Nah nah don’t speak to me of perfection
Perfection’s not a thing
The Ode to a Nightingale isn’t perfect
If it were it would be a total failure
Instead of the glorious triumph that it is
These faults that anyone can find
These Homer Nods
Invite our appreciation
Not our censure
Necessary for the new stage
In the new theater
On the terrible new riverbank
That is every poem

What would you
Autocorrect the seizure that announces the shaman’s enlightenment
Subtract from the burden that each one bears alone
Before the multitudinous sea of people and other things
Making the red one green
Autotune the cry of mourning for unappeasable loss
Edit the song of the mockingbird

But what about striving aspiration lust ambition
Leonardo’s ornithopter
Earhart’s media-driven quest
One small step for man
Don’t we have a duty to uplift
Sure we have duties
But what kind of uplift do you mean
The moral or the mood
Support for insensible passion
Command for affirmation
But affirmation of what

Good must be good enough
When everybody tries
Must try to cobble a platform
Not to be seen but to see
To gaze across the whole miserable affair
The stilts are too flimsy
And the edifices already extant
Rising on every hand
Conceal more than they expose
The foul rags and bones in the charnel house
Turn from your autoanatomizing
And seek the holy wicked involuted world

No matter how far back you look
You always find modernity
The old magnolia
The brutal flowers
The glossy leaves

So many undone
Their substance rendered
To the bitter dross

Take your position
Beside the river

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A patch of blue amid the boughs
Of the great white oak double-boled
One stem greater than the other
And the roots they say extend just as far
As the limbs now so lush with foliage
That the sky arrives only in glimpses
And sometimes the ground becomes so sodden
That a tree topples in the gust
And the web of roots rises sadly exposed
And yet you can see the many places
Where the strands have broken
The smaller branchings perhaps still active
Collecting nutrients dissolved in water

And we have established those processes
By measurement and inference
And yet we imagine their participants
The dipole of water
The radical of phosphate or nitrate
And a genetic analysis might reveal
The separate identities of those twin trunks
But why speak of separation
For the infinite communication underground
Or for that matter in the canopy of leaves

Must I always make disclaimer
About the meaning of we
Humans a species like any other
And like every species unique
Who justly esteem our neurological prowess
But the botanists tell us how oaks reveal
In their merry promiscuity
Ambiguating the white say and the red
To say nothing of their root hairs and stomata
The clumsiness of our taxonomies
Of our distinctions even unto the living and the dead
Those things that live
And those descended to dreadful death

And hence we know the significance of shit
Or something of that significance
Proximate source of those very nutrients
Through the ministry of molds and bacteria
The mechanical industry of boring invertebrates
That return the tree to the soil
And deliver the fruit of the soil to the tree
And hence we should esteem
Those things to which we are most averse

As the child chants long pent
In school room living room or bedroom
That the rain should go away
Making the obligatory disclaimer
That it should return
In some suppositious future
So we imagine
So we delight to imagine
The magical efficacy of words and songs

And we mythologize our aversions and delights
When the scarab raises the unconquered sun
Or when Mad Dog Tannen
Gets a mouthful of road apples
Fit punishment we delight to suppose
For his cruelty a fall of man
Fruit of the tree of knowledge
Whence the sweat of our brows

And as for the pains of childbirth
They derive at least in part
From those big heads with that impressive neurology
So maybe hominids with their big heads have it worse
Than horses or other matronly mammals
For after our labor the real labor starts
For we are not as foals who stand within minutes
More like grubs
Who must creep and crawl and swink and strive

And thus do we impose upon the child
The burdens of orthodoxy
How the rain must fall to engender the flower
How we must flush away the fruit of our bowels
And with every step the child esteems its knowing
And asks for more and why
And where does the poopoo go
And we delight to explain
That the water carries it to a place
Where bacteria perform their silent ministry
That the water cleansed might return to its source

But we conceal for a time the further fact
That our brilliant technology
Exploiting creatures great and small
Leaves behind a sludge
That we don’t know what to do with
And for the moment we must accept
Those things to which we are most averse
And take delight in a patch of blue
While the clouds gather
Threatening they say
Another interval of rain

What that
Where there
When then
Why thy

I loiter in anger’s vestibule
I’m sorry I say out loud
I made a commitment a long time ago
I still think it was the right decision
And you know I’m a stickler for revision
And not because I’m committed to commitment
The great commission
The sign with letters upside down and right side up
So that the arrow can point to left or right
Wagers of sin I thought it said
Funny how you can live your whole life
Without realizing
That you’ve been a letter off the whole time
One letter too much
But I haven’t lived my whole life yet
Maybe just the troubled part I keep hoping
All those troubled memories
All those looping passageways
That get you nowhere

