Peccavi, 28 February 2018

Apocryphal punchline in Latin, from Punch,

Supposedly communicated by the general 

Who massacred as needed to take Sind.

I have. Let’s say you haven’t. Let’s begin.

I’ll start by confessing my hypocrisy: I take

A righteous satisfaction in my unrighteousness,

But I’m often horrified by the unrighteousness 

Of others. Why is this? Well, the obvious—

Self-interest, myside bias. No excuse.

Now your turn. What would you like to confess?

Notice I didn’t say you needed to do it, or that

You did it. Just, what would you like to confess?

Never Been Here Before, 27 February 2018

Never been anywhere before, never will be
Anywhere again. Always new but almost always
Familiar, experience works it way slowly
Through infinite variations on a theme.
The details are intriguing but the theme is so routine
One wishes, on occasion, for something major
To happen, even though by far the largest class
Of major happenings are disasters. One pushes
And takes fresh risks and is largely rewarded
By more of the familiarly similar, the only
Dramatic changes generally accruing
To one’s flesh, one’s self worth, one’s family,
One’s social relations. Enough about one.
There is the weather, today’s weather to discuss.
There is tomorrow to plan and more plans to rush
Into place in hopes of improving the future.
There is that little dangling carrot, progress.
Truth was the gods allowed a nibble, just
A nibble, a taste, to really torture Tantalus.

One and the Same, 26 February 2018

Perhaps the number one is as fictional
As all the rest, and there is no discrete whole
Of anything or everything. What is one?
If you mean the universe, the only one,
You don’t know its boundaries. If you mean
God, if you’re a mystical monotheist, you
Have to wonder whether God is the whole
Of God’s creation or a creator separate from it.
More humbly, not to say tractably, what is one
Of anything? There can be no one of something
Without, at least in human imagination of it,
Another. The endling, last of any species
Is one because attended by the ghosts of others.
By definition, one requires a difference. One
Can’t be coterminous, isomorphic with another
And still be one. We get addled when we think
Through this. Identical twins have been murdered
Because one soul cannot have two bodies,
Although now we’re content to count two souls
To one genome, even in a partly fused body,
So long as we get two persons, two heads.
We get addled, like I said. A one of something
Is a fiction. No two items are the same, else
They would not be two items, but no one item
Can be defined without the concept of another
Of the same. I’ll grant one a greater fiction
Than all the fictions that follow from it,
The infinite number lines in all directions,
But it is only the set of itself and at one
And the same time the set that includes nothing
But the empty set. Oh, the dolls we nest,
Knowing they can’t nest unless they’re changing,
Can’t nest unless they’re nearly the same.
Every one is the only one, and there is no one.

So I Gathered, 25 February 2018

A bit of swirling’s all I’m leaving, a pattern
In the pattern, a tiny vortex in the dust,
And that was all I have been, all I am. Pixie dust,
If you like, that became imbued with consciousness,
A slight distortion in the braided, preexisting
Currents and channels of waves, of airs,
An alteration debatably distinctive to the way
Things were already changing and being
Said or written, that’s me. The physical
Manifestation of an unfortunate existence
(Not especially unfortunate, mind you, only
Humanly so, typically so) can be traced
As these scattered handfuls of flipped bits,
A twist of echo here, and there a mark
On a surviving paper page, tossed in a box somewhere.
This can all be disposed of. This can all be
Erased, but it’s a race, the finish of which
I’ll never see, as to which vanishes completely
First, these tiny forensic clues that someone toyed
With this language, or these circumstances
That produced my lust for endless composition,
This joy in rearranging, this pulse that bursts.

