Redaction, 7 April 2018

You can find the words, but only scattered.

They’re ashes from urns lobbed over the edge.

They’re eggshells smashed in the middens.

They’re the meanings in the Voynich manuscript.

They’re animals fleeing the forest fire in Bambi.

They’re microstates of quantum gravity.

They’re the rations that form the sole source

Of subsistence for a half-starved family.

They’re the surprises in human behavior.

They’re the Devil’s Big Three of dances,

Card parties, and booze. They’re easy to lose.

They’re the dates on a fictional calendar.

They’re the dates on any kind of calendar 

That’s no longer used or understood.

They’re the sisterhood hidden in the sacred grove.

They’re the raided warehouses of evoked

And studied mathematical objects, the null

Sets and spheres of arbitrary dimensions.

You can find the words, but you can’t have them.

A Day Spent, 6 April 2018

Mostly in bed and five hours’ drive away,
One more minor miracle, impossible only
A few years ago, now mundane. A sick day
For daughter and no one to babysit,
Father set up the phone connection
Two-hundred and fifty miles to the north
And they both stayed in bed, talking, joking,
Reading, even ignoring each other amiably
While he read poetry and she played a game
But always hearing the digital replication
Of each other’s breathing, able to check
Each other’s face. After seven hours, mother
Came home from work at the other end.
If that was only a simulation, well, so is this
In the brain, so is everything in the brain.
A day of affable companionship. Don’t complain.
A day of affable companionship. Well spent.

Replacement, 5 April 2018

In an empty room on a lonely afternoon
(In a room on an afternoon), the most
Exquisite touch is the dust. The pulse
Flips like a fish on a dock and the hips
Ache, in any position they ache, the chest
Makes it worse with cough after cough. This,
So people claim, is what it means to age.
But it’s not. The body is more background
Noise to go along with the rumbling trucks,
The hum of the household machines,
A thump from the basement as another body
Stumbles over books. It’s all background
For an awareness freed from conversation
And checking the news. The weather stutters
And then there is this: when the afternoon
Is finished, the words gather in the pit
Of the memory and, here we are, replace it.

Now Serving Time, 4 April 2018

Put that thought aside and look around.
What can you find that’s not only familiar
But that you understand? I’ll be damned
If there’s one thread of your sensorium
You can track to its actual origin. I’ve found
Nothing about any understanding available
To me that wasn’t also yours and others',
Wasn’t also incompletely right if not completely
Wrong. You and I, we could switch places
Anytime, could and have hopped from body
To body, but can never find ourselves as I or you
Except when forever attached to one body.
So here we are, or were, once upon a time,
A couple of alien pronouns at home
In the flesh we long ago invaded, trying
To command our eyes to look around and find
Something beyond this prison to keep in mind.

Alone With the World, 3 April 2018

I never stopped wanting the random world
To say something clear and other than
Random to me. I never really meditated.
I listened. I tried to pay attention. I wasn’t
Praying, mind you, not past the age of seventeen.
I wasn’t asking for any particular thing.
If I wasted time, it was not in the listening
But in all my studying about the world
In the traces left on the earth and air
By fellow, anxious human beings.
There is no human, living or dead, no artifact,
No text sacred or profane, no architecture
Song or painting that can explain on behalf
Of the nonhuman world, sorry, not even math.
There’s a humility to certain empirical approaches
That commit themselves to scrutinizing
What isn’t yet rendered human, but even then,
When we record and compare observations
We’ve already secreted messages that are us,
Not it. I set aside what I could of my time
Not to converse, commune, consume,
Or compose more lines, not to learn, but just
To wait for something to come through. It won’t.
It probably won’t. But what’s never, was never,
Might never be said, says something too.

Subdivision, Utah, 2 April 2018

On a front lawn across from a cul de sac,
In a maze of brown-trimmed beige houses,
The guest is put in mind of another, nearly
Identical setting near Atlanta, Georgia,
More than twenty years ago. This pattern,
This kind of pattern, still raw and novel
When he was born has proven durable.
Even the infamous soullessness of these
Motherboard bedroom neighborhoods
Feels soulful to him now, if not appealing.
This particular setting benefits from a wall
Of snowy mountains well off to the east
And a nearer, similar but smaller wall to the west.
An old water tower from back when this was
Ranchland hovers over the nondescript herds
Of cowed houses like a spider from Mars.
But it’s not just the vivid backdrop, absent
In so many other, similar communities, not
Just the unusually fresh spring air this day
That gives this necklace of shells its soul.
It’s that the guest resting on the front steps
Has lived long enough now to notice
That charm and strange are not estranged
From any of the duller names and flavors,
That the similar and the boring, the nothing
Much expanses of the nearly homogeneous
Remain the common parlance of all the cosmos.

Warm Springs Spring Fling in Retrospect, Easter Sunday, 2018

Weather this calm wants to write something,
The late afternoon breeze in the trees
Quieter than a quill on vellum. Let’s see.
What letters now are self-inscribing?
A story, a neighborhood version: a woman
Told it at a microphone to a little crowd
Of children, progenitors, and guardians
Gathered for a fundraiser this morning,
Including an Easter egg hunt. There was
A temperate hot spring, here on the hill,
Where indigenous people gathered to winter
Uncounted centuries. Settlers surrounded it,
Built a half-century’s worth of bath houses,
And then, at last, this grand pre-cast palace,
Warm Springs, about a hundred years ago.
It thrived decades, then became unprofitable
And was converted into a Children’s Museum.
For the past thirty years, only the model
Railroad society has continually used it,
Occupying the basement floor. The goal,
Of the event was to restore the building
To its former grandeur, a place of pools
And socializing, in a world where warm water
Is easily produced and heavy freeway traffic
Rumbles by the old wintering grounds.
The story finished. People mean well.
The building was perhaps handsomer
In its desuetude than it would ever be again,
The sun this morning of the harrowing
Etching the exquisite shreds and layers
Of tan paint, cracked cement, flaking stucco,
And peeling boards. Parchment. Put down the pen.