The skeletal remains of yesteryear’s leaf
Fairy wings that engender the flower

Three buzzards gracefully glide
In neither circles exactly nor gyres
And for long minutes never beat a wing

Mockingbird perched on utility line
Spreads wings silhouetted against the east
And flourishes the prey

You don’t need a sword
To cut and kill civilization
It only requires a connected device

And an age that prefers
Passion to truth
Affiliation to family

Our interpersonal problems we can resolve
With a little understanding
But woe the assault

That rides not in
Onboard ship or chariot grim
The ever-burgeoning abstract machine

That accumulates so gradually
Assembling out of sight
Under our beds

The impersonal system
Vast invisible
That gathers and pervades

And the harmful habit for hierarchy
Necessary perhaps to nurse the young
But gross dependency in free adults

And images arise on our screens
And we listen to the windbags depicted there
And put each other down

And we ourselves commit acts of violence
Turning weapons inward and out
Just following orders

The discontent of those
Who choose compliance
Over courtesy which requires thought

An old rock band played the blues
And Billy Preston added
A perfect organ solo

Vers tat menilci courp meam
Fur it ribe mosely sup ramane
Virc ceal mimo paca velor
Cendrebruk dicpass gats dom get
Prec grend ap feelie
Nie nie dunart
Cib metz mala kwercruz cedoc
Medias mnymono
Glice crodomo
Othas cod monaigremo
Falredel orpes creym meldes su selbt
Mak wird wrom ccressm
Daasol lalute
Crysoleblime

Let us open the gate
Nor fear beloved father that the stranger there
Who knocks with such importunity means harm
Though experience has taught you
That strangers bring bad tidings or worse
What time you stood upon ship’s deck
And fired upon the kamikaze
Whose momentum carries it down
Though the pilot be dead
True you have never shown me fear
Nor boasted of your wounds
But your Purple Heart covers only
Insults to the body
And not the lacerations of the mind
And you learned that the manly thing
Was to bury pain
Let us admit the insistent stranger
Who knows but that his tidings might be glad

Trained from early times to observe
With microscopic acuity
To detect patterns in streams of data
A skill poorly developed in the end

Never saw distinctly the many relatives
The aunts who smoked
The uncles who drank beer
The one I liked best who drank something stronger

Who bid me ride in fishing vessel
Beyond sight of land
And the other one the fat one
Who carried me through the waves past my height

Another who wore boots with straps and buckles
Who raised hogs and drove a truck
Whose wild sons almost grown
Gigged frogs by moonlight

I neither feared nor particularly loved them
Diverting and pleasant
Like the swoop of power lines
While I reclined in the back seat

I wasn’t strong in relationships as a child
Like good or bad weather
By far mostly good
Glossy magnolia leaves upturned in the wind

I saw them and never mentioned them
I played with my brother
And didn’t especially notice
That I enjoyed myself

The same when I played alone
Or with whichever was the yard dog at the time
The simple construction set
Mad magazine and Fahrenheit 451

Listening was less highly prized than observation
Adult conversations the evening news
And oh Gilbert and Sullivan Ray Charles and Johnny Cash
Dylan and the Beatles and the Stones

A single star bright Venus maybe
Cheshire crescent promises cool and dry
And from a heap of garden waste
Springs a single daffodil

A parliament of toads
And those that eat the toads

Hey Jason
Wake up way out west
Where time doth grow less
Not that you sleep a lot or too much
It’s later than you think out here in Georgia
Not that you think not right or too little
On the contrary I’m the one unclear on time and space
We’ve talked and talked and talked and talked and talked
And you know chat is my third favorite thing
After music and well you know
And getting high used to be an enthusiasm
For me but in old age I’ve cut way back
And still we’ve talked and talked and talked
In our offices in building H
At the Marlay in Decatur
And since you moved to California via Zoom
What kindness you have shown to me
What concern for my health and wellbeing
What gratitude I feel
What time you came to me saying
You that is I seem to be interested in ethics
Overhearing me speak of fact sincerity and respect
And we’ve tried to understand what matters
Of what it means for something to matter
And of what we should do and how we ought to act
And you’ve done most of the teaching
Though you credit me with some contribution
And we’ve discussed our psyches pathological
And the deontic and the axiological
And tried to orient ourselves toward appreciation
For the world is emphatically real
In its forces and its particles yes
But we are more confident you and I
Of the beautiful the true and the good
Than of the speed of light or the inverse square
Or the efficiency of mousetraps
And see more value in a tree or turd
Than in the cleverest invention
Or measurement most precise
And the age is ever darkening
With catastrophes in dwindling Fibonaccis
That is in inward spiral ever growing tighter
Starting with the agricultural revolution
But in earlier dim millenia past a species of ape
Gained the power to speak of futurity
And to speak in frank modality
And to understand reasons
And respond
And I wish I could devise an argument
Elegantly like you
But I’m a picker and a grinner and a singer
And a talker talker talker talker talker
And I’m a teacher I don’t say how excellent
And a poet I don’t say how excellent
And for a long time the worst sin a poet could commit
Was the fall into didacticism
But why should teaching in poetry be a sin
It’s good to help to learn
And it’s good to write a poem
I don’t say how excellent
So here’s a song about real things
The reality of value
The one life within us and abroad
And songs mostly express feelings
And some feelings come from facts
And some facts give us reasons
To act or believe or feel
So here’s a song about reasons in real things