Caesuras, 24 February 2018

Often the solitary survivor, trouble in mind, finds
Himself required to remember what he can
Never retrieve and would never want to find.
Often alone, every first light of dawn,
I have had to speak my sorrows. There is no one
Living to whom I would dare to reveal clearly
My deepest thoughts. But stop me if you’ve read
This before. I’m speaking to you now from one
Thousand years plus a few long lifetimes more
Ago, the garbled voice of a long lost relative,
A language like that spoken in the red room,
Ne maeg werig mod wyrde withstondan
Ne se hreo hyge helpe gefremman. Go ahead,
This time I’ll let you. Read it out loud. Feel it
Clotting like raw-churned butter in your mouth.
Swimmeth eft on weg. I will too, but not yet.
Walls stand ruined by the wind, but walls
Will likely be raised up again. I have lived
In an age a later age may sigh for, the age
Of the race of giants. Still here, everything is
Transitory, and all this earth will empty of us.
It’s well to watch, without weariness, the way
The ordinary night orders itself back in, the way
Even a day composed of pauses slips away.

Snow Globe, 23 February 2018

It will end, but it hasn’t ended yet, and that
Has always been my favorite stage of a fall.
All day the flakes have filtered down, the news
Has filtered in through wires and waves about
The rest of this mostly probable world outside.
It will be dark soon. The cars and trees
Are white beyond the windows, and the white
And blue-point alley cats have not been seen.
I fished the morning paper out of a snow bank
Where it had landed, just outside a window
Screen. If only supplies reappeared by magic
I could live here alone and watching until spring.

Grey Street, 22 February 2018

The car paused, idling, at the end of the drive.
What was going on in the head of the shadow
Inside? Another shadow watched the scene
From across the grey street, behind a window
With half-drawn blinds. What was going on
In the head of the other shadow inside? Imagine
A panoramic vista, tinted almost to match
The umber-ochre coloring of a blood moon.
A roughly level expanse of gravelly rubble
Extends to a pink horizon, side to side. You
Can can just make out the shadow of the rover
That has trundled to this overlook after years,
Local, Martian years, of trying and surveying.
That vehicle was sent to that landscape
From a blue-green dot of light in the night sky.
It has been transmitting to the home world
All this time, an invader and an emissary
And a thing that is neither one light nor
The other, a message between the worlds,
But not a melding of their insides. That’s what
The shadow in the house was thinking about
While watching the mysterious fellow shadow
In the black car now easing out of the drive.
That, and the fact snow was forecast tonight.

Taphonomy of Silence, 21 February 2018

I am a guest in the house of a man hard of hearing.
He suffers for it, but it’s the inaccuracy
That causes him difficulties, that places
His intensely social nature under stress.
There’s plenty of buzzing, he says, in his head.
Profound silence, is it worse? I expect not.
No one ever referred to my multiply broken
Frame as “profoundly” twisted. No one refers
To the wholly sightless as “profoundly” blind.
Maybe there’s a depth to the silence of the deaf
That has nothing to do with a sensory lack.
I would not lightly give up music, but there are
Times when turning even the best of it off
Shapes a relief. Even the more quiet world
Underneath has been so distorted by sound,
True silence is a fossil for reconstruction.
Alone with the mild hiss of tinnitus in my head,
The soft chuntering engines of the home’s
Central heat and its sisyphean opponent,
The fridge, the occasional rumble of a truck
Down the street, drone of a jet somewhere,
Hum of the distant interstate, hoot of a train
Hauling freight, indeterminate clicks and sighs
Of an old house adjusting itself in winter sun,
I am not profound. I am hunkered down
Over the remains of silence with the overlay
Of louder noises removed, bemused.

Sugarhouse Snow, 20 February 2018

The man on the corner with the cardboard
Sign is dirty, tall, and heavily dressed. He is
Probably under forty-five as well, young enough,
Despite a little grizzle on the chin, to get
A double take when he tells someone
Who hands him a couple bucks that he served
And was wounded in Vietnam. Vietnam
Is about as long ago now as the Civil War was
At the start of World War One. No one
Who served is anywhere near young. The last
Nineteen-year olds to see combat in ‘73
Are hitting retirement age next year.
The trees around the parking lot are heavy
With yesterday’s snow. A clear cold front
Is settling in, and one wonders if the liar
In his filthy brown great coat and black
Knit cap, with his sign and his chapped
Hand held out for handouts has anywhere warm
To go, any chance to live to be actually old.

