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Waiting for the Clouds to Part

Six shades of silver
On the lake. On again,
Off again. Again, six
Shades of silver, same as
Three times six years ago
In Scotland, the Shetlands.

No one gives a shit, lad,
No one, not even you
Anymore. It's too cold
In those islands of days
Before. Here, it grows hot.
These nights are longer, now,

Although the days are, too.
Eternity awaits
Even the silvered mouse
That snaps the pantry trap
As the human, thinking,
Sips the last light out back.

A Barren Cow

One word can mean too many things.
The things a word may mean are words.
Numbers, however abstracted,
Are only more words, words, words, words,

Obsession with counting caught up
Into arithmomania,
The conviction that some names name
Meanings beyond any naming,

The reason why mathematics
And philosophy rub shoulders
More often with divinity
Than with their cousin, poetry.

Words dance a quadrille, complaining
That they are only words, no things.
They dance tarantellas housing
Automata that ignore them.

Pause. The word stark, in English, means
Or has meant, the same thing, complete,
Severe, rigid, a barren cow.
Words can come to terms with monsters.

We give our monsters up to words.
We give up ourselves, the patterns
Of interference shaking out
Between monstrous, monsters, and us.

Ever So Slightly Numb

Complacency can't be
Such a terrible thing.
It will kill you, of course,
But so will everything,
Joy, anxiety, trust.
Immortality is

A cloud on a cold spring day
When the days already are
Long enough to be summer,
And eternity sprinkles
Goose flesh promises of death
On the ever-dreaming beast
Then retreats, into the sun.

Fantasies Are Organisms

That which hovers, vaguely,
Over the surfaces of the waters
Is troubled by the teeming things

That stir up from beneath to feed
And be fed. They will not
Leave the surfaces alone,

And all the mirrors of reflection
Scatter, miserably broken charms
Which that which thinks can't be.

Back at the Lake

At the beginning of June it was
Sunny and the water was clutching
Cold, and I splashed out into it,

Unable to keep myself from thinking
That the water was spectacular
For my usual first short dip in it

But too cold, even a few quick
Strokes from shore, to not want
To turn around inside and flee.

The four locals who fell out
Of a borrowed canoe, I realized
In that instant, had not a chance,

Didn't matter drunk or sober,
Didn't matter life preservers or not:
Once their canoe was over

And they were out there in the deep
Water I love and romanticize always,
They were over, too. So too would

Have been me, have been you.
I warmed off in the sun on the bench
Then got back in, as I have to do.

Watch for Changing Conditions

Evenings at the Greenbriar Inn
In Couer d'Alene, long times ago
When our adventuring was done,

When our dog was none, our daughter
Was one, our musical artist
Of the evening was eighty-some,

I would be your huckleberry,
The sun would be singing love songs,
And you would be mine, gold long time.

Duke of Nevers

Maturity coincides with dissolution.
The great whitewashed concrete M
On the side of Mt. Sentinel rose
Over the rooftops as I walked.

It was not a dream, although
I've dreamed of it often enough.
Dreams are more vivid, less
Memorable. I walked up there, once.

Unusual Bones

Life is one long sortie
In a war where every
Now and then someone
Signs a fresh peace treaty.
I sit in my hotel
Imagining I own

It or something like it,
A bookstore for instance,
Or a pub or cafe,
Or all three things at once
In one, adorable
Cottage beside a stream

That makes cheerful noises
Across the chuckling rocks
Worn slowly within it.
The rocks I love because
They can't contend against
That uncontending stream.

I would call my budding
Dream of a warless self
"The Emancipated
Mole" and sell frothy pints,
Books with uncut pages,
Hot coffee, sandwiches

And sundries by the stream
That customers could hear
From my open windows,
Surcease from love or war,
From complaints of bankers,
From importuning gods.

I have unusual
Bones bending in cages
Around the usual
Heartbeats alarmed by mind
Fluttering like a moth
At assimilation.

Goatskin

Hard to imagine the shield of a goddess
Once consisted of the stretched hide of a goat
And the fearsome apotropaic visage
Of a wild-eyed woman sticking out her tongue,

But the supernatural world evolves along
With the roiling ecosystems of culture,
A game in which the islands and continents
Exist only briefly in comparison

With the archipelago-hopping species.
It's a kind of flying world our brains have made
Possible, filled with impossible beings.
Everything that thrives among us transcends us.

Simple

Someone with whiskers lies back
In the front passenger seat
Of a Subaru Outback in evening sun.

Pedestrians stroll past with plastic
Bags and sunglasses on their eyes.
Gossipy conversation fragments

Drift along with the dust and a boy
Sneezes. Not a soul, least of all
The whispered someone blesses

Him. A little wind, a little hymn
To wanton erudition and useless
Drollery: more simply, just a breeze.

Now Departing for White Island

I am not, I believe, the first
Person to doubt my existence.
The glow of the impossible

Moon, the satellite of Earth's moon,
Echoes, a torch inside my eye.
The wounded animal I am

Pretending to interrogate,
And on whose sole behalf
I intend to negotiate

The shoals of alien atolls,
Told me everything. I don't know
How wandering selves, resurgent

After so many nights growing
Nothing more dreadful or thoughtful
Than brittle hair and fingernails,

Can constellate philosophies
Out of varieties of waves
And threaten to beach on far shores,

But I am not the thing that knows.
I am the thing those things that die
Invest with lust for afterlives,

A spokesperson for the creatures.
I am, in their flesh, immortal,
The green-eyed wave in their going,

And, if I am not mistaken,
I am conceived as mistaken,
Ship shaped for one eternity.

Slim

Any sunny evening has more than one
Twilight, you know. There's an unnoticed glow
Before sunset, before the better-known,
Stupidly cute, and anachronistic
Gloaming sets in, a somewhat fainter ghost
Of day, mostly shade the thin-edged sun wedged
Here, this slim bit of dim, long and gone thin.

To Be Dead

"[T]o admit that we’ve fallen behind, that we don’t know what anyone is talking about, that we have nothing to say about each passing blip on the screen, is to be dead." ~Karl Taro Greenfeld

On Memorial Day (this was last May),
Cotton of cottonwood trees on the breeze

Clouded the cloudless skies of green Zion.
"Time was, a poet could rely on good

And bad, as perceived by the aggrieved
Hypocrisies of local deities,

For a job. 'Sing, muse, of glorious Zeus,
Hurler of lightning, all-wise and frightening.'

Immortal Zeus is mostly dead, a ghost
Who haunts a dying tradition of lies.

Time was, a poet could rely on lies,
Lines, rhymes, and love of sensational crimes.

The madness stays immortal. The portals
No longer belong to narrative songs,

No longer to throats and ears alone. Boats
Bronzed by gore slip their inky mooring slips

In old divinities' infinitely
Deranged brains to arrive, not quite alive,

Not quite dead, on the far seas of greased screens
With news of new wars, new poets fallen

Behind in the churned mud of phosphor-burned
Anniversaries," Gone Century said.

The Beast Fable

The lake only takes what the lake
Already owns. Expect nothing
Else accepted, pollution excepted.

Human behavior and weakness
Are subject to scrutiny by reflection.
The lake is an allegorist, but not

Like other fabulous creatures
A moralist. Surfaces
And depths coalesce, trade places.

It is a mind that remembers what
Its thought forgets. The water
Churns and returns; the clouds

External to the forever of waves
Determine the appearances,
Grim or smiling, fallacious,

And then become internalized
As rain. A performance, utterance,
Washer of great logs and detritus

Down, the rain restores the lake,
Taking snows and ice along,

But while the water comes and goes,

All the logs and detritus, mostly all,
The lake pushes aside to the shore.
That which the lake loves well

The lake holds dear, the memory
Of forgetting things, never recovering
The bodies at the bottom of the mind.

Zero Dynasty

"Jokes are very mysterious."

The solution of an equation,
The fulcrum's balance, was as likely
To be nothing as anything

Else. Else, we would not have
Grown from arithmetic and geometry
To, well, whatever it is we know so

Well. Algebra myself am hell. Leibniz
Might, no, Borges might, nightly,
Have construed some sommelier

Such as could have gladly recanted
A fin du vin such as that. Don't
Misconscrew me, opined Charo,

Quoting Charon, quoting Zeno,
Quoting paradoxical Palermo
Stones, quoting Dynastic Zero.

Should We Believe Him When He Tells Us about Himself and His Family?

That's a Druid question.
He wasn't a shepherd
And the muses never
Kissed him on Helicon
As he, or someone else,
Asserted. Not a chance

Encounter ever missed
An opportunity
Like him. Uncertainty
Had to wait for such time
When sufficient decay
Of evidentiary

Testimony, data
Mining dwarves and fact-based
Arguments had elapsed
Before it could set in
His ways. Hesiod works,
If he works at all, days.

Travel Aide-Memoires

"Ten more minutes of being silly, and then you can go to bed."

Begin with the choice of pronouns.
Evasion won't be of much help.
Even non-narrative lyric,
Composed never to be performed

And written never to be read,
Needs ruminative agency.
The night market in Sarawak
Is friendly and reeking of fish.

The snake in the lake in BC
Sports enormous black and white stripes.
Boat bones on the Skeleton Coast
Bleach beside dead brown hyenas.

The dog in the Nevada snow
Shakes under a bristlecone pine.
The ponies in New Zealand green
Appear bored with glory to me.

