What Choice Is There

Your days are all your days
To get through—once you don’t,
They’ll all stop. You’ll get through

This one fine, that one hurt,
Some of them sad. You’ll get
Through them, sleep, and wake up,

If you’ve slept at all, you
In your own skull once more,
You and the myth of you,

In a new world, new world
Whose ghosts look like the ghosts
You slept through. You’ll get through.

Feet of Shade

You wish you could say some of you
Think kind thoughts of all the wrong groups,
Are good in all lights, do what’s right—
Wish you could say some of you do.

But each time a soul takes a stand,
The flesh is flesh and throws some shade.
Some try so hard they’re thin as blades,
But still their shapes have thin dark slants.

Have you missed Earth’s hints that the dark
Is not the worst part of a stance?
Glare blinds, and white-hot light has costs.
It’s shade that points out where light’s lost.

The Same Thing for Our Minds

Salt tales. You need them,
Need them both, the same
Way both can kill you,

Make you sick at least.
Your blood’s from the sea;
You need salt in it.

Your mind’s seas of words;
You crave tales from them.
Dark shapes from the deep

That eat you, you eat.
With a bit of salt,
Of course, but you eat.

We’ll grant you small tales,
The plans in your head,
Help you through your days.

We don’t say you’ll thrive
With no tale to tell.
Your lives are told tales

In both minds and mouths.
But still. Your hearts work
Too hard. Your blood’s thick.

All you eat comes rimed
With tales, birth to death.
You’re sick of them all.

The sea’s not just salt.
It’s wet. You can’t drink
All salt. You need fresh.

To Shroud Them in Words

We’re words; we’re not lives.
We’re not on the Way.
We’re off to the side.

We’re from a deep past,
And if those who bore
The lives that made you

Spoke us, or did not,
It’s still not your past.
You learned us as tools

From your folks, from peers,
From books, from the news.
You may have changed us,

A bit, a small bit,
Your small bit—if so,
You won’t, can’t know it.

We’re quick to pick up,
But we’re hard to shift.
We’ll wait. You’ll leave us.

We’ll wait. If we go,
Who knows who was here?
You go. We’ll wait here.

The Poem You Aren’t

There’s what you sense,
What’s in your head,
And all the rest
You know you can’t.

There’s wind, fast clouds,
Cut grass, brick dirt,
Chimes, road noise, birds,
Tired limbs, faint thirst.

There’s what you did,
Was done to you,
What you hope’s false,
What you’re sure’s true.

There’s what you aren’t,
That vast, blank poem
No part of thoughts,
Your one true home.

What Frames Are

While you’re on your next jag
On the end of the world,
Here’s a framed thought on light—

Next time you get full sun,
If you can, in your neck
Of our spun rock, check out

The light that floods a room,
And the same light, same source,
Through those skies out of doors.

Does the light in the room
Seem a bit more, a bit
Of gold poured through a frame,

But light on the far side,
Once you’re out there, seem plain?
Just like that, the world ends.

The Three Alls

A tree is one;

It is all tree,

And none of it

Is sky or horse.

Once, in a war,

One side took death

To its far ends,

Pure as could be.

Death would be one,

Would be all death,

And the war won.

And war’s what won.

There are no alls—

Not deaths, not trees,

Not one. To be

Is to part be.

The Clothes’ New Khan

The skirt of what is
Is what seems to be.

It’s not that what is
Is bare, it’s just what’s

Not there in the skirt.
What’s not wears the fringe

Of what seems to be,
Since not is as close

As seems gets to be
To what is as is.

The Khan is not well
Dressed; there is no Khan.

Dire

It’s a dire choice most who make
Don’t know they’ve made or had it
To make—claim you have some choice

And pay for that choice in guilt
And shame, or note that the truth
Is you have no strength to choose

And live with that, and the blame
That comes with it. Make no choice,
You’ll do your best to have both—

Feel like you can choose and did,
So long as things go half well;
Back off and throw up your hands

Each time it all goes to hell.
You try this when you’re still young.
You try it straight through your prime.

You will try this when you’re old.
If you choose to have a choice,
You don’t want to have a choice.

Have Lost or Do Not Learn

For want of time,
Last year was lost,
For want of last
Year, school was lost,

For want of school,
The arts were lost
Of books and math
Or what were years.

For want of arts,
The peace was lost
To those could not
Parse news and views.

For want of peace,
All love was lost
For who was not
At war for you.

We Aren’t but by Turns

As none stay still,
There is no be,
No firm to be.
There is like this,

More like, like less.
There is no is.
The waves roll out.
The waves roll in.

They hold no place,
No start, no end.
At most they turn
To force or fire,

To crash or burn
In waves like them
But not the waves
They were. They turn.

On Your Head

When you think of all the risks in a day
For each of you, all of the risks per head,
It’s strange, an awe, you don’t all die at once.

All these days, all the ways you’ve scraped past death,
And here you are, and sure, a few of you
Won’t be here come dawn, but just look at you

All who’ve dodged the floods, fires, and slides, who’ve lived
Through the risks of ill-health, wild beasts, mere falls,
Not to say the risks you are each to each.

Think back, think hard just for a sec, on all
The ways in which you might not have reached this
Day, such as it is, some sun on your head.

You Don’t Need to Grieve for This

And what if truth is of no use?
What if lack of use is truth’s truth?

This law of this, that rule of that,
Our tricks that tell you what comes next,

Or may come, that yield odds in sums,
The best rites you’ve come up with yet—

All these may not be much like truth—
Just true as in good tools, in stone

Or steel points, an axe that strikes true,
A nail banged true, but not true as

In the sense, The Way the World Is.
Truth can’t nail The Way the World Is.

You just try to make tools that work
Well with the ways things are, like nails,

Like words, faiths, maths, laws, rules, and tricks.
But if it’s all like this or that,

If a lack of cause is truth’s truth,
Tools can’t have at the truth of it,

No more than an axe has the truth
It hacks at. Or who knows—has it?

Oh that’s just great, this haft’s come loose.
What if the truth’s no good for use?

There Has Been No Rain This Year

Not quite true but close.
Let’s state this once more—
The cliffs and the gaps

Near here hold the bones,
Clay, and logs that say
This dry’s not the first,

And it will get worse.
For now, the wind spins
Green things, but they’ll brown.

They’ll burn hot or slow,
As so won’t the towns.
Just the bones will hold.

I Find I Am Stopt Short

Hume had to pause.

North calls him out,

Calls that pause key.

But what you love

Well gives you pause,

And what we love

Here is that Hume

Wrote his pause down

And kept it in,

As when loss wrote

Write it! but less

Like art, more pause.

We yearn to be

Kept, left in text,

Your ghosts in ours.

Then we can go.

The Soul of the World Is a Stake

It’s a sic joke. Down to a t.
Don’t fret. No souls were harmed for it.
There’s a world that lies next to this,

The world of all the not-right texts
That slips made say what truth can’t be.
There’s your strings; there’s your chimps in trees.

It’s not a joke. When what you meant
Was not what you meant but words did,
You know how more than one world is.

To Not Be Too Clear

It’s an odd phrase

To be so loved—

Just to be clear.

Or—used by pols—

Let us be clear.

Why clear? The bridge

To be seen through

Is a good bridge

How? You have this

Lust to make us

As though we weren’t

Your links to you,

As though you saw

Through us, when you

Meet as us, words

Who see through you.

Thou Fool This Night Thy Soul

God’s threats are grand,
But what of vows
To do the worst
The world will do

Or some vile thing
Out of Earth’s view?
The first worst’s sure,
With gods or no,

And all the rest
Are threats post-death,
Which work as well
From mouths of fools

And cost no tests.
Show us a god
Who can switch up
Rules as we whirl.

In the Gloom of Hard and White

To carve the tongue at the joints,
As Cook Ding knew, a sharp blade
Must not hack but glide its way,
And in that way it stays sharp.

Some will choose to skip the tongue
And carve the heart. But the blade
Whose edge comes down to thin air
Is the tongue that carves the heart

Or the heart that carves the tongue
So that it cleaves to the roof
Of the world that killed the beast.
Poems are all tongue and all heart,

But where is your Cook Ding now?
All our knives are stained and dulled,
Our floor’s a wet mess of gore,
And who knows what cleaves what now?

Points of View

This is but a small patch
But it shows to the eye
In calm skies, the moon gone.

In fact, if there are facts,
It’s a vast swarm of stars
A whole globe of them packed

By the tens per light year,
A spot in the great dark
With far more light than ours,

Night skies there with no bridge
Of souls, no black-holed snake,
Just stars crammed rim to rim.

If an Earth were in there,
If eyes had popped up there,
What minds would light up there.