Late Winter Storm, 19 February 2018

Forthwith the weather report. I’ve never met
A human who could keep quiet about weather,
So why can’t a mutant, alien poet, mostly dead,
Pretend to be human again? It started warm
And windy, with shafts of sunlight stabbing in.
For hours, then, flurries that melted on landing.
After dark, the snow began to stick, but even
At midnight it was just two fingers of frosting
And was hardly coming in. A little more at dawn
And by breakfast a faint, fine steady flickering.
Only after mid-morning did it find the strength
To earn the warnings on the highways, in the news.
Quiet and concentrated, not a trace of wind,
It accumulated like change itself accumulates,
The world slowly turning into that other world
It always had within it, the blank future piled
Up in the past, the problem of truth as we know it,
The blurring of knowledge by belief. Time
To count on further change to erase this
Erasure. Time to hunker down indoors.
Do not think I’m going out there, anymore.

Abravanel Hall, 18 February 2018

The red glass tendrils, pillar of fire by night,

Chihuly glowed through the glass wall,

A decade since Dave Brubeck played

In autumn on his final, Indian Summer tour.

Last night was High Noon, in concert, a full

Symphony orchestra below Gary Cooper

And Grace Kelly. All these living, all those dead.

The audience, mostly silver haired, cheered

When the bad guy got shot from behind

By the pretty young Quaker bride. America.

The couple left the small town twice. Once

With their happiness suddenly racked,

The bride distraught, the groom turning back.

The second time as battered killers of four men,

Exhausted, climbing on the same wagon,

Driving away in the same direction. Again.

The world all before them, but what bitter 

Way to wed, the Western in its highest form.

Outside, the crowd murmured in the mild air

Locals call “the warm before the storm.”

Indoor Sunlight, Salt Lake City, 17 February 2018

Each afternoon for months now, the angle
Has moved from the south further west.
The straight west window almost frames
The last fire of sunset now. I squint at the blinds
Half drawn down one window, the texture
Of their fabric, the small details of the weave
Glowing at half past three. There’s a thing
About this universe I understand intuitively.
Whether or not I understand it correctly, it
Feels dead right to me: the texture whispers
Vastness, the literally unfathomable expanse
Of small and smaller movements embedded
In large and larger moments. It’s dizzying, yet
Also somehow boring. Sometimes I suspect,
When watching dust motes twirl slowly
Through indoor, sunlit air, what I’m studying is
The infinitely thick perimeter of an unassailable
Prison of existence. No, I don’t mean living,
Being aware of being—from those, there is
Inevitable escape. But from existing, being
Any sort of pattern of atoms and twisted
Gravitational shapes? What kind of cosmos
Spawns a creature capable of such considering,
A temporary creature can catch itself at it,
Perhaps compelled to consider its cosmos
A hoax? The houseplants turn so slowly, I only
Notice monthly how they have followed the sun.

In the End, Nothing Happened, 16 February 2018

I wonder if the world would ever change
Enough, if the nature of the world would change
Enough to change the nature of change,
So that some things could truly be still,
So that pockets of genuine timelessness
Could be scattered around, with pockets
Of awareness entirely free from pain. Ah,
But then you couldn’t enter any of those
Timeless regions because your entrance
Would introduce a change, and you never
Could know if you were already in such a space,
Because thinking and reflection would require
Movement, which is change. Come to think
Of it, this may already describe the world
We are in, in which whatever timelessness
Exists is inaccessible except in dreams
And those at peace can’t know it, and those
On the fringes of Nirvana can be calmer
But can never knowingly, in the end, enter in.

