As a boy, I'd find my father
sitting in the pitch dark living room,
cigarette aglow, as I'd pass
from my bed to the bathroom.

Did the boy consider, at that late hour,
what plans or fears occupied the man?
Not at all, nor did the man share
with the passing boy what he thought.

Now he's gone. Back from that ****
and many another, I can well imagine
the mystery I must be to my son.
Has much changed but the date and where the man fought?

Most men, most times, abide in peace,
leastwise not always angry or afraid
they cannot save their children from the gas
or the abyss about which God lied.

Yet, when the boy dreams through the room
in the movement of his body there's a sleepiness
to make the man weep for himself, his father
and the boy who comes to the darkness unafraid.

The teacher dies having made her small contribution
to the colonization of other planets by motivating
a boy who would otherwise be a coal miner to become
a rocket engineer.
                                  Throughout the nation teachers
are sending their prize pupils through the funnel
flask to produce technology from pure science.
The mother and father are good, disciplined, god-
fearing people who stand firm against dissolution
and chaos. They hold their clod of soil in place
and others do the same to create the landscape
of community.
                            Communities across the nation
and the world produce the many to support the few
who make the tools and do the math to colonize
the planets. Once the secret of warp speed is
discovered, expansion of the species is
limitless.
                   Perhaps learning Sidewinder, playing it
imperfectly, is not a direct contribution to destiny.
What can I say. Please yourself. So
insignificant no one notices or cares. Yet
some stories may be told for centuries. Homer,
Shakespeare, Bible.
                                   It takes constantly renewed
consciousness to persevere, retell the stories and
interpret lessons. You go, girl.

For the accountant, the librarian, on this cold day
there is no revelation. He will go his own way
to the roar of the tinnitus in his ears.
About our war what is there to say. Yesterday
a flock of bluebirds was the only color in the woods.
Have they arrived too early for their good?
Of Judith and Inanna I have Korf's fears.

Inanna is generous, Judith is dangerous.
On each the wise elders depend for sustenance,
protection. Agriculture is ******
and wars end when men remember *******.
To savor the young woman's thighs and the old one's food,
to water her womb and cut her wood.
Is this not what's real, the actual, the animal?

The women I have known were bluebirds and crows, such
nuthatches, cardinals, robins, an occasional thrush.
They did not consider their bodies holy,
they found my seduction easy. What good luck
on the bed, in the light of the land, in our youth.
Our enemy eventually becomes our brother,
his misery lifted by coming to her city.

RNA or DNA polymerase, an enzyme, protein, attracted to
promoter molecules in the polypeptide chain causing a zipper
motion and transcription of the code, a duplication of codons,
introns and exons, and so it goes, sharing and unsharing electrons.

These attractions and repulsions, coming near and going far
in nanounits or light years, fail to explain things permanently
but make possible the technology to live long and well, with
      personality.
It is a form of governance, the governance of elements, elements are
      now

apparently our gods. Learn all you can about their laws, their names,
their needs, read their poems. Only the mentally unusually sound
      would,
given this knowledge, agree to the process of mitosis and fertilization.
      However,
organisms go round then senseless via involuntary respiration.
      Therefore, Pilot Oh Pilot Me.

“There’s nothing you wish for that won’t be yours
        if you stay alive.”  --Beowulf

Winter has arrived and the wind cuts through
the parking lot under the el in the Bronx,
streets stretch out in their directions, events
in their mere chronology have no relation.
Old friends face certain dissolution
with perplexity, comity and humor,
look with gay eyes on their future
in a forest or a city, someplace.
Snow outside, despair inside. Homelessness.
Raccoon tracks cross the soul. Prostatectomy.
Winter mix. Don’t relax. The difficult
dangerous season when weak creatures die
and the strong barely survive. Leave me alone
with autumn, an autumn like last autumn.
Don’t stand around my bed, I won’t be in it.

Jack’s in jail. His panic attacks are like
an AI on automatic pilot
who wants to live, just like the rest of us
under the eye of eternity or
running in new snow, loving that feeling.
Some people go dancing in fishnet stockings.
Effortless mastery, success without practice.
Fractals without chemistry. Do the small
things first, clean the house and bless the guests.
Sick of Krshna, sick of salad, sick of self.
Sick of meditation. As I lay dying
the full moon’s rising. My existence
is indivisible from the wry Creator’s.
I like the old Rhymer, his smile resplendent.
It’s Death, not the Jewish king, in your rose garden.

I ply my arts all day alone. All I have
is all I do not know. The past isn’t dead
it never even happened. Learn the changes
then forget them. Keep on learning and re-
learning them. Down the steep and icy trail
through hail and storm. Take into eternity
my hail and farewell. We’re living in the
Anthropocene. Indestructible garbage.
Bulldozed landscape. Big Brother, dead father.
***** of the tiger.  Getting thought to twitch
the prosthetic. Mischievous, malevolent,
militant thistles. Or just plain polite
Americans, afraid to get shot.
Bump bump bump down the igneous rocks of life,
take the boulders two at a time down.

Old-timers bagging groceries, low social
security for the security guard.
Situps, pushups, fix yr brakes, fix yr leaks.
I know what’s gonna happen before it happens.
Polar bear mugs wino exhausted by that earlier,
irritating, constant need to survive.
Surrounded by history, neither seen nor heard
from again. And a deaf mute in a pear tree.
If it’s human, nothing’s wasted. Pasted
into a big wet kiss or posted
on the internet. Stolen from the pockets
of the dead, burgled from living memory.
Most art is dispensable, ***** and *****,
vaginal lubrication, prostate enlargement,
the unknown, anonymous man named me.

I’ve been wrong before and I may be wrong now.
Things fall apart. Or maybe not. Maybe
it’ll all hold together 10,000 years more
after all we’ve observed a galaxy born
13 billion years ago, a faint red blur,
and microbe partnerships on the ocean floor.
The good life’s all around us smiling
girls on bicycles, dogs on leashes,
equality is mandatory.
Sweet solitude and privacy, quiet
sitting spot, write a little, read a lot.
Tip generously, gratuitously,
like good luck. Haircut, cabride, dinnerout,
to eat a continent is not so strange.
Does Jack even exist? I doubt it but

the class of transformations that could happen
spontaneously in the absence of knowledge
is negligibly small compared with the class
that could be effected artificially by
intelligent beings, aliens in the bleachers.
Japanese knotweed also known as kudzu.
The Chinese navy also known as t’ai chi.
Water shortages. War and wildfire.
What you’re scared of and what you love. Contracts
and deliverables. Hate speech, fate.
Humor or ardor, I can’t decide.
Dad’s steel-toed boots. Leaves, flowers, fruits.
Things are said, mistakes are made. I’m driving
pontificating on geopolitics
when an archangel flies into the windshield!

Lost my timepiece, lost my metronome.
Well, music is a manufactured crisis.
Caloric restrictions, control your addictions,
desire to be famous, propensity for violence.
The profusion of species contents me.
Wilderness comes back strong as cactuses,
chestnuts, coral. No more missile crises.
Eat less, an empty belly’s holy.
Horselum, bridelum, ridelum,
into the fray! World order—not my problem.
Only meditation can save your soul,
should there be such a thing. There are actual people
half woman half man running past me
and dream people in movies half language
half light. Or they lie under polished stones
embossed with actual photos of themselves.

Learning who you actually are is difficult
as sitting still 10 minutes w/o a thought or want.
To get lucky you gotta be careful first.
Knowledge of death without dying =
early retirement. Counting your blessings,
a healthy activity. No solution
to death’s finality, and such a blessing
awaits me, too. If you’re suicidal
they call the cops. The audience is full of glee.
Watres pypyng hoot. Chinese characters. Quantum guesses.
Most failures, and most successes, are in our future.
I embrace wild roots and run through streets
with arm around my girl. Inmate #427443.
Poetry and surgery—they go together
like a horse and buggy. Cheerful as a flock
of chickadees. Looking for a lost horse,
I hear Appalachian Spring!

Look one way, from another come the heart’s
missed beats. Much better to look slowly,
labor for the success and happiness
of others, even the old and frayed.
Look it up. There is no death, just perfect rest.
Look more closely. It will be gone in a few days!
First entertain, then enlighten if you can.
Is it stress? Yes. Tired of death? It’s what it is.
Let’s play sports, have ***, live a wonderful life,
give generously. If you see a hawk on a bough
at field’s edge beyond the corner you should have
turned, maybe it’s a sign to go on, alone.
No body, no soul. No mirror, no black hole.
No mission, no hero. No applause, no noise.
No experience, no nonsense. If words can
be arranged in any order can they be
of any use in foreign policy?

Disappointed, didn’t get what was wanted.
Forget me not, is that all I want?
A catbird account, a mockingbird account
and an owl account. Then, and only then,
nothing’s missing and nothing’s left over.
Jail or zen mountain monastery
hiphop artist hypnotist bebop trumpeter
unknown soldier black bear bad bladder
ice cold beer poker player wry Creator.
If not one way, then another. Otherwise
give me your 5-10 best hiphop artists. Can
they take the sting out of life like bluegrass, jazz?
Mimics, woodpeckers, sing-songers, hawks,
chippers and trillers, whistlers, name-sayers,
thrushes, owls and a dove, high pitchers,
wood warblers and a word-warbling wren.
Unusual vocalizations.

