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.