Approaching the Asymptote to Stationary, 15 February 2018

One of those days of minimal movement,
Allowing most of the alterations to carry on
With the body that barely can drag itself
On crutches between the bed and the desk.
Read the news recently? To be sedentary
Is death. But is it? Take a thousand humans,
Take a million, count up their behaviors
And control your matching variables.
Lovely large-scale patterns emerge, displaying
Measures of comparable tendencies.
Women over forty have trouble making babies.
Men over forty have many autistic sons.
Consumption of processed foods links tightly
To cancer. Couch potatoes rot. I am not
Anything except the sum of the vectors
Pointing my exact location on demographic plots.
I am gone already. I am here in defiance
Of tomorrow when I am not and yesterday
When I never should have been what I was.
When you can’t find me anymore you’ll say
That maybe I only got what I deserved anyway.
Deserve’s got nothing to do with me. Everyone
Who goes could cry, “We all deserved to stay!”

Breakfast Table Ancestry, Valentine’s Day, 2018

Somehow the talk came round to mating
Habits of distal and proximal ancestors.
The three of us, unrelated by any shared
Progenitor within the last couple centuries,
But with mostly common ancestors
From one or two thousand years back.
All those bodies tangled before dying,
All those lineages intertwined, all the way
Back to the last ancestor common to all
The ancestors of the three of us, the last
Common to all the humans living, the last
To all the humans that ever were, the last
To all the hominids, all the apes, etc.
What were they up to that we embody only
The strategies that thrived? Like humans
Everywhere we strained to see ourselves
In them as we have strained to see ourselves
In our offspring. Whatever they did, it failed
To keep themselves alive, worked well
To keep their lineages intact. Our conversation
Slid, words like beads on the long abacus
Of the generations, moving forward and back.
A famous forefather for one of us, a century
And a half past, Brother Brigham came up.
His descendant spoke disgustedly of how
He snatched two teenaged sisters as extra
Brides, thanks to their father’s hero worship
Of him, the elder of those two girls becoming
The mother to the great-great grandmother
The descendant now reveres. That anecdote
Was followed by a middle-finger salute
To the habits of Brother Brigham, whereupon
Another of us pointed out that it was thanks
To those habits his descendant sat here.
Later, I shuddered to think how many other
Habits of how many other ancestors helped
Their descendant lineages thrive, how many
Forms of desire and viciousness proved
Effective, how many each one of us might
Carry on along in our dark DNA, unknown.
If I were to choose a faith, I would choose one
In which we believed that somewhere outside
Of this world that we know there was another,
Nothing to do with us, in which hunger
Wasn’t necessary to life, in which waste
And possession weren’t needed to thrive.
Not possible with these physics, I know,
But why believe anything unless you wish it so?

Recent Weather in Cedar City, 13 February 2018

Yesterday returning through the interstate
Traffic pipeline, rain, sleet, wind, and snow
Churned in the high country near Cedar City.
Past the Parowan gap the snow cleared, but
An odd phenomenon could be spotted
Directly over the highway mostly ignoring it:
Where the northbound low-front sheared
Against the southwest-bound high pressure,
Two lines of fast-moving clouds appeared
To mirror the traffic directly below them.
The cloud on the west hand, like the vehicles
In the west lane, streamed south rapidly.
Immediately next to it, and as thin, an eastern cloud
Raced just as rapidly north. Barely a gap
Divided them. The deep meaning of coincidence
Is this: it can’t be a coincidence except
That naming makes it so, and we don’t name
Anything coincidence that doesn’t feel to us
Like the unheimlich opposite of coincidence.
It has to look weirdly meaningful, potentially
Significant, for us to declare it incidental.
We protest too much. We give ourselves away
When we say that the clouds that sheared
In perfect parallel above the divided highway
Were a matter of mere coincidence. It’s that
Mere that gives us away, the same as when
We say the shadowy man in the bushes
About to leap out at us is only a lamppost.
We are rebuking ourselves for being ourselves,
The beasts whose instinct is to see the numinous
However often that instinct proves ruinous.