We have hope that everyone alive is
essential, consequential. The commonplace
and everyday is sanctified. Nothing else
special need be done but stay alive.
Don’t lose passport, don’t be late to airport.
Insects are pollinators, insects are us.
Romance without finance is a nuisance.
November, however, is sweet, sunshine
through bare trees, dry brown leaves companionably
visiting among the dead. When middle school lets out
at the periapsis of Earth’s orbit
that’s the face of joy. Each leaf out and Jack
in his boxers. If you run over a chipmunk,
a groundhog or a skunk, say a short prayer.
One can’t help being here, queynt.

I live in a state so blue there’s nothing I can do
to change man’s trajectory and if I could
what angle of re-entry or ascent
would I choose? Grace is what we get
no matter what. Come the tired end of day
Jack thinks why not waste time watching tv
but the next day he has a hangover
like Ernest Hemingway or **** Jagger.
Your soul is immortal. It exists outside
of time. It has no beginning and no end.
If you cannot accept this, forget it all,
do not even begin. It all goes into
the same church service and comes out babbling
for God to appear. The shorter the service
the better, less passion, more resistance. Joy
may outlast the holocaust. Get it while it lasts.

The material world is reality, my friend.
Reality is not always what we’re after.
I like Jack’s confidence, that working the problem
will result in better outcomes than guessing.
Confidence is the feeling you have
before you understand the situation.
A hawk hunting or just floating waiting
for inspiration, a heron rowing east,
an owl’s quiet hoot even simpler than
the pentatonic bamboo flute.
What’s not to like? Ice cream, yogurt, profit, tofu.
Mosquitoes this summer are relentless,
heat and humidity, merciless.
Ice will ice those little *******.
Killing time before it kills me. Ha ha.

Whatever forever. Poetry is plumbing
your unhappiness habit until you reach joy.
As I think of things to do I do them.
Thing by thing I get things done. I think
that’s how my father and his father did things, too.
“Away up high in the Sierry Petes
where the yeller pines grow tall, Ol’ Sandy Bob
an’ Buster Jig had a rodeer camp last fall.”
It is the older man’s responsibility
to protect, not as a hard-charging archangel,
Jack’s joints couldn’t stand it, or hero
but as a rational participant,
cool, caring and completely zeroed in.
Culture or religion is an answer to
the problem of what to do and why do it
when your cancer makes poetry from
losing the argument with yourself.

To die spiritually in the hot sun
and the body go on climbing, haunted,
hunted, nature’s intelligent partner.
People are the element I live in, or else.
Call for the elevator. Wait for the el.
Snow on the Sonoran, each saguaro
wearing a white yarmulke. Creosote
smell as snow melts, ocotillo buds out.
Man needs help from every creature born.
The blackbird contains death but it’s bigger than death.
It’s more like God but an ironical god.
Smaller and funnier than God, impossible
to regard directly, gotta look sideways,
aim binoculars left, right, up, down—
missing every time. There’s nothing you wish for
that won’t be yours if you stay alive.

Dear Robert
                I'm enclosing the warranty
                                 for your shaver In case
anything should happen
                I've circled the address
                                 where to bring it

Dad still isn't feeling
                well and is going
                                 this week to the doctor I can't
imagine
                what can be wrong -
                                 but I'm really getting concerned

Oh!
                by the way
                                 did you mail
that letter
                to the bank
                                 I hope
so

Today
                we are going to a wake
                                 for Phyllis Spina.
She died
                on Saturday -
                                 acute leukemia.

Your brothers are fine
                they're off -
                                 Yom Kippur
All else is
                okay Love
                                 Mom

I waited too long
to mow my lawn
biopsy my lung
yet lived long enough, anon,
however long is long.
Whatever. It's not wrong
to count along
while busy living. Sing
and stay strong
absorb the sun's photons
and store them in your bones.

Those bones
outlast slights and spurns
are white as lightning and strong
as sticks and stones.
Inside is one's
spirit, soul, the nameless one
the one that's never known.
It has no cell phone
can't communicate or even moan.
Therefore. Why complain?
Have some fun.

Soon
I'll be undone
underground
my garden burned down.
So what. John Donne
died and so did Milton.
Emerson too, and Whitman.
Get over it. Vote. Love. When
the train comes in the station
whistle with it, wish on
stars with passion
or careful hesitation.
Anything's fine, within reason.

Season by season
things get done.
Algebra and calculus, Malcolm X, George Washington.
No taxation
without representation.
A gun
in every den.
People will be governed
one way or another, by a king
or trusted friend. Corporation.
Men
are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than
to right themselves by abolishing the Evils to which they are        
      resigned.

I'm too young
to die! I cry. My generation
cannot outrun the sun
but I want to see what happens
next, a tsunami or tornado, rain
and wind beyond our comprehension
hit in the head by speeding debris, irony
of ironies! plastic contraptions,
rotting computers and yogurt cups, pain
in the baby! Moment's
notice. None,
I notice, live long
enough to see the end. Amen. A million

years hence
human sense
has so modified and mutated under
other moons
we share one mind
and everything's remembered by everyone.
Look it up. There is no death, just perfect rest. A perfect tan
is possible, and work is fun.
I'm going there when I pass on
because souls will travel at warp speeds, using nuclear fusion.
About suffering, religion
was right (and wrong) all along.

From marble and granite to steel and glass,
we were discussing Rhina Espaillat’s On the Avenue in class,
was it 1950s or 1980s NYC and were the fifties
the city’s halcyon days or is it now, the 2020s,
the boroughs teeming with immigrants
from the round earth’s imagined corners,
Hasidim and Muslim, Haitian and Russian, as we
Italians and Irish in an earlier era were. Everything will
be ok or not, the recombinations which make
prediction and intuition fortunately hopeless
and each individual an experiment gone well or wrong.
On the avenue God speaks by spewing
toy and clothing stores, breakdancers and ice skaters,
the Brooklyn Navy Yard seen from the Brooklyn Bridge,
the skyline admired when my car broke down on the Triborough Bridge.
The numbers of us overwhelm, there exist powers
overwhelming for the human body and mind.
I don’t mind but I can’t make sense of it.
Gandhi said What you do may not seem important
but it is very important that you do it. By that what is meant?
Linda said Why does God always have to be a man?
I said He could be a she but She’s probably really
a Tyrannosaurus rex. I like to be in America!

What would be the point, in this first winter snow, of going
back to several of the women whose bodies I have known
and wondering what they thought about all these intervening
years. Inevitably it is their children, illnesses and death.
Their art, their work, community. How their words
enter your ears and stay forever! Rib cage and knee.
How we lay on the beds in our youth and late afternoon light.

At no point will the snow and bare trees stop being
interesting to me. Seven loads of apples went into Jim Kelly's
cider press Saturday afternoon. A paragraph from Wendell
Berry's recent essay was read. Those who felt part of that
      place
were embraced. Fields of pumpkins, corn to the west
and east. But I remember winter nights hurrying under
elevated subway, Bronx. Alone, unknown, I did not exist.

The point being maybe now I don't exist anymore than in
      Afghanistan.
A land to be admired, like all lands. How lovely the harsh
mountains and deserts, indigenous plants and people, adapted
ungulates, carnivorous mammals. What is left of them after
10,000 years of human history. Much has been made of the
      snow
leopard, by Peter Mathiessen. The city of Kabul is
      understandable
using the very same analysis Jane Jacobs learned from New
      York City.

At this point I would have to overcome a deepening solitude,
the snow of it falling about my ears, to hear their cries and joys
and understand thanksgiving. Has my father gone to his grave
without saying his one essential thing? He has said it, said it
in war and in preparing boys for war, and in peace and his
      wife.
Have my lovers gone to their graves already or are they still
in life? I have heard a random, strange selection of their
      words.

Organization man. In the best sense
creating the environment in which experiments
can be savored and remembered.

Then there is the world of interlocked
organizations. A world of missions and contracts
finely tuned and binding.

Is the formation of associations
as instinctual as nesting and gestation?
A leader may be one who asks a question.

Or may be one imposing order.
Imposed through consensus and broad shoulders.
Waits, watches, acts his part.

I was impressed by the list of distinguished senators
from Vermont. He placed himself among men,
orators, imperfect, in history.

We march forward, imperfect in our justice
and compassion. Overriding logic with conscience
sometimes, not often, when it counts.

And mercy. A seemingly irrational, total
abnegation of the markets, rules of war, law.
Good to be so flawed.