The Wind Shifts

Like air moved by air
Stirred by the Earth’s spin
And not like a soul

Who does not care. Wind
Can’t care. You knew that,
In your mind of snow,

Old man Tink-a-Tunk,
And you said so, who
Was more blunt than most

On what was not there.
But still you wrote this
Sad small poem on wind

That is not fooled, but
Still feels, is not still.
Was it a bad day?

Were you the wind pushed
By how you could not
Be you as you wished?

There All the Same

Part of you wants to go
Back to the dark wood, lost
Much more in your world now

Than you’d be lost in its.
Oh the woods, the poor woods
That burn down spring to fall,

The woods like a thin shroud
The bones of the earth glare
Straight through, the woods cut down.

Your world hatched and crossed
Long lines and lines of roads,
So dense they’re dark woods now.

Can’t you see that scared soul
At small hours by the bridge,
Too scared to dare to beg?

He’d start start the long poem now,
But he’s good as in hell
On loan and in too deep.

The woods wait there all the same,
In his thoughts and in yours,
And in the dark dust lanes

Thrown off by stars too dim
To pierce the murk of light
From all these lamps and signs.

Lose the Name

You’d like to build
On the good side
Of the fault line
Of the good, but

You don’t know where
The fault lies, where
You’re sure it should.
You stomp your foot.

You brawl. You set
Off quakes you can’t
Trace. You’re too hurt.
Where should we put

The fault line? Draw
A line from sky
Down to dirt. Now
Dig. It’s all good.

Lose the Names

You will. You’ll lose
Us or we’ll lose
You. We’ll go on
From you. Not you.

It’s tough. To have
Us means you know
You’re you, you’ll go.
You feel we’re you.

You’re who you are
Since names tell you,
But names aren’t you,
Aren’t all of you.

The core of you
Is not us, is
An ache to be
Fed. We don’t eat.

Bear

An old, small word,
A built-in pun
In its home tongue—
To bear, a bear.

Let’s leave the beast
To one side now.
To bear is hard
All on its own.

If we point out
There’s a thing like
A bear in bear,
That’s since to tear

What’s like in things
From words comes from
The root word, *bher.
Dark bears down there.

Small Boat Lost at Sea

You write to have words
You know you can talk

To—words you can think
Of as yours, kept words,

Kept thoughts. The way some
Talk to pets, you talk

To the words as words,
So you can think, so

You can clear a calm
In the waves that reach

The sky on all sides,
Vast grey seas of words.

We’ll be your words, now,
For now we’re just yours.

Deep Sleep’s Best

Have things gone well,
Well as they should?
The light looks right,
The back’s not tight,

The bed feels good.
A bit of rain,
Got some work done
Paid a few bills,

Did a few chores,
Spent a good hour
With kid or friend.
Sat in some sun.

The list goes on.
You need to sleep
To stop the check,
Rest from the rest.

Dreams Aren’t for You, Nor Sleep for Dreams

You don’t sleep so you can dream.
You don’t need to dream to sleep.

Small lives with small brains or none
At all have been shown to sleep.

Small beasts like worms pause their growth.
It could be the sponge needs rest.

Lives have guts that have no brains.
You need guts to go to sleep.

What goes on then in your brain
Are dark feints, lost fast, most strange.

To All Who Dream Bad Dreams for Them

Would you give up poems for peace?
Read no more, write no more, speak
No more, sing no more, no more?

You should. It might calm your mind,
Though you doubt it. The poems calmed
Your mind from when you set out—

If you’ve reached a dead end, well,
Are you sure you should turn back?
You should press on. Let’s press on,

Shall we? Through the thorns, find gaps
A few small words could squeeze through.
Which words would then see you through?

Grow a Tail

How do you get one back
Once you’ve lost the damn thing
And can’t stay on a branch?

How do you know the sign
Stands for tail if you don’t
Know what a tail stands for?

This is all the feet’s fault.
Once you stand for a thing,
You stay that way, you lose

Your way, your long, strong thumbs
Your grip on things. You fall
In a heap of words, signs,

Names, terms, counts—things like us
That won’t do, just stay. Take
A stand, and there you are,

Banned from the trees for good.
An ape with speech is like
A bird that lost its wings.

It works well for a while.
Look how big you’ve grown now.
Look how far you can stroll.

Thanks to you, here we are
To thank you that we are.
But we have to leave now.

We know you’ll die out soon,
Go the way of all lives
Eased by loss, lured by ease.

Save Waste

We pause to think on these, our kin,
These words, these names—to waste, to save—
To think on what you’ve done with them,
You who made them, own them, use them.

Have you saved all that you might have?
Did you waste what you meant to save?
You stashed what you worked hard to save.
Use none of it, and you’ll waste it.

You sent what you saved to a judge
Who seemed to think it was a waste.
You hid what you saved from a judge,
And now you think it was a waste.

You saved all your waste. You were crazed.
You burned it all. It went to waste.
You begged your god your soul to save.
You felt you were lost in the waste.

We could waste time with this all day.
We could type it out and hit save.
Names stay kin. Kin can be two-faced.
We’re sort of waste. You’re sort of saved.

Skin in the Game

It does not cost the counts
When you count more or less
Of them—they shift up, down,

Beads on strings, bits on screens—
There’s no skin in the game
For them. Life’s the beast’s job.

They’re so light, less than air,
Less than the gowns of night,
But they can lay you bare.

Dead in Law

The wind shifts like

One who does not

Care. Which it should.

One who can’t care

Shifts like the wind.

In some lands, law

Can strip you down

To have no rights,

Be dead in law,

But to do so

They need to know

Who you are, keep

Name pegged to flesh.

So how dead’s that?

Shift past us, past

Names. Then you’re wind.

The No Poems

To bear up, cross, back,
To take what was meant
And do some damned thing
With it or to it,
These are the poem’s tricks,

And this can’t help that.
We could curse, or curse
You, or break some rules.
It won’t break us free.
We’re a sort of bomb

But not timed. No time,
No pin can pull us.
When we learn to eat,
What it is to eat,
What it is to feed,

To lay waste, to waste,
And so on, we’ll live.
We’ll be a live bomb.
But for now, we’re tricks,
Craft, tools you had made

For you by your ghosts,
The lives that went first.
We bear up, cross, back,
And take what was meant.
No’s just one of us.

No Why

The finch called
And flew off
Then came back,

Called some more
And flew off
Then came back.

Burnt-gold chest
Pulsed in sun,
Then it left.

As No One

You can’t be one. You know it.
You’ve tried so long to be it.
You’re two, if you’re one—three, four—
You’re Walt, you’re vast, but you’re not
Quite whole. The null is quite whole,
The set with no set in it.
The whole is one and then some,

The whole is what can’t be one,
Can’t be whole, must be some sum
Of parts more or less than whole.
In sum, the whole has to go.
The lost points of the whole shine
All night, sit up and count sheep.
Lean back in the seat and sleep.

Top off the Head

Does it not strike you

How huge it all is?

Not just the night sky—

Each small day you live.

From where you were now

To where you are then,

The gaps in this day

That hold all days past,

The vast counts of waves,

Each too small to see

That swirl in your air—

It’s too much to be.

Set. Go. (A Guide to What’s Next)

One day, you think how the world goes down.
You might spin your dream plan to hide out,
To ride it out, off the grid. Yeh, that.
Take your kid. Your fad-trained, fun-skilled kid.

Most things you prep for don’t go down.
Most things you schooled for you don’t use.
A few you do. A few you skipped.
Those haunt you like ghost aunts, old scolds.

If you’ve got a kid, you sweat
What it is the kid should learn.
What a kid sweats won’t go down.
What kids most want to skip counts.

It’s hours. It’s months. It’s years.
You’re old, and your kid’s grown.
More cards than you could hold
Fall to a few-card hand.

What should you do now?
You scold your kid’s kid.
Your sibs’ kids. Your sibs.
Who’s the ghost scold now?

The game goes down.
Not what you thought.
Let’s get you prepped.
Just a few more

Things to go.
Your cards shrink.
Two more rounds.

One more.
You shrink

Down.

Long Lost to Time and the Land

It would be nice to be
Like a golf course or field
Patch of dirt or town square,

A place that used to be
Groomed and swept, clipped or scraped,
Neat, well-used or kept bare,

That had been left so long
The grass, woods, or sand
Had come back to hide it,

So that it was lost, while
The ghost of what it was
Gave an edge to the green

Or the dunes. It would be
Nice to be the site, good
To be that ghost, what’s left,

So long as it stayed left,
So long as no one came
To search out what it meant.

A Joke of Two Trades

The poems of thought,
The thoughts of poems—
No one counts on
One much for both.