The Alternative? Silence

A baker's dozen hundreds
Sounds good. I am posthumous
Productivity, mad glee
Personified. Been around
Much, anymore? Always more.
The goldfinches, the stray cats,
The motorcycle tourists,

And the wind out of the west
Noisily contest tonight.

Tonight can't be contested.
Everything's already yours.
Be contented. You have won.
I am the boss, says my wife
To our daughter. I have won.

Well Being

Well well well. Here is another
Yesterday. Something new to savor.
All the big ideas have appeared

To arise from little animals
Roughly the same size and shape
As whatever it is I am. Not a thought

To inspire confidence in thought.
Typical insight belongs to typical
Distraught humans. No wonder

People place a premium on people
Who don't behave like people
When uttering pronouncements,

When uttering pronouncements
Is such a human failing. Wisdom is,
Too. Well well well. All is well.

Refutation

"It would be unimaginably perverse to believe that all numbers are the same." -Robert Kaplan, The Nothing That Is

I am an unimaginably
Perverse believer. Imagine me.
See? Metaphorically, if you see
At all, now, then what you see is me.
All numbers are the same. The counting
Alone is infinite, as is now,
Then, and whatever one thinks will be.
Here are two things, infinite. Here is
One, infinite. Nothing, infinite.

A Heterogeneous Series of Independent Acts

I saw it ambling down the road
Toward me, and I was not I
But glad. It could have come on fast.

It could have come so slowly I
Could not have met it at the last.
I was glad, not I but glad, not.

It seemed to know its face,
Seemed to know I knew it studied
Me. I nodded. Off, at the last.

Here We Are

Mortal only to others
And through the loss of others
We never wanted to lose,
We are immortal ourselves,
Unsuspecting otherwise
If we had never known grief.
The maniacal desire

To restore or resurrect
Or render impervious
Forever one's existence
Is not exactly self-love,
Not a wish to be a god,
But the reflexive horror
Of watching love disappear.

Those most obsessed with killing
Likely most fear their own death,
But those most saintly certain
Of their immortality,
Viewed as externally true
And justified by belief,
Have their own pathology,

I guess. We could imagine
A cellular awareness
Identical to the cell
In which it exists confined.
Then fantasies of escape
Would always have to be mad,
And sanity contentment.

Lizards Make Me Happy

First, because we have such a lot
Of them around here, bobbing and scurrying
And snapping up biting flies. That's good.
Also, they have bright blotches here and there,
An odd eye for detail that matters to them,
And their skin is dry and pleasant.
As far as I know from my experience,
If you can catch them, you can hold them.
They're good at escape, but locally
They are not poisonous and they slip
Through a child's fingers long before
They bite. They must bite sometimes,
But not that I've ever seen. Everything
Has a bite of some kind. We exist
As we do because we are the products
Of a world of biting, biting wit biting it.
But when I see the lizards running
Up the southern Utah stucco,
Over the local, sun-stunned walls,
I'm happy. God is fond of beetles.
The image of divinity feels entitled
To inordinately love something, too.
There goes one now, ridiculously
Serious little reptile, busy as me,
Ridiculously seriously happy monkey me.

An Uplifting Sense of the Rightness of Things

We prefer not to surrender per se.
We indulge our little delinquencies.
We understand we cannot be ourselves
Indulged always, although we cannot know
Why not. Learn calm from the indignancies,
Including the sudden tug in the guts,
The mess of inner and outer contests,
The pain. Everything is right or nothing,
And nothing is everything in the end.
We could, if we like, prefer everything.

Of Experiencing Ghosts

Consider deprivation
Of sensory perception
That inverts your hierarchies
Of experiencing ghosts.
You unfold your narratives
Out of a richer darkness
Than my voice against your skin.

Because hallucinations
Spook you, as dreams sometimes do,
With exceptional detail,
You deduce away from truth
And believe your ghosts too real
To be false. Consider loss:
The ghosts are you and the real.

Our Madness of Sleep

Doctors make a joint announcement
Proclaiming we are "arrogant"
About our sleep, risking early death
By not taking rest seriously.

The same day an anthropologist
From Stanford sallies forth to say
That we are not restless enough
Like original human cultures

And worry too much about sleeping
Soundly, thus forgetting our nightly
Quota of soul adventures in dreams.
This is madness, all these voices

From outside our heads, barking
Sleep more, sleep less, deeper,
Lighter, longer, briefer. Go away,
And take my dreams with you.

What's Left Me

Among the Greeks, more
Circle than dot, among
Those in India, more
Dot than circle. Now X

Among us, who among
Us now could doubt?
I am that which won't
Recall the dreams I do

Not want from you,
Anthropologist of sleep,
Convinced your own
Perturbations inspire

You to conclude those cultures
Closest to your own contrary
Hopes are wisest and that you
Remember what I forget,

The sunya, the pleroma,
The dot in the dust, the circle,
The embodiment boding more
Dreams, nothing to me.

What We Wish Had Happened Becomes Part of What Happened, Too

I write and I hope what I wrote was true.
Was ever anything truly finished?
Behind me the child sleeps through a small dream.

In front of me the snail the small child took
From a dry sleep probes as it turns around
On a pink ball in a blue wading pool.

Some Houses

"Some houses are built on midden and are replaced by midden when abandoned."

I will never abandon you,
My ash-heap of sweepings. You may
Abandon me. I'll never know.

I love you with all the fervor
Of a tenant in a mansion
More ancient than my memory

And falling to pieces daily.
You are me. You are everything
Becoming me, peace, suffering.

Your ancestors revered their own
Ancestors and buried their bones
In the foundations of their homes.

Black Window

You're in my pottery
Section. It's naughty
And alone and usually
Involves objects. It's
The saddest thing
We do. My sauce is
Dripping out the bowl.
If I glue it, it's gone.

Letters from an Empty Cell

Other people's disapproval,
The care we love to disavow,
Is all that motivates our selves
To behave as if behavior

Ever mattered. I don't believe
I've ever met a devotee
Of a faux-disinterested faith,
Of whatever earnest intent,

However hard-earned, who didn't
Covet one or someone's divine
Intervention for inventions
Of moral conventions. Not me.

Oh heavens, not me. In the caves
Of Nasik, the symbol of ten
Of the monks was written weirdly,
As if to suggest that nothing

Existed in the abacus
Of the divine, of the no self,
Of the simplest arithmetic.
I wonder what my fellow monks

Would say about my heresy
If they discovered I'm averse
To revelations? Mercy me.
I'd better begin to behave.

The Sky Becomes the Same as What Is Added to It

Clouds count themselves
Lucky to be
Seen by my eyes
And distinguished

From blue zero.
The red dirt sulks.
Sayadvada,
No replacements

Found, propounds truth
As what may not
Or may be real,
Or, in the end,

Real and unreal,
Past description.
Past description
The catalogued

Clouds disappear
Into their blue
Constituents.
I am not eyes.

Table 2: Alternative Measures of the Risk of Dying

He stored up glory for himself.
He surrendered to destiny.
Contrary to the true spirit
Of the simplest signaling game

Nature flips a fair coin to choose,
He kept sneaking peeks at the source.
He did not stick to whole numbers.
He said the odds are one to one.

He settled in his easy chair.
He noticed the first flakes of snow.
He saw the infamous ghost ship
And asked for an explanation.

You're Still Not Home Yet

I bet you got that Peter Piper
From your Dad. Yogurt yoga
In the yurt. If you put it
To a pattern, it's a thousand

Times easier. Goethe's Gouda.
Facetious sweater. Moki hour
In the house on Winderland
Lane. Real Winder's, said Wayne.

There's Not Enough Philosophers to Go Around

Gods and nonsense come in threes:
Blah, blah, blah, the Trinity.
Monsters have three heads, like me:
One for hunger, one for love,
One for pain. Below, above
Hint we're in the middle of
A closed, tripartite shell game.

We're not, although it's a shame
That what's easy for our brains
Vanishes on inspection.
We snap back from correction,
Redirect our attention,
And find fresh mythologies
In games, etymologies,

Glorious doxologies
To our own ideas spinning
Brain to brain, within the thing
That dreams only beginning,
Middle, end, again. What's right
Feels wrong. Afraid of real night,
We enumerate our frights.

Prelapsolitudinarism

If there is a world
And that world, outside
Me, means anything,
Then I mean nothing
To the world outside

And, conversely, I,
Who mean naught outside
Me, think, perversely,
The world outside me
Means nothing to me.

For Everything That Mattered

Sometimes I am amazed
We know what kindness is
Given the cruelty we inflict
On each other, the cruelty

Lives inflict on lives, the green
World on all living. Mostly
The green world's wet and sweet
But the wormwood's in it

And in us, and if we drink
Too much, even the sugars
Give us nightmares, shadowy
Cruelty being to solid kindness

What a fetch met at twilight
Is to the unfortunate soul perceiving
The terrible resemblance. You know
You look like the end of me.

Black Cygnets

Anticipating any
Highly unlikely event
Is terribly unlikely
To prevent unreadiness.
Unlikely happy events
Only make us more reckless
Because we get too giddy;

Unlikely unhappy ones
Only make us more reckless
Because we get too distressed.
In the event, most events
Never happen anyway,
And the few that do always
Catch us napping, once again.

The Prostrate Iconoclast's Image

We love what we want to believe
And one of the things we want
To believe is that we are indeed
Loving the right: divine, just, joy,

Lust. The body on the bed, the icon
Returning love from the camera
Mirror, the careful consideration
Of artistic temperament and media,

These things, these sorts of things
We want to believe. We love pattern,
As we know behavior is the world
By which our beliefs are selected.