Purposes as incomprehensible and wonderful as these purposes
Either you had no purpose or the purpose is beyond the end
The purpose of sitting is not to be satisfied or satiated

Because the timepiece not only serves a purpose, it is adapted to that
      purpose
Except it was a secret purpose
The world is a mental activity, a dream of souls, without foundation,
      purpose, weight or shape

People in collective idleness are even more repellent than when purpose
      motivates them
God, glass, my townspeople! For what purpose?
His purpose and mine is to catch photons and store them in our bones

Lately, as have you, I have thought about our war and its purpose
To have a season for every purpose, Ecclesiastes was right about that
Names of plants, languages of mammals, purposes of insects, placement
      of rocks

My friend who is counselor to kings and presidents never lacks purpose
To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Not to say there is no purpose necessarily, just I don’t immediately get it

Stately purposes, valor in battle, glorious annals of army and fleet, death
      for the right cause
Use of violence by the local militia for a limited purpose, protect the
      young from the janjaweed, the crop from the ****
The knight, the penitent misses last assessment of life’s purpose,
      babbling for God to appear

I mean your entire purpose should be living, you must take living
       seriously
Sleep with a purpose
Or lose all purpose beyond ******, child *** and food hoarding

Counting is associated with primitive forms of writing, that is the
       purpose of poetry
The purpose of school is to introduce us to the world’s innumerable
       wonders
Their corners sharp, their lines exact, as if their purpose was to show
       the plane geometry of snow

That’s when everything becomes clear, purpose v. purposelessness
       matters less
Lonely physics, national purpose
This then is the purpose of purposelessness (and of eating less)!

We will live with the question What was our purpose?
If we are not at home in the world, contributing purpose, we lose our
       desire to stay here—and we die
The men who left the machine have started their own business, a new
       endeavor by which they will keep warm and purposeful

You go the way of an unknown soldier, unable to assess the purpose of
       the battle
Let Greece then know my purpose I retain, nor vex with new treaties my
       peace in vain
And shake the purpose of my soul no more

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.

5 a.m. Souls ascend
from earth’s vale
of fears. Others wait
don’t give up yet.
Nothing I can do about that.

Not is my name known
but am I a good man.
That goes for John, too
a man of faith
who wants what God wants.

What about hate
in the streets. What do white
people want?
I see no need
to pull down statues of General Lee

instead put him side by side
and head to head
with Martin Luther King,
Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi.
Also kids who cops shot dead.

Meanwhile on the macro
economic and political scale
leviathans (peoples, nations)
drift toward perpetual
armageddon or peaceful solutions.

We don’t know which
and John will be gone
before it matters
except to his children
and, of course, ours.

What I have done
to change man’s trajectory,
for better or worse, remains
anonymous. Every action
meets an equal and impassable mountain.

Passion
is its own predicament.
Cast a cold eye and guess.
The clouds go, nevertheless,
in their direction.

I can't blame the teenage girl for being forward,
then passive aggressive. It shouldn't make one angry;
she has her interests and that which bores her.

Or the adolescent boy for being antsy, a little loopy
and aloof. Under that hat he wants to be good,
is deeply disappointed with the world (and the food).

Robert Francis: the finest poet no one reads.
We care not. Such prisms of philosophy need
no acknowledgment. The catamount is only believed

to be extinct. The wildlife tree, a mere bole,
deep in the forest, far off the road, when it falls
takes many squirrel turbines and spider spans down with it.

Noon, Julian has nothing much to do
and likes it that way. That way nothing much gets done today.
Every man, every tree, lives with disabilities.

Crooked finger, rotten bole, under stars, over soils.
The I in my old poems is no longer me. The one
in this one will be someone else soon.

Wherever peaches grow I go and pick 'em.
When they get ripe I try and swipe 'em.
The farmer runs out with a shotgun and wonders where's the
      varmint gone?
I'm hiding by the railroad tracks stacking the peaches I've
      found.

Then a freight train about a mile long rolls by hauling a bucket
      of rain.
I hop aboard while beautiful clouds gather to the north.
I put my peaches in the bucket and lug it to a hidden part of
      the train.
The rain begins, the night looms in, it's summer and it's
      thoughts and warm.

To the clacking rumble and the patter I close my eyes and
      dream.
An earthquake swallows up the people who wear horrible
      masks of fright as their daily tasks are trampled.
In a favorite movie theater an illumined lady puts her hand in
      mine, warm mouths, breath, skin, hair wing-soft, whole
      bodies, wind, bare.
I open my eyes at sunrise there's a steady glow of light
      around.

If you can believe in God, you can believe the mountains go
      from purple to green.
While the last partier meanders home to bed the first farmer is
      up to milk his bread.
Fruit of the world ripens audibly and cities make a silent,
      distant sound.
Lonely guy stretches, rubs his eyes, pees out a passing train,
      has a breakfast of peaches and rainwater.

While waiting but not watching for the sun to set, perhaps the bullfrogs are creating the shadows with their croaks, my friend screams out because he has been bitten by a fly. He is not quiet enough so the flies obtain special pleasure from teasing him. Meanwhile bluebirds skirt the lake surface like the most perfectly designed fighter planes in twos or threes and argue rising up on their tails into the air. While insects prey upon and tease the bare flesh and blood of we humans, they fear the silent violence, the sudden huge presences of these family birds.

            A larva with a leaf tip for a cocoon descends a white birch by a long thread. We free ourselves from our writings to observe phenomenon. Then thinking about dinner. The flight of J. Krishnamurti, the eagle guru says even artists (after physicists and mathematicians) may penetrate the unknown if not too absorbed in their own emotions and imaginations. We common people too who loving our wives can love everyone.

            What eyesight the bluebirds have to swoop the lake from shore for a flying insect or descend from fifty feet on a thin straw grass and return to chew absent-mindedly! Just fun having song sung among men. As for the syntax, a daisy could swing it unthinking and coast. Along the beehive rocks ants crawl on connecting interlacing instructions. All around us and inside too as if stars were unseen but present it's true. So a man desires breakfast with his lady; could it be more amusing, material or smell?

            As the eyesun descends below spun clouds, spirit or the eagle or the drum? Round. The dialectic obscure couldn't be more better said. So round and serious. To love everyone with clearer vision than a bluebird or a lake is to transcend the innocence of insect and take flight action and feed the babies of fate. Phew! Dinner outside the cocoon. I brought myself a student upon the hill or mountain and said to myself I said Obo rebop in summer sweater and what less overweight can carry test uphill so slow? Presently, reformed, informed by the bluebird's eagle spirit, clear cleanhead, I return coagulating mightily ideas the bites of insects ow! to breakfast home and everywhere unknown. Hearing bird with clear conscience echo make.

Yr cancer is inevitable as love.
You didn't last forever. The pain
wasn't the main problem, unconsciousness
was. Dad cannot see or hear,
the walls of the house contain just dust,
that's it, and if he shows up as a ghost
I'm lost, all my theories false.

Dr. Cherry certified my cancer as a cyst.
A drupe, a stone, a past mistake.
I left the examining room elated,
and have gone on to conflate my happiness,
relief, with that of the whole village.
The message is: to the east and west, the self
which is carried around as a pound of garbage.

"I like to be kissed before I'm ******."
And what is poetry anyway. Its role,
local and global. Well, I for one have no
friends or family sufficiently interested
to come to a reading. Don't take offense,
we prefer novels, and especially movies,

coffee, sugar, oil, parrots, ponies, you
name it. Seven goes to six. Prices
bust and burst, but life (and school) goes
on, or whatnot. Atomic bubble gum. Protein computer.
Grass roof. Sun spot. Perfect error.
In the mirror where everybody hides the body.

Finally, I have been going for walks, girls
with protection dogs, black flies in my eyes.
Peace of noon, bird siesta. August returns,
the snow flies. Did you survive summer,
beat the reaper? I hope so, and yr fern allies.
Perfect rest is priceless, paradise.

Peter has gotten a new job
as a bookstore clerk from one to ten
down by the river
in a sunny little house.
I've come to visit and I'm thumbing through
a book of poems
by Robinson Jeffers' brother.
Incoherent but
more interesting than this.

Out of the river rises a *** of a blob
dripping with water and begging a yen.
While he shivers
I call him a louse
and say This isn't Nippon, you!
So off he roams
probably back to his mother.
He was a nut
because he wasn't a fish.

An old man remembers what he has been
yet the details are unimportant. Then
the outline disappears, and the meaning.

Good, I can die or go to work, be wise
or a ****. Rich or poor, the wind and rain
wear us away and it's o.k.

Ask what matters, that
question. Feeling the seasons, wearing a hat,
loving your woman, a good ****.

Children born. Two cells meet, multiply,
spiral into fetus. The mother is amazed:
an intelligence apart from herself.

The violent rainstorm kept me awake
although the lightning was still far away.
I lay in my bed and listened naked.

Pokeweed waits
underground, snow crusts
small greenish white flowers, leaves entire
and alternate, black berries
poisonous, ripe late.

Waits patiently past February
when the sun stays up in the sky more than January
and six more months after that
past the peepers keeping watch
for every passing dog or truck.

We await our time
or have had it, or are having it.
Body in slow, not precipitous, decline.
Expend ourselves on work and wine.
Percent of budget expended, year to date.

I heard a redwing this morning
who might have been choosing a nest site
holding the spot against chevrons from the south.
Choosing the best site, away from predators, near water,
in sight of seed and buds.

It happens that when the pokeweed fruit pokes out
the chicks were born, the fledglings flown
leaves already leathery
and the weather has the faintest
hint of January's cold snow hold.

Have I ever been profoundly lost? Yes. Railroad tracks and a river wide as the Amazon, yet lost. Living in the intense sunshine of northern New York summer, but lost in the shade of a gazebo. And here? Here I am enclosed in a tomb of porcelain machinery. With another winter passing its calling card in at the window. The warm steam no longer cutting the rough edge. Wearing wool sweater nights. The freedom of summer gone and only one ****. What a nightmare, what a strange dream, life on planet, winter all around.