One of the Only One, 12 February 2018

Of a time, even if not always of our own,
We never were depressed, we never thought
We were bad, we just never understood
What happened. There were more of us
Than we would ever encounter or have
Counted for us, even if each one was always
For each of us the only one. Regardless
Of our topics or the stories others told
Or would have told to define our lives,
Had our lives been worth outlining,
Almost no one wanted to contend
With the results of our experiments. Some
Of us had been, have been, will have been
Uncovered and claimed, named as rediscovered.
The rest of us disintegrate, decomposing
Elegies in a county landfill. It’s why we came
To love the middens, to dream of rigorous,
Earnest archeologists of another time
To which we might actually belong, for which
We might yet have some value. To those ones,
The ones who pull us out of Herculaneum,
The ones who restore our moccasins we left
In the mud when we hobbled on, the ones
Who carefully brush the dust off our bones
Heaped and crushed at the bottom of a lake
Long gone, we dedicate our experiments
In unsuccessful living, singing, you, you, you,
And you, too, to us, are one of the only one.

A Pronoun Is a Haunted Cenotaph, 11 February 2018

Any given verse of mine is likely to say what
I’ve often thought, but never very well
Expressed. In the mirror of these lines I look,
From certain angles, ruggedly persistent but,
From others, dim and obsessed. I’ve never
Been more frightened than the once or twice
I was wandering, lights out, around my home
At night and saw a shadow shifting in a glass
I’d momentarily forgotten existed. That is
How I feel occasionally revisiting these
Arrangements I usually refer to as poems.
There’s someone or something moving in
Here, in the penumbral intimacy of my home,
Moving on the far side of the room, paralleling.
Even once I realize it’s only my silhouette,
My own outline, and not another creature in here,
Even once my pulse returns to nearly normal
And I grin at what a goose I am in the lonely dark,
It bothers me that the fetch I spotted drawn
Was both a mere reflection off the surfaces
And a cut-out shaped by how I blocked
The little available light. When I scrutinize
More closely, having switched on a lamp
Designed and manufactured by other lives
Far away from mine, I see the familiar lines again,
The weary concerns. I greet myself again
And consider how possessed I am and have been,
But I’m muttering to scattered illumination
That cares no more for bouncing off of me
Than for caroming off ocean waves or lunar dust.
That’s not me I see in here, only the shifting light.

Eavesdroppers, Liars, and Translators, 10 February 2018

I am the playhouse; you are in rehearsal.

I host you all, although I have never offered

The invitations myself. You have agents,

Producers, promoters, and shills. It’s them

I want to understand better, not you. You

I understand. Those promoters and agents,

They're spooky operators. They aren’t you,

They aren’t me, they aren’t any audience

We know. But they know. They maneuver.

I hosted a play once, an archaic thing

With the archaic title, Me! Me! Me! Meme,

The same. It was a one-act, an allegory,

Medieval, simplistic, honoring the unities.

It portrayed interactions in which agents

Did not exist separately from actors. But

I am a playhouse. I house the rehearsals,

Often the negotiations as well. I’ve seen 

The shadows within me and I’ve learned

You actors are not the agents, the agents

Are not the producers. Writers may or may

Not exist. I’m agnostic on that head, having

Contained too few possible examples of them.

But there’s an entire bestiary swarming,

Coming into my globe to plot and complain, 

To profit and declaim, and where I front

The world you come from I can perceive

That even the colorful world I hold will never

Exhaust the varieties of your kind I’ll never

Curtain in me as an entertaining scene.

Never Dark Era, Forever Dimming, 9 February 2018

We have emerged because we will disappear,
But while the rates of coming and going vary
Continuously as a part of both, the continuity
Of coming and going could be infinite, could
Be what infinity is, its essence, its identity.
Mortality is immortal, extending forever
In every direction, the sole dimension. But,
What about entropy? Haven’t we been sliding
Down from low to high since the beginning?
Isn’t order finite? I suspect entropy of being
An aspect of gravity, as gravity is the effect
Of nothing on everything, allowing anything.
But I haven’t answered your question. Entropy
Is a curiosity in the numbers, as, summed
Over the entirety of everything, it can only
Increase, and yet it can’t increase infinitely.
But what if that last part’s wrong? The law
Demands we head in the direction of more
Entropy, but why are we convinced the cosmos
Could ever attain a maximally entropic state?
After the first death come infinite others.