The Void a la Void

In now here's middle, learn
To trust the traitors against
Whatever burly nation state
Of mind threatens your heart

Healthy awareness of being
Something mysteriously unlike
Your self, "a trolley for bacteria"
Who outnumber the selves

You shed indifferently. Magic is
The explanation we invoke
To square our social human
Explanations of the inhuman

We inhume in our own skins.
I am happy for reasons that defy
Me. I float, the conjury of cells
And cultures, vaporous, over me.

"So Much Luckier Than Some I See That Will Never Walk Or Have Their Sight And Will Have To Hide Themselves Away From The World"

And what if one were to want
Very much and for no good reason
To hide away from the world?

Not a saint, not an abomination,
Not a proper, natural hermit,
Not a victim of war or the law

On the lam from a true or false
Conviction, but one of conviction,
A believer in the truth of the hidden,

Such as might find equal comfort
In the corner of a country
Library or a quiet secret thought

About why the world one is
Is not one with what is one.
That sort of thing. Excuse me,

I have to vanish shortly
And I don't want to seem
As if I meant anything by this.

Depth, Firmament, the Endless, Joyously

Thunderous names and gentle,
As all names are, little breaths
Barely, precisely controlled

By the last magpie primate;
I love you, the universe
Of you glimpsed within the you

Universally of me.
Can either one of we none
Of us truly calculate

The syntax of all deceit?
I am a small man counting
Small grains of sand, joyously.

The Pursuivants

We are the official heraldic authority.
We have no coats of our own. We

Have no arms. Zero results
From unimaginable agon of thoughts

Over centuries as counted by lives
Of those who invented "century."

We're cold. We shiver. Summer
Is delicious in our knightly

Orisons. Happiness. If you know,
You know you know. Rejoice.

Every tomorrow that you fought
For only arrived as yesterday

Today. This very day. This very
Past day that is already then, today.

I am whatever I was, and that
Includes what I might have known

About knights of yore, you, you
And everyone else. Makes me smile.

The Dirt

So much sameness in so much
Edgeless alteration, be it blue or grey
Sky or the red and black mud

Of the day. Who in the world
Wonders that so often background
Can credibly be completed, time

And again, by repeating a patch
Without variation? Trick of the brain
Or trick of lazy creation? A serious

Boy works a toy shovel on a slope
Of finely crumbled lava and sands,
Scrutinizing one long glassy hour.

I Am Happy for Now

Not for a moment, for now
Is no moment, is inifinitesimal
Past any series of diminishing
Fractions along an infinite line

Of temporarily temporal certainties.
I am happy for the infinite
Next to zero, the companion
Of the divine and the immortal,

The demon at the ends of the cross,
At the end of every crossroads
Crisis, the sweet delight that is
Not nothing but what nothing

Means when it laughs mischievously
Into its empty sleeve. Nature,
That old joker, mated forever
To that other Joker, is so pleased.

The Diabologian

I am a pretty good poem
Badly translated from the Polish
Original, so badly I am

Better than the original.
Don't you dare laugh at me.
I know how evil your maker

Made you. That's my trade,
And I am nothing if not
A day trader. You send me

Home sated. Darling, you
Have no idea what I mean
If you know what's good for you.

He Opened His Mouth in a Great, Glad Laugh

God can only truly be great for those
Who, devoutly, love their devils, too.
The dust rolls the lightweight sprites
Merrily across the Kolob Terrace.

Every person is a market trader
Where egos are concerned. Belief
In one's own image comes easily,
And even the hardest fall rarely

Convinces anyone that the persona
Was only a random bit of luck
In the beginning. God, how
Hard it must have been to accept

That the person who named things
So glibly could have been taken in
By one of the minor deities named.
But once accepted, oh the laughing!

Tumbleweeds, joyously, still lift
Their skirts and dance across
The grass where serpents breed.
The personaless person is free.

Some Things Will Never Be Known

“'It’s a dark forest,' she said of the masked men in one interview with a Russian television station. 'I don’t know who they are, or what they are.' Soon afterward, she vanished."

Kha. Ambara. Akasha. Sunya.
No atmosphere on the moon,
Space empty of life, watching life.

I am happy to know I am not.
Esse in intellectu solo. I am
At ease with the monstrosity

That fascinates me. I am not
Comfortable with the deceit
That monstrosity is ordinary,

Even ethical, indignant, esse
In res. No. The reason the moon
And the deep, dark woods

Go together in our minds
Remains a flicker of panic.
One is baleful, beautiful,

The other filled with grotesques
Who would happily eat little
Monkeys like us. We know.

But I know, too, the moon
And the forest of creaking
Branches it peeks at me through

Are not, of themselves, the things
That make such magic nervousness,
Just the bodily inheritance

Convenient to the need thereof.
We, I, you, they also, sense the truth
Means, wide-eyed, to disappear.

God bless the woods, the moon.
God bless me. The shapes of love
Carve a part from fine, terrible dark.

Of Even This Decision

I will joy in my despair.
I will celebrate the dark
Taste of utter helplessness,
Knowing that it is the way
Of all things to be helpless.
Even the agents of power
All surrender, however

Unwillingly, to unknown
And unknowable nothing
And are unwoven in time
As time, from nothing, wove them.
I will make my peace with peace
And joy in the unweaving
Of every last decision.

Requin Requiem

Poems like dreams "say their say
In series, and only
Rarely is a single
Dream revelatory."
When one is, it's too good
And rips through mind's seine,

Leaving a hole the rest
All spill through like herrings
Small enough to escape
Now the great weight is gone.
A poet stands on deck
In the oil and tangle

Mourning leviathan
For all the harvest lost
Trying to catch that one
Or cackling ruefully
In that way loss does when
The monster is not done.

We Ask You to Be the Ghost

I'm reading about immortality
Because I'm curious about subjects
That can never have been experienced
By any available expert. Death,
Divinity, superhuman powers,
Immortality by definition
Are outside of the experience
Of all living, mortal, human authors.
It's not a question of whether such things
Could possibly exist. Some do; some don't.
Death, however beyond living knowledge,
Appears to be the only certainty.
The rest are fantasies of fighting death.
Loss, that would be the window we see through
When we come to the wall that is the end.
It's why we hand the calligraphy brush
To the zen monk on his death bed. It's why
The Victorians collected last words.
Toe-knuckle cracking, table-top rapping
Ouija board charlatans aside, we know
No thick descriptions over the transom
Will be tossed to us from the other side.
We wait breathlessly by the near breathless,
Knowing the certainty of looming loss,
And try to glean that last glimpse from the edge
Of the light that goes through the looking glass.

The Beauty of Gehenna

"I was probably the most entranced listener to a sermon . . . about Gehenna, the hateful valley outside the walls of Jerusalem, where outcasts lived, and where their flickering fires, seen from the city walls, may have given rise to the idea of a hell of perpetual burning." -Robertson Davies, Fifth Business

"The valley of Ben-hinnom . . . on the south side of Mount Zion, a place which was notorious from the time of Ahaz as the seat of the worship of Moloch . . . is supposed there, of whom nothing further is known." -Wikipedia, entry for "Gehenna"

South of Zion, Saint George wages
His interminable battle
Against the fiery red dragon
That goes now by name of Dixie.

How much can you trust a Moloch
Known primarily from the faith
That praised its founding Abraham
For being so faithful to God

He was willing to kill his son?
Only the choice of divine name
Differs between the approving
Lord accepting the sacrifice

And approving God declining.
Let them all go, "the mythical
Elements that seem to me to
Underlie our apparently

Ordinary lives." The dragon
Lives to fight baited-fish-hook saints
For one more nightmare. Fires with fire
Ornament dark nights of our souls.

Could it be our eyes are clouded
By the swirling and stinging fumes
Of hearths we lit to clarify
Our position under their stars?

Every myth deludes us, even
Those we still refuse to believe
Are myths because we cannot see
Any narrative must be one.

Look around you. The hills you see
Are only higher or lower
Than those around Jerusalem.
Beauty is a valley of flames.

Reverist

One night you wake up to realize
You're a hobbyist. Doesn't matter
What the hobby happens to be,

Whether model trains or online
Avatar games, whether Frank Sinatra
Vinyl or plastic poodle dogs,

Whether reading novels or
Composing poems. You dreamed
You could be happy, one day, doing

Something for an honest living
Until this night you wake up
Dreaming you. You always knew.

Oh God, Our Bodies

The scrawny, tall speaker gesturing
And grimacing in his flimsy suit
And the short woman barely
Contained at the hips by her silk
Conference-couture dress, remind
Me of something of mine. I glance
Down at my crooked legs
That terminate in dusty black
Orthopedic boots. I'm next.

Want Decisions to Count, Right?

The declarative playwright
Sips his tea at the cafe
Of the street of real people.
There has got to be a right
To scrutinize looking-glass
Egos until they marble
Under the gaze. I'm alright.

Intense afternoon daylight
Bleaches even the shadows
Under the cafe awning
Where people in shades make light
Of their own seriousness.
Could they believe what they love?
Sorrows leach out of delights

Until everything shines white
Around his cup of green tea
At his black table, his ink
Fading from his not-quite sight
Even as day bends his night.
His pulse tightens. He's frightened.
"I'm alright," writes the playwright.

The Sleepless Philosopher's Dream

It's a gift you could send yourself,
A reminder of the sunrise
Through the kitchen window

In spring, after the coughing night
Your daughter spent crying in bed
Because her cold kept her awake

And therefore kept you awake, too.
It's a poem and none too fancy,
Just another lined reminder,

Like the furrows in your forehead,
That you are true experience
Of a myriad myriad

Things happening beyond control,
From your daughter's fit of coughing
To the pale green tint of sunrise.