            A system, they call it a system. I call it an evolved anarchy. Repetition, never. What do I know. Repetition, every two thousand years. Coming of a frost, coming of a fire. When nature proves furious beyond remembrance. Polar bear mugs wino.

                               --------------------------------------

                         ­               *******

                            Tall, attractive, talented WM, 31,
                            trumpet player, takes pleasure in
                            performing ******* with clean
                            attractive women. Age, race, marital
                            status no object. All replies answered.

            Here is where it started, amusing myself in an undisciplined manner in the playpen. Being rude when interrupted. Height of bad taste hitting the wall, what's he talking about. Marlowe went to bed. He had a headache. Used an empty bottle for a teddy bear/sap. In the middle of the night, three secret men approached the rock he slept under. They did not see him there, the fire had long ago gone out. But they'd seen it across the valley, and tried to estimate. They were close.

            What do I care. They did this, he did that, they did this and this and that. He used his feet, took off his shoes. It mauled him to death in two minutes of the first round. Would have been better for him if it happened faster. Never got his knife out of his pocket. But he lived, with one eye after that.

                               --------------------------------------

                   What do you do with a drunken sailor early
                               in the morning?
                   You pull that sailor out of bed by his hairy
                               moorings.

            Why should anybody believe this, this tiresome outpouring of old moans and groans, grumbles about loneliness of life and dominance of telephone. This gamble on print, above the spoken, sung word. The meditative call to inhabitants of planet to kneel woefully and pray. No, to chant as if the planet were mending.

            Mending rhymes with ending, why not. And television, radio appreciated. Drugs and *****, jagged bent faces, black wet rock. The mantle of moss ripped away. Period. Amen to men. Absolute magical ripcord.

All conflicts are resolved via coercion, implied or applied,
of the dominant party over the denied (Niebuhr).
Not news at the 2nd St. jail. But the Constitution
provides for moderation, persuasion and elections
as way stations, stopgaps, safe havens before the decision's taken
to go to war. Civil war, daily low intensity warfare is unavoidable
      when
chambers of commerce and large corporations wrestle naked
and who are the 1% controlling 25% of the wealth, name names,
hold a french revolution over it. This space I write from's
safe, comfortable but what about a Taco Bell cashier with 4 kids x 3
      men
who came and went when they found how human her bleeding and
      complaining was, how voluble, not faked.

This obtains when you consider Niebuhr: "That the limitations of the human imagination, the easy subservience of reason to prejudice and passion, and the consequent persistence of irrational egoism, particularly in group behavior, make social conflict an inevitability in human history, probably to its very end." (emphasis mine)

                         respiratory tract infection, hunger pains

Popper drops by: "Their story that democracy is not to last forever is as true, and as little to the point, as the assertion that human reason is not to last forever, since only democracy provides an institutional framework that permits reform without violence, and so the use of reason in political matters. It is clear that this attitude must lead to a rejection of the applicability of science or of reason to the problems of social life - and ultimately to a doctrine of power, of ******* and submission."

                                           split lip, fever blister

Cynical nihilist Niebuhr: "Educators who emphasize the pliability of human nature, social and psychological scientists who dream of 'socializing' man and religious idealists who strive to increase the sense of moral responsibility, can serve a very useful function in society in humanizing individuals within an established social system and in purging the relations of individuals of as much egoism as possible. In dealing with the problems and necessities of radical social change they are almost invariably confusing in their counsels because they are not conscious of the limitations in human nature which finally frustrate their efforts. So persistent are the moralistic illusions about politics in the middle-class world, that any emphasis upon the second point will probably impress the average reader as unduly cynical. In America our contemporary culture is still pretty firmly enmeshed in the illusions and sentimentalities of the Age of Reason."

                                            terror, runny nose

An apoplectic Popper: "And being a typical historicist, he accepts the judgment of history as a moral one; for [Heraclitus] holds that the outcome of war is always just: 'War is the father and king of all things. It proves some to be gods and others to be mere men, turning these into slaves and the former into masters . . . One must know that war is universal, and that justice -- the lawsuit -- is strife, and that all things develop through strife and by necessity.'"

                                 lonely physics, national purpose

Poppa Popper proceeds: "Sweeping historical prophecies are entirely beyond the scope of scientific method. The future depends on ourselves, and we do not depend on any historical necessity. This prophetic wisdom is harmful, the metaphysics of history impede the application of the piecemeal methods of science to the problems of social reform. We may become the makers of our fate when we have ceased to pose as its prophets."

                                    fatal heart attack, fatty acids

Reinhold, while drinking orange juice: "Conflict is inevitable, and in this conflict power must be challenged by power. Since political conflict, at least in times when controversies have not reached the point of crisis, is carried on by the threat, rather than the actual use, of force, it is always easy for the casual or superficial observer to overestimate the moral and rational factors, and to remain oblivious to the covert types of coercion and force which are used in the conflict."

                                          alphabugs, antibiotics

Doc Wheeler runs the 2nd St. jail keeping the High School Dropout
      Prevention Program
breathing. The Sheriff's Dept. provides guards, a metal detector, one
      man with a gun (encased),
door buzzer (in out), sign in sheet, breakfast and lunch. None too
      clean, not too tidy.

Niebuhr goes nuts: "All social cooperation on a larger scale than the most intimate social group requires a measure of coercion. While no state can maintain its unity purely by coercion neither can it preserve itself without coercion. The inability of human beings to transcend their own interests sufficiently to envisage the interests of their fellow men as clearly as they do their own makes force an inevitable part of the process of social cohesion."

                                 3 hots and a cot, circle with a dot

Popper replies: "Instead of aiming and finding what a thing 'really' is, and defining its 'true nature,' science aims at describing how a thing behaves in various circumstances and especially whether there are any regularities in its behavior. It sees in our language, and especially in those of its rules which distinguish properly constructed sentences and inferences from a mere heap of words, the great instrument of scientific description, not as names of essences. To those philosophers who tell him that before having answered the 'what is' question he cannot hope to give an exact answer to any of the 'how' questions, the scientist will reply, if at all, by pointing out that he prefers that modest degree of exactness which he can achieve by his methods to the pretentious muddle which they have achieved by theirs."

            "when making an axe handle, the pattern is not far off"

Niebuhr nods: "The problem which society faces is clearly one of reducing force by increasing the factors which make for a moral and rational adjustment of life to life; of bringing such force as is still necessary under responsibility of the whole of society; of destroying the kind of power which cannot be made socially responsible; and of bringing forces of moral self-restraint to bear upon types of power which can never be brought completely under social control."

       Popper and Niebuhr were married yesterday at the 2nd St. jail
                      under the federal Freedom of Marriage Act

Problems many of which are not getting solved
not because I'm not resolved but because I delay
to savor the day, the moon and the season
which is why I'm a non-person under the eye of eternity.

Except for my unpaid bills. And iambic pentameter.
Aaron fails English. Is there summer school?
What an *******! I want to slug him, but also
his teacher, Mr. Fisher, who's probably

a nice guy, just doing his job and raising a family.
Then there's the catheter from my last surgery
I was so sick I thought I was dying. The out of network
pathologist and radiologist have declined my insurance

and charged me to the hilt. Like I had a choice
face up in the emergency room. Facing doom, you don't ask questions.
Now that I've rejoined the living I've got to raise a million bucks
to save organic farms and endangered species I'll never see.

Perhaps none of this matters and chanting's the answer, Buddhist
      precepts,
or as Dad would say This too shall pass.
Life is a back and forth game but baseball is zen meditation,
you're in right field, nothing's happening, nothing's gonna happen,

but you can't let your attention wander for one second.
I should clean and oil my trumpet for Saturday's gig
or the valves will stick. And leave early enough
not to get stuck in traffic. Other lives, other quilts.

A guy who takes the subway to a dead metal desk
and the boss who fires him with the cold hard eyes
of one who accepts the rules entirely. Actually
we're fortunate to have rules because otherwise

child soldiers armed with AK-47s would be shooting up
the village and setting fire to our thatched roofs.
Instead, under the rule of law, when snow falls
even old roofs look like problems with proofs.

Prose is unpretentious, that's its attraction. Avoids bombast of line breaks but forgoes -- what -- perfect rest. Anyway today, a November day in February, no chance getting rest with the poor clay I'm made from.

With my mother this weekend, her dementia proceeding according to what plan. Saturday the kind of day I never have. Actually read three stories by Updike. One extraordinary -- Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth -- which I chose from his Complete through 1975 for the reference to Macbeth and in it he so humanely, sympathetically explains through the high school English teacher's thoughts Shakespeare's mid-life bitterness or disappointment realizing few men achieve their potential in the face of history, society and their personal flaws. Making for tragedy. Hard to be humorous about that although Updike finds in Shakespeare's late plays, especially The Tempest, a resolution amounting to wisdom that there can be contentment with imperfection and partial achievement. Updike took some of the starch out of my contention that all Shakespeare's plays are comedies, impossible to take Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth and Othello seriously. Certainly not Romeo and Juliet. It is a consolation that Updike's and even Shakespeare's achievements are imperfect although it would be wringing blood from a rock for me to achieve as much. The other two stories by Updike assured me that prose story-telling is as hit or miss as poetry. Bulgarian Poetess and How to Love America and Leave It At the Same Time made me think how fortunate I had been to find Tomorrow on the first try.

