​
​      RETURNING FROM AN OVERNIGHT IN THE MOUNTAINS


I went with yy and XXX, two poets I recently met.
They were very considerate companions, 
staying out of sight the entire time.
And they never made any sound.

Here’s are some recordings from our conversations:
​

Looking back though, as healing as it all was, I can’t help but wonder
what was left unsaid.

=================================
 
        DRIED FLOWERS


After a while, the angiosperms were, and started, becoming after which: they began. To be. They were, the angiosperms. Flowering plants. And, Then:
 
One of the forms of this  - Existence -  one of the forms of this, of these angiosperms, one of the shard-shaped planes of glass, that are, even now, piercing their membrane {Outside vs. Inside}, one of the forms of the glass which is this-defines-the-angiosperms: One of those piercing planes is simply the angiosperms’ expressing. It, the angiosperms, is, in part, their shaping of their outsides; their Expressing. It is their shaping, of their outside, to refract, themselves. To twist, outward, change, expand and enlarge-biggen. Themselves.
 
For the inside of this Expressing be-becoming, "now-visible! I can see it!" and the Inside, be-becoming, it becomes more than that. The inside of their expressing, it over-opens its mouth, too wide; now the interior of their inside finds itself wrapping round, outside, over and backwards-behind. It is inside-out and then deep down within, into the throat of the Inside, the interior of their Expressing, it is Deep in the inside of. That, that is the act. It is them. They, are, in part, their Expressing itself. 

In very many ways, the angiosperms shape their outsides. The angiosperms cultivate these shapings, these expressings of theirs, gently growing them, nurturing, nurturing parts of them, developments  - certain ones -  among all of their shapings of parts of their outside. Nurturing carefully, ever so gently. But, also, inside this Outside, deep down (so dark!) into the throat of it, which is them: some very, oh so fraught, they must do some careful pruning. Some snipping. Of parts that will not be nurtured (and never even seen, ideally, if the truth be told).
 
But, also, being surprised (the crucialness of surprise!) by those parts that “now-becoming!”, after so long, their nurturing. And then being enveloped by it, by their own blossoming surprise. And by some others as well, surprises that is, surprised by surprises. Being enveloped by surprises in what it is being expressed, in The very this-is-the-angiosperms, in their they-in-themselves. All such, this surprising of the angiosperms, by what it is to be an angiosperm: it is changing what it is that an angiosperm is.
 
(How do you describe the angiosperms’ expressing, their acting on the world, their artistic creations, at least some few of them? How do you describe the art that they create, that then (re)creates them? That molds them into instances of the art that they do on everything else?)
 
And some of the forms of this cultivation produced tools, you could call them that: External to the internal of the angiosperms, means to their ends, external means to the Other out of the same. External means, within those specifically, the angiosperms cultivated and nurtured, for the purposes of their artistic pursuits: Tools. Outside of the angiosperms, for wrapped backwards and envelope the angiosperms themselves; Tools that angiosperms could use. Could use, to help, in their shaping, their expressing, to create a few of those expressings. The angiosperms had no hands, you see, and so wanted to grow tools with hands. Tools to help, in the reshaping, of the angiosperms themselves. Into something else. To help change, them, the angiosperms themselves, into works of their art.
 
For why make a piece of art unless it changed you? Unless it was you that you were making? And why express yourself if you weren’t making a piece of art?
 
So they cultivated, the angiosperms did. They bred. And eventually, they had an instrument with hands. A tool, that they could use, for some types of to-express, could use upon their very selves. The tool would never express itself, the tool, of course; it was a tool for expressing, not itself an expressing. It would never even have an independent conception of what is, of its It. The tool would never understand what it was that it was, what it was used for, to express by the flowering plants, that it was a to-be-used-as part, it was such a part of a to-express. The tool was a tool, a collaborator in the expression, a structure within and supporting the expression, supporting the art piece. The tool thought it created the art piece. But it was just a tool. A tool wielded by the creator of the art piece. The art piece that acted back on the Creator. The angiosperms had created humans; tools.
 