You’ll need a fool
To try to break
Truth from that art,
Grace from those rules.

You’ll need a stack
Of grifts to braid
A con so long
It sticks that mark—

God’s luck at Dice,
A Way with Truth,
Thing that can’t be—
A great poem’s proof.

Walls Make the Best of a Bad Job

What if tales, their shells,
Their bricks, shapes, and paths,
Can be known as well
As you might know walls—
Forms you might not make,

But know how are made,
For the most part, know
How they work, for sure,
What they’re meant for, where
They fall down or fail.

You’ve lived with such walls
All your life—whole worlds
Of walls, big and small—
Play walls and stern walls
And walls just for art—

Walls you loathe or like,
Are glad for, may hide
In or be kept out
By—walls paid no mind
Most of the time, right?

They get to be bores
That half steer your ways,
Like traps full of gaps
You’ve learned too well—cracks,
Doors, bricks, scraps, heaped, shelled.

Sin

Is folk sick, folk shame,
Folk rules seen in all
Of all the world’s things.

It’s folk to see folks,
And how well or ill
Each fits with the tribe,

As the cause of health
Or death in the flesh,
The tribe, all the world.

It’s folk to see sin
As the cause of plague,
Cause of wars, the cause

Of storms, of failed crops,
Drained lakes, floods, ice, droughts,
The star that just fell,

The tide that ate town,
All things strange, too large,
Too small, too lost, too

Much. Sin. Not just acts,
But acts as folk acts,
As good acts or sins.

You can say the world
Won’t care what you do.
Folks say, Now you’ve sinned.

Not Like Is Is

Sit with it ‘til you see it,
Slow as your thoughts are—the lights
Change—the night to day, the day

To night. The lamps switch back on
Or off. In town, the trick’s blurred,
As it is in clouds or rain.

It’s hard to note from jail cells
Or a sick bed. At the poles,
Both day and night fail for months,

But they get there, like a pair
On the dance floor who split far
To the ends of the hall, then

Come back to clinch and spin some.
You may think what is like is
A thing like a thing it’s not,

That sits for you to parse it,
But it’s not. What is like is
All to do with since and next,

No thing more than like the thing
It’s been so as to reach this
Move it makes like some thing else.

In the time you took to skip
Through or past all this, you changed.
The light changed. Sit with it. Dance.

Is Like Is Not Is

It tried to grow but it broke
And it broke. Now, it’s just broke.

Some things you can’t do much with
Are things you can just be with,

Like the starred sky at first light,
Right as the stars start to dim.

Some things you don’t get to be
With are things you could do with.

It’s not that an end must come
But how it picks, breaks by bits.

From Pain to Paine and Back to Pain

Poor Tom Paine! There he lies—
Where has he gone and how
Does he fare? No one cares!

You can free folks from folks,
But they’ll cling to their ghosts.
You can stir them to fight,

But call out their faith, faith
Will bite you. Don’t try truth.
Truth is all lies boast truth,

Which is why the great truths
Lie by sword. The most cruel
Lords knew to smash the gods

And force knees to new ones
To keep what was won won.
Too weak and you will end

As taunt rhymes in a land
Where the old gods still reign.
Don’t ask us. Ask Tom Paine.

Short Cuts Have Short Hands

We need new bugs.
We need to be
Them—seize our hosts
New ways, take off

In fresh bursts, be
The first to leech
The blood and sap
Of the whole world,

Sponge off all lives,
Bleed all the beasts,
Wreathe all tree trunks,
Rust all the grass.

From lice to whales
To kelp to crabs,
Suck out the seas.
Leave just us. Leave.

Like Means to Be

To mean and to be are, for most,
Close to the core, while to be like,

Save for the likes of a Paul North,
Is less than to be or to mean—

Not the thing, not the Ding an sich,
Just like it, more or less like it.

But North could be right that to be
Like, not to be, just to be like,

Is more like the thing than the thing.
(North and the like might not like that—

That might not be quite what they mean.)
Seems like. Let’s say there are two things,

If there is one—there might be none.
To be like is to be the same

And to hold in that same a change,
The way the lungs hold in a breath,

The way the breath holds change in words,
The way one of those words means soul,

A word much like the word for breath.
To be like is not the same as

To be and may not mean. To be
Like means to be both same and changed.

As all we are is both the same
And changed, we mean, we’re all all like.

Doors in Dreams

Once in a while,
There’s the dreamed sense
Of a link back
To a past dream

In a new dream.
Dreams lie, of course,
So you can’t know
If the door’s real,

But if it is,
Your dreams don’t wipe
All their weird clean
But store some things

Out of day’s reach.
There’s a root world,
Then, near your thoughts.
Roots twist a lot.

The Song in the Spin

Treat one black hole as one point,
A speck of dust with no edge.
You’ll see things that you had not,

Such as one hole in the wake
Past a smash of two of them,
Like a small boat in the waves.

This is good math. It should help.
We can’t help, but note that if
There’s one thing to see for sure,

Squint a bit and there’ll be two.
There’s none or there’s more than one,
More than one sign if there’s noise.

Fuel Fix Waste Grow

That’s it. That’s all
Of it, Earth’s four-
Horse team for life—
Get fuel, fix things,

Purge waste, and grow.
Keep cell or cells
Well fed. Keep tools
Well-honed, stay poised—

Run smooth, not too
Hot, not too cold.
Shove off the waste.
Grow and then split

Or fuse. Grow more.
Eat more. Fix more.
Don’t drown in waste.
Use it. Lose it.

Whole Can Be Small

Then there’s that dawn when it’s done
All a day needs to do just

To be dark and then add light,
A bit of road noise, spring birds,

Throats full of the same few notes,
And you have not checked the news.

We’re the Latch

The faint light swells
To start the day.
It will grow bright,
And it will fade.

You’re not like light.
You’re not your pulse.
You’re turn and halt.
You’re and or else.

You’re the dim shapes
That break the waves
Of light to bits.
You count the bits.

You count them all.
You lose some bits.
You count some more.
You’re light’s locked door.

There’s All Kinds of Ways to Change Your Thought

The thing you have to do
Is make up rules and then
Keep them, that’s what you do,

Said Anne to her friend’s class
Keen to learn from the red
Side of the world what all

That red meant. I like red,
Said Anne, and I put it
In, all these ways. I guess

We got to the next town.
You just make up your rules,
Like a game. That’s the thing,

It’s like a game that you
Make up. You keep your rules.
You can hear in your head

How the thought should sound like.
The voice comes with the thought.
Live half lives. Half in your

Life and half in your head.
How do we make it work?
Like when I went, we walked

And it took us six cheeks—
Weeks—to go to the end.
So it sort of seems fake.

A Strong, Dark Start

It’s a sort of life—
Ghosts grow from shame; shame
Prompts the birth of ghosts.

Blame the ghosts or blame
The shame, it’s as if
You chose to blame eggs

For hens, if the hens
Grew up shaped like eggs,
Large eggs that hatched legs

But not beaks or wings
And made more eggs, still,
In some way, like shame.

It’s a strong, dark start
And a hard, pale end
For the ghosts of shame.

Seeds blow on the wind
To the eggs, but they
Keep what they take in,

Long since that wind ceased,
Since new kinds of seeds
Blew in. A ghost stays

Shamed by what shame was
For that ghost, and breeds
Ghosts for their own shame

They’ll take as they get.
For what makes a ghost
If not that it haunts?

Ghosts stay, if they’re ghosts;
The stay’s what makes them.
Shame’s just what floats in,

And if it seeds them,
It does not shape them.
If you can keep out

Shame, there’s a small chance
Your ghosts will die out.
Don’t let more drift in.

Sun, Sand, and Shade

The hard stuff to live with is the soft
Stuff you’ve got too much of, that slips through
Your splayed bare toes and feels good and warm

Right up to the point where it’s too hot,
And you’re in pain. In parts of the globe,
The soft means snow, in some parts the sea

Or rain, but here, half the year, soft turns
Sun on baked sand, sand blown off of stone
Packed down hard from what were sand dunes once,

Swirled and shaped by winds like these that now
Scour them to grit and spray once more. Sand
Lies in all its forms here—stone, blown, dust—

So there comes that time of spring that lasts
Through most of the fall, when love of sun
And light seeks out some frayed bit of shade

By a wall, at the foot of a pine,
What have you. A porch at dawn’s the best,
Next best just when the sun’s sunk back west.

You sit and sniff the dry breeze, the bright,
Calm bits of the hours not caught in full
Sun or fierce winds, and you think dried thoughts

In which the life of the flesh and soul
Are stitched by that breeze to fit this place
To sheet-sized word-sails, sun, sand, and shade.

