I have the shape of the institution.
Each email address is a human.

They are known by their words and actions.
The whole wide world is just a fraction

of all I do not know. Expansion
and contraction, breathe in, out, meditation

on existence, non-existence, creation
and duration. I have no explanation

for fusion, fission, taxonomic relations
or artificial classification.

More I do not know: locomotion
by combustion, electron separation

and transportation via superconduction
which supports the idea of the unified nation.

What girls are like behind their eyes. *******
a useful restraint on overpopulation.

The story of a life, my life, any life, cohesion
must be rationed, conjured, a fiction

about a vexed, tenacious town, its rail station
truck stop, high school, night spots, recreations

the temporary citizens enact visions
dream-like orations, ballets, conflagrations

to in the end receive in annals honorable mention
from family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, institutions.

Not like a figwort but not an aster, either. Could he be a buttercup
with sepals, no petals, but sepals like petals? Alan is a bluebeech,
an ash if his books sell. Quick shake hands. Zach's bald ok, a
magnolia, cone-like fruits a bridge to his Neanderthal father.
When did Ben become a chestnut lover? It's said women are practical
but there's much variation in their leaves, ovaries. Many are older,
stumps, snags for peckers and porcupines, teachers, feeders, seeders.
What did the wood thrush sing
                                                      teachi­ng its young thrush meanings?

Sometimes a mushroom. Did you know such fungi are mostly protein?
Mushrooms could replace meat, and the dead, the dead's feet, white
as pyrola, could replace the living. Well, we worry. Will we, bad luck,
be extinguished. Denizens of convenience stores think who cares, will
I beat the reaper? Hope sempiternally springs. Things rarely clear
as sun among the sundews. Eating huckleberries from your kayak.
What Paulinaq says is live your life and then your death until nothing's
      left.
Then thou shalt be bereft
                                            of the heavy sackcloth of the soil, soul.

Said to Mrs. Buckthorn: good poets imitate, great poets steal.
I think she's more an apple tree. Or pear. Good to eat,
amenable to loving. Rose or Ericaceae, the differences make the
difference. Emerson and Rylin Malone are dead. The dead
are dumb, the dust won't speak. And this deep, dull and dark
blessing's a horizontal reserve. Moonlit. Mr. Hickory is actually a
      yellow birch,
holy and exfoliating. Busy spilling seed on the surface of the snow.
Teaching essay
                       writing, algebra, earth science, branches of government.

I would be a cypress, cedar, branches calligraphy brushes, divorced
      from desert.
It takes a divorce for one to know one knows no one, not only one's
      wife
but your very sons who will always choose the open flower bud.
Good, as they should. Their bones are your bones, strange bones,
      and a
strange selection of their words. They are Uvularia sessifolia (wild
      oats)
and Polygonatum biflorum (Solomon's seal). They outlast the
      holocaust
or not, they're made of matter. These windows need a good
      cleaning.
Leaf-raking. Dusting for ghosts. Ah, sweet peace, perfect rest, there
      are
no ghosts
           adults are trees, teens are shrubs, and children are herbaceous.

I am outside the circle of ***. Just as well. Population control,
the biome's survival instinct. Or I'm old. Look
in mirror, skin over bones. Young girls
on bicycles, running, have that granddaughterly smile for me,
all is safe, well. Much is well.
                                                  The neighborhood safe,
the nation a non-violent helpmate among nations. Until
food shortages, weather crises, nuclear mischief apply.
Police patrols. I was proud of Massachusetts
voting to decriminalize ******. Let's go all the way:
free all non-violent offenders from their cells! Force police
out of cruisers to walk the streets and say hello.
What else can we try:
                                       Open the border with Mexico. Let labor
flow like capital.
                              What has this to do with the self,
the temperamental, fragile self. The one that leaves no footprint
in eternity. No smell.

The wood is stacked for winter.
One way out of the mind's limitations
is through other minds' contemplations.
The books are stacked for winter.

Yet even that cannot satisfy.
Failing to hold still for meditation
my teacher smiles, makes this observation:
The purpose of sitting's not to be satisfied

or satiated. Remain hungry,
cold, uncomfortable and counting enemies.
These, and fear, are our commonalities,
and the discipline of not hitting whenever angry.

You'll appreciate dying
quietly at home. Whichever season has been randomly selected will be
      beautiful as ever
as a molecule of water is to all matter.
"In my life there were always too many things."

If there is no time, only change
the linear becomes circular.
Do not say north or south. You're
within the winter range

of chickadee, hawk, owl and heron.
River grapes, rose hips, the cedar waxwings'
repast. Their talk is my reminding
change outlasts endurance.

Zero.
By which nothing is divided.
No zero
no negative
no opposite
no hope
no Adam, no apple, no marriage, no morning.
No mirror
no knowledge
no God, no soul, no ear lobe, no Iliad, no Odyssey.
No universe
no black hole
no zodiac
no hero
no mission, no omission, no fission, no fusion.
No beanstalk
no tractor
no yellow
no 7:30, no wind, no window, no owl, no one.