And in order for their tools to live long enough to fully in-sync with the angiosperms their maker, to “hear” their creator, to do its bidding; so that their instruments could persist reach well-aged, and burnished, polished, could be some of them things of beauty themselves: So the tools could become their own art themselves, not just be for the making of art. For this the flowering plants, the angiosperms, they produced stoppers, out of rubber, and integrated those into their tools (tools which gave themselves names, being human) that they bred. The flowers endowed what they bred with a way beyond itself, beyond what was in its own breeding. They provided the tools that they bred with stoppers, in order to hold it all in, for a while at least.
 
            ***
 
All of the stoppers were hard rubber, usually very hard rubber, but a few were a bit softer, if that’s the word. It was just marginally possible to push a thumb into those ones. They were all very small, ranging from about a third of a centimeter in diameter down to fractions of a millimeter. From the sap of Ficus Elastica, a tree with almost invisible flowers.
 
A few of the stoppers were still their pristine original black, while a few, in a very tasteful choice, those few had been dyed an off-white, a shade not-quite fully contrasting with the black. A tan-ward tint of bone-white. But the vast majority of the stoppers, they had clearly been used. They were still black, underneath. But now had streaks of very dark red on their surfaces, the color of clotted blood.
 
All of the stoppers that anyone still had were (of course) attached to very fine chains, the width of a single thread of silk. Chains growing out of the person from near where the associated stopper plugged a hole in the person. A few of the chains were still noticeably silver (typically these thread-chains were attached to pristine black rubber stoppers). But most of the chains looked like they were, had turned the color of dark dirt. A few other chains appeared to be very darkly tarnished. Or could be imagined that way.
 
There were even a few stoppers that had been dyed lime green, or even a sort of neon-pink, since that had once been a bit of a fad, a wan, atavistic gesture, at the idea of the now-scorned (but how still envied) recent history, when rebellion was not just a birthright, a noble calling, but an obligation, and oh the embarrassment! not to have a shiny emblem attesting to one’s scorn for emblems attesting to things. However, these once dyed stoppers also usually had dust and grease grimed streaks marring their surface, in what appeared to be permanent stains. So the dyed color of these stoppers visible beneath the dust and neglect looked sort of like frozen memories, of smiles once understood, like faded photographs or portraits (remember portraits?) of a loved one, or if not a loved one, of who you once were, beneath the patina that comes with being abused just very slightly a bit too, too much.
 
People would almost unconsciously hold their arms close about themselves, hugging themselves. First you must love yourself, it was said; wan smile: First you must protect your dangling threads, your chains. First you must protect the stoppers those chains would pull on, if you weren’t careful. If you didn’t hold your arms close, close to your self.
 
Some of the people who were still alive were very old. These people had only about a dozen stoppers still plugged into them, mostly in their torso, or neck, or face; their legs and arms long since having been unplugged. Most people still had at least several dozen stoppers though, often up to about a hundred or so stoppers in all, still wedged hard, in their flesh, stoppers wedged in all over their bodies.
 
Sometimes you would see people who had stoppers that had been pulled out but were still attached to the ends of their chains, still had unplugged stoppers, now dangling, stoppers that hadn’t been snapped / twisted off, or cracked off, not yet. Sometimes these dangling chains-with-tiny-stoppers-at-their ends got snarled in a chain still attached to a stopper in themself. Or got entangled in a chain still attached to a stopper in someone else. And, often, eventually the other person pushed them away, or they pushed the other person away. So that the entangled chains … One tried not to think about this, typically people went into some private place when a stopper had been pulled out, and returned deeply drained, spent dry, the chain now dangling in air.
 
Some people have never actually seen a stopper being pulled out…, even when it happens to them. A chain gets caught on something in life, or someone reaches out and grabs hold of it, and “pop!”, out comes your stopper. When they look at the spot afterwards, these people, once the pain has stabbed them there, and twisted, and then push-in-the-hilt-of-the-knife-until-a-squishy-sound, afterwards, after the feelings that had been beneath where the stopper had been wedged into the torso, after the feelings had ossified, formed a scar, without any more feeling, with only a memory of the pain. After the liquid that had been held in by the stopper, the plug, had all drained out:
 
A little part of their surface, where the stopper hole still was, and just a little around that structure, that little part of skin is now grey, burnished wood. That part of their surface is now salt-smoothed, polished, by all the spindrift it had withstood, all the storms that had wracked that area and the beach where the stopper was now washed up, a tiny clump of driftwood.
 