Not so much luck. I was attracted like a bee to a blossom to Shakespeare's lines in my personal anthology. No anthology and the poetry dependency it has created and I might have passed over the story. But now there is this conversation between me and all other writers. The anthology helps me know what I like but now I am tempted to try to articulate why I like what I like. Like the calendar, time and all else man lays his mind to it is a matter of bringing order from chaos by naming things according to our observations.

First, I like to understand what's going on in the poem. Not paraphrase it but describe the action. In Yeats' Lapis Lazuli, in the first paragraph, strophe or stanza, he talks about a community, a city or country, in which people, the women especially, high-toned maybe?, are upset about a political or wartime situation and are too hysterical for art or grace. Then he talks about actors playing Hamlet and Lear holding it together even though their characters die at the end of the play. No shouting, no crying. Then a paragraph or stanza about how whole civilizations are transitory too. Finally, in a reference to one of our oldest civilizations, two old Chinamen and their retainer are in the mountains. From their perspective, calm acceptance and longevity, perhaps some sadness, they look on all of history and non-history with something like gladness.

From there we can appreciate the artistry -- in Yeats' case the interesting rhymes and variable line lengths -- recognizing, however, that the artistry is not so much a demonstration of skill or a performance as the particular vehicle or discipline by which this artist discovered the content of his mind. It little matters whether verse is free, rhymed, blank, or formed as long as it is understandable and meaningful. Understandable to anyone, meaningful to someone.

The oldest formulation I have is Pound's -- the great themes of literature can be written on the back of a postage stamp. Until recently, I thought you could do it but you'd have to write very small. Now I know you can do it in your normal handwriting. I think they are Love (how we come into the world), Death (how we leave the world) and Governance (how we live in the world together). It may be possible to group Love and Death together, coming into and going out of life being similarly unknowable mysteries. The ways of talking about this one same mystery are apparently endless and endlessly fascinating. We cannot leave it alone. Almost all the greatest poems are about this mystery. Life is but a dream.

Then there is Governance -- how we live in the world together -- about which there are far fewer great poems. And usually they are about how our failure to live together leads back into the unknowable mystery through premature and sometimes mass death. Siamanto's The Dance comes to mind. I think the best poems of this type are written by so-called oppressed people.

Many poems treat both themes. But on the question of content, Pound is where I begin. My anthology -- Whole Wide World -- has a section which I'll call Double & Triple Features: Poems to Read Together, which pairs and groups poems according to my feeling that they share something -- theme, voice, structure -- in common. Subject matter is, I think, the commonest sharing. If I tried to name each pairing or grouping I might then have a hundred or more themes. Naming them adequately would be difficult to impossible. But why? And why not try? It would be a necessary start to talking about the poems: I read these poems together because....

Prose doesn't have to be beautiful, sometimes it's best when it's flat as Hemingway conclusively proved and one of its attractions is you can run on and on as long as the mind goes on following a thought without a stop sign for a whole page of books like Proust or Faulkner or Joyce.

Auden's is the second useful formulation that comes to mind (besides his chummy reverence for Shakespeare in naming him Top Bard). He classifies poems five ways:

            1. A good poem that's meaningful to him;
            2. A good poem that's not meaningful to him;
            3. A good poem that may someday become meaningful to him;
            4. A bad poem that's meaningful to him;
            5. A bad poem that's not meaningful to him.

I find I do about the same. But I discard all poems, good and bad, that are not meaningful to me. I have little taste for artistry for art's sake. The poem must speak to me or awaken me. Dickinson's formulation -- takes the top of your head off -- is the same as We can't define ******* but we know it when we see it.

A short aside: it feels inappropriate to answer the question What do you do? by saying I'm a poet. It would be like saying I'm a leader or I'm a prophet. You cannot anoint yourself a poet, a leader or a prophet -- others must do it for you. I wonder if I would be more comfortable if I had a larger audience (following) like Billy Collins for example. I think not. It would be like being a rock star, not a composer.

It's much more acceptable to say I'm a writer. Then when you answer the question Oh, what do you write? with Poetry, you are not self-aggrandizing, merely irrelevant, effete. Being a poet is viewed as being a flasher or nudist, exposing parts of yourself others would rather not see, at least not up close and personal, providing more information than others need or want to have. Maybe that's a good definition of a bad poet. Self-revelation dressed in verbal prowess is acceptable but naked, abject confession is unpardonable, tedious.

Although content is requisite for a poem to be meaningful, a poem is not really a communication like fiction or essay. It is more like an object, like a painting or sculpture, and perhaps like a musical score, sheet music. Yet I would still instruct students of poetry to first read each poem by the sentence, not the line, to derive its meaning, understand its argument, visualize its action. Then one might ask how and why is it sculpted, structured, with line breaks and strophes. Ultimately, the form of the poem is nothing more or less than the method by which the poet discovered his meaning. Although it is arbitrary -- it could have been said another way -- it is the only way it could be said by this person in this time and place. I have always liked the idea of a sculptor carving away stone or wood to reveal the form inside the block.

The poem lives on as an object, recognized by many or few or none. Like art or furniture, most are briefly useful then are moved to the attic or shed where they gather dust and mouse turds then break, dry and decay and find their way to the dump, the dust heap of history, only not even human history, just your personal history.

The anthology has made me an antiquarian -- one who cares as much for objects made by others as if I had made them myself.

So how can one talk about poems? The argument that any attempt to discuss or describe a poem is better served by simply reading the poem, perhaps memorizing it, has merit. Except in one respect -- the process can take you to undiscovered and half-discovered country within yourself. Always, first, you must understand the action otherwise we are just re-reading ourselves in our own tried and untrue ways. We must not mistake an old dog dying for a puppy being born. Misunderstanding the words is like constructing a science experiment with a flawed methodology and then using the results to shape or live in the world. It can be dangerous. Therefore reading poetry is a mental discipline worthy as the scientific method itself. It takes you out of yourself.

The fun of criticism comes in examining why and how the poem made you feel or think as you did. You can read closely for the chosen words, rhythms, lines and stanzas. You may admire the skill or wit of the poet. And you can refer to your own experience to understand your reaction. You can even disagree with the poet's thought or perception, or reject the sentiment. You can say that's him, not me.

Then there are Bloom's formulations of which I am wary, he being a critic not a poet. Yet here they are. Three sources of healthy complexity or difficulty in poems: 1) Sustained allusiveness -- cultural references that require the reader to be educated beyond the poem's content, for which he cites Milton as an example and could have Dante; 2) Cognitive originality -- leaps of perception and depths of understanding that startle, enlighten and take off the top of your head, for which he cites Shakespeare and Dickinson as examples and to which I would add much of what is memorable in modern poetry; and 3) Personal mythmaking -- whereby the poet constructs over time a system of images and personal (more than cultural) references that with familiarity become understandable and meaningful, citing Yeats and Blake as examples. How to make this formulation useful.

A second formulation by Bloom discusses poetic figures or the indirect means by which poetry uncovers truth, dancing with and romancing language rather than wrestling and pinning it down like philosophy tries. There are four: 1) Irony or saying one thing and meaning another, usually the opposite; 2) Symbol (synecdoche) or making one thing stand for another; 3) Contiguity (metonymy) or using an aspect or quality of something to represent the whole; and 4) Metaphor or transferring the qualities or associations of one thing to another.

Meanwhile, here's my **** poetica:

1) Poetry is an acquired taste, like golf or wine, with no obligation to appreciate it.

2) Poetry is divination; prose explains what we think we know but poetry discovers what we didn't know we thought.

3) Poetry is one of many man-made systems, like baseball or the scientific method, for producing knowledge, meaning and pleasure. Or are they all natural as ***?

4) Of all the other arts, poetry is most like sculpture; the word "poem" comes from the Indo- European root meaning "to make, to build."

5) It is impossible to write exactly what you mean or be accurately understood; poetry uses this to its advantage.

6) Line length -- enjambment -- is the single most important feature of poetry.

7) Poems are made from ideas; poetry is philosophy but where philosophy wrestles language down, poetry romances language.

8) Meaning is the most important product of poetry but it's completely personal; poems almost always say one thing and mean another but the poet often doesn't know what he meant.

9) It is almost impossible not to rhyme or write rhythmically in English or any other language.

10) The forms poets use are how the poet gets to his truth and are basically arbitrary choices.

11) Poems may be difficult and complex and irrational but they must be comprehensible.

12) Just describing the action of the poem will take you where you need to go.

In disaster and war movies
the protagonist (Queen) and her immediate circle
are protected from anonymous death. They may die (one by
      one or all at once)
but someone at least grieves.
Or the audience is full of glee.

But in Star Wars (for instance)
what about the many hundreds of nameless, faceless soldiers
in body armor and visored helmets, or planetary citizens,
who fall by the dozens or more, like the leaves this rich fall.
      I think
no one thinks

how one of them may have had her first lover the night before
and one may be leaving behind two sons he read to last night
and loved with all his heart.
Neither belief in God nor being a god entertained
can explain or forgive this oversight.