Any brain carries the desire
To divine causation. Only
Minds must worship implication.

Aldebaran and the Moon at Sunset

Stargazing note for today:
April fourth is on my mind,
The light from that date reaching
My eyes in ninety-one days.
We've six years together
Of various April fourths,
Beginning when I joined you

For Big Rock Candy Mountain,
Utah, a real unreal place,
Driving gingerly, one foot
Weak, the other leg broken,
The perfect time for romance.
("Hezekiah reminded
God, a canny bid to save

His bacon, it was only
The living, the living who
Could sing His praises.") Two years
Later, same date, we found out
That we two would swell the ranks
Of the living. Three years more,
We carted our daughter here,

The very mouth of Zion,
Determined now we would stay.
A year on, under Watchman
We praised choice: So far, so good.
Who knows what's next as life flies.
God is fond of expanding
Universes and beetles,

Otherwise inscrutable.
Aldebaran and the moon
Glowed on the toothed horizon
At sunset over Zion.
I forgot five years ago,
Neither married nor parents,
In the wee hours of Cape Town,

The lovely, desirable
Dead end of early humans
Fond of the bounteous sea,
Quarreled over ever since,
We touched down, met our driver,
Meandered through orange lights,
And came to rest a moment

In our peregrination
Around the navigable
World, the blue dot in darkness,
The darkness outside our lives.
There was a house on a hill,
Manse converted to cater
To tourists from everywhere.

The Absolute Is Becoming

Experience and the inferences
Drawn from experience contradict
Each other. No element

Of experience is other than
Experiencing, but merely waking
Suggests a gap in experience

That experience cannot contain.
The urge to make myriad decisions
Contradicts the evidence that none

Of those decisions are made by
Deciding them or by feeling the need
To decide, nor by deliberation

As experienced, and few decisions
Matter more to experience
Than do all the events surrounding

Them, over which experience suggests
And also feels, in accord on this point
At least, no deciding power exists.

By late afternoon, one surprise
Is therefore the misleading consequence
(Misleading in the way that all things

Mislead, being inconsequential)
That defiance of the morning
And all the decisions made therein

Produced better-seeming events
Than the imagination now projects
Would have been the case

Had the decisions been held to
Firmly, better than the imagination
Then projected would be the case

Had the decisions been ignored,
As they were, now and then
As such being ineluctable delusions,

Arbitrary and yet truly ineluctable,
Like the craving for decisions.
Snow on the mountains melts

Regardless, before sight, or (go ahead,

Say it, it feels so good to say it,
So bold and queasy) irregardless.

Paths that promise immortality
Converge on the following phrases,
Sometimes mistakenly believed

To be opposite, even twinned
With the absolute as with infinity:
Zero is ineffable; nothing

Is colloquial, as well as an indefinite
Pronoun; the number that is not

Number is capable of infinite damage.

Neither now will ever be
Finished, experienced. Neither nor
Will experience ever be. Finished

Growth Is Only Division in Every Cell

"They grow up fast, don't they?"
Seems to be the wisdom
Of parenting closest
To performing the role
That "Hot enough for you?"
Plays for weather lore.

No, they don't. We age fast,
Especially parents
Already absurdly
Old, as I am. I watch
You, and what I mark most
Is the way you divide

My attention in halves,
One half of which marvels
At you, daughter of mine,
Delicate miracle
Of youth like none before,
Translucently tender,

The other half of which
Is foolishly amazed
That you are a human,
Ornery and unique
Already, the latest
Instance in my long line

Of roommates since childhood,
Each with a persona
Unique and ornery,
Pitched to match my own
Problematic nature,
Prone to split attention

Between boyish delight
And churlish selfishness,
Patience and self-pity,
Me myself my own best
Argument. I didn't
Grow fast. But I love you.

The Inclination

Because it is fragile, value
What is sweet in this world you are,
This world you have no control of
Even though all the world is you.

Because you are fragile, savor
Whatever joy of movement comes
To you, whatever sense rewards
Whatever swift moment of you.

Because we are fragile, let us
Rejoice despite fragility,
Irreducible and plural
Singularity in the sun

Because we are, you are, it is,
However it is, however
It lies, plays, leaps up and gambols,
Because we incline to delight.

Red Conservancy

"Tonight was dead calm.
From the bitch light by
The bedside window
Rose an even flame."
We know what we don't.

I saw a darkness
Crossing the road
And stopped my car, hard.
International
News knows the story.

Everything's sliding.
Nothing ever holds.
That's why I believe
In nothing and hope
Someday it takes me.

Red Conservancy
Perches on grey hills
Going green, coyly,
Over eponymous,
Devastated rocks.

Somewhere there is mud
Let loose by thick rain
And ready to fall.
Here we will wait, safe
In our ignorance.

From the Verse Essays of Ivar Benløs: Canopus

You, weightiest southern star,
You old man, you contrary,
Cowardly, solitary,
Steadfast, you bringer of change,
Ominous navigator,
Invisible from the north,
Steer me between hemispheres.

We are setting in the crown
Of the forest whose whispers
Contain and constitute
Alike you and me, glow worm
Glimmering in summer leaves.
Bound in a grove, I'm arrowed
Through and through, pleased to burst free.

From the Verse Essays of Ivar Benløs: The Weeping Willow by the Road Has Grown Green and Huge

When I imagine myself
As someone I never was,
The man who never knew here
Where I do live existed,
A parallel hypocrite,
Ruthless, weak, and privileged
A thousand-some years ago,

I wonder what made him laugh,
Jolting along on his shield.
Was it cruelty only?
Did he, on his conquests, look
Around at the green islands,
The Celt and Latin stoneworks,
Clouds, roadside weeds, and know joy?

From the Verse Essays of Ivar Benløs: The Travel Writer Takes a Turn for the Words

We are all tourists in this
World, especially the gods,
Who visit rarely and do
Strange, inexplicable things,
Betraying their ignorance
Of local mores and needs.
Why shouldn't I look around

While carried on the shoulders
Of more humane souls than me
And pretend I order things
To be done to the natives
That are done because of me,
Though the weather and the tides
Here ignore me completely?

From the Verse Essays of Ivar Benløs: Welcome, You're Here, Again

Let's say for this moment, you
Were only visiting this
Moment. Would it be enough?
Lack of equanimity
Attacks us, attracts us all,
No matter how much we praise
A calm level-headedness.

Can you look at surroundings
Without thinking of the things
You have to do to make them
Acceptable to you? Why
Would anyone not want to?
The cloud blocking your sun goes
Before you, pillar of light.

From the Verse Essays of Ivar Benløs: A Hateful Task for a Poet

Would be either: one, writing
Fiction in order to eat
Or, two, reading poetry
And writing criticism
Of it, in order to eat.
Easier to imagine
Being a boneless Viking.

From the Verse Essays of Ivar Benløs: Life Will Bring Him Down to Earth, No Doubt, in Her Usual Brusque Manner, and Will Teach Him Something More Intimate to Write About

Such a simple thing, really,
Such a simple, short-lived thing.
When knowing was young,
We knew what we knew. We weren't
So sure, soon. Then we forgot.
These days we are sure again,
Sure we were wrong, on all points.

Why write a novel? Why read
A poem? So many better
Writers of novels to read,
So much temptation to write
Another lazy garden
Of weedy, less-than-diverse,
Untended quotes for a poem.

Write a novel if you can,
If you need to, if you need
The money. ("Novel" stands, here,
For whatever story form
Earns the most in your era.)
Don't write a poem. Read a poem.
Do a poet a favor.

Then, go back to your life, calm,
Filled with equanimity
The poet never attained.
Words in pretty patterns aren't
Things to subsist on, like fruit
Or vegetables or bread.
They're not even much like flowers,

Unless you're talking about
Those revolutionaries,
The undesirable weeds
That look half-pretty growing
From their loved, "well-rotted corpse."
Such a simple thing, really,
Such a simple, short-lived thing.

From the Verse Essays of Ivar Benløs: Thinner Than Groundwater

John Crowley might be in line
For one of Edward Abbey's
Sabots. I am reminded,
Reading the former's blog posts
Chastising the New York Times
For dangling modifiers
And expressing bafflement

At a reference to a shoe

In the works (then inviting
Readers of his blog to chime

In on the metaphor, thus
Yielding a long comment chain
Mocking etymologies
And quoting Star Trek at length)

That we no longer know much
And most of what we do know

Is bluff. Perhaps ever thus.
Long before Crowley adored
John Dee, Giordano Bruno,

Or Harold Bloom, Old Possum
And Ez faked esoteric

Knowledge of Chinese and Greek.
We grub around in culture
Like crabs who can decorate
Their shelled selves with enough
Weird camouflage to get by,

Although we try to attract,
Not distract, damned attention.

From the Verse Essays of Ivar Benløs: Rain

The long and the short of it
Dwindle to a speck of it
In its own good, drawling time.
The clouds lift enough to show
The helpless soul on his shield
The snow come to the mountains,
Reminding him of his home.

We are all so far away,
All so helpless, determined
To prove we have a real choice,
Ready to make one true faith
Out of our capacity
To choose what we cannot choose,
That home will never be home.