For almost everyone, when they lose a stopper, when the feelings have turned to wood, the liquid drained out: the flesh around the stopper’s hole cracks, a little. (It’s almost impossible – almost –  for a stopper to come out of the hole  that it was so tightly pressed into in a clean pull, without eventually cracks forming.) Moreover, unfortunately it’s not uncommon that such cracks extend to other nearby stoppers that are still in their holes, seeking them out almost, surrounding those other stoppers, just barely in a complete envelopment, on all sides, with turning flesh into wood and splinter. So there’s a bit of a progression, a cascade, several feelings in succession, scarred over, made memories only, one after the other. All of them into what-was, in one jerk, pause, jerky a bit further, extended fracturing event. These pieces of clenched-teeth wood, riddled with shards of stone, of glass, that stick out of the wood-flesh and snap, eventually.
 
And occasionally, rather than turn to wood … these people are unfortunate. Many of their stoppers, their plugs, were pulled out, yanked hard, by others. Too much damage done. Like strawberries, frozen and then thawed, with dark mud-like mold making them stink. Some splinters of what looks like it was once iron shavings. It eventually, slowly  - mostly -  gets removed from the now enlarged gouge, where the hole had been. Wiped onto some other people, or perhaps the furniture. But there’s always a foul odor, and it seems that the there is always some small residue of reddish slimey stuff, oozing a bit, inside the misshapen gouge.
 
And some others still … a stopper comes out smoothly. But so very unlucky, where its hole is on their torso. The liquid, in the hole, it gurgles. Just barely. It pulses, just barely  … and that liquid never drains, until they are entirely made of wood. With cracks, one major crack, one spine-broken crack, and others radiating out of it.
 
All of these people, almost all people, whose wood forms with cracks; eventually each of them is a clump of driftwood, laid out on a beach, a small pile of wooden sticks, trying to hold itself. But no arms. Then one morning, after a rain-tossed-and-turning night of breakers and winds, they’re eyes still, and wooden, open on the beach. And then, they can’t be found anymore, nowhere on the beach.
 
But some people – the others –  eventually, when every one of their stoppers has been pulled, when all of their holes have now emptied of the liquids that they held inside, those people: no cracks. Never. No jam either – they are all wood. So lucky! A single piece, a single spindrift-salt-varnish driftwood, whole. All of its holes smoothed, gray, a storm wracked piece of wood. Without a single crack. Driftwood that washes up on the beaches, above the high tide line. Slowly covered by sand. So after a long time, they too are no longer found on the beach, as driftwood. Perhaps as something else.
 
            ***
 
There are places that are now far back from the surf, its susurrating waves, shish-shish-shishing sounds on the sand, places where you cannot even see the ocean from these places anymore, they are now so far back from the sea. There are dune grasses there, those places of sand, now, dune grasses where there had been driftwoods, now buried. Dune grasses being what they could not have been otherwise, not without the driftwood. Dune grasses that are continually whipped by the wind, that were flailing the wind, sharp-edged, dry, salt-scrubbed dune grasses.
 
Sometimes, people come by, gentle, retiring, ambling gaits, now, at peace. People with many holes, people all wood – but usually no cracks. There are no cracks in the people who wander the dunes.
 
These people who gentle smile, warm blanket people, very often women, sometimes these people will cut some dune grasses. They will use extremely sharp shears made for just this purpose, the perfect tool for the job. Exquisite instruments, these shears. They will snip off some perfectly shaped blades of grass. Blades, grass blades, collected in a bag. That can be combined later, just perhaps, with other desiccated parts of plants. Maybe with flowers, that have been dried, and pressed flat. People who wander, who are instruments of their muses. Sand-polished people. No understanding of which dried plants work together, and how, and the why of their feeling this, just those feelings, which is what it is that they use without understanding (though they imagine that they actually do, some of them). To create. Their art.
 
