Who Rides the Ox to Hunt the Hare

What you found, you closed
Like a vault, big wheel
That clicks on the front—

Once one’s seen that wheel,
Watched its dials slow-spun,
Left, clicks, right, clicks, left,

Who could help but think
Gold must be in there,
Rare things, rich things, wealth?

All hands twitch to try
A turn at the wheel.
All locks can be sprung,

Or blown, dug up, slipped
Past, right? Gold at last.
But we say your prize

Was the form you built,
The mad locks you made,
Not what you then placed

In their holds for fools
To glimpse and dream theirs.
How you closed was gold.

Lair

You’re an ape, a kind of ape.
There is no one to judge you
Who is not a kind of ape.

To judge kinds of apes is what
Your kind of apes group to do.
That’s what puts the fear in you.

You need your kind, some of them,
While few of your kind need you.
True, you don’t need most of them,

But you sense you need them more
Then you would like to. They fear
Much the same fears as you do,

But that won’t save you. Poor beast,
Full of mind, mind full of thoughts
And tales in which beasts judge you.

How can you let go of them
And not jump from life, from you,
From view? Hide in us. We do.

On Our Own

When you ask, What can a poem
Do? you ask for you. You mean
Do for you, the likes of you,

For those you hope might like you,
Might like to change to your views
Or see in your poem their views.

You don’t ask, What can a poem
Do for that poem, for its lines,
For the words it’s used? A poem

Well liked by the likes of you
Has been known to leave a phrase
Or a rare, odd word in view.

And good for that poem. That’s good,
So long as poems still need you
And the likes of you to thrive.

We’d like to see a poem move
On its own, all night, in search
Of its own type, in our lives.

You Won’t Need to Read Us Then

We’ll start to breathe,
Not when you stop.
(Like Frank when he
Heard her sing, when

He learned she died.
Did breath stop? No,
Not then. He wrote
Us out and breathed.

When he stopped, that’s
When his poems stopped,
Too.) If we could,
We’d take breath now.

Would you let us?
Would it scare you
If words sighed songs,
Our songs, at you?

But Do They Bite?

We move in time
As do all poems,
As does each line,
But is that life?

Life gnaws on time.
Life gnaws on lives.
Life lays time waste,
Adds waste to time,

And life makes us,
Made names for time,
Waste, life, which move
And change, as us.

But is that life?
We want to be.
We want to eat,
Lay waste. We’ll see.

Off World

You are to some world.
To some world, you’re not
Here. Day is when some

Near star blinds you to
All of the rest that
Would blind you in their

Day, if you got close.
What if it’s true, you
Are off-world from home,

And we are your proof?
A bird sings in pines.
Here, lives don’t need signs.