And That Is This, and This With Thee Remains

Son of a bitch, I forgot about you.
At least, I came to believe I forgot.
Forgive my crude English. I've nothing new
To say about your genius, your argot
Compounded of neologisms coined,
Apparently, by you, low local speech,
And the loveliest rhetoric purloined
From your own age and the Latins (less Greek).
This is just to say your patterns amaze
Me here in thickets of empiricists
Where songs are lost in mumbling numbers, dazed
Recitatives. Your nightingale insists
On arias of invention that are
Nothing less than intimate, more than far.

A Part of the Dance

Glancing around the human world
It seems we have an overplus
Of monotheistic beliefs,
An excess of sole deities

Whose followers accept no gods
Other than their singular own
Queer creator of everything,
Being nothing we can point to,

Anything for which we have rules.
And therein, in the paradox,
Lies the secret of gods' success:
Nothing ourselves, behold our rules.

Biped Laity

Surrounded by academics
Of a variety of stripes,
It's easy to make a mistake
That looks foolish in black and white.

Professors fear looking stupid
Like millionaires fear looking poor,
Like athletes fear appearing slow.
We hedge our bets, score points, count coups.

And what do our strategies win?
What cultural reproduction
Tips the cost-benefit trade off
In favor of publications

Over a quiet contentment,
Much less some extra grandchildren?
We are not in charge of this show.
We live to make what makes us more.

Gate B10, Ten AM

Nothing is richer
Than the wonder of becoming,
Than the boredom of becoming
Each moment richer.

Here is an airport,
For which the future has no words,
A fen of nostalgia for words,
Eternal airport.

The end is so far
From this half-pleasant waiting room
This heaven of waiting, this room
Where nothing so far

Has happened except
That passenger with the guitar
Practicing blues on his guitar,
Strums to no effect.

It Is the Moon

Barely up there,
Silver sliver
Under Venus,
I claim to be

A metaphor,
Substituting
A this for that.
Cynical me.

Truly earnest
Romantics want
To speak the truth
And nothing but.

There is no truth.
There's what we know
To be untrue,
And there's the moon.

Location, Location, Location

What does it matter
Which speck of this speck
I'm sitting on when there's
That out there, not
Only the stars, not
Hardly, but all the vaster
Incomprehensible distance
Between them? Why wonder
About the most exotic
Spot to live on earth?
Might as well agonize
Over which side of a crumb
Would be better to butter.
Might as well advise
A retrovirus on the best
Part of a parasitic bacterium
In the last drop of pond water
In a long-neglected petri dish
To parasitize. The difference
Can only matter to life
And its ridiculous descendants,
Which will not outlast this,
Our hungry little planet,
Our whole history, whole
Prehistory, all of life
We know exists at all,
All the only way life exists,
Our speck of dust,
Too small and dark
To reflect much borrowed light
Even far as the nearest star.

Time, or the Lack Thereof

He's a bastard I can't figure out
And ought to leave alone. He's not
Important in any tractable way,
His existence is existential,
Not humanly useful, even though
Humanly made. He's not natural,
Or at least he's not normative,
Or at least he's not gendered
Or relevant in anything but
A pragmatic way to any religion,
Revolution, underground movement
To organize us properly, the better
To save us from ourselves, you know
The sort of thing, the human need
To save humans from humans,
Humans from the world, the world
From humans, exactly the effort
That dooms us all to being led
Around by the hopes by each other,
And thus to the opposite of saved.

I saw a holy piece of digital movie,
Shot in the Frank Church River
Of No Return Wilderness in winter.
A mule deer doe had taken herself
Into frigid river water cold enough
To kill her if she stayed there, but
She stayed there because the wolves
Who were beautiful and hungry
And organized and threatened
With extirpation by furious men
Had trapped her between them
And the bitter rapids. For all
Her valiant swimming, for all
The fear in her eyes, the adrenaline
In her bloodstream, she could not
Avoid them. She struggled, they
Stalked, the filmmaker tracked
The drama, as humans will.
In her end, she was ripped
From the icy water by her throat
And still flailing legs, and torn
And gutted, dying, in the snow.
And that is what enough time
Will do for you, the bastard,
Who lets you film the suffering
Of the hungry in the jaws
Of the hungry of the world.

The filmmaker's colleague
And wife in the wilderness
Had just been diagnosed
The year before with rheumatoid
Arthritis. "My immune system
Has gone haywire," she explained
Of her swollen joints a month
Or two before her husband shot
The wolves devouring the deer,
Just a few weeks before they cut
Their year of filming short because
Her self-consuming joints became
Too awfully inflamed. That bastard.
He wears away, he wears away,
And though he is not real, he's not,
He will not let us be.