A teary splash settles just before you blink
And an infinite rainbow regress
Surrounds all objecthood
Not a particle at rest
Not a gesture of force but signifies interestingly
Thirsty fills the neural labyrinth with motion
The assertedly living the seemingly inanimate
Sternly prevent inertness
A flux a flow a fluid mingling and separating
Light and more light suffuse matter with energy
Light more than energy
Life more than light
Calling to the past demanding the future
Gathering all movement all into now
That yet continues to move
The trees undulating lofty above the houses
Nestled in the quiet cul-de-sac
A mailbox balancing upon its stolid pillar
Front doors colorful or dull
All reverberate beyond the visible field
A group of dark birds less than a flock
Momentarily staged in the middle height
Their progress arrested by an effort of will
To schematize to render into subjectivity
That reaches out to grasp to reproduce to replicate
To transform to maintain to sample to integrate
To insist in the transformation
Grateful for the sun the clouds the greenery of spring
The warmth of southerly clime southerly breeze
The gay profusion of ephemera
The dwelling places the varied apparatus of transport
The natural and the seeming artificial
And they head into a future
As frenetic as the frozen moment
Frozen only fictively by exertion of consciousness
But no less real for that
And in the middle depth the pavement
Recalled as having marshaled the scintillating points
Like diamonds in its petroleum blackness
Under the streetlight pulsing yellow and cold
But now shimmers with the iridescent lushness
Of wing of tropical bird or lightshow of playful cuttlefish
The freshness the brightness of a dream
Bright as even those anxious dreams of awkward needy presence
Perhaps merely the product of a gestating neuron
But which nevertheless all generations have esteemed as significant
As they have esteemed the constellations as significant
As his youthful majesty the sun has coursed halfway through the Ram
And the lawn its inch of variegated grass
Not grass alone but a metropolis of leaves
The broad the narrow the brown the green the pointed and the clipped
Illuminated like manuscript and transfigured like mystical body
And memory retrieves the circular dewdrops
Nearly circular this being the phenomenal world
And how like the fragment of a tear
And the insects winged and wingless solitary and swarm
The earthworms that emerge and die
Being driven hence by the lifegiving rain
That mingles and separates in drizzles and torrents
As flowering plants seek the stab of lifegiving light
That drops like rain like honey like fluid of many colors
The small mammals that wary forage
And the raptors that swoop to catch them
And the little snake that occasionally rides
Admirable in its self-confidence
And afar an owl new to this range this habitat
Not having chosen the circumstances of its hatching
Calls and answers in daylight and darkness
And vast web of exotic spiders a prism of prisms
Like all they too products of circumstance
As the sunlight pierces and recedes
Where the circular sun or near-circular
This being the phenomenal world
Or rather the phenomenal part of the world
Casts shadow
Crazy irregular teetering between solidity and abyss
And how to conceive of this merely relative absence
Token of disconsolate mood
That hovers like shadow in memory
And like cold unrecognized in science
That knows only degrees of heat
While the vibrant indistinct periphery
Placid in its multitudinous assent
To a consumption that never consumes utterly
A haze nor purple nor blue but heavy metallic green
Lacerated by ultra-violet and infra-red
A plenitude inexhaustible and refreshing
To glimpse to drink a world so impressively dynamic
Caught and cause in an orgy of sensation
Sensory sensuous sensual
A sexy floorshow at an extravagant banquet
A kaleidoscope a circus of spectra
Never a dull moment of sameness
Crowded into the fragment of a tear
Briefly lodged in the ocular oracular organ
And yet change must mean that something changes
And thus that something persists
With astonishing regularity amid the flux
Unless this too is a quirk of fancy
In our brief time and narrow space
But feel the surge of serpentine confidence
Leaves will be leaves
Of grass and trees
And bugs bugs
As far as any eye can see
And outside and beyond and through and through
Numbers will ever generate sum product dividend
The circle will be circle
And good good