From the Verse Essays of Ivar Benløs: Fog

Whatever we claim time is,
We only experience
Time in one way forever.
Einstein with his equations
Still trundled through life and died
As he often slept, pure gone.
No one will ever go back

Or leapfrog forward, except
In accidents of being
Aware of a discomfort,
A puzzling rearrangement,
A dream, then forward again,
The incoming coming in,
Another and another.

From the Verse Essays of Ivar Benløs: Diversion Is Desire Plus Aversion

This is enough. It would be
A complete philosophy
Once attained, since believing
Would then be identical
With the truth. Enough sages
And holy fools in hair shirts
Fervently praying, waiting

For the berserkers' return,
Would like me to believe them,
Their saints, their grisly martyrs,
But they never offer this:
This is enough. Even you,
Boneless wonder, sinful soul,
Are enough. No diversions.

Dewy Interlude

Paul Muldoon recently chastised
Susan Cheever's biography
Of e.e. cummings for using
The term "dewy" with reference
To Radcliffe students attending
The six nonlectures. "Exactly
What does 'dewy' mean, anyway?"
I thought of his complaint today

While reading the pilgrim's novel
In which bodies are stacked like cords
Of firewood outside cabins.
The pilgrim refers to "dewy
Beauty" in a context something
Like Cheever's, which reminded me
Of Muldoon's review and, in turn,
Of an equally sour review

A few year's back, castigating
The pilgrim for being showy.
Showy and dewy. Reminds me
Of the pun about the law firm,
"Dewey, Cheatham, & Howe."
Is it possible for writers
To parse other writers
Without logrolling or envy?

Probably not. Logs roll under
Bodies clearing logjams, drowning
Whatever isn't wholly crushed.
It's why I still like the pilgrim,
However dewy and showy
The cruelty of the meadows
In which Death gets loosed in those texts,
Mowing characters just like us.

From the Verse Essays of Ivar Benløs: Standing in a Row on the Ocean Floor

Death has been nosing closer
For a couple of years now.
Not own death, not relatives':
That dark sniffing's a given.
No, literally closer
In these sun-struck, quiet lands...
The woman who froze to death

On the steps of her front porch,
The couple watching TV
One night in the nearest town,
Crushed by a massive rock slide,
The woman one town over
Murdered by her gardener,
Who fled in her car, torched it

Not far from our house, and ran
Into the canyons that hid
Outlaw bank robbers, Mormon
Polygamists, and so forth
A century-plus ago,
But that bought him just a day.
The lovely world disappears

From your side any moment
Now, whether you deserved it
Or never in a million
Years. Sun piles a hot gold hoard
Of secrets on the slowly
Cracking rocks over your head,
Your sleepy village. All gone.

From the Verse Essays of Ivar Benløs: The Secret Curse

How much of a paradox
Is human hypocrisy?
Because we tell monstrous tales
About each other seems not
To affect our affections.
That we who suffer inflict
Suffering indifferently,

Even gleefully, seems not
To affect our suffering
Or our self-pity, seems not
To stop at hypocrisy
But to push through to a truth
About the world difficult
To resolve, to unify

In any myth or theory,
However accurately
The theory pulls together
Disparate facts, however
Well the myth depicts the pain.
It seems we just re-describe
Mysterious injustice

Again and again, with math
Metaphors or monster tales,
And even those lucky few
Of us at the lip of true
Description stay hypocrites
Or, if you like, paradox
Personified, damn their eyes.

From the Verse Essays of Ivar Benløs: "Time Is the Warp and Matter the Weft"

Death is the hurtling shuttle.
Shoot your arrows endlessly
Until pinioned heads explode.
Why are the victims so cruel?
Among us there is beauty,
But no commiseration.
Everything is everything

Always and the approaching
Speck of an exploding world
A trillionth of a trillionth
Of a trillionth of a bit,
The first bit of time that warped
Everything that would matter,
Bursts from the bent back longbow

Of an archer on a shield
No one ever lives to see.
The pilgrim loved the texture
Of a life, intricacy,
And did not turn away from
What no one should like to see,
The hints that gods are hungry

And consume their holy meals
Swiftly, surreptitiously,
So that more offerings come.
I am offering these lines
Of cobbled-together verse
As a cobbler offers prayer,
In faint hope I am not me.

From the Verse Essays of Ivar Benløs: Spirit Time

"I have the power to read! And sing books! And make the wind come every day!" ~ Sequoia, verbatim, age 3

No sorrow, said sad Helen,
Long since returned back home,
Trying to ease suffering
In the wanderer's offspring
And friend as she slipped nepenthe
Into the wine comforting
Them against their memories.

If you, child, should ever feel
Pain after a long absence,
I hope that you will realize
The magical potion lies
In you speaking through these lines.
You have always been the balm,
The spirit that calms the man

Who feels like a captured beast
Locked in a traveling cage
Of a frame that will not yield
Around him, though it bears him
Constantly onward through what
Woods the cage itself was made
From, blow by blow, long ago,

Like a stranger on a bier,
Like a helpless king on shields,
Like an old tree trucked as logs,
Like a sentimental fool
Who writes verses for his child,
Crying in his cups. Helen
And Penelope were one

And the same, upon a time
When charm and perseverance
Grew from the same poetry
And the drug of forgetting
Could be drunk without hurting
The thought of an enduring
Suffering too terribly.

From the Verse Essays of Ivar Benløs: Battering

How carefully I detail
My quiet philosophy,
My long-distance perspective
On the madness of the world,
But let one gatekeeper block,
With a human smirk, my way,
And how quick I am to rage.

I could be a tree alone
On a sun swept, grassy slope
Overlooking a forest
Rapidly being timbered
And perfuming the breezes
That reach me with lop-limbed pleas
For help when they can't be helped

While I allow my own leaves
A calmly rustling response,
Until men with axes come.
I could be a secure oak
Surrounded by dragging vines

That poison the ground around
Their long, rapacious roots,

Convinced, long-lived thing I am,
That I can remain aloof,
Until the poison rises
Into my own veins. Anger,
The madness that is madness,
Will fell me as easily
As any weedy sapling.

I rise on the backs of felled
Giants cut down to shavings
To make a great shield for me
To ride on like a warrior,
Imagining my orders
Are holy, matter, carry
In a wide world not me,

But I am weak, not because
I carry no weight myself,
Or not only, but because
I carry poison in me
That felled my fellows, and wage
War against swords and axes
With siege engines hacked from peace.

From the Verse Essays of Ivar Benløs: The World Is Small Because I Am

How far can anyone go
Who needs to be carried there?
It's an important question
To me and to Franklin D.
Roosevelt, who pretended
He was halting not helpless
As, halting and helpless, he

Gathered together his power
And advanced hegemony
Jauntily. There's no free world
Apart from his four freedoms
Now, is there? Your head explodes
With these possibilities.
Time's no respecter of men,

Nor men respecters of time.
Gendered denouncements aside,
Everyone here's a specter.
And then, the wind in the trees,
Which happen to be blooming
Dogwoods, judas, cottonwoods,
Tamarisk, Russian olive,

Sagebrush, greasewood, cherry trees,
And assorted invaders,
Impostors, and mysteries
Around colonial parts
Such as these, whispers in words
Borrowed from longship Vikings,
"What's culture without a shield?

Trinidad Timeslip Interlude

1. Observational Magic

Come to Big Lagoon with me,
Collect smooth stones from the sea,
And we'll see what we shall see.
The magic doesn't inhere
In here or in you or in me.
Inland, there's a tree stump
Of a redwood cut down a century gone,
Big as a small cabin with its own small woods
And flowers now growing out of it,
Obscuring it as it obscures
The actual small cabin behind it
Where we can stay, in a green shade
Between a creek, a chicken coop
And two highways, all murmuring
To the distant punctuation of an axe.
What is it, actually, we don't like
That is samsara? Is the suffering
Of samsara just things we don't like?
Would an absence of preferences
Mean the absence of contentments
And rhapsodies as well as suffering?
All conversations contain an earthquake
Anecdote this afternoon in Arcata,
The sun and the bumming around
Back after heavy rains and last
Night's chittering and rolling wave
That you sensed as a ghost
About to drag you under the couch,
About to swallow you up in the floor,
Then as a poltergeist rattling the cabin,
Then, "of course! It's an earthquake!"
And you jumped into bed at 10:18
And roused the slumbering ego,
And the ego said, "yes,
It's an earthquake" and patted your hand
While you lay awake in the cabin
By the giant stump of time, waiting
For the earth to change again
And you with it this time. Forgive
Me. I was so tired, I had to sleep.
Come to Big Lagoon with me,
The magic is out there, turning
Particles into waves, and tomorrow
We will sleep in and sun on
My enlightenment bench between
The cabin and the overgrown stump
Beside that cabin, listening to birdsong
And rooster crows, the unseen
Creek and passing cars, the axe chopping,
And a hound dog briefly baying
For no known reason in the west
Woods. We'll read poems about woods
And prose about creeks and time.
We will take our notes and talk
About time existing or not, and that
Will finally change us.

2. Baba Yaga's Postal Worker

The flower of boring places,
Suburban lawn dandelion
Blossoms in the dank woods.
On the old wagon road,

Baba Yaga's surly postal carrier
Refuses to admit knowing
Where the road goes. Every stump
Grows four or five great trees,

Each holding a private conversation
Of falling things. The day stays
Bright and ordinary around
The dream of a trackless waste

We make tracks trying to find.
Have another cup of coffee
On the lawn chair. Turn your bright
Face to sun neither here nor there.

