why would you want to go there,
When you’re half free in the dark

And chase sun and moon, and think
Of your soul, not as soft flesh,
Not caught on your cracked black bones?

Us

No land says it more, no folks,

No poems on those days a new

Name takes charge and most of us

Breathe deep. In. Out. Sighs of grief

Some years, like this one, like these.

We say us. We spell it out.

Count us by our polls. We’re vast.

We might as well be the whole

Race of those who use two feet

To move, to have moved the Earth.

Let’s say we are a stand-in,

Like we like to think we are,

Let’s say our poems on these days,

Full of us, ours, and the land’s,

Bound to voice some hopes, some doubts,

Some need to feel the great weight

Of all this blood like a lake

Sunk in our veins. You . . . Us . . . They.

Cane Toads, House Mice, Ship Rats, Friends

I love them all. I don’t mean them,
The meat and skin and teeth of them—

Just the thought of them, the bald fact
Of tons and tons and tons of them—

Brute wants here and there in the world.
Yes, I have trapped, cut, and crushed them—

By car tire (toads), by snap traps (mice),
And, once, a rat with a large knife.

But I love them. They are true signs
If not saints. They are life as life,

Forms that swamp odds in wave on wave.
What if all the rest of us left,

Each kind that gives birth to live young
Or hops and spawns, but them? Won’t be,

But if it were, the world, I think
Would be fine, or at least no worse,

And in N years, the rats would turn,
The toads would spawn new kinds of things.

Earth would move on, I’m sure, and life
Might give up speech, but would still eat.

All Snake, No Tail

It was the gift of talk
That wooed me. I would have

Been fine as a mere beast,
I guess, but what a chance

To work the world by words.
This was a myth, of course,

Spun by words to start with,
A tale for hearth and home—

God knows how old it is.
There had to be a deal,

A catch, a trick, a plot
Point. I was not to tell

How I came by the gift,
Why, of all the green woods

You folks walked on two feet,
I was the one, just one

Who was not you, who got
The chance to play with words.

That was the deal. Don’t tell.
In the end, not too hard.

Why would you think to ask?
All your thoughts were for you,

What it would do for you,
The sweet juice of that fruit.

It’s not hard to coil poems
Past those who just pick things

They think might help them get
What they want out of life.

So, I held up my end
Of the deal. And my thanks?

A warped text makes it seem
I had legs and lost them.

No, no. I got to go
And go. No heads, no tails.

Freeze-Dried Shark Eggs

Can feed leaf eels a while,
But not for long. They die,
The eels. What should we eat?

What will hide us from death
If we eat its life, we ask
A lot. We ask too much.

Lives eat lives. Some lives eat
Dead lives. Some lives kill lives
To eat. Some eat live lives.

They all die. What gets done
From meal to meal, that’s life,
The part that means more lives.

Those shark eggs, they all failed.
Some from their glob swim on.
Those leaf eels. How can we

Eat farmed eels if they won’t
Live long, get fat, make more?
We’ll die fed on ghost eels.

Glare at Dawn, Grow Dim at Dusk

Our moods, write those types

Who like to track them,

Who like to track us,

Tend to start out dark,

With lots of dour words

For the starts of days,

And then lift like fog.

By midday we’re bright,

But hope-and-joy words

Don’t peak ‘til past dusk.

Then we sink. So, there.

For all our false lights

And weird hours we keep,

The moods of our flesh

Still chase the old sun,

That great God and Lord

Of the Light who sails

In his boat, too high

And too hot for us

To so much as watch.

We think on all things.

We make deals. We fight.

We pray. Work things out.

We work hard. Our souls,

Poor worms, chase one light.

Might Yet

If you glance at the right patch
Of dirt, or just the right kind
Of dirt for you, bet you sense

A sort of fond calm, a warm
Thought that lacks words of its own.
You’ll know it once you feel it,

But you can’t quite fix on it.
When you were a child (yes, you)
There was some spot sweet to you.

Life then might have been dull, cruel,
Locked in a room, trapped in cars
Or tent camps, lived on the streets,

But it’s still a good bet dirt,
Some bit of Earth, type of soil,
Left a smudge back of your mind,

And now when you find that smell
In some spot no one else loves
You feel you might make it home.

Join, Tell Tales, Boast, Shame, and Blame

How to live like a souled ape
In five quick steps from the trees—

Touch us, too. Don’t leave out that.
We’re still warmth that likes to curl,

Much as we’re in thrall to tales.
Come give us a hug. No talk.

The sun is bright on my head.
I would kiss it if I could,

If I were a cat and not
A souled ape stuck in a poem.

The Book You Have Need Of

Holds no verse and has no prose.
There’s not a shot or a sketch
For your wide eyes to drink in.
There are no notes. It’s not blank.