In 773, at Al-Mansur's behest, translations were made of the Siddhantas, Indian astronomical treatises dating as far back as 425 B.C.; these versions may have been the vehicles through which the "Arabic" numerals and the zero were brought from India into China and then to the Islamic countries. In 813 the Persian mathematician Khwarizmi used the Hindu numerals in his astronomical tables; about 825 he issued a treatise known in its Latin form as Algoritmi de numero Indorum, Khwarizmi on Numerals of the Indians. After him, in 976, Muhammed ibn Ahmad in his "Keys to the Sciences," remarked that if in a calculation no number appears in the place of tens, a little circle should be used "to keep the rows." This circle the Arabs called sifr. That was the earliest mention of the name sifr that eventually became zero. Italian zefiro already meant "west wind" from Latin and Greek zephyrus. This may have influenced the spelling when transcribing Arabic sifr. The Italian mathematician Fibonacci (c. 1170-1250), who grew up in North Africa and is credited with introducing the decimal system in Europe, used the term zephyrum. This became zefiro in Italian, which was contracted to zero in Venetian.  --Wikipedia

After my father's appointment by his homeland as a state official in the customs house of Bugia for the Pisan merchants who thronged to it, he took charge; and in view of its future usefulness and convenience, had me in my boyhood come to him and there wanted me to devote myself to and be instructed in the study of calculation for some days. There, following my introduction, as a consequence of marvelous instruction in the art, to the nine digits of the Hindus, the knowledge of the art very much appealed to me before all others, and for it I realized that all its aspects were studied in Egypt, Syria, Greece, Sicily, and Provence, with their varying methods; and at these places thereafter, while on business, I pursued my study in depth and learned the give-and-take of disputation. But all this even, and the algorism, as well as the art of Pythagoras, I considered as almost a mistake in respect to the method of the Hindus (Modus Indorum). Therefore, embracing more stringently that method of the Hindus, and taking stricter pains in its study, while adding certain things from my own understanding and inserting also certain things from the niceties of Euclid's geometric art, I have striven to compose this book in its entirety as understandably as I could, dividing it into fifteen chapters. Almost everything which I have introduced I have displayed with exact proof, in order that those further seeking this knowledge, with its pre-eminent method, might be instructed, and further, in order that the Latin people might not be discovered to be without it, as they have been up to now. If I have perchance omitted anything more or less proper or necessary, I beg indulgence, since there is no one who is blameless and utterly provident in all things. The nine Indian figures are: 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1. With these nine figures, and with the sign 0 . . . any number may be written.   --Fibonacci, Leonardo of Pisa

Yogurt.
"I begin the day buying yogurt in a small favorite grocery store."
Not pizza, nor gatorade.

Bananas
although they are imported from afar and grown in monocultures.
Attract fruit flies in August.

Peaches
locally grown with rainwater. I ate all the farmer's peaches alone
stacking them by the railroad tracks.

Water --
rainwater, tap water, distilled water, carbonated water, spring water –--
deep gulps, infinite sips.

Nuts
in moderation, or not, unsalted, raw, replacing chips. His bowl
of filberts, almonds, walnuts quiet weekday mornings.

Edible plant parts --
roots, leaves, stems, flowers, fruit, buds. In olive oil
or butter.

Potatoes --
look online how best to prepare. Baked or fried. With a little
fish or meat.

Tea and honey,
play and prayer. Swimming and running,
talking quietly.

Bread?
Bread's possible as the Bible. Each is liable
to bloat us.

Wine and dandelions.
Dandelion wine's Ray Bradbury's story. Cans in a pantry, books on a
      shelf
to the end of time.

Pasta
we used to call spaghetti, never noodles. I wonder if I can remember
      how to make
grandma's sauce.

Tomatoes --
cherry, grape. Grab God's eye
going by.

5th Ave. was shoulder to shoulder with
hungry lunch-seeking business men
and women. Ricardo unpacked
his horn nervously and a foot cymbal.
Spring, early street season, too cold
for most musicians but he needed money.
His lips kissed the cold metal mouthpiece.

Carrying the saw and the pulaski.
Cutting brush for a fire line high up,
where raptors and ravens fly. No sound
but wind if you could subtract the crew
working and *****, joking during lunch.
A good year it had been sitting in the soil
feeling Ricardo's body on the mountainside.
Mountains moving as good a feeling.

Alone in his town, most neighbors at work,
housecleaning done, Ricardo settled down
with pen to write and ate lunch.
People = chickadees.
Clutch size, substrate, territory, gestation period.
Mating rituals. Use of alcohol and hallucinogens.
Forms of cancer, heart disease. Burial rites, memories.
Creation myths, beliefs for which there is no evidence.
Range: tundra to tropics.