Dried flowers and grasses, carefully arranged. Carefully placed, between shard-shaped planes of very clear glass.


=================================

     PREFACE

​
I want

-    words that well 
up from within this page, words emboldening, bolder, that – too much! - 
start to quiver, palms shaking as they grip me, I want words 
that shiver 
their flesh from their clothes, that shed out of their skin, that
look, upwards at 
me. I want the mouths of my Words that are opening 
wide. I want 
Words, that diffuse, out from my view, a 
collectively squeal, a collection of thinning 
in the distance: howls. I want words that return
from behind my head, with so much to tell that
they cannot say. I want words that are

-    Tight. Words -
Upright, with 
triangular ears, with 
trapezoid eyes, that see their own Eyes 
quivering, emboldened, into shivering 
question marks. I want 
words that slither and
lunge up from this page.
Words that seppuku, onto the top of this page, that
slurp-squish out their Meanings, on the top of this page; I want Words that command:
write them.
Words that seppuku 
their guts:
Me.

​
=================================

       A SIP FROM THE RIVER STYX

 
I’ve read many essays on what it’s like to learn one has cancer. Lots of firm-faced affirmations, lots of “I am so grateful for …”. Lots of self-help calendar quotes, and smiley-faced emoticons (colored with just the right tint of grim determination).  All supposed to describe what it feels like when you are woken, in the dark, by the carcass breath of Godzilla. Grinning. At you. Through a mouth that’s as wide as a human’s grave, and just inches above your face.
 
Maybe it really was all emoticons for them - I cannot say. But that's not how it was for me.
 
To help you calibrate what I’ll say below: I’m a research scientist. Many people do science as just a profession, as a job. But at the risk of hyperbole, I’m in it for the sheer glee of wrestling with God. Of trying to pull free one of the gazillions of tiny, shiny keys that He has stuffed deep into his pockets. So important is this to me that many times I’ve made a conscious decision to give up salary, power and prestige, just so I could have as much freedom as possible to do research. To wrestle for a key.
 
In addition, you should know that I’m only 54. And that I’m a bit of a health nut. And that despite that, I was recently shocked with a diagnosis of lung cancer, when I was sure the mass in question was benign.
 
Well, the verb “shock” doesn’t really suffice. A bit more metaphorically, for the first week or so, I was a rat in a cage, frothing, with bloody claws, shredding them on the wire door.
 
As a fer-instance: One day I watched an interview on Youtube with the surgeon who would soon remove most of my lung. Next to the interview were video epistles, by people who knew they were to die from their lung cancer within a month. Their last words to their loved ones. I clicked on one of those video goodbyes.
 
Afterwards, when the shattered pieces of me had managed to find one another, I was curled on the floor. Bawling, like a child.
 
And that was not the worst of it.
 
In moments between … the worst of it. When I was going for a walk, or looking out a window… One of the saddest things for me was thinking about the people I love, living after me. Inevitably forgetting about me, rather quickly.  It felt like I was sitting on my front door stoop of my house, watching my neighborhood friends gathering to leave for summer camp. They will have so many adventures this summer, have so many surprises. But I won’t have those surprises. I’ll be left behind, on my front door stoop. In their past, quickly disappearing as they drive off.
 
Remember how much I said I loved science? When you wrestle with God for a week, obsessed, and then, finally, you break through, find a shiny key … It’s like you tapped a jewel, oh so gently. And then - exquisitely – the jewel cleaved, into two pieces that just plop, into your lap… Or when you lie on your back, looking at the stars, and finally manage to drop upwards, into the sky, manage to feel the three-dimensionality of the positions of all those stars, falling up from under you.
 
All of these feelings, all my deepest, most profound joys: They. Are. Nothing. Not when set next to Cancer. Cancer is real. All those passions, those raptures? They’re only microscopic, trivial baubles imprisoned in me. Cancer … is the hugeness that is outside of me. My raptures are like tiny, flat stick figures. Drawn in thin, scribbly ink, on scraps of plain white paper. Pasted to the ground. And now I saw that next to those small, two-dimensional figures is a Three-dimensional, Vaulting, Churning Brimstone, a fully filled-in… what would you call it? A skyscraper? My neck screamed, as my head was pulled up from the ground. Pulled up for the very first time in my entire life. I had never even known there was a third dimension. Or colors. Or filled-in figures. A skyscraper: Godzilla.
 