3. I Was the Moon Tonight

This morning I was the driftwood
By the long breakers, the sneaker waves
That can claim lives briefer than trees.
Highway at my back, crushing surf
Blowing mist in my face. I was
Really something for nothing
This morning as a bee blew in
Against me, fighting the breeze
To get a little nectar from the wild
And tiny beach flowers anchored
By the oldest and heaviest dead woods
Sunk like spars of shipwrecks
Across the Lost Coast. Something
Wants meaning from a broken beach perspective,
Crossing the bar, no bar to any watch we keep,
The long withdrawing roar proving longer
And longer and louder than any one
Turn of the tides. Everyone's a beach comber
On a monstrous, magnificent beach,
Poets, painters, philosophers, photographers,
Even the penitent sitting in silence,
Stunned by relentless thundering.
That an unseen moon drew on
The tide was such mystic nonsense
A skeptical Galileo couldn't countenance.
The veil smoking up in fine tulle
From the shy faces of deadly breakers,
Anthropomorphized for faint understanding,
Looks delicate, intricate, faint and
Promising something holy, something rare
For the patient, who scrutinize the pulverized sands,
Near-sighted, anxious and finicky as sandpipers,
Something for nothing but feeling that presence
Greater than the sum of our gnawing hungers
And more constructive, more corrosive.
We take away nothing but the feeling
There was something to grasp we could grasp there.

This afternoon I was the astonishing stump
Of a redwood so gigantic that broken
In two it glowered, huge and pale, a spire,
A breathing ghost bigger than Tane Mahuta,
Wrecked lord of younger, greener woods around it,
Recreating itself as new trunks from its corm
Underground, becoming massive future shades.
"A tree stands there, mute," wrote the pilgrim,
"But secretly it seethes." The secret is safe
With me. No one is listening, anymore,
And hardly anyone reads. I was content
With that observation so long ago
I couldn't complain when lightning split me.
Look through the signaling, fringed fling of green.
The fallen, crescent moon stands on end,
Carved by coincidence and glowing,
One bone-white curve of smooth wood in dark leaves.
I may not be upright, but the pilgrim liked my adjectives.

Tonight I was the moon, dragging the tide
Like a blanket up the beach and over
The silver heads of the driftwood logs,
Lighting the way for moths to dream catchers
Strung by tidy spiders in the stumps of trees,
Peering into the melancholy cabin
Between the breakers and the hills.
I'm so tired. I'm so tired. I'm so tired.
But only from time to time.

4. Inside It

Sequoia the little girl, not this tree,
Sheds clothes quickly and when she wants
To put something back on that's inside out
On the floor where she left it, she picks it up
And asks me to "please inside it."
She's got Grandma to do that for her this week,
And you're alone with me and books and these trees
And we're well and truly inside it.

Where will this moment lead when this moment
Is never singular, never anywhere? We talk
Of time and space between the cabin and the trees,
The marsh land and the scrap yard,
The highway, the town square, and the shuddering beach,
But all our terms are inside out and always have been.
There is no now or then, no next
That we can count on, only shades

Of change. Cherish the well-worn, savor
The incoming, and let what's next
Take care of itself. We must somehow,
Ourselves and without help,
Inside them.

5. Blue Lake

Last stop at the last resort.
Time plays possum all the time,
And then the mystery is history,
Time to pack up and go home.
Did we do all we wanted to do?
No, and we did some things we didn't.
One hates good byes. One savors them.
In the end is the beginning of love
That began somewhere near here
And has returned, again and again,
Always slant rhyming, the truth
Being an approximation of the past
That can never remember exactly.
How to rightly portray a goodbye?
The workshop tools of craft writers
Want a lot of showing. No telling
What they would make of this
Rhetorical tree the earthquake bent
To a simple curve in front of me.
Ferns and giant clover cloud the ground
Around the cabin we are now leaving
Where we woke up dreaming
A chant that was never our own
And then long since a part of us,
Bent lines sung from old quartets,
The sheet music rustling in branches
That all night hovered over us.
The end and beginning are always
In love, the beginning and end are one.

From the Verse Essays of Ivar Benløs: The Moral of Immortal Botany

"I suspect that the real moral thinkers end up, wherever they may start, in botany."

"With a spendthrift genius
And an extravagance of care,"
The id turns to botany.
The woods are mounting a dark
Counter strategy out there.
They will retake the human
World and sink their roots through us.

The grasses will be tougher.
Woods can only surround them
And wait for the continents
To regather in a way
Configured to favor trees.
This will be after we're gone
Likely leaving no offspring,

Not one descendant species,
Thus mercifully ending
This brief planet of the apes.
What will remain are mountains
Cut, scored, and excavated,
Along with a layer crammed
With the sort of rich rubbish,

Plastics and metals and oil,
Some species will specialize
In converting to fresh loam
For the rooted bark giants
To draw up through woody straws.
The id is contemplative
In a way that the ego

Can only watch and admire.
Beasts know their role in changing
One era for another.
Egos search for transcendence
Of egoic existence.
Trees search out means to return.
Change, nothing, conquest: success.

From the Verse Essays of Ivar Benløs: My Notes Are Going Back in the Trees

Reproduction created
The passion of death in life.
The passion of death in life
Created human culture.
Out of competing cultures
Rose immortality,
Our unrequitable love,

Our golem who will save us,
Our noli me tangere,
Our unicorn in the trees.

We want to dream forever,
Even though forever is
All we ever have. The last
Moment of dreaming still dreams.

Doesn't explain anything.
Just the way was is what is.
The passion of life is death,
But nothing alive is dead.
That's why we suffer so much,
Not because we will die, but
Because we're wed to dying

And divorced from dying's dream
Upon its consummation.
We are always in the midst
Of life and lost in the woods,
And our dreams of other worlds
Comprise those woods, in which we
Dream branched word worlds we're lost in.

From the Verse Essays of Ivar Benløs: Joseph Fink

I don't know about Isaac.
He seems lucky to me, but
Abe, "who grew up in the Bronx,
Had a spectacularly
Horrible childhood . . . he was
Usually on crutches,
Because of a bone disease."

Visitor Parking. Reserved
For Employees. No Parking.
Reserved H Parking Only.
Do this. Don't do that. Can't you
Read the signs? Hippies couldn't,
But they're long forgotten now.
Time doesn't wrinkle. It dies

On arrival, like the shell
Of a seed dispersed by breeze
When the breezes are the seeds.
Kitty Genovese. Who?
An urban legend needing
Further resuscitating.
We live lives seeking villains.

Here is the rapist, straight out
Of an angry LeRoi Jones
Play. Here is the neighbor, gay
And white, like the victim but
Male, drunk, and crawling away.
Here is the rising newsman,
Middle aged and middle class

And Jewish, interviewing
The Irish Chief of Police.
You're allowed to tell me this
Was so long ago, so long
Ago in America,
Cold War powerful and rich.
You're allowed to point fingers

At the snake curled in the leaves
At the top of Yggsdrasil,
A white-boy myth if ever
I were myself one of these.
Your vehicle, in which you
Breathe, has selected a place,
Visitor, Employee, H.

From the Verse Essays of Ivar Benløs: Even So

The burdens of our failures
Make us think ourselves greater,
Make us more, not less likely
To emphasize our triumphs
Or our imagined triumphs
Or the triumphs of our side,
Even though we are diamonds

Compressed into existence
And fractured by time, our times
Turning each side carefully,
Loupe screwed to life's gimlet eye,
Finding out and chipping
Our glints from proud flaws' facets.
Look at me, rock in the tree,

Squeezed by these roots around me.
The crystalline, cracked essence
Of me now's whatever's drawn
Haplessly into the crown
Where green viper voices sway
In the hissing of the leaves,
Respiring as oxygen

Out of their carbon rings
Whatever, deep in the ground
Of me, used to be me, used
To be adamantine, calm,
And under the delusion
Of having escaped living.
They, we, are, I am, bared fire.

From the Verse Essays of Ivar Benløs: I Became Resigned to Being Myself

Lovely little trilobite
Spines sticking out everywhere,
You have quite a few good points
Worthy of fond metaphors
For a quill tip invented
Some long time after the last
Of you, self-consecrated,

Curled in your fine enrollments,
And sank, pins folded, in depths
Of sedimentary seas.
The terrible land lizards
Who invented those first quills
Have since followed after you.
The quill-wielding monkeys will

Follow after them soon. Too
Poignantly pointed, your shells
As arranged around the shelves
Of the collaborators'
Bookshop. The only rebel
Ever was fell from the tip
Of a scribbling hypocrite.

From the Verse Essays of Ivar Benløs: The Dignity With Which We Have Lived Our Lives

How easily victims can
Become the perpetrators
Noted Arundhati Roy.
Perhaps it is because we
Are all the victims of death
That we perpetrate so much
Death, and it is because we

Are all the victims of life
That we insist on living.
By "we" the author means all
Us living things and dying
Assemblages, tottering
Across Earth's landscapes littered
With green beings constructed

From fossils made from fossils
Whose taphonomies suggest

Why Efremov seized the word
Itself, "the burial law,"
To describe the transitions
Of all our bestiaries

Through night's ark of gardening.

From the Verse Essays of Ivar Benløs: The Qilin

Unicorn, giraffe, monster,
Archaic sign of the times,
The original qilin
Browses its hybridity,
Meaning nothing, in the trees;
Another spring and autumn
In the garden of Huangdi.

Who thought up this dream of ours?

The forest of the brain teems
With bizarre chimeras
All perfectly at home there.
Auspicious and ominous
Notions that sages and chiefs
Could rule us shiver the leaves.