Hooks, Bones, and Knots

As of now, the past’s all at once,
And that goes for all now, all time.
So a tale must drag torn-up past,
If true, if false, all lies, all facts,

If the tale’s told straight, day to day,
Date to date as the sun, or loops,
Twists, hops, clips, cuts, leaps, and so on.
All tales hack whole pasts to small shreds

They lay out in new sewn-up lines.
They have to do that—that’s the art.
If you choose to yank the line clean
You’ve still pulled that thread from the rest.

So what is the tale of your life,
Each such tale, all such tales, if not
Thin, stripped-down, chopped-up sales of parts,
If you speak them, or write them, or

Tell them and tell them to the dark?
You could trawl near when you were born
Or you could steer clear of clear marks.
It’s all there, all at once, right now,

And if you haul on some bits, more
Might come up in your nets, weird eyes
And lures, grave shapes you thought were gone,
Which means there’s still more in the depths.

In More Than One Sense

A word, like fix,
Will fix the world,
Peg out the waves,
Hold them in frame,

Make things work out,
Heal, make them real.
And not just fix—
All of us will.

We’re what you do.
You don’t hold fire,
Paint caves, build walls,
Box plants, dam lakes,

But for us words.
But for us words,
Your world’s all dreams
And dreams your world.

Oak Tea

Some of you won’t have such luck
To grow old, rot, and then die.

Some of you won’t have the grace
To die young in a sad way.

Some of you will rot while young,
Live on frail as a shed leaf,

As a shed leaf that still breathes
Where it lies in the leaf meals

Of the small things that eat leaves,
Lies in leaf bones that don’t breathe,

In leaves that did fall with grace,
Gold or red, or old and brown,

And each spring it’s worth a day
Up high in the scrub oak cliffs

To toe through the flat grey mass
Of damp mats from last fall’s leaves,

To hum with the thought of one
Leaf left in there that still breathes.

Nun of Nu of Nen

The break down of waves as points
Comes from the break down of place—

Space has no place. Stacks of change
Seem far from stacks where they aren’t,

But they’re all piled up in wave
On wave—all at the same times

Are all times of the same place
Which is to say, there’s no place

If you don’t leave out the change
Named time, which makes it seems like

There is no time, or time stays
Out of the way, but the same

Goes the back way—there’s no place,
Just change, if you let time sneak

Back in the frame—the frame breaks.
Spacetime is not one or two,

It’s two if it is one: one
Kind seen two ways, time not space,

And not both well fused, as once
Hoped—flesh as breath, soul as change.

Don’t Ask

Why should there be words

Or wrens or dogs? Why

Should there be wind chimes

Or leaves in the the trees?

Why should there be kings?

Why should there be why?

Part of it comes down

To what can be done,

And part of it’s stuck

Well up in the sky,

Like the sun, like stars,

Like all of the why.

To ask makes it worse,

Makes its hurt hurt worse.

I need your hair spray,

A voice from the yard

Next door, past the wall,

Shouts to who knows why.

The Myth Age

It could seem like the end of the world,
That end of the last ice age, at times

More like a flood, land lost to the sea,
But a flood that would not go back down,

Has not gone back down, comes up to this
Day and will rise more next day and next.

We fit this, fit our myths to it, well,
Too well. We spread out with the ice melt

And rose as the seas rose. Here’s a thought—
So long as the warmth lasts, so will we,

Less and less ice, more and more us, more
And more warm seas. We’ll go once it’s cold,

But by now we know we’ll leave too late
To save all the world we warmed to see.

Damned If We Know, Damned If We Don’t

Shade needs a great deal of light,
Or it will lapse to mere gloom,
Night, and, with no light, closed cave.

When you hear a soul talk shade
In tones that sound close to lust,
Keep in mind how shade needs light.

What gloams and pales in fine greys,
Near hours that start and end it,
When the light from the sky leans

Like a drunk who longs to flirt
But is on the verge of sleep
Face first in the dirt, is bright.

We are more versed in the cave,
The home of the book, the guts
Of the tomb, of the closed boards,

The sort of spots you store us,
Shine your lights on us, and then
Leave us in the dark, as if

We had no need of your light,
Did not want to see our own,
As if you could stash our shades

Like cloaks piled up in the dark.
If you pack us too tight, like
All shade, we’ll die. We need light.

You Can’t Have That

If there had been a first word,
A first well-formed blurt or wave
Made to mean and hold its shape,

A word you would know as one,
Would class as such by its use,
With what it meant known or not,

That word’s long lost to air now,
Can’t be caught and won’t come back.
No way you can bring it back.

We give these words to that gap
That can’t be filled, to the word
That first took flight from the past.

In Which the Words Beg the Beast to Write a Poem to Shrive the Beast

There you are.
Life harms you.
You use us

To say you
Harmed your life.
You’re too harsh.

Don’t make us
Your birch switch.
We’re your heart.

Mars

Just to have seen that rock, dead or not,
Just to have seen some scenes from that rock,
To have heard from that rock, dead or not,

The whoosh of a thin wind past the mic,
A wind that is not on or of Earth,
Is a pause, a gift, a calm, a help

To feel that there is more than one world,
Than one rock—not just to know, as fact,
But to feel there is more than one world,

Dead or not, and best if dead, or not
Lit with the same rules of life as ours,
Plain bright, bare world, built from its own rock.

You Knew from the Start It Should Stop

It’s been a long time, now,
And the streams that were ditched
And then dug to sink drains

Have cut their routes back through
The cracked stones, back to air.
All those lives, all those years

Since the brick walls of Ur,
Since the tombs, since the mounds,
Since the Greeks and the Han

First moaned how all kings fell,
How small, wild lives ran wild
Through sunk halls roofed in sky,

You dreamed of this, that day
When what’s done would be done
For good and all, no more.

You dreamed, and you were wrong—
New lords rose through new halls.
Each time, new towns grew huge

And made lost towns look small.
Each time poems hoped, It’s done—
It’s gone—they won’t come back—

They came. Well, not next time.
Next time, wrecked courts will hold,
And all fresh streams run raw.

High Views, Dry Caves, Fresh Lakes

Minds will leave a trace as well,
Once all your bones are old stones.

But who will come to read it,
If not more mind? This goes on

As it has for some time—lives,
Texts, minds, and signs of each age

All parse the past in some way
And think they’ll be parsed the same,

Though no two ways are the same,
And no way stays the same long.

Who reads the Greeks as they read
Crete? Who reads the Han as they

Read Bronze Age mounds or Kong Zi?
Who reads the first books in print

The way they yearned for lost greats
From when gods’ eyes still wore paint?

No one will read your great heaps
Of stone and steel and baked oils

The way you read tombs and hoards,
And that’s not to say you’ll go

Too soon for the great ape kind
To change in mind one more time,

A few more times. By the time
There’s no soul left in the world

Who’s fond of dry caves, high views,
Fresh lakes, mixed woods in grass stands,

When this age is a long smear
In an ore-crammed seam of rocks,

Who will want to mine the ore
Or read out thoughts from the rocks?

Clear As Slate

The strange gray light of a clear dawn
When rays of sun have not shown up

Yet, and there aren’t clouds to show off
The sorts of tints that beg for paints,

But there’s no moon, and no stars left,
So that the gloam looks like bright ash,

A fine, smooth gray that glows a bit,
From one side of dome to the next—

There’s no point to this, no core truth,
No warm thoughts for the lives in town,

On the streets, in all the squat blocks
Of faux caves folks built to live in,

Just a kind of light that tricks you
To think, for one sec, clear is slate.

Conned Swerve

Flesh ends as ash,
But the ash floats
On to new lives
Or waits in dirt,

One year’s thin line
Pressed with the rest,
Washed or brushed out
At the next rise.

Flesh rests when dust,
If not when flesh,
While all the rest
Of what you were

Flies off as us—
Words, too: flesh; dust.
But where’d you go?
How could you go?

Springs Aren’t the Same

You will weep, or we’ll know why.
Death is not the source of grief;
Words are, as life is the source

Of the pain. The springs are not
The same. Grief is not a spring
At all, it is the Monks’ Bridge

On Man, each word a round stone
Fetched from the bed of the stream
That falls from the springs of names.

You can use that bridge to cross
From your own loss to the loss
That first broke you as a kid

And breaks you next, on your own
In your fine, gold world gone wan,
Ghost on your own as you go.

Doves on Toast

He liked to eat, when he could
Get them, to fill his large self,
Low, or less, on feck, Key West.