Those Without Faith, 8 February 2018

In medieval England, it was the word belief,
Derived from the Germanic source of beloved,
That meant trust in God, while the word faith
Stopped at loyalty and duty to a person, thus
To prove one’s loyalty was to keep the faith.
But the senses shifted and evolved, as senses do,
And belief lost any association with love, caring,
Holding dear, and became only the holding
Of something to be real or true, while faith,
Rooted in a secular term for confidence,
Took on, perhaps because of its Latin source,
Increasingly the religious senses of trust
In God, in the Church, in Christianity as such.
Something was lost in the switch, although
Those older meanings themselves evolved
From earlier ones and those from earlier still, so
There’s no original, sacred meaning to any
Word anyway, certainly not to the word itself.
Nonetheless, faith as it travels conversation
Today may be one of the most two-faced words
Out there, a double-edged word to hold up
For awed celebration and to swing around
For fear and slaughter. Those without faith
Appreciate how dangerous this word can be.
Those with faith, like anyone owning a weapon,
Tend to think of their own as necessary,
Handsome, protective, and only of others
Owned by others as instruments of death.
Perhaps that’s enough sermonizing. I trust
The senses will shift still further, and this faith
Will go out of fashion. Unfortunately, words
Will not go out of fashion, not while we live
And they contest for territory with the rest
Of culture’s armies in the wastelands of our brains.

Pit Stop in Parowan, Utah, 7 February 2018

On the radio, someone’s speaking urgently 

About the consequences of belief. A hawk

Is circling over the field by the gas station.

Daughter stays in the back seat watching

The Lion King on a badly cracked iPad

While I lean at the gas pump, listening. 

Human voices cast as cartoon animals sing 

Inanely, “hakuna matata, no worries!”

In a dozen inflections, again and again.

No worries, eh? A different hawk lies broken

At the edge of the station parking lot. I am

Curious how it could have died at that spot.

Only a human would believe there are real 

Consequences to the convictions humans 

Hold. Only a human would be so daft

As to disagree and risk the consequences.

Watching Shadows Cross the Room, 6 February 2018

Is it surprising for someone so convinced
Of the singular reality of temporality to be
So deeply suspicious of narrative? Perhaps
Not considering how routinely linear stories
Experienced linearly, chop up and resequence
The events as presented, looping, doubling,
Reversing, the more so with the invention
Of writing and in medias res, still more
After the printing press, and vastly more
In recorded narratives, particularly film
And digital where the geometric, Einsteinian
Faith that time has no final direction is bolstered
By the illusionist wizards of scenes and effects.
And yet, deeply suspicious as I am, I admit,
Those are the narratives I love best, lost
In time conundrums, multiple perspectives,
Memories played back to front, front to back,
The loopiest of loops, the defiance of death,
The same day over and over and over again
That is never, not once the same. Similarily,
Still, the stills are never still, the original
Prints so cleverly cut still decay, the data
Become corrupted, and it all, however well spliced,
Fades away. So that’s not it. What the egg
Of an unhatched soul wants only is not release
From lies but from the lie that there is a truth
That does not alter when alteration finds it.
The arc is long but it bends, is ever bending
Toward what I am not certain, but then,
Again, I am certain of nothing.

Inhuman Wisdom, 5 February 2018

Truth is, you don’t want somebody calm,
Somebody who comprehends the larger
Truth. Someone like that lacks motivation.
Stoicism is good. The stoics were made to rule.
Theirs is a ruler’s religion. Just ask Aurelius,
Scourge of those creepy atheist Christians
Who refused to acknowledge Roman gods.
Because the calm of the stoics is deceptive, brutal
When it feels its role requires it to be so,
You can count on a stoic to get things done,
Even if occasional slaughter is involved.
But somebody truly calm, not out to conquer,
Save, or enlighten anyone, is hardly human.
You don’t want that. That won’t help you.
That long perspective sees bland erasure
Blurring every margin of every existence,
An indifference born of sinking gravity,
No hopping off the wheel of rebirth, no
Eternity of hosannas beyond mortality,
No sutras, no scriptures, no prime directive,
No redemption, no necessity. Dispassion is rare
In a ravening species self-domesticated, bred
For striving, for competing to scramble quickly
Up the sliding piles of rubble our ancestors
Raised, just to add a bit to the top of the heap.
Leave an inscription, leave a legend, a song.
Leave descendants, a fortune carved in stone,
A prophecy, a romance, an empire, a notion,
Something immortal, another damned poem.