That skyscraper is so vast, it cannot fit inside my skull. Not really. A very small part of it, tightly compressed, managed to squeeze itself inside me, at the very beginning, at the moment of existential shock. Unbearable pressure in my skull. But it soon burst loose, unfurled from my brain, stretching for miles, out of my direct awareness. It is simply too massive to be contained in a mind. (Or at least in my mind.)
 
How did all this end?
 
Well, I had a reprieve. The diagnosis was wrong.
 
I do not have cancer after all.
 
I feel like some unmusical Orpheus, who woke, in nightmare, at the edge of the Styx. An unending scream, seeing that gentle, flowing water. And who was then whooshed back, inhaled by some greek god. All the way back, to the land of sunshine, of baubles and butterflies. Of dancing dandelions in the daylight. To our “reality”.
 
But it is there. It is what is real. Everything else, all the wonders that I take to be so true and glorious? They are shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave. No, not even that anymore.  They are dimming memories, of the shadows I once saw. After I’ve turned my head, to look at the light that was casting those shadows. As I’m blinking. Almost blinded, by the immensity. Too much for my eyes.


=================================

IN THE MIDDLE OF AN ARROYO

A paper plate impaled
upright;
The side of a prickly pear cactus

(after Ezra Pound)

=================================

NEW YEAR'S EVE

Black garbage bag
speared on a tree’s sticks;
Unfolds two wings, and then
jack-knifes
slowly.

=================================

WHAT WRITING FEELS LIKE
​

The baby is yet still 
-  Baby; the baby is yet newly
born; the baby is
New-now old Breath; It is 
Baby yet 
new-oldest needs. The baby is 
must most right now; but is Newness of 
deepest of void. The baby is 
newest Now needs - it is now new need newest
of filling. The baby is
skinness-to-skin, it is
outside
that’s yet filling in. The baby is in
-side 
unfurling, it is
mother is
Baby
is morning.

The baby is contact 
with father, The baby 
shows both of them 

how. 

 ===============================

A FOLD IN THE SKY
 

Deep indigo drapes, heavy 
felts that are hanging
from high, distant ceilings
at the back of the stage.
Silently, slowly, 
their long sides
wave
back, and forth.
 
Tall, twilit spruce
with hanging blue branches, that 
whisper
side to side,
that are tucked, deep inside
of murmuring breezes.
 
My head - just my head:
It's a cushion from a chair
which is tucked in a fold
of a tall spruce tree’s drapes, which gently
in a breeze, me blind and mute,
back,
and forth.
 
Or perhaps more accurately:
Tall blue spruces - But
flipped, upside-down, and
hanging from their roots 
which are buried, in a ceiling,
which is hidden far above, 
in a fold
in the sky.
 
Or perhaps: I’m the one upside down,
with my feet buried somewhere
in an aquamarine sky,
with the spruce 
right-side up, and it's
perfectly still.
And it's watching, me, as I 
back,
and forth.
 
Metaphors, standing in a line
with patient, liquid eyes.
Whispering, together, like long lace curtains
which are brushed by a breeze
as it turns in its sleep, which
​afterwards;
​
quiet.


    ===============================

All of these people, all
walking by the lake,
all of these hands
through the hair,
the fluttering breeze.

All of these
        40-page, loose-leaf
         checklists:
this trait, yes, and that one, as well,
but that one,
no.
Each just
40 pages, loosely stapled,
flapping in the hair
of the fluttering breeze.

But turn, out there, out there
if you look:
some flapped-free pages, now
singleton sheets, now
waving, slightly,
within the slow, lapping
wet.