We think we're about to change.
We recombine our fossils.
We adopt our aliens,
Pollinate our predators,
Turn everything outside in.
Here is the church, and here are
Our creatures. Open the doors.

From the Verse Essays of Ivar Benløs: The Color of Things

"Here we are and there we are."

Beginnings are remote and

Small at the start of them all,
At the start of any one
Of them. That we don't question.

We have an organic need
For everything to start small
And then grow bigger, whether

We believe things only end
Once and for all, or get small
Only to begin again,
Death or rebirth. Why is this?

Don't ask for godlike wisdom
From any human. You're one
Of them, you should know. Who you

Like is like you among them.

What can we ask of ourselves?
One fond answer is kindness,
Another is tolerance,
Another, joy in what is.
Joy in the color of things
Would be good, and kind, I think.

That's color in all senses,
The palette and the palate,
The textures that delight life.
And as for life's origins,
Perhaps we'd better leave them
Where they will always remind
Us we are and as we are.

From the Verse Essays of Ivar Benløs: Coral Pink Sand Dunes

State park. She drank half a flask
Of my best available
Scotch. Needless to say this was
Not Scotland. This was desert.
Our sense of the future is
Our sense of the past. That's it.
Mule deer and bighorn sheep jump

In front of me. Aside from
This ribbon of pavement
These lines don't look differently
Than they did a thousand years
Ago. Uncertainty quakes
Bashfully in front of me.
Here we are and go again.

Has it occurred to no one
That eternal changelessness
Is, in fine, synonymous
With that word, revolution?
You want to get out of here?
Lose the are and prove patient.
There's never a civil war.

From the Verse Essays of Ivar Benløs: Willfall

Why should I care who invades
My country or that country,
When it's highly unlikely
Any invasion means my demise
Ahead of age or disease,
Addiction or accident,
Homicide or negligence?

I have no way of knowing
If it's true, as I have heard,
That sinister lullabies
Like, say, "Rock-a-bye Baby"
Really derive from English
Civil War underground rhymes,
But I do know they're absurd

And one good reason to fear
The cultural endurance
Of horrifying nonsense
In the soft, blossoming ears
Of new-born baby world minds
In a hundred or more years.
And yet, I prefer treetops.

From the Verse Essays of Ivar Benløs: Pando Redivivus

I spread everywhere, although
I am not one kind of I
Nor kindly, glaring about
From the tower of my eye
Perched and hidden in the crown
Of the largest tree around.
As I spread, lives should fear me.

Wind flutters the leaves. I'm not
Fanatic for ekphrasis.
Let each scene, each picture be
It's own truest description,
Transcended by synaesthetes
Rarer than breezes like these
That whisper so frantically.

I insist this is gossip.
Please leave me be. I'm not free
To discuss my liberty.
I am, after all, what hides
In the sun-besotted crown
Of the most triumphant tree.

I thrive in hegemony.

I lie, a viper in wait
For exquisite birds that feed
On the fine tips of these leaves,
The fruits that they wave, with ants
Intact, fungal spores pouring
From their uplifted, captive
Heads, brainless, nothing to me.

From the Verse Essays of Ivar Benløs: The Willow of Hurricane Utah

Human bodies are fearful
Mysteries haunting themselves.
They whisper within chambers
Created by their whispers,
Wondering why they wonder,
Unaware of why they are
Inhabiting awareness.

This spring, the weeping willow
Corresponded to a mood
Of weighty, great amazement,
Greening daily by the road
With little to commend it
Except that massive willow
Out of place in red desert.

To whom did that mood belong?
Bundles of microbes trundled
Within the skin of an ape
Tormented by thinking things
Inherited from thinkers
Of fearsome things in their skins
Containing communities?

Why not them? Minuscule things
Genetically distantly
Related to that thin skin,
Inhabiting it as thoughts
Tangled up in skeins of words
Inhabit its transmissions,
Nodding to the nodding tree

Sic passim. Everything is

Passing, is strange and estranged
From itself as it passes.
The community of me
Believes itself singular,
Believes nothing haunts that tree.
That tree, however, is me.

Convalescence

Drinking more than six men
And talking more than twelve,
The man with a seer of a monkey
Goes about from inn to inn

Inquiring of the number of customers
Within, just as a happy coincidence.
I'm with him. What will become
Of me, I hope he answers nicely.

This is the ancient meaning of invalid
In several antique tongues. The head
Hangs heavily as unloved fruit
On the narrowing neck of the saint

Whose future is the answer
A madman elicits from a con artist
And his prognosticating monkey.
You see? said Don Quixote,

Displeased with his own prognosis.
Read a lot, ride a lot, see a lot,
Fall off your scrawny horse plenty,
You'll die saintly. Me, I feel better already

Plum Lucky

How reprehensible the fellow enamored
Of the flowers growing weedily by the roadside.
Sure do appreciate you, sing the nodding heads.

Does anyone dark of heart as any starred, dark
Night bedewed with dark matter and invisible,
Habitable planets know of a way to rise

Above those nodding charms? Why are they so polite?
Humbly they attract the hungry bee, secretly
Designing ways to withhold protein-rich pollen.

They didn't count on me, wastrel down on his knees,
Down on his pluck, ready to scrutinize petals
And behead the best among them. That's why I'm pleased

But dubious, bedazzled, unlike worker bees,
Those genetically enchained pollen predators
Who harbor no illusions of sweet fruits from flowers.

We Are Tourists

The peacock blue sky without eyes
Fans its feathers over drab rocks.
One variant of the many
Worlds hypothesis holds our world

Is likely a simulation,
Given that, if any one world
Perfected the technology
And art of pretense well enough,

Simulators would get busy
On so many simulations
Of worlds that any given world
Would be statistically likely

To be an artificial one.
Plus, there's the mysterious point
That mathematics fits this world
A little suspiciously well.

Digitized acoustic music
And digital music alike
Unscroll smoothly with faint birdsong
And the whispering of breezes

In my ears, rowing into me
Or into what I think is me
From over that open blue sky,
Being simultaneously

Distinct, indistinguishable.
It's getting late. The moon will rise
Soon to the music of the spheres.
Time for me to be getting home.

But first, what I would like to know
Is how can we use this world's math
To ascertain the likelihood
That this world's mathematically

Unlikely to be and likely
To be unreal, mathematics
Seeming to work too perfectly?
If we are in a universe

That's itself a simulation,
Just as our brains simulate it,
By God, what's it simulating?
Who or what within this are we?

The Sound of the Drum That Signaled the Night Watches

Beginning with the seemingly simple
Task of defining the risk of dying,
The founders of the state of insurance
Worked their way backward in contrapuntal,

Crablike elegance, mincing and waving
Their pincers at the hissing sands of time.
Inside each crab, a tiny, monk-like flame
Lit the dim lamp of absurd awareness

Of the absurdity of awareness.
Why would it ever matter to matter

What happened to matter on conversion
Into one more energetic gesture

Of an over-sized claw on the long shore
That defines the edge of this enigma?

Risk Homeostasis

Everything we do to be safe
Entices some new recklessness.
The successful rehab provides
An excuse to start back smoking.

The lack of need for a rehab
Is a good reason for gorging,
The diet triumph yields shopping,
The windfall from frugal saving

A reason for paragliding,
Airbags an excuse for driving
Too fast down country roads at night
When the moon is up and shining,

Even the escape from marriage
To some lunatic derelict
Is all the more reason to date
Or to join the ladies who lunch

In narrow dresses believing
They can't get too rich or too thin.
Gregor Mendel, celibate monk,
Indulged in feasts, cigars, and peas.

Prince Hal sobered up for warfare.
Mother Theresa found herself
Strangely attracted to lepers.
The healthy young tempt everything.

And if we defeat our killers
And leap into longevity,
There are strange diseases of age
We still die from rarely but will.

Sur la belle étoile

Is there any ugly star?
Our sun in our eyes comes close,
But we love it and need it
And know not to look at it.
The ones at night break our hearts,
One by one and heart by heart,
Although the whole panoply

Visible desert camping
On a bedroll, by the car,
Proves alien heartlessness
In a language neither math
Nor profound faith comprehends.
That one there's the loveliest
Cries the brain, the lonesomnist.

The Idiocy

Cut the bullshit. Never mind
If your goddammed gods are mine.
Worship whomever you like,
But vote without violence.

"While I'm inside this darkness
I can see no difference
Between death" and what I see.
Your anonymous masks me.

Here I am. Wo bist du? Hier
Bin ich. Love lives in the end,
I believe, even as lives
Led in the Teutenkreuz dance

Jerk and gibber to the end
Of their Owl Creek Bridge gibbets.
The bonfires on Maidan Square
May rise, may confuse us all,

As the streets of Homs confuse,
As the packed squares of Cairo,
As Red Square, as singing throngs
Of the free Rus confused

Us, but god and godless, each
And every one, I will trust
In universal suffrage
Before I trust any one.

Representative for the Lower House Man

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Rubs her drunken eyes near Toquerville
And bursts into uncounted blossoms.
(Toquerville is a town in Utah,
More or less equidistant between
Saint George, where the poet was working,
And Springdale, where the poet then lived.
The poem's first line is a quotation.)
All of this was back in early March,

A time lost to imagination,
What one appalled critic called a pool
Of mud and blood. Well. What but design
Of darkness to appall. Do the math.
The best evidence for creation
Is that our universe, or the world
That appears to be our universe,
Is a simulation. If not, why
Would mathematics work perfectly

Consistently to describe our world
Before we had discovered our math?
And what has this to do with cherries?
If the world is best described by math,
Then for nonsense, poetry's the best
Way to populate the barricades
Against the ruling party's decrees.
I love numbers and politicians
Equally. I just don't believe them.