Ah, how sweet
the film in which no actor dies or if they do
it's from their own disease or golden age.
People grieve for the soul that left
and celebrate the soul that flew.

I was in Providence for a conference,
a town I had thought insignificant, not a city to be considered
a city in flight. But that night they lit
one hundred bonfires in the river running up through the streets
      and the face of every girl and woman with her lover
by firelight was beautiful.

Had the city been nuked
by a terrorist or rogue nation I would not have minded dying
      there,
with them, that night. It is possible
to be several million strong
and every homeless man with a singing voice belong.

Imperfect world, purposeless person.
I retired to pursue perfection
learn jazz tunes, woody and herbaceous plants,
read every inch of English literature,

Scientific American and Foreign Affairs,
have an affair with an American.
Oh, and by the way, before you ask, I'm from Mars.
Orbiting your planet, admiring the girls.

Paraphrasing prayers by George Herbert to share
with Jesus believers on talk radio shows
where we try to bring your lives into expressible states
before it’s too late and climate change inundates you.

Reversed thunder, savior-side-piercing spear,
one day you’re feeling fine, the next not.
We’re pretty matter of fact, clear about
the fact of death. Once you’re gone most of us forget

your face and previous accomplishments. The place
you lived is repopulated with the next generation (of aliens)
and that ought to be a comfort, a sort of restful
certainty all is well, nothing special need be done.

Bluebirds are back, crows are mating on the sky
and chasing hawks away from their nests. Juncos
and sparrows glean together. I hear pileated woodpeckers
jackhammering and barred owls hooting soothingly.

Herons smoothing feathers and spearing fish.
Everything is as one would wish.
Numberless are the world's wonders
but none more wonderful than aliens.

Five days of steady rain. A hurricane approaches the city. The streets are flooding but the wildlife is thriving. Every person wears a raincoat or carries an umbrella. Indoors is cozy. Movie theaters are crowded in the early afternoon. We who live alone are more isolated; those who live together are more aggravated. The heavens are having a fine time belting it out.

            A fly is swept from a windowpane in early August but men's machines are almost oblivious to the storm. Except the wires in Mr. Glyckman's Volvo are wet. People's dreams begin to take place in the water. When they awake their thoughts are floating in the puddle of night.

            Raindrops slap the leaves and splash the ground. Travel is not advised, wherever you are it seems like home. Next month dirt on the shingles of the house will remind the painter of the great rain. Even the rain no longer makes an impression on the earth, only a ripple in the rain. If there are mountains or the sea they seem more like brother and sister than father and mother these days. Summer feels like winter.

            Children are less visible and mothers are women who were once girls. Nightclubs are full and the listeners listen more seriously. Music continues but the rain muse has her say. Lovers are less joyous and more happy. The full moon's influence is muted by clouds, the blood between people is thicker. The Himalayas come to the Rockies and the Rockies reach for the Alps. The imagination comes to the market.

            The roads leading down to the river are empty and wet and the bright painted houses along them are quiet. A dog and a cat under a porch patient and unperturbed. A love-gnarled man with a brown beard and walking stick walks in the middle of the street. If a curtain moves, a woman wonders how many days he's been out in the rain like a child. But only the water winding back to the sea, a mad naked saint at the Last Judgement, welcomes him home.

Rereading the poems of others
and my own. Community across
time and graves. What's left
exceeds in significance
one's last moment. Yet
his last moment must have been
exceedingly important
for the poet.

Nothing he did that day will seem meaningful.
While we prosecute the war
a pileated woodpecker and red squirrel
compete for sunflower seeds.
A winter slow
to assert itself.
I can still see my mother's father and his bowl
of filberts, almonds, walnuts
quiet weekday mornings.

Both grandfathers read sports
pages religiously. I don't know
if my grandmother who gave me the
anthology of, to date, dated
unreadable poems read poetry.
I remember my mother's mother spoke
rarely as an animal.

Writing but not knowing where I'm going
unlike Joan Didion justly
cannibalizing candidates
who didn't read the Constitution, Bill of Rights or
Federalist Papers. It's late,
I have not vacuumed or shopped for food.
Instead I reread
Phil Levine's Salami.

Cold, a killing cold
is the best defense against aliens. And viruses, bacteria
are our friends.

Perfect rest, perfect motion.
Another autumn, another election.
So aimless and sublime.

Back and forth, forth and back.
Rock and roll, spoon and bowl.
What a symmetry, calculus, trigonometry.

Measurements reduce violence.
Makes sense. Temperature measures change. Time's irreversible.
Change is all that's visible.

Learn the changes, then forget them.
Lost my timepiece, lost my metronome
now my music is ethereal.

Ethereal or dissonant,
the clash that brings you home from winter and starvation's wisdom.
"Unit, corps, God, country!"

Rhodora in winter, capsule like a claw,
remains of the 5-part flower Emerson saw,
gone to seed. Deciduous trees and shrubs
have their own winter beauty and a power
akin to the fittest's survival, self-same
that brought me, musing, here. Large globose buds!
(that dwarf the rose's but not the butternut's)  
distinguish it from other Ericaceae that
surround this inland wetland. The Lord
all claim to worship is not better
than thou. I'm passing through naming you,
your parts, and the autumn elaeagnus who
is your neighbor. Good a walk as it gets
before edible understory herbs sprout.

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.

Appointment to have ***** removed by robot-assisted surgeon.
Air-conditioned, no mosquitoes in the OR. When you arrive
You'll remove all your clothes. Naked before the ladies, nurses
Who have seen it all before. Mainly remember you're not unique.
Think about the government while they're mixing up the medicine.
There's always governance even if there's little or no government.
Back to counting backwards. Inside out, if I die, will I know it?

At 70, Jack's running the gauntlet with some skill!
Benny Golson wonders aloud what might have been
Had Clifford Brown not been killed in that auto accident.
Jack's girlfriend once said he was the reincarnation of Clifford
But he doesn't believe in ghosts, karma or an afterlife.
Benny's old girlfriend Betty inspired the tune Along Came Betty
And that's the most afterlife Benny or Betty's gonna get.

The Trojan bench being not as deep as the Greek
Once Sarpedon and Hector go down even the lucky shot
To Achilles' feet is not enough to save the town.
Aeneas is no match for wily Odysseus
Although unbeknownst to all he has the last laugh when Rome
Conquers Athens, the Myrmidons, what's left of Ilion
And the whole known world from India to Britain.

It's not bad to acknowledge death's primacy
Although after a while you stop remembering
To fear. That's when everything becomes clear
Purpose v. purposelessness matters less,
Anomie v. rule of law, that's a preference
Love v. loneliness, worth about 25 cents
Or a million bucks in the light of the holocaust.

Nothing but light, love and the majesty of death in the room.
Machines stand ready like marines, their beauty is in the motion
That overcomes inertia. The food supply is deeply compromised
So eat whatever you want. Mourning the dead is part of the business
Of healing and staying alive. When you get to the afterlife, walk with
      eyes open,
Ocotillo and cactus may be in flower. The robot does the work,
      imposes
Its own small order, like a ******* a bicycle with disorder in her hair.

Jack awoke in his usual pain, un-
daunted by it. We're all gonna die
someday is his morning mantra these days.
Isolate the variable, anything
you do to one side of the equation
you gotta do to the other. Practice
zen, eat less, an empty belly's holy.
These are the rules for old men waiting.

On the other hand, attachment to self
and to things to do. Clean the house, watch for war.
Count syllables, teach English to immigrants
from Slovakia or Syria.
Advocate vocational education
in the schools. Jack has much to do, a new
administration, low social security.
He goes slow as the day will allow.

I begin the day buying yogurt in a small
favorite grocery store. The clerk
a man of few pretenses was making jokes
about his wife, how they fight in bed.
Discovering the better stores in the community.
In a given day, isolated from friends,
I speak to few people. An old woman
asks me for directions to the post office
or I speak to a stranger over the phone about night work.

At home my every thought comes to the counterpoint of
      a dream:
a girl I love surprises me by knocking on the window.
I ply my arts all day alone.
After this silence like being hidden away in the woods
in a cabin, bored
but owing no member of society an explanation,
invitation to a party. A flow of wine and devilish drugs
and quickly I am making a fool of myself.

My new friends like me
but when they think about me at all,
they wonder.
                        Wandering home
through the midnight air, alone again,
free, admiring
the ghostly houses of my new neighbors
by new moonlight.

On one of the myriad bays
along the Maine coast. Keep the holocaust
at bay I said to Dave because
you’ll spend all day gathering
2,000 calories and still be miserable hungry.
An undiminished population of humans is risible.

Black spruce and balsam fir,
you can eat the inner bark
in a starvation emergency.
There’s plenty of Cornus—bunchberry—
each orange pith around the stone
worth maybe a quarter calorie.

Lots of sarsparilla but the fruits
not out yet and to date I have not
savored one. Let’s see—dandelion
of course and huckleberry but
the most important source of sustenance
would be seaweed.

Learn your mushrooms! for the protein.
Accept the situation
come the apocalypse.
I struggle against my insignificance
but it would be better to struggle
against my ignorance.

Less effortlessness, more fishermanliness.
That’s the lesson of this Maine vacation
there’s a lot you can eat when in need—
the hips of roses and the pips of grasses.
And an endless supply of seaweed—
bladderwrack, dulse, kelp and thin green lettuce.