A blink measurable in milliseconds
Bathes all in red blankness and hints
At the possibility darkly tempting
Of annihilation though nothing
Can ever nothing nothing
But practically impossible does not mean unreal
For the imagination can conceive
The square root of negative one
As it can of the inexorable digits of pi
And what emotional posture
Might these imponderables demand
For we might undergo an involuntary shudder
At the thought of mere nothingness or less
Or of great infinity that teases out of thought
Anxiety induced by an imaginary fact
Or a factual figment
Assist me Muse nurturing mother
Provider of sustenance bodily intellectual and creative
Say first what source our pleasures our pains
Our drives for nutriment for reproduction for expression
Our grim dejection our poetic frenzy
We know the source of the greatest joy
The holy communion of family and friends
But say most for thou knowest
Whence the advent of witless terror
For while the tiger
That the trainwreck disgorges
Gives an object to our fear
With timestamp heading and coordinates
And we mobilize the forces required to subdue it
For we have it in our crosshairs
While that other tiger
Which burns in the forest of the night
Resists such easy crucifixion
And we rage against the injustice of reversal
For we enjoyed briefly a moment of hope
What time we said ahead ahead I see a light
But with what sudden supernatural horror
Do we gaze into the face
Of the tiger alive with flame
Impossible upon earthly frame
And yet a factual presence in the mind
And sharable with other minds across centuries
Through the miracle of text
The sacrament of image
Disorientation congealing into nightmare
But our companion soothing speaks
See what you’re looking at
It is but an animal friend
Cool bluey green
Padding to left
Not facing you in threatening confrontation
Alter eye to alter all
But though it be the last thing we might want
How often do our steps resistless lead us
Into that dreadful forest where we stumble again in the darkness
Again fallen into the fearful mood of shadow
The Dis of deep dejection
Only to be betrayed again by that meretricious light
And threatened by that imaginary tiger
Conflict internal bursting into birth
So you can replicate this experience if you want to
Replicate not repeat
For repetition is no more than perfection is
A thing in the phenomenal part of the world
The second happen somewhat differs from the first or the third
The eternal return of the same a psychological quirk
But no less factual for that
And certainly not unthinkable in a multiplicity of universes

And in one universe of space and time
Limited by space and time
Though haply interpenetrated with transcendence
What a waste is conflict and how unnecessary
When we lash out like tigers
Or slow burn like leaching acid
Anger directed inward or out
Or fall upon the sword of self-slaughter
When we can work out our differences
With our neighbors and with ourselves
Can
The ugly battlements of unreasoning fear
The nauseous intoxication of attack
The mystic bloody rituals of vengeance
Loving spouses hissing hurtful words
A drunken dispute among friends erupting in gunfire
A teenager poisoned by images to take their own life
Talking to you Zuckerberg
Warfare against both other and self
That shows that as we respect others we should respect ourselves
And not be talked into self-harm self-contempt
Or the bloody disproportion of retaliation
In adoration of the algorithm
In adoration of the volk
In adoration of the habit
In adoration of the dollar
In adoration of power
In adoration of the leader
Nor raise our fist in anger nor in compliance to foul command
Blackjack and truncheon
Lance and pike
Dagger and gladius
Halberd and partizan
Cannon mortar and howitzer
Long and short guns the automatic and the semi-automatic
Battleship destroyer nuclear submarine ballistic missile and intelligent drone
Aeroplane and zeppelin
Fortification and catapult
Reconnaissance intelligence and disposition
The firing squad for espionage or desertion
The heartless post the hostile incursion
Surgery dressing and prosthesis cobbling together the broken body
Reconstruction and torturous rehabilitation
Veterans of war trembling limbless faceless
Displaced persons dazed and mechanical
Reliving the trauma long after the fact
The corpse of a child recovered from the rubble
See ye heedless governors and die of shame