    ===============================

    Words can be a filmy barrier; can be

a blurring, in the

in between here and 
over there; can

require a remaking, a
re-self-constructing
as they emerge, as they are
pulled across and into 
over there; can require 
a rebirthing
by a thought, of a thought, one that is very, very similar
but

    well, not quite, not exactly, and not fully completely so. A softest
    blurring, but well,
    not quite, instead a …

distraction

    from what I’m still trying so very hard to say

    ===============================

Every second
leaves its taste in its successor.
And each year is
an aftertaste
in all of its descendants;
their ancestor.
 
How can a right-now slip loose 
   - become a moment with no futures,
a time with no taste,
Immaculate?
Slip loose
its pasts, my futures, this question; Become
a sight without a thing
that was seen?
 
My futures become my pasts, but
without a right-now. I am
Vanished
from my telescope's eye. 

    ===============================

Sometimes you look up
at a cornice, or sky
or a roof,
when nothing is there because
you think there is.

And once I was walking on a city street
and nobody looked up
at a cornice, a roof,
or the sky,
even though something was there because
they thought there wasn't. 

    ===============================

Most words are made-up, constructs
of us.

But some few are discovered,
like some previously unknown mineral. A
peculiar patina, just cleaved clean
from a hillside. Casting new reflections
into our eyes, into places that
we'd never been. New
twistings inside
that now we can see.

New words.

    ===============================

LOOK AWAY
​

This sentence does not see itself.

The rising sun is blind
to the glints of brass, flaring below.

The wind does not feel the leaves,
a broom beating dust from a rug

Except:
            A rowboat, with raised oars
            on a still, shadowed pond.

And so, your eyes,
they twist, and then they slip free,
and then they sprint back outside
through the big black back door.

​
   ===============================

SELF REFERENCE


​One of Yin / Yang is larger than the other.

Which?


   ===============================

A path in the snow on the right of the road,
loops back
in the cul de sac,
and now is aimed at you.

It is simple to check that a particular code opens that lock in your palm.
It is difficult to find the code that opens that lock in your palm.

A particular way of thinking, that seems to work.
"How should I think about life?"

The snow cups the path,
in its palm.

A way of thinking is "consistent" if it never contradicts itself.
A way of thinking is "complete" if it can find the answer to every question.
Our way of thinking has explained that our way of thinking
    cannot be both.

Our way of thinking suspects, but is not sure, that in our way of thinking,
it is always easier to check an answer than to find it.

Orange sunlight slipping
sideways, between the too few
black trees.
Tinting just the tips of the snow.

"How should I live my life?"

If you magnify a coastline, you will find
            it always looks the same.
​If you magnify the snow, you will find
            it always looks the same.
If you magnify the cells in you, you will find
the image keeps changing and changing and changing.

The snow melts slowly, in the spring,
opening its palm.


   ===============================

A PROGRESSION


I need to know what is the me that I am
to certain others. 

I don’t mean certain other people. 

In addition  
    - this is important, and very hard -  
it does not matter whether those certain others are correct. 

This goal will never be attained.
This too does not matter. 

    ***

All of that had been etched on a thin white plate.

But turn it over; 
the other side is hollow, and wide, and
you cannot see its bottom.

One could fall into it.

   ===============================

A PIECE OF MUSIC


A baton, right after the conductor taps the music stand, 
and raises his hand.

A chopstick, just before the patriarch spears down into dumplings, 
popping open the family's feeding. 

A napkin, just before the mother taps its tip at her baby’s 
oh-shaped mouth. 

A booty, plum-sized and baby blue, as it falls from the happily swinging feet
onto the perfectly flat floor.

A perfectly flat mirror, as it shows you people,
emerging from behind your head.

A mirror-flat lake, after the glare off its surface
forced you to turn around.

You, with your back to the lake; after staring into the woods
you finally  - finally -  take a step toward the trees.


Some decisions are hard to explain.


   ===============================

To get under your topsoil
don't try digging with words;
Words 
will just puff from your hands,
if you try to pull them to ground.

To get under your topsoil,
you must dig with
a hole;
a hole that's about
two feet wide and six feet long
  -   just like the holes floating behind you
wherever you've been.

Press your hole, down,
deep into the earth.
Then get up, and brush off 
the dirt from your pants

puffing, off into the sky.