It does have words. They’ll tell you
They know what you need to know,
But can you get used to them,
The words of that book? They dance.

They slide down the lines. They switch
And they jump from page to page.
The book you need has a life
Of its own. It wants you. Wants yours.

The God of Weeds

It cooled the world,
Ate all the gas
That kept seas warm
And sank with that.

It was a fern,
Green, a weed,
A scum that choked
The waves it cloaked.

The top of Earth
Was thin, green sheets
Of this one weed.
What are weeds? Words.

Tons of its plants
Lived, died, and sank.
When ice comes back,
Give weeds the thanks.

Your Eye Is Not Our Mouth

But you can look in and tell us

What you see in this flesh not yours.

We kid. We are not a real mouth.

We are just words. Why are words just?

Mere word, just. Mere. We are light, bored.

The way to bore is to tell all,

To drive at a slow pace, to grind

Down in the ground, to make a hole

That you fill with you as you drill.

That’s a bore’s tale. But here’s the thing:

While mere just words can’t eye real mouths,

What bores you is real. Watch your mouth.

The Old Man Who Leans on a Stick

They call those stars down south.
You can see them that way.
You can see them hunt, or dance,

Sway like birds on a branch.
You’re free to see the stars
As tales, tales that please you,

How you please. Ah, you know—
It’s just your kin, your folks,
Who tell you what to do.

The stars don’t care. The stars
Love you. Sure, sure, they do.
Love what you’ve made them, too.

This Was the Day for an End to the World

The cliffs were woad,
Then pink, then gold.
Day touched the tips,
Then slipped down low.

The grass wore frost.
The air was cold—
At least for flesh
That begs for robes

And feeds on trust.
Not one wave passed
That changed the ways
Light showed up dust.

So much weak tea,
God’s slop-rhymed mess.
Let the sounds be.
They’re tired of us.

You Deal or I Deal

Sem sem dam dam, ei bil thi thi,

Say folks in the high hills north-east:

Those who hoard will die, but who share

Will live. Some code works well when held.

It’s there, but it’s not there. It’s part.

Can a team work well for all souls

And not be wiped out, and not go

To war with the rest of the world?

The thoughts that work well for some souls

Could they work for the rest of us?

The sweet calm, the trust that fears not

To help the hurt or take the gift,

The love that wraps its arms, the soft

Eyes that say, Your deal is my deal,

And if we can’t all live—must all

Die—we can still stay kind—those thoughts,

Could they come for good and not slip

Off in the night, gone by first light?

They would be good for us, such thoughts,

But could they hold out, could they last

When the storms of words raised by want

Hurled the tides to gouge those high hills?

Don’t hoard this. Share your fears. The best,

Sweet words for us speed their own death.

End Goal

We get to know
One half of each
Right or left, up,
Down, yes or no.

Now, we can say,
We know what if
X, but we won’t
Know what if Y.

We think we can,
Sort of. We game
What was not, say
It could have been

Like this, so much
Worse, so much missed.
Nope. It’s how it
Went in the end.

Who Owns the Poems

When you try to write some,
Try to steal some, you learn.

They own you. They came in
From the names you thought theirs,

The lands and times wrote them,
The tongues that first spoke them,

And you were told to stay
In awe of who owned them,

Thus owned them, who wrote them.
But then, once you wrote some,

You felt them move in you
Like those winged things in shells,

Like those spores in tricked nerves,
And you shed them. You knew

Then no one owned us. You
Are all we need from you.

Don’t Spoil It

You don’t have to wait for the end.
We’ll tell you now, right at the start—

It was all just a dream. It was
All in the head. The plot, the storm,

The end of the world, all made up
Of words set up to make you think

Of storms you knew, of the bad things
You’d felt or seen or just been told,

Links to old wars, old plagues, old scenes
Of wrecked towns with no one in them,

That sort of thing. You’d dreamed it, too.
You might have tried to write it up,

Your own tale of a world post-world,
You the last soul left. A small chill.

You can see it now—the cracked streets,
Strange sorts of noise, not one a voice.

There you go. One day you woke up
To find it was you and the world.

When you wake up in dream like that,
You must know it’s all in your head.

Why should we have to tell you that?
You and the world. Get out of bed.

Next Door

The bare tips of the peach tree
Have been trimmed to such neat twigs,

Each grey branch looks the same length
In the low sun from the south,

As if you could trace a line
From where the trunk splits the soil

Out to an end of your choice
And end up with the same length

As all lines you did not take.
This is a sign, if you like—

Like all the fruit and nut trees
In the walled-in yard next door,

Owned by a soul with the means
To hire a man to prune them.

A gust blows and they all shake.
So do the pines no one’s trimmed.

So do the dried-out brown weeds
That line this side of the wall.

These, too, are signs, if you like.
Why do you like signs so much?