And the mood of shadow strikes
As the headsman’s blade falls upon the traitor to the king
Though the liege lord lacks authority
In tradition or in fact
To take the lives even of those deemed disloyal
But like the capricious whirlwind
That shatters one village and spares the next
Slashes regardless of intention act or explanation
No justice save the monarch’s will
For the hapless soldier disoriented in the fog
The guildsman in good faith to fulfill a contract
The wife who exercises the feminine lore of herb and textile
Neighbors who toil and till and heal
Consigned without warrant to dungeon and death
For satanic perfidy or foreign cabal
Spurious fantasies of a demented autocrat
Who punishes the poor for poverty
The migratory for migrating
And the thoughtful for thinking
And all suffer under his sway
So falls unbidden the mood of self-contempt
Dejection and residence in the city of Dis
And you can see the darkness visible coming
When the little dictator in the brain
Provincial governor
Pilate at his ablution
Like novel virus banishes all taste all pleasure all joy
And that compliant patient the accused
Remembers beauty
But cannot see it
Remembers sweet melody
But cannot hear it
Remembers the batter which nourishing mother bid them stir
But cannot taste it
And the little dictator possesses the mind merely
And the train of sincerely sympathetic friends and family
Baffled by this strange interloper
Ask what have you done with our friend
But where friends shall I put this fear of fucking up
Where shall I put this anger at the world at myself
Just don’t fuck up they helpfully reply
Just don’t get mad
And snap out of it the spell isn’t real
And they want to help more than they want to listen
Than they want to know what help might help
Meaning well as most are wont to do
Serve only to remind one of his wickedness
His incapacity
Morally torpid and an incompetent boob
Fully aware that every person he knows is human
That he himself is merely human
And subject to the limitations of every object every organism
Happy to accept the fallible humanity of all but himself
Who appreciates truth beauty and goodness everywhere
Except in himself
Arrogant in his exemption from the common run
Miraculously devoid of any extenuating virtue
Save perhaps that he is not the most vicious of criminals
But merely an inadequate mediocrity
And a pompous ass to boot
Vaunting his erudition in gratuitous display
Exposing thereby his ignorance infinite
Teasingly indulging in suicidal ideation
Who passively accedes to the sentence of death
Fit punishment he concedes
For the clumsy the wicked the ugly
Generous he supposes
To spare others the carnival grotesquery of his madness
The offense of his incapacity
Judge jury and executioner in one fell stroke
Denying himself alone the dignity of due process
And why do we torment ourselves with a cruelty
That we would impose upon no other being
Fie on punishment
Cursed be the curse of the ages
The debilitating wound of hierarchy
The tyranny of the vertical axis
Right comes from reasons not from command
And do you suppose your command
Will bring about right
Commands backed up by naked force and blind
By the threat of punishment
Thereby fostering the breed of sneak thieves
But people can understand reasons
Which come from facts
And people can act accordingly
Within the limits of their knowledge
And of their human self control
Can
For we experience those limits the livelong day
In our small and permeable selves
In our small and narrow provinces
In our small and finite universes
And we should esteem those who strive against the limits
Let us therefore forgive their wrongs
For they know not what they do
For they create not themselves in any case
And let us forebear to cast the first stone
We who have done and will do wrong again
Almost certainly in the suppositious future
Let us forbear to apply ugly epithets
As ass or boob with their puerile suggestiveness
Or yahoo even if amiably qualified
Let us experience the pathos of their vulnerabilities these humans
Their defects yea even unto their wrongdoing
Let us recall how endearing
Are the incapacities of those we love
As of pronunciation syntax or physical maneuver
Who shop at Walmark and dine at Chic a Fil
Who use fasteners of velcor in their condominimum
Let us appreciate the nobility of striving
In person beast alga tree
Let us tend to the weary and to the afflicted
Let us check the darkness
Let us love one another
And let us love ourselves as our neighbor

