Gob of Mud

Among the popular topics
Publications have forbidden:
The evolution of language
And the wreck of the Titanic.

Not that anyone stops trying
To write about the forbidden.
Too popular or too wicked,
Writing itself is temptation,

Each effort at composition
Driven by desires to attempt
Things unattempted yet in words,
Although we know they've all been tried.

There's always possibility,
Angles concealed in blank spaces;
There's always a revolution,
An injustice, an untold tale.

The combinatorics of words
Are infinite, of narrative
Infinite upon infinite.
Oh, what the hell. Here's this blue-eyed,

Round-headed, waddle-legged toddler
Bringing me fistfuls of wet mud
To accept, examine, approve.
No, no, no. No more mud, I say.

But still she trundles down the porch
And gathers more mud in the shade
And trundles back, wet, squished fists clenched
To offer me more, quite convinced,

By herself, or by me somehow,
Or by heaven knows what command
Come down the long generations,
That the right gob of mud will work.

Empathetic Fallacy

How have we become
So obligately social
That we feel a debt of gratitude
To the world for being

Beautiful, as well as vague
Resentment at the unfairness
Of the world when it hurts?

Seated by the window with a view
Of recently leafed-out fruit trees
Partly obscuring the severer beauty
Of the monumental red mesas,

I feel my body as a sack
Of heavy sand and broken glass,
While my daughter naps upstairs

And my wife goes out for a run.
I want to apologize to the day
For not doing enough to savor
Its mid-spring perfection

Of picturesque, painterly clouds
Framed by the blue and sun,
Of green things nodding in breezes,

And I want to castigate
The day for being wholly part
Of the world that has framed me
To yearn, wobble, and die,

Until I remember a baseball field
I saw once in the deep woods,
A collaborative labor of love

By scattered local agrarians
In the far north who banded together
One summer to hew a ballfield
From second-growth spruce and fir.

It was growing over already,
But the boundary, blurred, still
Showed: inside here, the game,

With rules and handshakes,
Self-consciously social conventions;
Outside, over there, encroaching,
The world that is not in the game.

The Outside Consultant

One morning, the two-bit criminal,
Cowardly scofflaw and all-around
Peripheral male finds himself

Unaccountably central and surrounded
By law-enforcing, sidearm-sporting
Growly-voiced males who do

And have done the real male work
Of defending and protecting
And bringing down outlaws.

They ask him for his opinion.
He does not hesitate to answer,
Though he hesitates to think.

One part of his weaselly mind
Can only see the badge on the chest
Of the officer seeking his approval.

Another part, the prideful
Artist of the minor con
Is pleased to be here, hard at work.

Lucifer, he thinks, listening
To himself fake gravitas,
Was not a great and awful angel,

But a little, barely tolerated figure
Among the hosts of heaven
When he was betrayed as a watcher

Not a true team member, a lurker,
A low mushroom of divinity,
Not even rebellious or sneaky,

Just contrary in his heart,
Bifurcated, observing himself
Playing at being one with them

Offering advice on how to shelter
The reality of human weakness
In the rumbling of thunder god.

Chance Plays Chess

The fictional first mover
Makes her fictional first move,
And the cards are dealt, 
The game is on, board set.

Can backwards induction
By a computer with more teraflops
Per second than electrons
In the universe tell us whether

A pure strategy exists in which
White or Black will always win?
Not in poker, baby, but
If this is only Go, Hex, Chess, 

Then, yes. And yet. No one
Knows or could know
Without such miraculous
Machinery what that strategy

Would be. Experts guess
That at least in the case
Of chess, there is only the hope,
The minimax of eternal draw.

But chance suggests,
In the usual, whispering
Bayesian rattlesnake voice
Chance prefers, no,

There's a better bet than that.
Somewhere in the infinity
Of games, rules, regulators,
And tickets issued for trivial

Infractions, lies the theorem
Of the purest, winningest,
Guaranteed strategm.
No, not God. Not gods. Guess.

Whale Fall

They're out there right now,
Sarah reminds me during
My morning phone call
From the road. Whales

Are living their watery lives,
Diving, surfacing, hunting,
Grazing krill, socializing,
Fluting their long-distance songs,

Getting on with the strange
Business of being giant,
Lunged mammals with giant
Brains, guts, and organs

Of reproduction, sheathed
In sleek shapes for swimming,
As like and unlike us as if
Wolves became submarines

The size of houseboats.
They're out there, right now,
Bizarre and somehow comforting
Thought as rain falls on the suburbs

Of this inland mountain town,
As humans packed into cars
As sleek and wet as metal
Dolphins cruise around macadam

Thoroughfares, thumping music
Sent through long radio waves,
Mostly not thinking of whales at all,
Thinking only of getting somewhere

Late again, overtaxed, anxious,
Calculating nonexistent futures
Conjured out of schemas, human
Stories about humans being judged

Severely by human peers and gods,
While they're out there, in deep water,
Presumably not praying
To float upward when they die.

Enlightenment

Two hours of thunder,
Blue clouds and old wind,
No rain.

Five heartbeats of spattered
Wet and worse wind,
Then hail and hard, hard blown rain.

Where is my lightning?
Out in the yard, in the green,
Weedy grass, red dirt, and stones,

I collected lawn chairs,
Opened a metal gate, carried
A satchel of electronic gear

To the car for work next morning,
Just taunting, begging for a flicker
To give me that last lick.

Not yet. I can ache,
I can groan, I can lug my bones
Like barbells through the storm,

But nothing wants me,
Nothing comes to take me
Quickly. I am too slow

To die just yet.
I'll have to rot and crumble
And grumble a bit more,

Which I do, upstairs,
A crooked man who sits
In a crooked chair,

The batting coming out of the seat,
Ensconced in a crooked house,
By a drafty, crooked window,

Wishing, peeking through
A crooked curtain at skewed rain,
For, one day, the clean, quick end.

Aria

Wind sings, and we're quiet.
She sings. We don't.
It's late in the era of empires
But the wind has been through
This before.  And she's not

That kind. Tonight, America
Battens down the heartland
For another round of spring
Tornadoes. A few more small towns
May more or less disappear.

Here, it's just another flustered,
Gusty weekend full of dust
Blowing from goat pens, rock cliffs
And chewed up trails and roads.
We have our monuments to time

All around us in these parts,
Lately settled by humans of any
Kind, and they remind us
With their flash floods, canyons,
Tumbled slopes and fault lines,

That the wind singing through
Them constantly is not
The greatest voice, not by
A long shot. But she seems
So much more personal,

More like us than water,
Earthquakes, or gravity,
The true titan. She bellows
She howls, she makes music
Among the bells we offer her.

And through her singing only
She does destroy and recreate
Mountains and empires alike.
She sifts it all in her husky throat
And powders our endless chuntering.