           Your past, your romantic past, is a shadow. Like all towns, Port Angeles was a combination of rain and clouds, sun and mist, with a chamber of commerce, barrooms and boards of directors, the known and unknown. No one of course is completely unknown. I was known for my tragic love life. She had found another man, a backwoods man, living on the land but not above a night on the town, who according to her would wipe snot on his pants, a statement of poverty or thrift or anger against the niceties of society. All of us heated our hovels with wood but only the rich burned hardwoods, me and probably this guy were softwood gatherers.

            There were few aspects to my life. First, I can remember a nook in the kitchen of the house I shared with a beautiful faceless woman who wore a ring in her nose where I wrote and watched flocks of unidentified birds comb a tree for seeds. This particular day the sky was blue with clean pillowy cumulus clouds floating toward Puget Sound. I believe all the poems written in that nook have been forgotten by their author.

            Nights, for entertainment, I would wander the aisles of the supermarket, admiring everything and buying nothing. I had no money. The fluorescent lighting, clean straight neat shelving and floors, warmth and the fact I could identify nobody attracted me. I lived on cream cheese and honey sandwiches eating them leaning against the kitchen sink. Thinking go back to New York City which is what I ultimately did. Drove cross country nonstop three days and three nights seeing and feeling nothing.

           I populated P.A. during the Reagan recession inherited from Carter. I'm unclear how presidents affect your life but good or bad, democrat or whig, alive or dead you've got to get a job, which I did. I supervised the living arrangements of developmentally disabled adults in what I thought were humorous contexts that gave no offense. They were beautiful and incorrigible having regular *** without protection. Normally harmless they'd sometimes have altercations with their neighbors. I balanced the checkbooks, paid the bills. Supposedly teaching living skills, I had few of my own as evidenced by my sleeping on the floor, I had no bed. One mature woman colleague judged me a short-timer living a useless fantasy about big cities. Still lost in my own history, still didn't know the calculus.

            I had a dog, Shade, black lab, leftover from my near-marriage until she realized I had no economic prospects, no interest in further *** or her logger boyfriend, and a complete inability to translate or imagine nesting and gestation. My homework comes to me in daily disconnected increments. Shade lived in my gray van, a Dodge slant six, which I could never afford to fix. Once the driveshaft disconnected from the rear axle and I tied it on with rope. Drove 60 miles on a knot. Shade was hyper and sad, both. He smelled bad but was a good dog with a lonely heart. When my wife who wasn't a wife finally found a boyfriend who wouldn't wipe snot on his pant leg they took Shade to British Columbia where I believe he runs free on a vast estate by the sea. I once beat Shade like a slave because he attacked a small dog out of frustration and loneliness and until I had kids and started saying and doing things just as bad to humans it was the lowest meanest moment of my life. The farmer who saw it will never forget or forgive it.

            Having confessed all this there's just one last fact to tell. The mountains were cold, the waters clear, deep snow and shadows.

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.

Silence of winter
distant from all but my ****** contacts
her bedroom nights
and day friends
memory of my independence vanishing dream
holding on to it, myself
knowing how love can hurt.

Its seduction of me, dissolving my man barriers
biologically, to procreate
or create a new personality, a deepening
humility, her womanhood hands.
Not giving in completely
touching sweetly
but staying strong.

Going into the winter to mark my trees
not flinching in the dark early morning
casting an eye cold as a telescope
moving inexorably
a part of nature, insect, star.
This is how I'll love
and live with her.

Tired body aches. Long walk on starry night -
ears attuned for bear at creek, or cougar.
Nothing, not a doe.
                                    But that afternoon
came upon a healthy young buck in a meadow.
High up. And a hawk left a feather for me.
Old, old stands of lodgepole pine, grey bark
like wrinkled hides of elephants. Thick carpet
of dead needles.
                              Thirst. Sit at snowbank
for an hour eating snow. Burn tongue.
To soon after stumble upon a pond and the place
that a creek springs from the mountain. Water
indescribable. Eat ravenously and drink deep
gulps.

Climb highest rocky peak at dusk. Razor-back
ridge. Mother hawk scream nearby. Must
backtrack and then go straight down near dark
feet fall through layers of scrub pine, hands
grab for the live stalks only support against
broken bone.
                          Choose steep narrow bed of loose rocks,
surely waterfall in some other season and descend
on *** and all fours, feet first always fearful
it will end in an uncontrollable hundred foot drop.
Trickles of water nearing bottom.
                                                         ­  Cracked hands, raw
behind, cross final snowbank and attain road
along Snake Creek.

A year
in which
each day
brings one
tenth inch.
First the
window sills
are covered
then door
jambs. Our
lips are
sealed then
our eyes
shut. Sleep
like this
we've never
known. Will
Spring return?
Unknown. We
care not.

Something created. Does the creator think ahead
or spill a storm. Rain happens. We supply the
reasons. Evaporation of water collecting over
huge expanses, condensed and pushed as clouds
over the land. We say it makes us sad or depressed.
We want to cry.

You describe the America you know and if you
are ashamed of yourself for what you see, you lie.
Or don't look. Loud noises of automobiles and
fumes. Today in Riverside Park, leaning on a rail,
the dead leaves and snow reminded me how far
from nature and life I am. The snow blew
in from the west. People passed in a smooth
slow line in front of me. Dogs trailing one
another. People hiding until crises bring them
out. Their dog smells another dog between the legs.
The master runs over to stop him. Maybe he
thinks they're going to fight. Doesn't want his
big German shepherd to hurt her dachshund.

Guy runs past in gray sweats on his tip-toes.
Glances at me. Another passes in blue sweats. Looks
longer. They think I'm a mugger. They are not
sexually attracted. I'm an opponent. I want something
they have. I look surly. Why aren't I out
running, disciplining myself, making myself healthy,
doing something. What brings you out here. You're not
doing anything but watching us and staring at the ground.

            Walking down Broadway I realized I've never lived here and still don't. Two women window shopping is strange to me. They talk about the clothes. They are friends. I slow down, I don't feel so cold. Stroll, looking at people is like a sunny day and it's a carnival. Streets different in different weather. Rainy nights are good. Cold rainy nights. Bars filled and warm. Streets empty and cold. People pass and look as members of a fraternity. They need someone and don't hide it. They will try anyone out for one night. They have tea together. They go for a drink in some neutral place. They go straight to bed in the dark. They can't see the face.

Soot on LA highway signs. Billboard of you,
a real estate agent. All endeavor slides
toward inertia, extinction, forgetfulness.

It’s very tropical. Vegetation invades
the house unless constant inputs of joy
apply. The scientist in you feels the

great ape in you. The great ape feels
death growing wide. What about work?
I devote my present to my future existence.

In what way, in what sense
does one continue to resist. As
a dessicated cell, a mole of elements,

an ancient’s aura, a daguerreotype-like
shadow on a sidewalk, persistent headache,
paleolithic herbivore, potential energy, will.

Some wake up and pray, say thanks for
another day. Others curse their luck, stale breath,
the very thought of the rosy dawn makes them ill.

Lonely as leaf fall.
Nature knows no pity or self-pity
according to antiquity, the roof soot of the city.

I admire fire, tools and ore. Agriculture.
Cities, empire. Trading and taking (war).
Numbers, counting, writing. Libraries, discoveries, zero.

And the single-minded universe
that’s only a paper moon
without your love.

While I'm reading a poem about it on the previous page
the girls come over to visit their boyfriends and dance
in high shoes and perfume. Their legs are strong and their voices
      high.
And the guys get high and hard thinking about what the girls are
      like behind their eyes.

That says more about me than reality. And it's exactly four lines.
Ken Patchen would say his angel smells sweet and sassy.
I feel the bony fingers of mine who has been working to stay
      alive.

Enough small poetry. One must conceive of a project -
say a poem about a bridge–or stop writing
and instead walk over the bridge at sunset and see the city in a
      nuclear war
the clocks, the Watchtower and the docks gone and no smoke.

I still exist but I'm late for my job. I'm dressed well
in honor of true love and Spring which both outlast the
      holocaust.
The manager cans me with the cold hard eyes of one who
      accepts the rules entirely.

Goodbye to the rows of dead metal desks and goodbye
to those who can take it longer than I.

The guys downstairs do not read poetry and very little prose.
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money does
      not occupy their minds.
The *** pistils of the mountain daisy is no concern of theirs
and the man upstairs who plays the horn is less than a curiosity
      but makes more noise.

When I feel like this nothing matters and this is good -
get warm with wine, turn out the lights and turn up the radio -
if only there were a woman who liked the down and out life too.

In the end someone sticks a gun in my face in the South Bronx.
How I got among the fire escapes in the sooty alley I cannot say
but it is one of my earliest memories. Perhaps it is my
      grandmother holding my hand
or one of the clowns. I say Drop that ******* gun and he blows me
      away.

Start now knowing joy,
that’s an order,
overcome a deepening solitude.

Like a bee at a bugle
or me at the deli
on Third Avenue.

I said to Joe when do you think this weather will break?
He jokes, April.
That’s no joke. Weak creatures die and the strong barely survive.