    ===============================

LEAVE NO TRACE POETRY


How do you sculpt a pot
without touching clay?
How do you compose a painting
without holding a brush?
How do you release your reflection
from the cup of your hands,
without it looking 
like you?

How do you beam lights
into the darkness behind
that don't reflect back at you?

    ===============================

PARTIALLY ORDERED SETS


On day n,
the tables were arranged as the perimeter of a square,
with a large hole in their middle
like a face with its nose cut out of it,
and with a few empty coffee mugs, askew on the table surfaces,
and the chairs were all angled,
sticking out.

On day n - 1,
the tables were arranged as a square,
with people pushing the perimeter, pressing table tops,
and in the hole in their middle 
their words began to lock, and whirlpools pulled,
tightening the faces,
and coffee mugs 
cooled.

On day n + *,
the tables were arranged in rows,
facing the viewing screen in front
with the chairs neatly tucked in, "smartly" as my mother used to say, but
none of it could be seen
in the dark,
the dark, the dark.

In the angled time, n- + n+,
the chairs were in fetters,
stacked as slaves had been, in the dark holds of ships,
with my legs threading the arms
of the ones beneath me.

Sometime in years A, B and C,
they called an ambulance
for me, dying
in the middle, between the tables.
And in the middle of those years
the paramedics watched, exhausted,
as a baby finally coughed, and wailed
and wailed.

    ===============================

It is common for poets (and I am not one),
to grace their nouns with souls
and surround them with baskets full of verbs. Gifts for
nouns to speak, to convince us
we feel.

So a stone
might stare
or cock a quizzical eye,
while a tree might nod,
and raise its face to the sky,

where a cloud might watch, or
whisper in Stone's ear.
Oh if these nouns might speak
so that I too could hear!

If language could explain,
if mere nouns could tell me how.
If we could sit around a table,

Language in one chair,
Conversation in another,
and I might serve fine wine,

might their nouns reveal their souls,
and thereby show me mine?

    ===============================

I didn't "exterminate" my self.
Nothing so intense, so 
taut with ambition.
I just abandoned it, maybe a thousand miles
back. 
Heaved it off the top of the wagon.
To be fully honest, it hadn't been doing anyone any good.
Way too heavy 
to bounce on the baked earth,
it just thudded, once. 
One corner of it impaled
into the greenish-brown crust,
may it rest in peace.

I expect life has worn my self down since then.
Become a target, for the sky's wet riflery.
Or maybe a shelter 
for some snarky, honking crows,
or for a nibbling family of nest-building 
rodents.


    ===============================

FRACTURED TIMELINES


Terminal G in Munich airport
is a long, long concourse
with a long, thin thread
of snack bars and bathrooms, coffee machines
and a smoking lounge
whose windows are very wide,
slipped all the way through
its long, thin middle.

Terminal A in Denver airport
is a long, long concourse
with a cancer at its center,
a tumor of shops and snack bars, coffee machines
and pinballs
of people.

I remember teaching you to drive a truck,
the glee almost splitting your face, its sudden
twist, up, into my chin;
Really? Can I?

There are chairs outside the smoker's lounge.
You can look in the fishbowl,
at humans making
fish-faces,
deep drags.
Sucking long ashen sticks
through the hole under eyes.

After the mass shooting,
Level 4 in Denver union station
will be just for the airport express.
The crust of shops, spangled barnacles
will all be sucked below, beneath the trains.

On the ramp to the road
to the train, to the planes
to the hospital
overseas,
I turned in my seat, to answer your question.
And so didn’t see the truck,
losing control.

    ===============================

On the trail he is
inside his eyes,
and inside his pole-swing
there are rhymes

Rhymes of thoughts,
rhymes that whisper
about a hiker,
who turns, and stares,

back at him,
at somewhere behind
where I just was. Where
faint rhymes now
surface, slowly

in the rhythm
of pole-swing.

    ===============================

SAMSARA OF A POEM


Every poem has a soul.
Born first as ... a cabbage.
It earns good karma, so its next version
is a cat.

But a sinful feline, alas, full of
claws, hacking
hairballs.
So next time it comes, its form is
a tomato, quickly chewed,
and sickly, and even a bit sour. 

