There cannot be two identical things in the world. Two
hydrogen atoms
offer infinite locations within their shells for electrons.
Thus, nothing can be definitely eventually known.
All to the good
because golf and chess and basketball, as well as
mathematics, language and genetic recombination
are systems
for discovering the possible (which is more attractive than
the probable)
in what we thought we thought about the sun and clouds.

In Borges' The Parable of the Palace, the poet's attempt
to replicate
the world in a word results in what, surprisingly, is
his termination
personal obliteration a piece of anti-matter that
occupies no known shell in this or any other instantiation.
Got the plot?
We are "moving through some allegory between a City of Hope,
where history
has been abolished, and a City of History, where hope can be slipped in
      only
as contraband."

Actually, the recombinations
which make prediction and intuition fortunately hopeless and each
      individual
an experiment
gone well or wrong, are represented by equations of such complexity
they differ
not at all from the very stars and neurons whose interactions we wish
to count.
The world keeps up or ahead of the collective attention span by
      offering
inexorable expansion
or otherwise rapidly contracting universes, big bang by big crunch.

I like that, I like that I can't know what I'm doing (until it's done).
      Therefore,
faith and understanding
(hope and history) become one absolutely fluid quantum motion, a
      lovely early
Spring morning
a thunderstorm, a terrifying and (for someone) final tornado or
      volcano.
Oh well.
From his earliest published work, Ronnow displays a fascination with
      death,
the world without the self, a ridiculous consideration considering time's
geological pace
6.5 x 1010 sunsets and sunrises over mountains and deserts (for every
merchant, traveler)
themselves rising and setting via magmas, oceans, tectonics, meteors,
      forever.

Do your homework I said to Zach. Why bother was his attitude.
I explained
time is an illusion, an invention man made, there is only change. Birds
know this.
But the calendar and colors, genus and species, bacteria and galaxies,
are the innumerable wonders about which Sophocles said man's
most wonderful
why because we identify or classify birds by the complexity or beauty
of their songs.

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.