The Epic Remains Incomplete

The text is ambiguous:
Rain slants, blown hard but still down,
Always coming down and down,
Even in a wind so strong
Leaves, detritus, whole branches,
Not to say cats and dogs, go
Down as slant-wise as the wet.

These are the facts as the words
Present them. The day was wet
And windy. But was the man
In the office sad to be
Upset by the world? His wife
Who had stopped by earlier

Thought so. Was that what rain meant?

You Do This Because You Think That It's Beautiful

     Having lost his miracle of modem medicine to a stealthy reptile, itself immortal still, the traveler did cry and think that everything was for nothing.

     But here's the amazing thing about him: even then he kept traveling, closing the loop to what he thought was the place he had left and was home.
     When he got there, he bragged to her about what a fine place it was, and it seemed no irony to him to call the stones more ancient than memory, after all that hunger for permanence that had pushed him on this hopeless journey, only to discover the purity of the impermanent.
     "Look!" He boasted, just as he had when he'd first left his City, without recognizing that this was not the place he had left, nor either place home.

In the Lights

The wind was blowing like fuck-all through Hurricane last night,
Setting the holiday decorations trembling
Above the double-edged highway between St. George

And dragon-backed Zion, when the night thought struck me
That I would always be between something trying
To kill another thing trying to kill the thing

Trying to kill something that might be killing me.
I drove on. I enjoy driving on. No reward
Is necessary for me to drive in the night.

But the world was not, was never, will never be
The same for me or for the roadside wildlife dodged
By my hurtling black car. We have escaped, we thought.

Morning exposed the snow, the hard world of silver
And jade, an impossibly detailed pen and ink
Scroll of the dragon in the mountains to unroll,

And down the other edge I rolled as some slid off.
Gem-bright police, paramedic, and tow-truck lights
Outshone dawn's pallid holiday decorations

Every few miles down the out-flung arm of St George.
Once the winds stopped, the clouds bowed down to make it clear
We had not escaped, but were the whole whorl of lights.

The Long Chain

From now back to Thoth is short
Compared to the chain from Thoth
Back to the earliest rock art,

A chain itself short back to
The first name, thunderclap
Equivalent to sex or oxygen,

Or enchained replication,
Or the first stirring of hunger itself,
God of all future desires.

Wait. Go back a few lines.
Thunderclap? Are you making up
Some claptrap about the unholy

Power of culture, of language
Again? You bet. We're all authors
And liars now, thanks to Logos,

Although I have no idea,
Among the small subset I've been
And sifted, how words first folded,

Like their sign-like predecessors,
Into the beautiful spiral chains
Of self-referential self replication.

Everything I can be or sense
Becomes, until my host brain fails,
Another link in our chain of names.

Nerozumim

What if you weren't born younger,
If poems were never enough,
If you found yourself walking,
Painfully, with awkward gait

That betrayed you as bizarre,

Somewhere you didn't know
The language enough to joke

And caper a bit to show

You were harmlessly bizarre,
Maybe even a person worth
Engaging with in small talk?
You would be, then, only old
From the beginning and sad
From disarticulation.

Signaculae

Small tags hang from our bowed heads
Ready to let someone know

We served the emperor, we saw
The shrine, we brought the image

Of the bodhisattva back with us,
And each of us has a real name.

A real name. The reality of names.
There's a conversation topic

For the kind of cocktail party
We haven't survived to attend.

What is the reality of names?
And don't beg off with talk

Of the surreal, the irreal, or
The alternate reality. Don't

Question the question as a dodge.
What is the reality of names?

All words are names, and reverse.
They are the only reality we know

Once we have outlived our bestial,
Wordless infancies, once we are

Dead in any other sense but words,
Echoing after us in other skulls,

Other countries, morituri
Te salutant. We have been

To the shrine and seen the saint,
And we have served the emperor.

Father of Air and Water

Chance was God's assistant
Once, and happy for work,
Content to be valued,
Chief among those employed.

What anthropomorphic
Creature can be creature
Alone forever, not
Wondering what else's left?

Chance rebelled, took a turn
For the worse, carried half
The creatures hard at work,
Then more, most, down to dark,

Near the mouth of chaos,
Where nothing else could go,
Chance alone excepting,
And left them. Chance alone.