The Jewish brothers in Defiance were definitely tough.
One wanted to **** many Germans, the other to save many Jews.
The German soldiers were expendable, unmarried, unremarkable.
Each little death was very little, a little spittle in a big wind.

Fast forward to my friend's son's bar mitzvah or daughter's
coming of age ceremony. Food is abundant, the music frenetic,
the rabbi paid. Gifts generous but not obvious.
Wealth does not obviate death and we know it.

Here too we have natural leaders. Youth basketball coaches,
school principals and, again, interpreters of prayers. When
violence comes to the neighborhood they are who we'll first look to
for governance and guns. Unless have you read The Admirable
      Crichton?

Boredom, boredom conflated with loneliness, may be a sign
of good luck. To live a good length or light year away from man's
bad breath, allergenic perfumes, sickening flatulence and shed hair.
But you are drawn back into the debate about perfection by your own
      *******.

While teaching at the old city jail I have learned this: only meditation
upon the periodic table can save your soul. From itself.
Imagining the world without the self will make you whole.
What else is there to say. Do less until one thing's done well.

After the war the brothers started a small trucking company
in the Bronx. Grateful for such peace, the accounting
was relaxing. They thought back to how they met their wives, naked
before the bombs and bullets. How they lost and found themselves in
      what happened.

Numerous number systems beyond the real:
complex numbers, octonions, omnions which can eat whole black
      holes.
It's axiomatic that your personal history, preferences, how you feel
account for nothing at all.

$30 buys a flock of chickens for a needy family (International Rescue
      Committee)
$29 gets a girl a school uniform (CARE), for $300 you can stock a fish
      pond (Heifer International)
$69 can start a female entrepreneur in the sewing business (Mercy
      Corps)
$5 will buy a bed net that protects a family from mosquitoes (Against
      Malaria)

20th century experiments demonstrated that electrical charge is
      quantized; that is, it comes in
multiples of individual small units called the elementary charge, e,
      approximately equal to 1.602
x 10-19 coulombs (except for particles called quarks which have
      charges that are multiples of
1/3e).

Why has the experimentalism of the avant-garde, which has failed in
      the novel, succeeded in
poetry? Because poetry is always experimental; while the novel, on
      the contrary, by its nature,
cannot be . . . which is to say that experimentalism is synonymous
      with poetry, and that applied
to the novel, it leads simply to the substitution of the novel with
      poetry. --Alberto Moravia

Man made the town, Fibonacci inflated zero to be the wheel
around which the universe turns and language is the soul
walking and talking quietly or going angrily to war.
"Counting is in its very essence magical, if any human practice is at all.
      For numbers are things no one has ever seen or heard or touched."
      As are words.

Joan Didion thought the scariest stanza in all of poetry
begins Row, row, row your boat gently
down the stream. The elements, the material penumbra,
irresolvable for the mortal, readily dissolve in words and numbers.

Accepting aloneness, incomplete solitude, imperfect rest. The garden
wasted, pumpkin patch planted late, potatoes untasted left in ground.

A thousand email addresses, each unique represents a flame of
passion, compassion, desperation or depression. To understand, to
      know's

impossible. It is therefore only reasonable to observe the shadows
on the mountain, the actions of the dreamer which tell us something,

little, nothing of his dream. It's a simple secret shared,
longevity. The half breed John Russell says it right, the

date and place don't matter, dry desert or cold mountainside,
lush bottomland, soulless or hospitable, contagious hospital.

The best laugh's death's, a perfect escape, perfect error, perfect
rest. Their solicitude's unnecessary, grief is temporary, life goes on,

you go under, underemployed, the undertaker's never unemployed.
Forensics prove an ***** with two chambers, ovule adnate to the
      funicle.

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.