Half a year goes by
another cancer checkup.
Cheer up. Any weather’s

better than no weather at all.
There’s always governance
even when there is no government.

My candidate drops out
after Iowa. Why do I always lose
at politics and poker?

Peace at last!
No lawnmowers, no leafblowers.
Big comfy couch.

Meditate on this: Do what has to be done.
Find your lover gazing at the moon
and take your garbage to the dump.

Your web site evaporates
and your possessions are thrown in the dumpster
except your trumpet which finds its way to a future trumpeter.

1

At peace perhaps too much
a fine Spring rain
we seek news from the desert or capitol
of those who have dedicated their lives to losing their lives
      for us
adventurers, ancient honor, land runners
this campaign a must to advance one's career
a war president needs war

2

All you need to know is the names of things
chambers of commerce and large corporations
elements, products, decay fungi, egg masses
cultivars and their relation to wild grasses and the edge
uses of herbs, languages of mammals,
purposes of insects, placement of rocks
the names of everything by which we know our way

3

I've read about those remarkable souls who maintain
      self-control
among murderers and the unentertained multitude
who may have even spoken persuasively
at the right moment for speaking
and thus attracted a now unwanted immortality
there are only two ways you can tell
a bird of prey from a vision - humor and ritual

4

the Fedex gal
would be unlike taking off Emily Dickinson's clothes
over the counter perfume and spray paint hair
postman's shorts, black socks
a woman's legs are much like a man's
yet she too is beautiful, too beautiful, weekends
boating with her man

5

Suburbs, lawns, blankets
in a long, long nursery of babies
napping, old, blameworthy
and, I say this respectfully, blind
certain and uninterested
in motives more subtle than their immediate comfort
Who am I to complain?

6

Plants, poems: riches
our financial advisor doesn't count. Good and simple
a man as he is. Comes tousled
from early morning golf and puffy
from a late night fight or lovefest with his wife.
Inchworm
letting out its rope down an oak.

7

Late afternoon meeting
like the dry samara, achene or capsule surrounding a seed
how often have I tried to escape
my need, community, chamber of commerce
you cannot drive
the roads are theirs and the signs, perhaps
you can walk if you can name the plants and rocks and are
      willing to die

8

O happy family
there's some contentment in letting community and family
      decide
your place in it. Gatekeepers -
unconscious god, invisible hand, natural selection -
kind when refraining from violence
when not responding with force to the universe's effort
to extinguish us.

The Stop & Shop strike v. Game of Thrones.
In Game what’s not made plain
is the condition of the people
compared with warriors and queens.
There’s no mention of land-clearance, tree-felling,
pruning, chopping, digging, hoeing,
weeding, branding, gelding, slaughtering,
salting, tanning, brewing, boiling,
smelting, forging, milling, thatching,
fencing and hurdle-making, hedging, road-mending and haulage.

As for the strike, most of us
supported the cashiers and clerks—
cutting benefits and pensions
when CEOs make millions.
A few pennies more
for ice cream and tofu
a leg up for our neighbors
and comrades in labor.
But don’t get greedy, power-hungry—
we don’t want the supermarket to go out of business
or the Army of the Dead to extinguish us.

A red-tailed hawk observes what small mammals, birds are in the
     clearcut,
awaits the moment to strike.
Three *****, two strikes, full count. Aaron pitched carefully, slow
     strikes and the opposing team scored.
Transit strike. Part-time tutor,
food deliverer, illegal immigrant,
school bus driver, supermarket bagger.
Let labor flow like capital! Full tank of gas!
In your dreams, you kick ***.
In your daydream, you’re breaking bones, killing mean dogs with bare
     hands .
In my childhood dreams, I fought side by side with my best buddies
against the Army of the Dead.
I wake up to a lightning strike and my dream incinerates.

The strike is over, like a thunderstorm.
Still a half dozen or so episodes of Thrones
before it sinks into the past.
Will women save the world?
Anything’s possible.
Nothing changes in Williamstown, Willie, except the seasons.
The wee hours, the bored minutes, the second guesses,
the town sewer department, the collector of taxes.
Pitcher’s elbow, runner’s knee, reader’s eye,
you live until you die.
That’s no answer.
Without the Mexican and Canadian borders
the White Walkers would dissolve like an aspirin in seltzer water.

The sun is up, the strike is over
next episode of Game is Sunday
the White Walkers attack
some of our favorite characters croak
but humanity survives
though the weather is ominous.
The habitable zone around the sun
is moving outward as the orb expands
getting hotter as it grows older.
Earth a billion years ago
was smack in the middle of the turf
but we’re now half-in, half-out
exposed to the sun’s ardor, agony.
The sun a dragon eating its babies, torching cities
we’re gonna hafta outsmart it
hold Labor Day barbecues on Mars.

Sub-atomic particles
the atoms they form
molecules, cell organelles
cells, machinery of life
organs, organisms
communities and ecosystems
planets, solar systems, galaxies
galactic clusters and their inverse
black holes the doors to other
universes, a contradiction
in terms.
                 For language and its shadow
consciousness must hold matter
the material world snugly inside concepts
theories and hypotheses to be
experimentally verified using vision
and the other senses, collecting data
and interpreting the known facts
accumulated over time.
                                          Can matter
exist without a consciousness to behold it?

Believing in
our mortality (the species)
we have created God
(a supreme being)
probably not carbon-based
to encompass every universe
but is God
inside or outside
consciousness? Can God
tell us what to do
or must we tell God
alone
what to do?
                      Here is ego
projecting personality, exerting force
on community, asserting the existence
and predominance of component DNA.
An already hackneyed theory that DNA
survival drives
procreation, personality, savings bonds
everything but poetry (most poems included).

Mustache, cowboy hat
horse whisperer, gulag master
Odysseus, King Lear
                                      salvation in the details.
Yes, these personalities individual and interesting
as opossum, bear
oak and ash
beech nut, pine cone
Grand Canyon sandstone, Green Mountain granite.

Sunset, quiet, except
for happy birthday to neighbor's child,
virgo, and all that means, purity
of morality, inability to scheme,
whatever else the stars dictated.

Woodpecker climbs oak, Connecticut.
Not ten years ago this mountain was
completely forested, untouched
since early arrival of Europeans.
Now my parents' home and others stand
in new clearings. The birds
do not seem to mind. Sing,
and deer occasionally visit, from where?
Out of the pre-historic past.

That I must die
is my every third thought.
On my hands and knees, cold sweat,
my own body murdering me.
I meet death with the philosophy
I lived in life. Acceptance
of the loneliness, the unregarding
beauty. There is that shoreline
along the straits to Puget Sound,
in mist, the generations
of sea birds nesting on the water.

Supermarket celebration
shoppers are cytoplasm searching
for cellulose, muscle, photosynthesis.

Oils, petrochemical and vegetable
love: faith and trust
for instance, the Food and Drug Administration.

In America, the custom is
to avoid meeting the other shoppers' eyes. We graze
like cows or wander as zombies to the oldies played over the aisles.

I've always liked it here.
Cornucopia, yes. Also
a place to be alone and depressed, or cool off.

Water and bone
and the known ingredients. Neurons
for remembering, calculating, touching stuff.

I have a favorite bagger
who has the smile of a lover,
wouldn't rather be elsewhere.

Like glamour stars in bikinis
(but unlike tomatoes and bananas)
cashiers and clerks are admired from afar.

Joe says What's not to like? Ice cream, yogurt,
profit, tofu.
To eat your fill is a blasphemy against God.

How far from nature and life it is
the gray clouds, airplanes in them
the night cooing and pigeons roosting
Sirma's garden gone to roses and seed

                        That airplane overhead!
                        pointing the way
                        pointing to war

War being an aggravated condition of what
we already know

                        Flowering beneath the noise
                        of yet another jet passing overhead.

                         --------------------------------------

Why this much sadness in a world so beautiful?
We are sad for the weariness of everything, including earth
(that will go on tropically flowering long after we are gone)
we

            who are nothing
            in powerful time's
            grip

history, passionate history, coffee between
neighbors.

                         --------------------------------------

            Enter into alliance
            With the sweet darkness, night!

            Night and day, day and night
            Everybody knows when the moon is bright.

            We dance by the light of the moon
            All night.

                         --------------------------------------

We dance by the light of the moon.
We dance by the light of the moon and setting sun.

                                            We drive
                  we crow and call
three pigeons!
                  and make the world alive
                                            even bricks.

                                            Jets
two pigeons!
                  Milk-skinned doves
                                            enmesh

Two gray-skinned sharks, jets,
embrace in the sky, a blue green oil truck takes
the hill, cobblestoned, in low
steady gear.

                         --------------------------------------

Zazen position
      to remain so
            unmoved
                  yet moved
                        by the stillness

the movement of the car uphill
      part of your system of beliefs
            unmoved by it, parked
                  necking in the front seat
                        hawks diving for pigeons' eggs

and so you are compelled to move
      by the force that created you. but
            you impose your own small order
                  departing from traditions
                        human history understands

                  a mutant

such as those currently developing
the human mind beyond its past capacities.

                         --------------------------------------

                  Two straw sandals
                        blue jay call
                              two sea gulls

                         --------------------------------------

The jets return
      flying low.
            Laying low

and breathing low
      mists
            of pure noise.