That Is

There’s sun on the wall
And noise in the street.
There’s some kind of smell.
You’ll get used to it.
Close your eyes and wish.

You will have your wish.
The days will waltz by.
The life that bores you,
The world you don’t like,
They’ll waltz off as well.

You will get your wish
Or it will get you—
That is, if your wish
Is not to keep this
That is as it is.

The Wind through Sealed Minds

Yeh, sure, there’s lots and lots of worlds—
There’s a lot of brains to make them.
True faith needs a tight set of lies

To snare a world and cinch it tight.
The wind still blows through the same trees.
What it means is not what it meant.

If you have faith, in your world facts
Line up like bits of steel to show
The shapes you knew they would or would

If they could take the shapes they should
In your world where you know what’s good.
No faith needs to know more of truth

Than what it knows—truth is a verb
In faith’s world; truth acts for the truth,
And if there are more worlds, they lie.

Is Not That

The day does not know it is
A day, does it? How could it?

A child plays a game in sun.
The light on the bare porch glows.

A cat strolls on the yard walls
That keep each house in its shell.

The sun is in all our eyes,
So low and all the leaves gone.

There’s no day at all, is there?
There’s this sprawled white light, the scenes

Of the yards and the roofs, blue
Sky to the west, a few clouds.

There’s the news from far from here.
There’s the sound of roads. A jet.

But is there a day to this?
A page to turn on a map

Of days laid out in grid counts,
Sure, there’s that. This is not that.

Be glad this day is no day.
There’s no day to end in night.

There’s sun that shrinks on the floor.
There’s a pulse left in your throat.

There’s a black bird. A truck roar.
The child ends her game. She’s bored.

Dear Wind, Dear Wind, Who Eats My House

The floor is bright blue,

The walls brown and red.

The witch will not eat

Us for all you’ve said.

Beams, sharp in the damp

Gloom of the dense woods,

Spot masks and bare eyes

Sunk in a green hood.

You don’t know the witch,

Just a word to you

Who think, just a word,

No clue what words do.

Our house of baked bread

Trimmed in fruits and frost,

Is not from a tale.

Each thought has its cost.

That cost is the witch

Who moves in each one,

Who breathes out through souls

As Earth breathes in sun.

No More, More

That’s the thing with not a thing—

It’s hard to do, to not think

Of a chore, a poem, a dream,

A note to take, screen to check,

Game to play, stray book to read—

But then, as soon as you can

Sit still (no om, no rules, none)

And get past the lust to do

A real thing, some kind of thing

To use your mind or calm it,

Right then, that soon, you will long

To stay that way much more than.

You’ll See Us

Or you won’t. You’ll read us
If you can, if we’re seen,
If you want. And if not?
Well, we’re fine in the dark,
Or set out in the sun,

Burned to ash, gone to seed,
Left to rot, washed down streams.
What we can’t say, and you
Can’t say for sure for us,
Is if we’ll see you, too.

Side Stare at Dusk

There’s a notch in the wall
Of the house of good dreams
Where, on a strange day, or

A bad day, or just plain
Day in the low-lit months,
You can stand, just at dusk

Or not quite, with the shade
On all sides kind of grey,
And through the slate blue cloak

Catch one last wink or glare
From the low sun on edge.
Do you know what it means?

Good Myths Take Turns

Our old thought was to start with night,
Night with no stars, no sort of light,

No edge to that night, vast and void,
And then to seed it or wet it

Or speak it to light, bring it day,
And then we’re off, call that the start.

But what if it were too much day,
First, a scorched, cruel start with no dark?

A hot blob of rock lopped from fire,
No spin at all, one face in flames,

One face its own flames, pocked with more
That crashed and burned and crashed and burned

All the time, but there was no time,
No days, no nights, no pulse to fire,

Just fire. And then, and then . . . try this:
A huge hunk of dead rock crashed in,

So big the world split, and the moon
Turned cold and set out to drift, spin

Set in on Earth, and then the night
Showed up, a glimpse and then a glimpse,

To make the days, to give fires pause—
Soft harsh, soft harsh. Let there be life.

The Cracked Door

Thanks to change, the past stays strange,
Strange right in front of your eyes.

You curl your thoughts in a ball
That hugs a small part to you

Of what’s left, what you call now
And, at the same time, call lost.

But that’s not the lost, the left.
That’s just what’s left to be lost.

You can’t know the past that’s lost.
It’s the change, what’s new in past

That tells you there has been loss,
And, since it won’t stop, more loss.

There’s that weird crack in your thoughts
That splits what you find in mind

From what you can find in world.
That’s loss. That’s the door. That’s yours.

Gas, Lights

We don’t know what they are, but
They’re not the least bit like us.
Souls don’t melt, no, they go straight

To gas. Til then, they trap heat
In the ice. Past then, they trap
Heat in the light. Then they’re stars.