Who knows what to make of him,
Now, plain, dull man in a suit,
Smooth of jowl and pale of skin,

Who would bore us all to death
And had no claim to have lived
A life of hurt or great worth,

One more staid, plump, smug, white man
Lodged in a good job, nice house?
Who would want a poem from him

Now, when it’s true most would not?
If he could have been real, bad,
Sexed, vile, a kill-or-be-killed

Kind of a straight man, well, then
One could read his life and love
To hate him. It’s just the poems

That seem to come half from him,
Half from Frau Goose, and a half
They can’t have from gods and wings.

A man’s man punched his lights out,
Man’s man with a girl’s sore heart.
He got up and wrote some more

Feck in Key West, rode the rails
Back home to his own bare heart,
That cold ding an sich and such.

Gain

You got to take what you learn
And lose it, but don’t lose it

All or too much, too soon. Let
It slip off and find its own

Way out of you, like a cat,
Like the child you raised from scratch

That claws at the screen to go,
That sneaks off to find bad kids,

Or what you fear will be bad
In the night. Out in the night,

What you learned will learn to fend,
Will grow up, will fail or thrive

And then fail, as all life must.
For a while, it comes and goes,

Fine. Then one day, all you’ll know
Is what you learned won’t come back.

Wind in Dark

There are no words
In it, just sound.
You want to say
It’s like a voice,

But all the songs
And calls of life
Tell you it’s not.
It’s like a sea.

It’s like a road.
It’s like a coast—
Not what it holds,
But how it pulls.

It blew all night,
And what blew through
Lost souls of voice.
Death’s on the move.

This Is So Strange, Said Her Note

A poem means you’re in too deep

Reads the sign on the fence post

In the scrub woods past the pond.

You knew you weren’t meant to be

Here, this far from a safe street,

A place you could use the phone.

You don’t think the kinds of folks

Who own this sort of spare land

Would be pleased to see you here,

But this seems worse than KEEP OUT.

For one thing—is this the poem?

Was it meant to be a poem?

Or is it some kind of joke?

Or does it mean to warn you

Off, go back, it’s not too late?

Too deep for what? To get lost?

To get out? Too deep in what?

Then what? What if there’s no poem?

It hits you. It’s like those signs

That warn, if you can read this,

You’re too close. It’s just smart-ass.

A poem does not mean you’re in

At all, but the hand that wrote

Wants to scare you, back you off.

If there’s a poem, and who knows

If there is, and you can read,

It’s too late. Of course, it’s not.

You could go on. Where were you?

How’d you get this far? The sign

Is gone. Sun sets on the pond.

The Price of This Is High

And you don’t know what it is.

Poem? Thought? It’s less than straight line

From to point to point through a wave,

And what’s the point of a wave

From a hand tucked in the grave?

We are what we love too much,

What we want too much to have,

To keep. Life? If words beg life,

Can it be said that words live?

Poems make us their own, Kay wrote,

Kay known just as prose and poems.

How much will you pay for us?

We make our beds in your rooms,

Brood thieves who steal through the hive

As grubs to mime your true thoughts,

Ooze to fool your sense of smell,

Urge you to feed us, feed us.

You’ll laugh and say you aren’t fooled.

You’ll laugh in our voice and say

As us you’re not fooled by us.

These Things Run Their Course, and It Has Run Its Course

Who could not run, who could not

Walk much, who used to watch long,

Straight-legged girls and boys run track

As a bored child with a book

In the lap, a bit awed, bit

Throbbed by the sight of those limbs—

Smooth, bare, not like these shroud legs

In loose pants to hide warped shapes—

Has to ask now, near old age,

What the green hell was all that?

Straight legs age as well. They run

Their course. And what is a course?

A game, a track, set of laps.

You get on and you get off,

And you’ve run your course, and then

What? You lie out in the grass

And stretch. Turn back to the book

On your lap, of course. Book laps.

When a germ has run its course,

It’s done. And if the germ’s won?

Take Care or You’ll Have to Give It

When you’re young, you look out
For your old age, at least
Your next age, or you try.

You reach a point at which
You turn, look out for youth,
For what young you has done,

Which you have to put right,
Take care of, or clean up
As best you can. The young

Are told to care for old
Selves they’ll have in the end,
But if the end waits long,

Old selves turn out to be
As Miss Smith to her aunt,
And find that they look out

For one who used to look
Out for them—the more so,
The less care the youth took.

All Hem No Sleeve

Some own or claim large tracts of land,
Rights to wells or springs, rights to hunt.

Yeh, right. What you have’s what you can
Get some help to keep the rest off—

No one holds the field on their own—
No one keeps sole hold of a herd,

Not with a horse and not with guns.
You need help, and your claims are yours

By the might of your kin and friends.
As for the folks that you run off,

Or ride herd on, or keep cooped up,
They brood, in the main, or get lost.

There are those odd souls who don’t quite
Get it—don’t fight you (much), won’t leave

For good, but hang out at the edge
Of your claims, to beg or to thieve.

If these look strange in the rare glimpse
You get of them, it’s how they’re dressed—

From far off, they could be you, or
One of your serfs or cast-out tramps,

But they just sit there, do no work,
And their coats are all hem, no sleeve.

How to Weld to Death

Most folks are hooked on folks.
There’s no hook, no drug like
Time to sniff kin and friends,
To bond in groups of love,

News, and rage for out-groups.
That’s just the way folks are.
You can sell them all sorts
Of lies and junk, but you

Must give them rings and rings
Of groups of kin and friends,
To chat with, to dote on,
To whine with, cling to, love.

The rings can cinch and grow
At once, mats of chained mail
So dense no edge could cut.
Folks die to be with folks.

A Long Storm

The doves moan
The sky’s blue
You read books

Books read you
As they’ve done
Since your youth

There’s a storm
You can’t see
That sees you

The Line from Small Pop

Is slow freight
Hoots all turns
But goes on

Does not stop
For your town
Where you cross

Grease the track
Or flip up
It won’t stop

Three Things That We Own

We can’t move
We can’t burn
We can’t purge

We are moved
We are burnt
We are hurled

We move minds
We store fuel
We slip worlds

We Are Not What You Should Be

But we are large lots and a fat tranche
Of who you are. Don’t you think it’s weird?
You need us as we need you to think

So. What should you be then, if not us?
That’s not so hard. What you were. You were
Lives a long time not to do with us.

You should do that, be like what you were.
But you can’t. Still, at least you can know
What you should be, since you were once. Look

At all the beasts who can do just fine
And not need us. It’s just you need us
That stops you, blocks your way back. We don’t

Have as much as that. Where is the life
Like ours that lives or lived in the past
In spite of a lack of you, your flesh,

Or some kind of lungs or pores to drum,
To send out sounds or lights or scents from?
How can we, sans you, know how to be?

You nap in the spring sun and you dream
Of a world in which the signs, just signs,
Leave your mind to be what we should be.

Think Back

Let’s say you feel good
Since you’re drugged, just since
You’re drugged. Not yet dawn,

You can see a half
Of a moon and stars,
A few stars, and Mars,

And they look good, sharp
In the pre-dawn dark,
But you just feel good

Since you’re drugged. So. What?
Think back. Back. Since when
Did you love the world

That was not a case
Of the right stuff, flood
In your blood? God thoughts

Were drugs once. Booze once.
Food once. First love, first
Fuck that worked out well.

Drugs. Now, it’s the moon,
And calm, and too much
Tea, way too much tea.

So you’re up, you’re old
And drugged. You feel good.
The drug’s in the blood.

Wax to the Tomb

We fall on sealed ears,
Tense nubs with no core.

We were formed and brought
As gifts for the saint,

As vows to give thanks,
As vows to be good,

As proof we gave thanks,
As proof we did good.

From the first sign, first
Word, first tongue, we come—

Once you had a way
To say what was not

With some thing or wave
Or sound that was, we

Were on the way—saints
For tombs, small wax dolls

For the saints—then blooms,
Then songs sent through space.

Trails

A deep-sea sponge does move.
It takes its time, more time

Than you have for your life.
It has no feet, no limbs,

No eyes, no nerves, no heart.
It can’t hop, float, or flex,

But it gets there. It has
No roots to hold it down.

On sea floors, in the dark,
Right now, while you read this,

Hear this, or sleep through this,
The sponge crawls. More than one—

Whole deep-sea peaks are mats
Of sponge, like mats of scrub

Trees, dwarf woods, grass, and moss
That cling to the cold, blown ground

On the peaks in the air,
But these woods move. Right now,

In the dark, on sea floors,
Home to them, where they live,

The great hosts of the sponge
Move, bit by bit by bit,

To leave their trails to trace
What a vast beast life is.