So next up, going back,
the poem is ... a cabbage.

But now it's a Brassica, with more insight,
self-awareness. And so
the next time
the poem is a monkey,
full of promise. And
so with yet more good deeds,
the poem sets up a cue shot,
to find itself a human
creator

    ===============================

Sleep is a slow swaying
in the bowels of a pond.
Dark and limp
things
gently loosen, down there,
float up.

Surface waters are always different
in the morning.

    ===============================

It's autumn,
time for aspens in love.
That one, she won't admit it,
but mention His name,
"oh by the way",
and her eyes peel open
like the sun
​grinning in the sky.

    ===============================

TRYING TO CATCH UP WITH MY FUTURE 


There is a person - 
I think it is always the same person.
I keep thinking I see her.

At a busy cross-street ahead of me, disappearing 
around the corner. Or across a crowded concert hall, walking
out the exit.
Or leaving the secure area of a building, as I'm entering
its foyer, through a bored metal detector.
So often, when I'm focused on something completely different (always it's that way),
I'll brush the side of an image, just as it's vanishing.

I think it's her, entering a museum
on the other side of the street.

To be honest, I'm not sure it's always the same person. 
It may be someone different each time. 
People who just look similar, 
when seen from far too far away.

Zeno's paradox. I keeping getting to where she was just a moment ago.

It may all be in my head, I don't know.

Let me make a prediction.

***

Sometime in the future, someone will make an artpiece that looks like
this:

The piece has a definite order, starting at the left, progressing to
the right.

At the beginning of the piece, it's one of those 19th century
stop-action photo-sequences, of a nude, ambling to the right. Many
frames, easily flowing together. Small changes between successive
frames, accumulating with time.

All the images are in severe black and white, as 19th century
photographs were. Very saturated film; almost no grey in the image.

Nearing the middle of the piece, the comfortable gait of the sequence
abruptly ends. The figure turns to the camera - toward the viewer of
the art piece.  As though she suddenly notices that she's being
photographed.

All the frames up to this point were the same size. But the next frame
is far larger. In that next frame, the figure is running, hard, clearly
very upset. Right at the viewer (me).

The next, final frame is huge. It stretches almost from the floor to
well above my head. By itself, it's nearly as big in area as all the
frames up to this point taken together. And this last frame is filled,
to where it seems like it's going to burst. With the figure's taut
face. Nothing but that face, its border pressing against the picture
frame. Screaming, at me (?). I can't even see the figure's neck, or
the top of her writhing hair. Her eyebrows are twisted cords.  A
giant, surreal tongue fills the central third of the image. Framed by
glaring, angry teeth.

In this future, I will read the title of the piece, placed beside it
on the wall:

"THE PAST, TRYING TO CATCH UP WITH THE PRESENT"

***

I stand back, appraising the piece as a whole.
Finished, I walk through the door on the right, into the next gallery.
Nobody is left in the room behind me.
Just a two-dimensional, frozen face.

    ===============================

My shadow blocks
my path. 
 
I must twist it, 
sideways, 
so I can squeeze past, 
complete my hike
move that dark pool

behind me. 

    ===============================

LEARNING TO SEE


The sun rolls over
on its broader
shoulder,
turning its backside
to us.

And then the sun pulls
a sheet
down over its head,
scooping our eyes
out.

And then when our eyes
are both dried,
the sun twists the blinds:

letting us gaze
into stars.

    ===============================
 
A spinning top
flamenco dancer,
A whole ballet whirling
dervishes
A rotating 
barbershop poll
spins, spun
now 
Quite slowly
and deliberately.

They / she / it / you 
have turned
less even than a half,
part-way, pulled insides
out
and through the mouth.

Have smoothly pivoted
a steady gaze,
like the long, sure rise
of a long, slow pendulum.

Try doing that 
when you're awake.
Rather than where you are now,
dizzy and half draped
over the side of a dream.

    ===============================

When the woods reflect you, well, then
something's

now found.

    ===============================
    ===============================

Copyright David Hilton Wolpert, 2013, 2023 A PIECE OF MUSIC