An Ode on Bacchanalia
He bounds from the chariot drawn by cheetahs
Who gaze knowingly at one another
The characteristic black streaks like tracks of tears
Each wearing a collar studded with bells
You can just glimpse the scrotum
Of the god who leaps with incomparable grace
Above the war car cunningly carved with foliate curlicue
Exposed as the great red cloak billows
The perfect anatomy the radiant skin
The long hair entwined with leaf of grape
The rich blue sky balanced with clouds
The streaky and the accumulating
That just hint of the sun’s retiring
Eight stars arrayed in circle
Or suggestion of circle caught in an oblique
Miraculous stars in dwindling daylight
The tops of the dark trees green
Giving way to ocher sometimes rimmed with gold
And a hooved haunch hoisted aloft
Before the obese reveler naked save headgear of leaves
Passed out astraddle an ass
With cheek pressed against that of a smiling companion
And another who sounds a trumpet to the sky
While a greybeard bows beneath the weight
Of a great bushel laden with who knows what
And the hoister of the haunch
With cap and girdle of grape
Legs with fell of goat
Lifts dancing human feet above the bluey flowers
Above the herbage green
And here image most strange
A bearded man struggles
To ungird or gird himself with writhing snakes
His brow creased with effort or with pain
Beneath the little horns
And above him a woman with eyes askance
Meets the eyes of him of the haunch
Her blue gown parted to reveal the pretty breasts
While she raises on high the tambourine
And cymbal too is raised on high
Played by fellow bacchante gazing at the god
Her garment too disclosing breast and thigh
And gazes too she of blue mantle and scarlet scarf
Having made escape from the labyrinth
For him who has abandoned her
And for herself gesturing toward the tiny ship
Departing
Past the rocky cliffs
Past the little town with quiet spire
The town unaware of the miracle in progress
While leading a dog a swineherd oblivious strides
Absorbed in another task than theophany
While she who turns sharply godward
The forsaken one
Stands above a golden vessel inscribed Ticianus F
She gazes at the immortal and he at her
Leaping to join her
To end her forsakenness
To have and to hold
To crown her queen
And cast her crown into the sky
To shine as significant constellation
And of all these figures
The frenzied the smitten and the oblivious
Only one gazes at us
A little boy his hair entwined with tiny white flowers
Toward whom a flopped-eared dog barks
In hunger hostility or invitation to play
Near the child’s hooves and goat-haired legs
Whose small cloak echoes that great of the god
And how child did you wind up among the divine retinue
And does your mother number among the maenads here
Who nourished your chubby arms chubby cheeks
And the child drags with rope
The severed head of a beast
Nor horn nor antler
Perhaps the victim
That rendered up the haunch
And he gazes at us
Of substance mixed
Goat and boy
Unsettling and unsettled
Lips parted
What is this overmuch of variegated world

How the infinite objects of the variegated world
Crowd in upon us each a congeries of other objects
What is this air of substance mixed
What is this ocean of substance mixed
What is this earth of substance mixed
And here a theme but little noted in a decadent age
Of monarchs and subjects and subjects and objects
Oh the times oh the mores
That not only is the object well fitted to the subject
But wholly dependent upon it
And yet the involution of the world
Involves the dynamic interpenetration
Of these two infinities
The phenomenal and the experiential
For we experience both what we perceive
And what determine a priori
But more directly we experience our own consciousness
And we directly infer the consciousness of much besides ourselves
And how closely allied inseparable
That which separates and mingles on the one hand
And that which remains on the other
Two hands of one consciousness
Of one subject perceiving and evaluating and knowing
But each subject exists only in relation to other subjects
And in relation to the world prior to subjectivity
And in relation to that part of the world divided into objects
Hail science compendious repository of objective fact
Incisive method for determining fact
Product of analysis template of rigor
Laid up in brick and stone
And in ephemeral gelatinous brains
And in generous bequest of hand and mind across centuries
Through the ministries of text image graph and schematic diagram
Donor of great pleasure in reading learning and growing in understanding
Discovered in the laboratories
Observed in the observatories in orbit and on earth
Induced in the huge particle accelerators
And collected near the sidewalk where a child brings home specimens
The ramifying taxonomies of biology geology and subatomic- and astrophysics
The proliferating units of measurement the grams the milliliters the light years
Ah but here let us pause
For we measure not merely in vague appraisal of duration or extent
Contingent upon our narrow familiar provinces
But in number unconfined in space or time
Innocent of phenomenal manifestation
Save that of certain merciful regularities to be inferred
As of that apparently insurmountable constant
The speed of light expressible as ratio
Such that we can intuit that spacelessness and timelessness
In the instance of mathematical facticity
Interpenetrate the spatiotemporal part of the world
That fluxuous world of forces and particles
That ceaselessly collect and dissipate
Mingle and separate
Every object a perplexing congeries of other objects
And what is this particle whose velocity we express as ratio
And what exactly do we measure
And how would we persuade this presubstantial substance
To sit up and have its picture taken
Wouldn’t it be simpler to confess
That we enjoy tantalizing glimpses
Of something deeply interfused
And that we know not how far
Manifestly present consciousness
Might extend in the world
That is in the world that is
The world that obtains
The world that happens happens happens
Both phenomenal and innocent of phenomenal manifestation
Something before force and prior to particle
Something far more deeply interfused than either
For time and space cannot confine number
Nor who knows what other entities with what other properties
Such perhaps as moral properties
Such as the immaterial properties of consciousness
And thoughts you cannot measure
But let us note that the gay science of phenomena
Of all this moving world that blooms
In color and in sound
In texture and in luxurious taste
Has been colonized by the dismal science of economy
And all value reduced to utility
But thus has it ever been
For to sustain our human households
Our human communities our human lives
Far more dependent upon technology than are other species
We must adapt we homo sapiens the objects of nature to use
And must prerequisitely therefore comprehend their properties
As of flint fiber antler iron and semiconductor
And but rarely do we seek knowledge for its own sake
And thus technology is the fall of man
The straitening of Pegasus in bridle and bit
To plummet earthward
Though conceivably a fortunate fall
When we direct technology toward wellbeing
While we fall and will again fall
But even our impressive future tense
Realm of dreams the tranquil and the anxious
Cannot anticipate unintended consequence
Circumstance being a dotard afflicted with presbyopia
As when playthings maim
As when labor-saving devices poison and destroy
As when the humans invent tillage
Thus condemning themselves to monoculture
Or nearly so
Loaves to feed multitudes
Badly
But you can’t plant and grow a fish
And the fruit of the field comes in all at once
And must be stored in granary ominous infrastructure
Under lock and key and guard armed and dangerous
The plowshare slow and patient
Begetting the sword terrible and swift
For the bounty must be doled out systematically
And not flung abroad for all comers
And must be regulated in fat years to feed the lean
And the commander controls the guard
And the sway of empire extends
And here we are as on a stubble plain
From which have been removed
Vast stores of knowledge and of grain
But where the hand to give it
And thus we humans have arrogated dominion
Over nature and one over another
And built our big beautiful walls
And built our superyachts too large to launch
And nobody should be that rich
While children in shadow
Dwindle to brittle sticks
Though worthy of our warmest love