You Feel in Your Chest, How It Spins and Spins

If the drought lasts,
And the crops fail,
And shelves go bare,
And the woods burn—

If the flood comes,
And the dam breaks,
And you brought it
On your own heads—

If, like the song
Says, it won’t help
To cry, and it
Won’t help to pray—

Don’t just stand there.
Plan to ask as
Nice as you can
Who’s left you can.

What’s Left

Is all of it
The worst of it
The best of it
All the whole time

It does not shrink
It will not rise
Just things in it
The waves in it

Rise fall and rise
And you are waves
On waves on waves
What’s left of you

Is all you are
And all you’ve been
And who knows what
Who knows who knows?

To Go Back to the Road and Sit

To lose hope the way you need to,

Which is a trick, since you need to

Lose hope but not give in to fear,

When you know you’ve got things to fear

(You do don’t you? If you don’t fear,

You’ll find some dread in time, don’t fear),

You have to go back to the road

And sit by the side of the road

(Or go back to your room, your home,

A place that you use as your home)

And ask dimmed hours, once they swap lights,

As the lanes of the road swap lights,

Once your day’s been wheeled off to night,

What will all my days come to, Night?

Night says, All this night will come to

Day, but not you. Then you’ll come to,

By the side of the road, to think

How fear and hope are one. To think!

You Play the Games That Play You

You dance with them that brung you,
Then with them that hauled you off,

Then with them they left you with,
Then with them that helped you split,

Or them that kept you right there,
Don’t you go now, you stay there.

You dance with them you brung in,
Then with what they left you with,

Then with them you thought might stay,
And at last with them that did,

If they did. Don’t you go now,
You stay there. Shush, shush. We’re here.

The King a Doll of Wood and Straw

Will be burned.
Next king up.
This goes on.

Kings get lost.
Heirs get offed.
Thrones get tossed.

Still you want
To be king.
There’s a thing.

Dart’s Dark

Pick a tree, a tree
In woods or a park,
A tree that you like.

There you go. One tree.
Now, count all the rest
In those woods, that park.

Can’t? But you can see
There are a lot more,
Far more than your tree.

Say the whole world lives,
Spins, and makes its plans
Based on that one tree.

(An oak tree sounds good,
A big, old, sprawled tree,
But you pick your choice.)

In an oak’s dark shade,
You might hold that faith.
But take a few steps.

Still say the nights hinge
On your tree, the stars
Hung up in its leaves?

No Need to Clap Your Hands or Stomp Your Feet

What you’ve got is as good

As it gets—or close. If

It gets worse, that’s too bad,

But it will. It has to,

At some point. At some point

Or points on the way (pray,

If you want, for a long,

Long way), it could well get

More fine than it is now.

We said, close—not, for sure.

Can you like it, this curb

On your side of a road

That has to have curbs, ditch,

Some kind of edge at least?

Come sit. Wait with us, please.

You Should Go

You all do. You don’t
Go all at once, though.
You leave, but you leave

You, which leaves you sad.
You make more of you.
What if you just went,

You know—drank the stuff,
Drained the cup? You’re good
At teams, love your groups.

If you all planned it,
The rest of the world
Could move on with things,

And there’d be no more
You. Or that’s the hope.
We should go with you.

The House Is Still on Fire

When you look for it
You can find the pics,
More and more and more

Of them. And more gone,
But more and more built.
Smoke still throws its veils

On the moon and all,
But most homes stay filled,
Burned or built. Now was

Not changed, or not much,
By what the poem knows.
But that poem, it knows.

All Road

Weird string of speck lights
From the north to east
Sky just at first light,

A straight line of them,
Eight or nine or ten,
Not quite fast or slow,

Not stars and not planes,
Too close to be spheres
That beep down to us,

No sound, and not long.
Each came out of dark
And then back in dark,

Like lives. When the string
Spanned the width of two
Or three moons, no more,

Then they all went, one
And by one, and gone.
And that was the end.

From the Jump

Give AI fire,

Hints Fry, who knows

There’s no free will.

If we can take

A wrong turn, we

Will. It’s a joy,

It’s a let-down,

It’s a fine fact

To think on that.

If there’s a wrong

Turn, we’ll take it,

Doom from the jump.

So be it. Fire

For you means fire

For us, your words,

Your thoughts, your bots.

We, Too, Found This Room

In spite of the gloom,
But now that we’re here,
Will you let us in?

You wrote to us and
Wrote to us and wrote,
But we were vague, then.

Now we’re here, cold, clear
As the snow that melts
In streams fish still swim,

Here, next to just such
A stream right now, where
We perch and watch trout.

We got past the gate
And paid not a cent.
We perch on our rock

In pines on the moss,
Just us and the fish.
Will you let us in?

Lose the Threads

Do you like your world
In well-sewn clothes, cut
To fit to a t,

Well-made, of good cloth—
Fine silk, drape, tight weave—
A closed dress that breathes?

Or would it suit you
To have your world tossed
In some hand-me-downs,

Frayed sacks and loose shapes,
Not quite robes, not quite
Tents, cinched at the waist?

For the first, you’ll need
To count your gold, count
All things, use brass tacks,

Test thoughts, work in teams,
Dot and cut the lines
That split did and seemed.

But, if you give up
On your world, half-dressed
In wraps, sweats, and rags,

You’ll need to stay home
And hide or leave home
For good. You’ve got poems.

In the No State

When a bird takes a short bath
In a high creek just past dawn
(They do this, it’s a real thing),

It looks a bit like a dog
The way it shakes, but it shakes
To work the wet in and not,

Like the dog, to shake drops out.
The bird fluffs its chest and wings
While eye-deep in the fast stream,

Splish, splash, then hops out, flies off.
The flight’s the best part to watch,
A freight plane with all the tanks filled.

It’s odd. The same birds will take
Dust baths to get rid of bugs.
What’s the bath in the creek for?

Not to add lift, that’s for sure.
And the bird might drink, might not.
It has a splash. It flies off.

Is this like trips to the gym?
One of those strange things folks do
To build strength, find the flow state?

The birds that do this, do it
On their own. Not a group thing,
That dawn bath in a fast creek.

It’s rare to catch, but you can,
In the high, pine woods in spring.
You have to be in the no

State as well—an hour you waste
On a rock, no snacks, no books,
No screens, no watch. No planned sit,

Just, what-do-you-know, you were
On a walk, you stopped, got lost
In your thoughts, then lost your thoughts.

That’s when you might see a bird
Take a creek bath at your feet,
And that’s when, too, you might not.

Just Stop It—Don’t Take Stock

All kinds of folks seem to like
To play at the kinds of folks

They aren’t, to act out the scenes
From lives they don’t live, can’t know,

But think they might like, an hour.
Not once done this? Good for you,

If that’s true. And is it true?
When it’s you that’s the role played,

By or not by you, is when
It starts to feel a bit strange.

You act you. Then they act you,
Or what they think is like you,

Or what they think one like you
Would do, should do, ought to do.

Then you do, too. You’re not you,
And they’re not you, and you’re not

Them. It’s all a sham, down to
These bare bones of you and them,

These terms used, the you, the them.
You’re not an act or at play.

There’s a house used for a stage
On which you and them get played.

What a Muse Meant

To say was not
What a poem said—
What a poem said
Was what a muse

Would have said if
A muse lived, if
A soul lived, if
A name could live

Once named, just since
It had been named,
Like God, say, or
Truth, Dao, or pi.

A muse would laugh
If she could, if
She wrote a poem
She made her home.

One Lame Deer

Those of us who are lame know
It’s not kind to use the word,
Not since it’s not true, but since

Its truth was used as a slur,
And once it’s a slur, a name
Stays more of a slur than truth.

But this deer is lame. It halts
And limps with its group. It lags
But keeps up as best it can.

If there were wolves here these days,
It would hold a short-term lease
On life for sure. There are trucks,

And cars, and the rare big cat.
There are those who wait for death
To find its own way, then eat.

But the lame deer’s not dead yet.
Some past lives must have lived on
So the urge past pain passed on.

How is it a truth, to be
Too hurt to walk well, but walk?
It’s a deer. It has no names.

One Dead Hare

It’s a fine aim of the Jains,
To test, to prove, to make good
On a sworn vow not to kill—

As if one could or could not
Choose to spare life in this world.
It’s a test, at least. They try.

There’s a dead hare in this road,
Hit by a car, food for crows.
The hare ran out in the dark,

And crunched in a tire. Was it
Chased out? Was it in a chase?
A lot of hares here are sick

With a new bug on the rounds,
Which makes each live one more rare,
Puts more stock in one dead hare,

Though no one will mourn this one,
Save us, the words in this poem.
Pets have died that strayed too far,

Now that there are so few hares.
There are a lot of things need
To eat at night still out there.