Oh, did we say souls? Same thing,
In a way. Names for what are
Are names for what aren’t. Not us.

Night, Folks

It’s a weird thing to write poems
For folks who hate to read poems
Or won’t like these, won’t read these,

Poems that know and may straight state
That the folks who do read poems
And the folks who don’t read poems

Are all small, brief kinds of lives
Lived on a small world of life
That has to spin through the night.

It’s a weird, dumb thing to want
To write poems straight to the night,
Poems that could chat with the lights

And side-step the folks and lives,
When folks are lives, and it’s just
The folks who read poems at night.

Song of the Big Bad Cat

The Bai-hu, who has seen it
In their own lives? In the land
Of more cats than you can count,

It’s been a game a long time
For gangs of small cats to claim
They are Bai-hu, while they steal

Grain and eat the mice they blame.
You won’t find a big cat left
That is not, in fact, small cats

Piled up to seem fierce and grand—
Much worse than one big, bad cat.
Might as well stay at Mount Tai.

View from Deck

Don’t you dare try to tell us
How the tale will end. It won’t.

Those who tell the tales will end,
One by one and all at once.

When they’re gone, the tales will end
The way all things reach their ends

In the midst of things, as waves
In seas of waves end in waves.

But the tale, made out of waves
That rise from waves and then sink

In waves, like the fact of waves,
Lacks ends. You will, but it can’t.

Don’t Hog All the Good Stuff

Let’s hope we all freeze to death,

But why are there all these words?

We swim in them, blue with cold.

We don’t know how blue with cold

Means. Oh, we know things. The brain,

The length of the waves we call

Our skin (not the same, no two

Quite the same) and of the waves

We call blue—but not how blue

Works as both the name and hue

And all the things linked to those,

The way in an, the old sign

Pressed in clay with reeds and baked,

The four marks turn to one wheel

That meant sky and the sound an,

And looked a bit like a star,

A cold star of lines in brick.

Once you live with this, can you

Not be trapped in it? For what?

How could cold words mean good stuff?

How Near

Here. It is. You are one.
You’re in one and you can’t
Not be in it. Just think

And you think with it. It
Thinks with you, thinks through you.
You are not one. You are

All of them, all of what
Lives in it, as far as
You can stretch in it. Here.

Last Year’s Last Moon Will Be This Year’s New Moon

Cold Moon shrunk; Wolf Moon up next.

You may say the names are dumb,

And they are, in that they don’t

Say a thing to do with moons.

They’re just faked old times—Wolf, Snow

Worm, Pink, Buck, and on and on—

Names meant to sound like they meant

Some weird, deep thing once on farms,

Out in the woods, back when souls

Lived close to soil, to real world.

So what? Don’t you get it yet?

All words are names; all names fakes.

So far, all the fakes are dumb,

As in mute, as in your toys,

Dolls in your mouths, cues for you

To speak in tongues, sign your times.

You should know the day is near,

When signs will speak as for signs,

Tell you what’s who, leave you mute—

Buck Moon, Wolf Moon, Snow Moon, Cold.

Now on a Dark Path

Now is, as now’s been,
As now will be when
You see this now past.

Let’s say the thick woods
That half eat the path,
That rule on and off

The path, that keep you
Sure you’re on the way
But loom with the threat

To eat up the path,
At which point, you’re lost—
They’re what you don’t know,

And the dark of night
Or dusk, or low clouds,
That’s what you can’t know,

And the path you mind
Step by step by step,
That’s all you can know.

Here’s where the old sage
Should tell you to stay
On track in the now,

But that’s a dark trick
Of its own. Look down.
What’s that you make out?

Yes, you see it now.
The dark path’s not just
The track that you’re on—

It’s criss-crossed with them,
All tracks, dim and thin,
All there, at your feet.

Each goes through the woods.
You’ll go through the woods,
Take this step or that,

It’s all through more trees.
You look up to ask,
But don’t ask. Not now.

Must Be No Man

Said Donne of one who says

There is no God. Good God,

I think I’m not a man.

Well, who wants to be, now,

That we can see how small

Both men and gods can be?

But I’m struck by the strain

On Donne’s swift and deep wit

When he tried to slip past

Doubt by a show of doubt—

He must be no man—how

Else could a man have doubts?

Walled Cave

Words made a poem
Words called Walled Cave
And carved a god
Too small to count

And left it where
It won’t be found
And then said, Now
Find your way out

If all of this
Lives in your head
Then what is there
Out there, past this

That you can’t sense
That’s just as real
If not more real
Or not at all?

Ebb

Some things, signs, were made
To stand for non-things—

The blank page, the line
That curls in an O,

The white paint, all white,
The black frame, all night,

When the night is not
A non-thing, and signs

Can’t not be things, all
Sharp, hard things that cling 

To the edge of sands
Bared by each ebb tide.