A friend of mine went rafting down the Salmon River
That flows through many moods the placid and the raging
With some middle-aged stout fellows
A friend and some friends of a friend
Confident of their integrity physical and ethical
Joshing and trading a modicum of bullshit
Vacation relief and healthful excursion
Who waxed philosophical
Asserting that a life was meaningful or valuable
To the extent that one made a contribution
Self-mythology of self-made men
But what thing ever made itself
An obvious fallacy considering
That we humans like all phenomenal things
Are products of presbyopic circumstance
And that the lives would be meaningless
Of those denied by circumstance
Those made by circumstances not their own which is all of us
The opportunity to carry out such an action
That the fellows might deem a contribution
A meaningful life an unearned privilege of the few
When manifestly most regard life as worth living
For even those who suffer which is all of us
Though some suffer with shocking exorbitancy
Regard life as worth living
Though we not oft consider
What factors might endow life with this worthiness
And what would earning a privilege mean
While the many suffer who merit our warmest love
As indeed all suffer included the privileged
Who nevertheless possess the wherewithal
To assuage to some degree their own suffering
As indeed that of others if they would
And which pray are those contributions
That might cross the threshold into the valuable
And who contributes what to whom
And what do you think value is anyway
While my friend tuned them out
Or responded with disingenuous nods
Or perhaps demurred courteously
While absorbed instead with the insects
Almost absorbed by them
Gnats caddis-flies or midges swarming above the stream
Sometime annoyance to the eyes nostrils and skin
But a thought forestalled his annoyance
At the fellows and the flies
The thought that flies feed fish and fish feed bears
Staring at miracle and getting flies in his eyes
And the shaggy majestic beasts
Owe their majesty to flies
In the flux of collection and dissipation
And bears shit in the woods or on the river bank
And certain flies love the shit
Of beasts majestic or pathetic they don’t care
Site of nourishment and nursery
While here in the soft hills of my home
Where rivers do not rage
But speak soothingly of cleansing pebbles
Smooth to the touch but not lacking in texture
Of cheering effervescence catfish and warm springs
And lakes and ponds perform their placid ministry
For worms for minnows for the larvae of innumerable species
Sought by birds that majestic strut the shallows with backward knee
I slap iteratively aiming to terminate with extreme prejudice
The canny mosquito
Wise to direct her dark body in sunshine and shadow
With graceful but erratic motion
To escape detection and prevent reprisal
Such as I intend
That she might feed upon the sanguineous humor
Absorb into her body something of my mixed substance
Proteiny compound of rich red milk
And nourish her gravidity
Neither predator nor parasite
But browser on the meadow of my skin
And when on the fifth attempt I score a victory
The meadow blooms with scarlet
And even before the crushing blow
See the swollen abdomen emblem of pregnancy
Glowing translucently with my blood
Mingled perhaps with that of other mammals
Of family or friends
Womb that should swell pampered
But now lies thrown asunder
Thwarted bequest from wingèd mother
To nourish her soon-swimming progeny
Sign of amphibious life lived interestingly
Vulnerably like all life
For the larvae hatch in the still water
Of pond or discarded tire
And wriggle tumblingly up to the air to breathe
And one day rise Venuslike to fly in middle height
If not devoured by birds or bats
Or crushed by iterative slap
Or poisoned by chemical agents
Supplied with chemical agents of their own to preempt
The clotting action that they may strive and sup and succeed
And like their mother nourish new offspring
So that I scratch and draw more blood
And continue to attack with merciless hatred
Any stragglers in the serial horde
For I know from experience of the annoying itching welts
And from science of the pathogens
Virus and plasmodium true parasite
Who would join the other animalcules
Bacteria of the gut and mites that dwell in eyebrows
That crowd in upon the space of my permeable body
Its stout integrity a self-serving figment
And yet I pray one day to make peace
To understand and patiently to forgive
For no being has made itself
Not mosquito nor confident stout fellow
Who thus cannot be held responsible
For the product of their not-making
For surely the attentive self-maker
Or the omnipotent creator for that matter
Or poor old circumstance of the aged eyes
Might have made the self better than it is
Might have made a world otherwise
Than that in which the suffering of one
Feeds the thriving of another
And in any case the creator
Is responsible for the creation
In a way that the not-creator cannot be
As men and mosquitos cannot be
Who thence play regularly their parts in the ceaseless flux
And thus I disclaim full responsibility
For these seemingly endless garrulous pages
Though the many errors are surely my own
Whatever my own means
But any being that can understand and respond to reasons
A category that includes human persons
And we must regard all humans as persons
Is accountable for their actions
Must be prepared to give an account
Of the reasons if any that have given rise to their motives
The modality of responsibility differing
Perhaps subtly from that of account
The ability to fulfill obligation a contingent potential
As circumstances not of our making
Permit our understanding and response
But since actions worthy of the name are motivated
And since many actions affect others
Albeit sometimes in unintended ways
We should take responsibility
Should
But we must be prepared to give an account
Must
We are necessarily accountable
Responsibility a should
Accountability a must
And it often happens that when we give unwilling account
Or when we imagine that we might withhold account
We give in fact the account of no account
That is we have no reasons to report
And henceforth must live with the fact
That we have acted without reasons
And life in its variegated involution involves pleasure
And also the endurance of pain
And worse the infliction of it
But we always have reasons to enjoy pleasure
And reasons to regret pain to prevent pain
Or assuage pain when it happens
And all make their contribution though mostly unawares
The sprezzatura merely of being there
In a situation that obtains
And an event that happens
In the phenomenal part of the world
And thus beasts and flies and fish and fowl
And amiable yahoos joshing upon a raft
Possess majesty in various forms
And they were right the jolly fellows
Though they did not go far enough
Down the river of their discourse
That all make their varying and valuable contributions
Without even trying though a little effort might go a long way
All participate in majesty
The selfsame majesty of moon and sun
And the collections vast or diminutive
Of river and mountain and ocean
And tree and mosquito and spherey turd

