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.