A Ghost of Information Lectures Me, Black Lake, 4 February 2018

It is only because of the possibility of loss,
Of the irreparable erasure of information,
The permanent vanishing of pattern,
And only as such, not just material exchange,
That anything changes at all, and it is only
As varying rates of change that anything
Exists at all, and it is gravity that is nothing,
That is the ultimate eater of pattern,
That allows the draw-down from a higher
To a lower state of entropy that is
The vanishing of information by which
Time is real and unidirectional, or else
And without which nothing would be,
While thanks to which nothing will be,
Or rather, thanks to the nothing which is,
Everything is. The ghost looked at me
Solemnly as we paused in our drive along
The shoreline road. Thanks for the lift,
He added, I get out here. Here was nothing
But a flat expanse of water, shimmering,
The surface of Black Lake, rumored
To contain a drowned town in its depths,
Rumored to show during droughts just
The bell tower of a church above its surface.
But I let him out of the car and he limped
Cautiously, as if afraid of falling, to the edge
That was rimmed with a thin line of ice,
Then walked straight down into the water
And kept walking until he disappeared.

Everyone’s a Corydon, 3 February 2018

You can’t get any deeper without drowning
Said the wildly pumping heart to the brain,
But the brain wanted to see what was under
The last of the light the eyes could perceive.
How do you split the darkness so you touch
The buildings at the bottom of Black Lake?
(“It's kind of weird,” he says quietly, the man now
Dead for years, “I wish the town was here.”)
You need a mind like a Lidar survey laser,
Not a mind like you got. But it’s down there,
You know it, the drowned town of future,
The sunken answer to your uncertain questioning,
The shape of the end that spells anything,
That would tell you why all the drowning
Of towns to hold water began. You were
A child when you first read of the ghosts
Coming out of the water and wandering
Down the road that ran along the shore. You
Knew then something no one knew anymore.

Divining Black Lake, 2 February 2018

Not exactly ex nihilo nihil fit. Nothing will
Come, and of nothing everything has been.
Speak again. The future is nothing, nothing
In it, the undiscovered country everything
Travels toward and from which everything
Obtains. Again. The future has created
The past, is creating the past. Because
Nothing is in the future, and only because
Nothing is the future is there, has there
Ever been anything. The future is nothing,
And nothing is the only cause, necessary
And sufficient, of everything trailing toward
Nothing, nothing, the only cause there is.
Because of this, therefore before this.
The Black Lake makes us by giving us a way
To change, a chance to erase, the creation
Of space, the plunge into gravity and grace.
The cause is all before us. Black Lake waits.

Creative Nihilism, 1 February 2018

Let the laws themselves be explained,
Demanded the renegade, nothing real or true
Is timeless. I like him, but it’s possible,
Perhaps, that nothing itself is real, true,
And timeless, too, being no thing, being
Outside of change. God, gravity, nothing at all,
These three remain, mystery one and the same,
But the greatest of these is nothing? One
Thinks of how weak numbers went, before zero
Anchored the number line, how the calendar
Handed down from ancient Vaticans began
Already at one, how the modular clock face
Counts to twelve then starts at twelve again.
The progress of civilization perhaps has been
One long drunkard’s walk toward knowing
That we’re missing the missing at the center,
The core where all becoming is vanishing, where
The sum of all variation is nothing, is none.
But if gravity draws possibility from nothing,
Erasure that draws us on, does nothing ever
Change, does nothing itself transform itself,
Can gravity weaken, diminish, and die?
The truth is an empty and voracious sphere
Composed of interlocking waterfalls of lies.