We have invested so much in objects
Available perceptible things and places
And categories and things
Readily or if necessary with augmentation of apparatus
Satellites and trees and capillaries and grommets
A train and a room and a car and a room and a room and a room
With our delightful little primate brains
Those thirsty fluxuous labyrinths
Involuted organs echoing the involutions of phenomena
When obviously verbs are more the thing
When objects exist and situations obtain
And events take place
They happen happen happen
And how far above do objects extend
That reach below to a congeries of other objects
Where does that tree begin and end
Root hairs and stomata
Whose name might be Sally
Who battens on decay
Friend of bacteria mold cockroach and beetle grub
Who competes for lifegiving light with the other trees
Straitened and driven and alive
Who strives like steeplejack ever upward
Who bends her bole inimical to darkness
Who dances in rain and opposes drought and pest
Who casts refreshing shade for denizens beneath
Salubrious cousin of the mood of shadow
Upon whose demise nourishes fungus to provide other nourishment
The waste of one the nutrient of another
Who tolerates the death of limb and branch
The loss of leaf that falls wavering to the ground
While continuing to flourish
And who unlike our primate cousins
Practices no sexual dimorphism
At least none dependent upon visual registry
And I should respect though I will never fully know
The experience of tree

When I awoke from surgery
For cochlear implantation
I found myself subject
To the tyranny of the vertical axis
Suspended within a whirling cone
Composed of disjunct fragments
Of sensory impression
Rotating clockwise at varying rate
Around one ever-receding apex
Simultaneously above and below me
Imposing gyroscopic inertia
Upon the crowded recovery room
Where other patients awoke and suffered
Mildly or intensely as the case may be
And the beautiful companion spoke to me
Greg could you please vomit more quietly