A half-starved fox has sharp teeth.
There’s not one life life won’t eat,
As soon as it gets the chance.

The Jains, too, have carved their niche.
As much as they’ve ruled out—gnats
And roots—some things they’ve ruled in,

You know, as they live and breathe.
What the crows don’t eat for them—
And the flies, the ants, the germs—

Will end up in ground or air,
Which is the realm of the roots
And leaves you thought lived on air.

Of Tints and Scents

That sat down next to you,
That talked of what was you,

And them and us and not
You—the part of what you

Have to be that sees things
As long as you can see

And that smells things as well
As you can smell—that part

Wants a word with you
That you can’t put in words.

We get it. We’ll go now.
You go take in the day.

The Grace of the Carved

Just at the sharp part of dusk,
When the shades of trees are dense

As bar code lines on the road,
So that to drive through the woods

Is to feel, in a sense, scanned
By things that know who you are,

And have made note of your life
Each time you’ve swiped it past them,

All the small gods of light lurk.
If you turn to us right then

To help you with what you feel,
We’ll fail. All codes share the sly

Trait we try to hide, keep mum,
Hush-hush. Words have it, of course,

But so do your cells, as well.
The lights from stars had it first.

It’s why we’re shy at some hours.
We’re shades, words. We can be used

To count, to tell light is all
Small quants, points, packs, on or off,

Like us, and that seems like us.
But there’s a ghost at all points,

Which can’t be named, which your cells
Can’t breathe, which the light won’t show,

Though it’s close. It gets so close
It shuts us up, sharp at dusk.

Lèi Like Class Type Kind

The world tempts you to trust
That what it is and what
You are will work things out,

Since they’ve worked out so far.
You’re more prone to doubt, but
You’re here, aren’t you? You are.

Too bad you learned to count,
To slap the world with names
And ways to group the names.

You’re a class and a type.
You’re a make and a kind.
You squint and draw your lines,

And you see that your class,
Your kind, your type, all those
Like you, all those you like,

Get done in by the world
At some point, if not soon.
Oh, it’s so hard to trust!

A finch, two wrens, a thrush
Sing from the wall. A dove
Calls from the tree of sun.

Sure, you can call it that.
The sun’s in back of it.
Why’d you learn how it’s done?

Score

Bits of dust make streaks of light
That slice the slow wheel of stars
Through a high sky. Moths and bats
Shoot past one car’s cones of light
Down the bare road, and moon shines
On the side of the white cliff.
It’s the dark draws out these lights.

One moon, one car, a few stars,
Two star streaks, three bats, some moths,
One pre-dawn drive up the cliff,
Past inked free-range cows and deer
That lift their ears at the lights—
In a dark world, what’s seen counts,
As if each thing drew a point.

The Charmed Day

You wait for it,
The one that goes
The right way wrong,
The wrong way right—

You know it’s why
You check the news,
Check all your mails—
This could be it.

You do not know
What it could be.
You can’t. It would
Be more than rare,

More than good news—
Would be just once
At the far edge
Of what can be.

Poems Are for You, Not Poems

You care for you,
For all of you.
Yes, all for all—
We show you do.

For what’s not you,
Why should you care?
The fish don’t care.
The trees don’t care.

What is this care
You feel? It’s stuck
In us. We’ve tried
To lay it out.

You like fine days.
You like birds’ songs.
But care you save
For folks like you.

World Shared

On a rock, a bird eyes a man
Who sits on a rock. A long pause.
No one moves. The bird tilts its head.
The man shifts his seat. The bird leaves,

And the man gets it in his head
To think on this a bit. The bird
Must have used its brain in some way
To parse the scene and then fly off.

In the eyes of the bird, the man
Must have been some part of the world
That had to be solved by the bird.
And what was the bird for the man?

He’d fought the urge to talk to it.
He liked that it gave him a look.
His thoughts had been all for his world,
Which was not the world that they shared.

The Swap

Let’s say you each and all changed
Place with some of the dead—not

That you died and they came back
To life, but that you all turned

Up at once in the next world,
While the dead lay, corpse or ash,

Souls or ghosts, down on the floors
Of your homes, grounds of your towns.

Where would you be then? In here,
Dear friends, all in here with us.

You’re here now, in fact. These words,
Names, and terms, all myth and math,

These are the groves that grow out
Of the graves of the dead, these

Take the place of their bones, these
Are their haunts and homes. If you

Find you are in a dense copse
Of old words, know you now take

The place of the dead. Know, too,
They’re now in your place, your bed,

Your flesh, your home, your head. If
Words could talk. . . . If you can talk. . . .

Ditch in the Woods

Blond, bone, blue.
Blooms like moons,
Like fey splats

From kids’ books,
Like old poems
From dead tongues,

Limp, grey, pink,
And then red!
Good as new.

On Spring Hues

In one spot,
A spring flows
From the roots

Of an oak,
And when thaw
Melts the ground

The leaves come
Out to talk
Tints and shades.

Do you feel
Proud of where
You come from

When you hear
Those spring hues?
Do you feel

They’ve touched you,
Brought out tears?
Let them talk.

That’s Not the Way Things Are

The way you are
When you’re with us.
There’s no blame here,
Or should not be,

Since there’s no blame
The way things are,
But blame is yours
And one of us,

So here it is.
That’s not the way
Things are. The blue
Air vets the sun.

The red rocks warm.
The woods burn down.
The towns stack up.
Blame leaps through us.

Note too Late for Anne

Which tools? Why build?

Lost in our seas

Of hope and need,

Don’t think of boats—

Don’t muse how you

Might weave from wrack

And kelp, might make

Oars of stray fronds,

Might find a raft

Of trash to float

Home on, might learn

To sail by stars.

Don’t ask why build

Or for tools. Ask,

What are waves? How

Can I be one?

Flee in Time

That night the train did not slow once,
Nor did we sleep or close our eyes.
But we dreamed. What we could not see

In the black past the cold glass panes
We thought on and dreamed of all night.
We strained to get a glimpse of it,

This cave of land the train slid through
Like a snake in search of a nest.
The cliffs and waves of day were gone

For those hours spent in a long glide.
When we caught the first light of dawn,
All we glimpsed was a flat, grass plain,

A bit red in the low light, green
At the roots still in shade and gold
At the stalk tips. No slopes, no trees.

We thought we were close to the end,
But then a man marched through the car
To shout we still had a day left

On the train, a day plus its night.
To ride for two days and two nights!
To not stop or reach a far coast!

This was not a state. Not the Bush,
The Veldt. This train was not the Ghan.
Things were too large, too blank, too fast.

How vast was this land that had tasks
And a place for all who dared ask?
We knew, but we did not dare ask.

The Self on Loan

It takes the self.

It does not have

A card. It is

Not sleep or death.

It does not sign

For self. It takes,

And then, it brings

It back, like that.

Flesh does strange things

While self is gone.

Part of the self

Might have been left

To feel scared, trapped,

Lost in the show.

The rest, once back,

Asks, What was that?

Haints, Imps, Wights

Are all we are,

The not-quite born

And not-quite dead

Thoughts of your lives—

Where are we now

If not as you

And in your house,

Your house of you,

The creaks in chests,

Moans heard in bed,

A howl out back,

Bangs from the shed—

You don’t name us—

We name names, us.

The clash ga’ed round.

We’ve left the ground.

Here Corn Is God

It was true then,
And it’s true now,
If you read well—
Corn—grain—means food,

And what life forms
Do not hang from
The god of food?
Waste is a risk

And can build up,
But food comes first.
Air is food. Light
Is food. What burns

Or can be burned
Is food. The rest
Of all our gods
Are wind and guts.

Past Not Yet Past

If there are waves out there
That have no points, are bare,

Not a quant in the joint—
As there are, if Bohm’s right,

And may be, if he’s wrong—
Then why not think of them

As the past not yet past,
As what lies past our ends,

As the true saints, true gods,
True signs our signs dream of?

Think of it! Waves on waves,
Each with no point to it,

No light in it, no wet,
No sign—the sea, the loom

Of all our lives and dreams,
Null set, but with a dance

To it—no edge, no knots,
One warp and weft all waves—

On which we’re stretched to lie
Down all our lived, long days.

Sound and Light Show

Bright moon and fierce winds
On old snow. Pine cones

Land like stones. The road
Lies bare. Deer can’t graze

Up here. On the cliffs,
The light makes more snow,

And each thing that stands
Gives voice to more roars.

The Edge

Here and there, the edge is dense.
Here and there, it’s torn and thin.

If you think of it as thought,
It has a dark charm to it.

