Is Not My Land

All names are forced on things, yes?
I don’t know. All names are forced,

But things have their own free ways
That get lost in terms for dust,

And, once we can see, the names
Lead one way, while the things named

Aren’t things at all, just long paths
That sink in the waves. Have fun

With your names, waves seem to wink,
And then we, the names, too,

Are waves, too, that wink, sly things.
That’s all these names have to say—

With smiles from bright waves—you play
This hand. Waves are not like land.

How Books

In a calm, all sides are lee,
Was how one book put it well.

You can’t find a book like that
But by sheer luck, like a calm

On a fierce salt sea. How books
Float up from the sea floor mud

Where lives are too small to read
But not too brief, not those lives,

Nursed in the dark for an age,
Weaned on faint sips from the seeps

Of fumes small lives use for breath—
Your guess is good as the rest.

Gazed Clouds

Help sand thoughts down the old word
For god, for the still, small voice,

For what we did, I did, you did—
Gaze at clouds for hours and hours,

If you can. Most of us can’t.
They’ll help you lose, in the end,

The plot and its lust for ends.
Clouds, watched—not read, guessed, just watched—

Will take what you knew you thought
You knew from you. It takes hours.

Jade Grass

Stone hills wear down. Who will read
These slips of green? Who will read

When the tongue is gone and ears
Hear just the weird in old words,

Or when the last one who knew
Has gone, and no one can read,

Or when they’re all gone, all those
Not yet here, all gone by then?

The poem codes its own fool dreams
Of change, of life, of what lasts.

This won’t last. Read it or not.
So long as there’s life, there’s rot.

To Walk with the Wind

I can’t walk. Not well.
My life limps, has limped

All ways, all my days.
But I take your point—

At least I hope so.
You would know. You’ve crossed

The bridge of the wind.
The wind is a thing

You know can’t be still
And still be the wind,

And still be no thing
But all the moved things

Who sing in the wind,
The talk of the trees,

Low notes in the hills,
The tones of Zhuang Zi.

To walk with the wind
Means to bend and lean.

Was More Than One Dove

Thief of joy, brick of the walls
That were first built up in Ur,

Stick, switch, whip, and staff of life,
Pulse in wrists, catch in the throat,

Rod of one and none that rules
The world of names, games, and gasps,

God of thrones, mount of the gods,
Womb of math and charts of moons,

What this is since it is not
That, which means that is not this.

Back of Me, I Can’t See Those Yet to Come

Sun reaps like the wren,
Like land loves the land,
Like stones gleam, like grass.

Your palms creak cool leaves.
It’s a pile of mean
Debts, love, and sun, Ducks.

God is love face down
In warm mud like you,
But you’ve been your own

Sun, last life here, this
Way to hold a bird
In a poem, palmed, frail,

Piece by piece, as if
We all wrote our way,
Could write a way, back

To when it was sun,
Land, grass, leaves, mud, wren,
And you not yet then.