The majority party in house
Had better be truly popular
To cast their votes against me. I'm old.
I existed before votes counted.
Nothing's equal before me, except
Votes registered by mythology
Of purely equal strengths in numbers,
Not in spite of contrary belief
But as I believe contrarily

Probability Does Not Exist

In its own time, an event

Is always very modern.
The shining truck startles me,
Pulling up alongside me
On the gravel, grinning girl
In the front seat peering down.
Someone hops out of the back

And runs over to the plaque,
Reading it quickly, arms crossed,
By my shoulder, and then sprints
In return, clearly quite pleased.
"It says the architect was
A Mormon settler from Maine,
A pioneer!" The truck leaves.

Quiet

Clouds shifted and chirped. You
Knew what was likely
To have happened in
At least a few cases. Control

The music by playing
Only familiar digital
Recordings. Pray
The equipment won't break.

Then you forgot. The control
Of a moment's performance
Depends wholly on what
Goes on lost inside of you.

You heard the end coming. You
Forgot you wanted to listen. You
Turned off the system to catch birdsong
You'd heard. Clouds shifted.

Crazy Ant Poem

Today, the myriad bits

Of me my brain produces,

That infest my brain, compete

Like crazy, running around,

Pouncing, biting, denouncing

Each other, carried away.

What's wrong with me, anyway?



Any secular mystic

Would instruct my warring parts

To quiet down, go away,

Enjoy this now; breathe the day.

It's sunny. It's getting warm.

You're blessed with a family,

Haven't gone broke, lost your home,



Been diagnosed terminal,

Or thrown into prison yet.

Be here freely and be free.

But who are they talking to

When they tell me the true I

Isn't me? Which? I or me?

Seems like they're talking to me.

And why would my true I need

Their advice, anyway? Why

Would a me leap to believe

The best strategy for me

Is the immediate end,

In this glowing morning sun,

Of all my fighting to be?



I know what my relatives,

Evangelical, would say.

Come back to Jesus, today.

My Mormon neighbors would say

Pretty much the same, although

What they would mean would remain

Sinful, between you and me.



More, behind desultory

Admonishments and polite

Invitations to the Church

Or the Ward meeting tonight,

Lie the vast religious plains

On which massed armies contend

For the right to command me,



Any me, including you,

To destroy or to ignore,

As god's prophecy may be,

Any other you or me.

If you ask any of these

What exactly's wrong with me,

They'll spurn or burn you, gladly.



So. Let's turn then to self help

And to the Jacob's Ladder

Of twelve rungs to the kingdom

Of blissful repentancy.

I have sinned. I'm a sinner.

My responsibility

Is mine own and mine alone,



I testify, mercy me.

I will lose weight. I will choose

To live. My longevity

Will prove my testimony.

I will recycle, really,

I will. I will redeem me,

And I will shop frugally.



I will live inside the truth

Of budgeted resources

Faithfully, eternally,

Please. Oh mercy, mercy me.

There is a truth eludes me.

No one, no body unasked

Would other than ignore me.



We give advice just to say

We heard you, now go away,

Or to pocket some meaty,

Gricean chunk of gossip

We can share with other friends

Whom we want to admire how

Well we can communicate.



What else could a body do

To survive nonsense blown through

The portals of awareness?

You've met those few who do care,

The ones with the vacant stare,

Who strain in pain to contain

The mandate of love to be fair.



A body built to compete

With a socially fine-tuned

Brain falls apart at the seams

When social rules become real.

The result is one fuzzed ant

Climbing to the canopy

To pose, throwing spores in air.



It's a cultural jungle

Out there, assuming culture

Does evolve and is out there.

Driving hosts mad is just one

Strategy among many,

Including encouraging

Hosts to fight and be healthy,



And if cancer can evolve,

Why can't culture? Two cancers

That we know of have escaped

The suicidal assault

On the body that spawned them,

One among Tasmanian

Devils that spreads by biting



Other devils in the face,

And one among dogs that spreads

Genitals to genitals

Its genome having been traced

To a single animal

Several thousand years ago.

Billions fail but one succeeds.



As cancers, so cultures go,

As cultures, so go ideas,

Including ideas of me.

One siblicidal fig wasp

Might make it out of the fig,

That pink pulp filled with fragments

Nothing inside left to eat.



And once free that creature finds,

It's just begun to compete.

Homicidal invaders

Batten on their victories

Until the next invaders

Usurp what they'd taken

As theirs forever and free.



In Texas, crazy ants spread

At the expense of fire ants,

As gods at expense of gods,

New me at expense of me.

They're immune to the venom

Of fire ant stings, seemingly

Or at least statistically.



They're disorganized, of course,

But that makes spreading easy.

They groom themselves with their own

Acid from their abdomens

And ninety percent survive

Well-organized fire ant stings

Instead of just forty-three.



There's no advantage to this

Except numerosity,

But I can't help admire them

As I wage my war for me.

I want their immunity,

To be one in that ninety,

And I want to win. Crazy.

Get Out of the Car

Said Edward Abbey and says my wife.
No one commands you back
Into the car seat who wants you to savor life,

But I savor life here anyway.
Parked in the dune, wind humming
The panes, here's my gone away.

The dune blew down from those sandstone cliffs.

That fly-strewn carcass of a deer

Tumbled down, too, to lie against a drift.

Edward Abbey, iconic iconoclast,
Wrote his funniest fiction not too far from here,
But he and that's all back in the past.

There's nothing to this living art
Thing seen from the front seat of a truck,
Nothing to sitting once you start,

And no one eager to hand you a prize
For being glued here and motionless

In a hunk of metal god meant you to drive,

But here's where I find my awakening

Thoughts running closest to my dreams,

Dislocated, broken, muffled, weird, still, me.

Lustreless Phoenix Laments Resurrection

The difference between
Imagination and discovery
Is that, if the discoverer
Dies with all notes consigned

To the flames, someone else
Might, perhaps will inevitably,
Rediscover whatever the lost
Continent was. That's not

The way it goes with imagination.
Burn my soul, my soul will not
Return as such but thanks
To someone else to haunt you.

There are no souls because
Souls are the only apparitions
Could be called what was. See?
I'm gone. You can't recover me.

Risk of Contentment

What might happen and what might matter
Walked into a bar together. Chance,
Pollution, purity, and danger
Followed after.  "Anger produces
Optimism," what might matter said.
"People don't panic in disasters,"
Replied what might happen, placidly,
In her usual sanguinary
But hypnotically stately fashion.

"Here: 'Everything exists just by luck,'
Runs one copyrighted translation."
"Formally study uncertainty
And you will discover a certain
Exhilarating ability
To stand in the square and predict things,
A disciplined form of prophecy."
"Don't be tempted to complacency.
Confidence inters all decency."

"Events such as winning lotteries
Conform to chance, but what if chance lit
On you? What guilt would be caused by it,
What resentment if the lottery
Were that rare winning ticket to death
By cancer at an early age, won
By someone who was uncommonly
Healthily behaved, without cancer
In the genes?" "Can one love random things?"

"Who said, 'The most important questions
In life are, for the most part, only
Problems in probability'?" "You
Wouldn't want to pollute that question
By putting purity in danger,
Would you?" "I would." "But that's cruelty."
"Randomness is cruelty. That's why
There's the tendency to deny it."
The argument went on over beers,

As if no one cared who overheard,
As if the subjects of the debate
Weren't sitting in a booth, meek but near,
Near enough so that purity's ears
Were burning, danger had to pretend
Risk hadn't been raised, and pollution
Sat frozen to his bench, not breathing,
Half hoping no one would notice him.
It was the beginning of evening;

How could such an evening ever end?
Believe me, there are thirteen-hundred
Twenty-six ways of dealing a hand
Of just two cards, and what might happen
And what might matter truly were
A couple of cards, especially
After a few beers, but they were drawn
From an infinitely staggered deck,
Lumpily shuffled, with lots of blank

Choices and dark matter blended in.
So objective probability
Couldn't possibly apply to them,
Which made it all the more distressing,
Given seeming openhandedness,
That this quiet evening in the pub
Drew straight to ineluctable ends,
Jokes about clergy, mating insults,
Poets trading fisticuffs outside,

Infinity tending once again
To the same old, same old things, despite
The claims of danger to purity,
The scowls of dejected pollution,
The boasts of chance that it had to win.
Nobody and nothing ever win.
Nothing and nobody always win.
Only fearsome symmetry demands
Everything play its hand to the end.

And here's the end: a brawl erupted.
The bartender, decision, burrowed
Under the clean, hanging shot glasses,
Hunting the safety on her shotgun.
Statistics, most easily fluttered
Of disciplines, wet himself and fled.
What might happen evaporated.
What might matter wrestled purity.
Pollution kissed danger. Chance was dead.

Precisely

No adverbs allowed.
We are strictly here.
Nothing you can't see
Means appositely
Between you and me.

Breathe. Count breaths slowly
Backward towards you
At the last second,
Frantic, swervingly,
Fighting life freely.

Start new. Ungainly
Body armatures
And fragile egos
Are yours. Contumely
Is humanity.

I'm not being silly.
I'm not avoiding
Truth, nor you, truly.
I'm not that funny.
Funnily, I heard

That Sid Ceasar said,
Curmudgeonly, "He
Who lives for his goals
And not for living
Life, lives foolishly."