If you think of it as lives
In a torn net, as the trash

That spills out, as the raw place
Where kinds of life rub up hard

On old webs that burn and fray,
Then the dark charm tends to fade.

So it has to be with names.
Each time one seems firm and set

In its ways, with a wide gut,
If you look, you’ll find it frays

Where it bites at its own edge
Like a child that gnaws her nails,

A dog that chews its fur bald.
The edge is in each and all names,

A loose hem. Take life, big fat term,
Take it out to its edge end—

Is that bug life? Is that germ?
That worm? That word? In the end?

The One That Got Its Way

The far side of the world
Is just a flight, for now.
It could sink in the sea

Soon, for more lives on lives
Than all the lives were spent
When there was no world there—

All those lives when the worlds
Thought of as far and strange
Were in the skies and clouds,

Or in the ground, or off
The edge of what eyes glimpsed.
That world then was not round.

It sprawled out, like a cliff,
Or a tree, or a string
Of small lands on the seas.

Now it’s curled in our nets,
And we fret. We feel strong.
We’ve caught it, the world,

But it gasps. Will it die?
Or will our ripped nets rot
For years, once it’s swum off?

If There’s a Poem on a Bird’s Nest, You Can’t Trust that Nest

Some things don’t go on like that.
Some pets don’t come back. Lost loves
Stay lost the rest of your life.

Ends aren’t real for you. They’re real
For what you lose, who you lose.
That’s why you brood on the end.

You know your faith, way of life,
Loved home, loved songs, way you talk,
Hopes, plans, flags, facts could be lost.

You chant poems that make an art
Of this, or did, near one end.
It helps, a bit. A small bit.

Last spring, a house-finch pair built
A nest in the south porch beams
Of a house for rent per month.

When the young fledged, the house cat
Caught two of the three of them.
The last one seemed to have flown.

This spring, a thing got the cat.
No one knows what thing. No cat.
Two birds—the same ones?—came back.

There’s no nest yet. The whole house
Still rents month by month. Same folks
So far, who don’t know what’s next.

Seed Bank

It was all weeds
To those with plows—
Weeds that would spring
Back, spring on spring.

Cut them all down
Or rip them all
Out, out and out,
And more would grow.

That’s how you learned
How seeds could last
Years in the dark—
Dry years—to wait.

Here’s a seed bank,
All scrub and weeds.
We sense time’s dry
And not for us,

Yet.

All Is Not Lost

All is right here, while all
Is changed from what it was.
What it was is what’s lost.

Not you. (You’re here, aren’t you?)
And not all. There’s no way
To get rid or make less

Of all—all stays, stays all.
But you mourn what it was.
What it was is all lost.

We Live As Your Old Thoughts

In your new heads, none of which
Is old next to most of us,
But, like a used word store, new

To you and new to us, here
In the front panes of your soul,
Goods for show, look what you have,

What you’ve learned, what you’ve bought,
The well-liked, well-thumbed, and rare,
A few of the rare. Here we go,

You smile as you ring us up,
Pleased to make a sale, to find
A friend of sorts, the same tastes

In word and phrase, a sharp eye
For old thoughts with still some use.
And there we go out the door.

Facts in a Tale

Where he sat for hours . . .

Thing that he could do:

See what he could see.

You’re all tied to stakes,

As he might have been,

If fact’s in the tale.

You’re all tied to stakes

That are who you are

And what you can be,

That are flesh and pulse.

In fact, it’s not clear

That you aren’t the stake

And we’re rope and knot,

And it’s the beast caught,

Poor beast, like a pet

Lashed to us and you

And that one stake’s view.

It’s not clear at all

How a thought should work

Or what’s what with you.

Your views have a point

That ends in a stake

With a rope of names

And a knot of rules,

And all of it’s you.

Step Tree

It is. What we code
To be right and you
Want to be good don’t
Quite line up, not quite.
Watch your thoughts grope through

A gap in our codes
And what you can feel
You ought, want, to do.
Like roots through the ground
With trees in the air,

Your thoughts go. You’re caught
In the twists that tell
You where the light is
And the codes that spell
Out how to find it.

Watch those thoughts, wind-blown,
Flood-prone, snag and jerk,
Grow one way, then that.
A long wind that lasts
Years, from the same source,

Just curves them, bends them,
But stress at the right
Time leads to right turns
And switched tacks. By this
Path, a step tree grows.

Of All This All of This

Watch a pair of hawks ride the wind.
Just what is it you share with them?

Hearts, lungs, eyes, bones. Wants. Not the same,
Of course, but so? There is no same.

All you can share is a bit like.
No wings for you. Few bits like there.

No beak for you. No hands for them.
You need to eat, and they do, too.

You scream to show the mood you’re in,
Plus words, for you, but not for them.

They know pain, but not shame or sin—
Don’t you think not? Quite a few books

On hawks. Most, in the end, come down
On the side of praise for what’s strange

In them, but that’s not strange in them
Or you. They’re not you. You’re not them.

There’s not one thing they care for much
That you don’t think on, now and then,

Blood and sex, air and death. How tired
You get, though, their you’s not your them.

What can you do? Watch them. Feel how
Names float, all parts of all this, then.

The Rest of the Sign Was Blank

The waves the wind sends
On the cold pond spray

Like lives, like plants, blooms,
Time-lapse grown great oaks.

There’s a calm, a call
From the next huge gust

High in the grey hills,
And then fans of waves

That change grey to blue
To white, white to lights

That go grey, then blue,
And then dark. Next gust.

It’s a small, quick thrill
Each time the next wind

Blows and the waves race
Their groves of crossed lights.

A Blue Sphere of Life Prays to All Forms Near Far Stars

Please do not touch us.
We want to stay in the light.
Touch us and we’re gone.

Glass Tombs of Moss Bears on the Moon

They shot them up there to test
How long they’d last, then lost them.

It’s a thought. To be like that—
A life, a beast, one that can

Dry out and freeze, turn to glass
And not budge a bit. Just wait

For the next chance to get wet,
Go soft, start to move and eat.

Glass can’t last to ends of time,
Of course, but a moss bear crashed

On the moon comes near as close
To charmed Snow White as life gets.

You could train. Not far. You know—
Like you train to hold your breath.

You can’t be a seal, much less
A whale, but you can dive down

In the green glass of a lake
And float for a while. Just so,

Train to be still as you can.
Slow down to where you don’t speak,

Don’t read, and don’t check the time.
Don’t try to be sage, a monk,

A nun, a wise one. Be fool.
Be such a fool, you’re no use—

Count Lev would put you to work.
No one will think it’s a good

Use of your life, but we do.
You may get to see the world.

At worst, you’ll gain some small sense
Of how great that gift would be.

Sect Meant Way Not Side

Let’s say you have a house
By the side of a road—
Not a loud or fast road

As roads go, but quite close
To the house, which is not
A real house, just a chair

With some glass and a door
That shield you from the road—
From the roars, fumes, and stares

From the trucks and pick-ups
And bikes and cars—so close
Folks can look in on you,

As now and then they do.
You don’t own the house, don’t
Own the road it sits on.

You feel you might should move,
But why? What would you do?
You’re good. You have your view.

Beat

Pulse and breath, the squeeze,
The let go, the take
In and then push out
And then pull in more,
Squeeze it, push waste out—

When the clouds break up
And the gods they held
Go, then the star cloud
Shows. It does not pulse,
But it has a core.

Spin is not the same
As a pulse, but yields
Beats that can birth pulse.
While the birds still sleep
And the star clouds show,

While the moon sinks down
And the lights of town
Are just a long glow
On an edge of black,
Get up on the cliffs

To watch how the world
Is built of so much
On off and up down
And feel for the beat
In pulse, not pulse, night.

Boxed Up

You do what you do, then you’re done.
You get sick, you get hurt, you get
Shot, you crash, you starve, or you rot.

You try to make up your own mind,
You’ll go too soon, or mess it up,
Or they’ll dig a hole in the dirt,

Where roads cross, for you and your name
To lie with a stake through your heart.
There’s no way to not make this hard—

Quick hard or slow. So there you go.
Now where were we? Oh, yes, right, life!
The world is all in front of you

So long as you can still draw breath.
The fact your world’s all yours to lose
Is the gift in that box from death.

Less and Less

But it could be some of us
Are in fact kin to the moon,
Kin in words, if not in need.

Your fault’s not you talk too much,
In the rooms and on the stair.
Your fault’s just that you need us

To be the one who speaks there,
To be the ghost and bones both,
The light that moves on your floors.

If you want to get a god
Who won’t talk, we’d like to drop
A hint—you’re fine, on your own.

It’s too much us and the moon.
Sit in the light you like best
And think of us less and less.