Tuned in to the Spin

The first faint light
That’s not from night
Is rare to see
With your own eyes.

You need to stay
Out where it’s stars,
And not a lot,
Or none, else shines.

You need to sit
Hours, front of dawn.
Don’t wait for it.
Sit. Let it come.

There’ll be no glow
First in the East.
There’s a slight shift
In sight. You’ll see.

How Much Is Not Lost or Found

Much of what was still is,
But you don’t know it, can’t
Know the least half of it,

And you know this, or should,
Since new old things no one
Knew of show all the time—

The lost bones, the burst star,
The tomb of the least-known
Chief of the least-known folk,

New kinds of lives lived more
Years than your kind’s been here,
And so on, and so forth.

What is is sunk deep in
What has been, which still is,
Which you must know you won’t.

With a Bridge and a War

Why not puff and blow fair winds?
Storms raised by the cheeks of beasts
Like you are just good for laughs.

You can’t make up your mind, and
Why should you when mind makes up
You? As far as straight talk goes,

It’s fun how it seems to flow
Right from the head of the beast,
As if the words weren’t all old.

They say that each breath of air
Holds a bit of gas breathed in
Once by some great, long-lost soul,

Pick a name—King Tut, Zhuang Zi—
Who do you like that you know?
The same goes for all your words.

You want to be sharp? Stern judge?
Blow hard. Words aren’t yours. We’re old.
Might as well blow fair, you know.

Words Are the Souls of the Dead

You know how you know
The world has an edge,
An end it can’t pass?

Hints are in the math,
The way no thing can
Show but a thing goes,

Not a quark more, not
A wave, not a soul—
You don’t squeeze to fit,

But you trade for it,
No loss and no gain,
In sum, on the whole.

But the words that squeak
Like bats and stand still
As signs want to know,

Was the god right, claimed
No thing could not be?
If so, where do we

Come from, where do we
Go, what’s just what’s meant,
No mass in this world?