Pocket knives, tape measures.
An extensive collection of coins.

Nails, screws, numerous sizes, and sets
of nail clippers, files, polishes and brushes.

Shoes, always shoes. And dresses.
Shirts and ties. Loud and quiet.

The sick and the dead are forever quiet,
never quite quiet. Our solicitude's unnecessary.

Playing cards, backgammon games,
chess. Every move's a variation on the next.

And so it is with words, numbers,
shapes and sizes. Feet and hands,

knees and eyes. Why and where and how won't matter
once we've divided the bags of clothes

among the poor and destitute. It's not too hard
to laugh too hard. The son and daughter deliver them

and then go home. Letters, wallets, clocks and watches.
Photographs in which the name and face don't match.

This summer, as ever, there's much to do.
But only one or two things I want to do.

I told Alan that, like him, I'm never bored.
But today, like a teenager, I'm both tired and bored.

The long expanse of summer stretches forward. Alan plans
the next 2 years in advance, always moving forward. I can't plan

the next 2 hours, sitting on my ****, undecided whether
to clean the house, make a list of prospective donors, or check the
      5-day weather

forecast. Fires out west, hurricanes south, drought here
in the east where the garden phlox withers and the corn's stunted. We
      hear

prophecies of armageddon, doom, but humans may go on another
      thousand, million or billion years
undaunted. What is that to you. A day alone in your room and a year

are inexplicable. Now and then a vacation, baseball game, night of
      love.
A divorce, a death, a drouth. To survive and prosper we must love

all of it, insect infestations and world wars, cloud curlicues and square
      dances, work
and weekends off. Knowing the unknowable = never knowing how the
      world works.

Last night's Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire, not starring Adam
      *******,
great in the great tradition of Metropolis, Fellini, Children of
      Paradise, Ikiru, Open City.
This is not comedy though it can be funny overhearing people
      thinking,

the randomness of thought, data dots, circles with dots, sadness and
      silliness,
silly sadness, confusion, rarely a clear thought, not one logical
lucid progression. Deep art.

I'd like to do better than my best so far, write something with
      hydroxyapatite
that won't gather dust then become dust a neuron of
sweetness, an early morning bicyclist, a lost ghost or fallen angel

any form from which death might abstain or forego appetite.
Appearing to meander from subject to subject is my practice.
      Looking for solutions to the equations. Learning the changes then
      forgetting them.
The expressions emanating from mortal minds are broken stamens,
      sticky stigmas.

Striving for immortality,
some Spanish philosopher (who looks like Don Quixote)
says he understands and it's alright.

I will read what he wrote and probably agree
but is he immortal? Not his body, but his thoughts.
True, I say, but this also: Not his mind, but his thoughts. Unchanging
      and finite. Put them in a hatbox and pass them on as heirlooms.

To overhear the secret thoughts of others. Sharing and unsharing
      electrons, disrobing
and bathing. That is the purpose of poetry. Gargoyle twice. Did Wim
give each thought its own voice or use the same voice for all thoughts,
      every whim.

It's already hard enough to say anything accurately
without further obfuscating and camouflaging the soul.
The faces in the funeral pews are impassive, impatient
and the dead woman cares not what's said, isn't even present.

The poet gets innumerable do-overs, it's one of man's wonders,
revises his vision of his mother and plays her piano, posthumously.
Why not say it simply? Hers was a comity and a tragedy.
As are ours. And perform the history that surrounds us.

Are caskets boats? The ship of death rides Charon's waves
or perhaps on that solitary day you happily kayak to the huckleberries.
Is the deeper sadness incomplete achievement or never to have tried?
Any attempt to decide this question for others is to badly behave.

The pablum of Christianity, esp. the Catholics, re the after life
must be rejected. It's necessary. To be replaced by community,
perfection of the human project, nature's intelligent partner.
Dusty, sadly habitable houses along the funeral route, shapeless

people crossing themselves when ambulances or hearses pass.
I wanted to describe the sweetness of her life, how she was part
of the problem and part of the solution. How love and evolution
are passed like loaves from person to person down the generations.

Find the humor in the cholera. When my father died
he waved like a surfer riding a wave or a clown riding
an elephant out the circus tent. Mom follows the same law.
The many ways a spear can pierce a warrior's jawbone or armor.

Next to my son's anger
plate tectonics are nothing
to me. His unhappiness
was caused by me.
His purpose and mine
is to catch photons and
store them in our bones.
Time measures change
which continues without self-doubt.
There is no self there.
Therefore, why care about
my son's anger
or my guilt?

Is it possible as Deutsch
suggests that the changes
a self-aware organism can
applying the scientific method
instantiate are innumerable
compared to those of the sun
or any big bang?
Therefore, one must care
about the harm you've done
or the good you'd do.
As Stevens proved
the essential activity's
to imagine the world
then test it against the breeze.

What good is philosophy
without a confession
I sometimes hit
whenever angry
and can **** given
opportunity and permission.
My knowledge of enduring
seeds and periodic
elements is limited
by my impatience.
If I could stop
circle with a dot
breathing
perhaps then I would
understand myself. But
what is there to know about the self?

Long ago, according to Borges,
Shakespeare imposed
a self-imposed silence
on himself. He knew
what, that perfect acts,
accurate and factual,
actually requiring
microscopes and telescopes
for growing small and going far
take you to the very space a
gentle breeze and ridiculous bird
occupy at the end of the mind
at the end of your life.
"Death initiates a complex process by which the human body
      gradually reverts to dust
but minerals may fill the cracks and voids, bonding the
      hydroxyapatite and allowing the bones to join . . ."
in the happy tectonics
of the earth's plates.

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.