See through this air this ocean and this earth
All matter quick and bursting into birth
See nighttime sky when the clouds give their leave
The heavenly bodies at their stately dance
That like dreams all generations
Have esteemed as significant
See in the hay infusion the animalcules
Who scurry to the sidelines when heat is applied
Desperate to escape the scalding
Frenzied to maintain bodily integrity
Who lack a nervous system
Ill can they afford to pause and consider
That this integrity is but an effect of consciousness
The stout perimeter plastic and thoroughly permeable
Through which the nutrients the wastes
Ceaselessly come and go
The wastes of one the nutrients for another
And the apparently individual insistently dividual
The organism into cells the cell into organelles
Even unto the fundamental particles
Which must not be fundamental
At most a ratio of matter and energy
And what pray ultimately are they
A perplexing congeries of object-sub-object
And the apparently separate a mingling of vectors
That waver within the eddying solute and converge infinitesimally
Even as they diverge in rainbow refraction
Phenomenal flux thus comprising a regularity of collection and dissipation
The hay infusion but an index of that more deeply interfused
But protect they will this semi-fictive coherence
And in that service nature has bequeathed them pain
And pain is bad
Pain must be bad
Intrinsically bad but extrinsically good
To perform its adaptive service of notice and alarm
Its service to the will to life
And pity those for those there are
Who regard that will as shameful
A will exercised by the smallest of things and the largest
The striving to nourish and to thrive
To thrive not merely individually
But for the progeny the species the world
To maintain the flux in any case
And real things that exist
Real situations that obtain
And most especially real events that take place
That happen happen happen
Are merely that portion we can perceive of the greater world
With our labyrinthine neurology and clever microscopes and orbiting observatories
Perceptual apparatus that we can set aside by effort of will
To glimpse those transcendent entities
Among which number facts of mathematics and of morality
And what is a thing but an effect of the mind
That struggles to define and defend the stout perimeter
Though no less real for that
Which takes and extracts the arrows of time
Hence the experience of life
Is the also the experience of pain
The epitome of that which is to be avoided
The epitome of that which we always have reasons to avoid
The epitome of that which we always have reasons to refrain from imposing
Hence we should not respond reflexively to pain
With the infliction of more pain
As if our punishments and retaliations
Would somehow even the scales and pay a debt
What are you a moneychanger in the temple
Converting act to coin
And what authority have you to impose suffering
When suffering already abounds for people and animalcules
What arcane knowledge have you
As to how another is and where they come from
Did you create yourself
Do you know yourself
And in your self-creation do you know yourself to be perfect
For perfection is not a thing in the phenomenal world
Where only the approximation obtains of sphere
In the form of sun or planet or scarab-driven turd
Let us do what we can to assuage not augment pain
And let us observe that sometimes stronger reasons obtain
For the endurance of pain over the avoidance of it
As the surgical procedure induces temporary pain
To relieve the larger malady
And just as with pain nature sounds the alarm
Pleasure signals all clear with heavenly harmony
The epitome of that which is to be embraced
And observe also how near allied are pleasure and pain
As plumpy youth takes love’s agony
Revels proudly in love’s agony
The torment of delay
In anticipation of delight
The torment of uncertainty
In anticipation of knowledge
Anticipation stronger than consummation
Delight intensified by delay
Relishing in love’s agony the epitome of passion
No mysteries exist
Not in the sense of the permanently unknowable
Permanence like perfection unavailable in phenomena
Nor in the sense of knowledge forbidden
For how often does foul transgression open the eyes
Alter eye to alter all
And we do not know the final digit of pi
For there is no such thing pure and simple
We do not yet possess all knowledge of things
Not merely owing to the numerousness of things
Nor to the orders of infinity
But to the flux of phenomena
And to the fluxuous historical challenge
Of comprehending that which lies outside sensation
We know to some extent what we can see
And we know to some extent what cannot be seen
As figures geometrical and properties arithmetical
We know in short our experience
In which transience figures more prominently than does permanence
We know that beings other than ourselves experience the world
And we know that the division of the world
Into those fretful antinomies
As subject and object and masculine and feminine and pleasure and pain
Outside inside up down great small black white predator prey nutrient waste
Dead matter and spiritual life
Phenomenal fact and transcendent truth
And into objects things discrete entities and stout perimeters
As phototaxic alga and a sweetgum named Sally
Distinction sometimes useful sometimes nugatory
But always more or less illusory
A consciously composed and sharable fiction
Derived merely from the evolution
Of our gelatinous if labyrinthine primate brain
Which perceives things separate distinct individual
Sources of nutrition or poison
Sources of pleasure or pain
Sources of acceptance or rejection
Objects of interest or of apparently negligible significance
And indeed from our cultural traditions
Source alike of expressions in language
Indispensable for mutual understanding
And of baneful acquired ignorances
As prejudice provincialism and superstition
And ignorance being infinite because fact is infinite
We know not yet whence the infinite variety
Or rather the merciful regularities
Characteristic of the flux
Which we perceive
Whose progress we arrest momentarily with a gesture of will
As freezing the flight of birds of indistinct plumage
As imagining the digits of pi or the square root of negative one
In our representations which do not accommodate
Much of the overmuch real world
Which oft resolves itself into vertiginous torment
Say Muse nurturing mother
Mother of nature
Mother before nature
Peaceable womb of all things visible and invisible
What barrier prevents the full unfolding of totality
No doubt the primate labyrinth has yet to accrue sufficient extent
To perceive much less grasp the originary or final truth
Truth that surmounts proximate beginnings and ends
That requires the deeper-than fundamental higher-than overarching
And yet no mystery obtains
How entirely natural that truth prior to understanding should baffle discourse
Especially given the difficulty even of posing the question
The superfluous dream of genesis or denouement
Hence the vagueness of locutions like something interfused
Hence the necessity of poetry with its free recourse to metaphor
Hence the elusiveness of sufficiently rigorous expression
Though the possibility persists as suggested by
The unconquerable conviction
That if change obtains then something changes
And therefore something persists
That truth is therefore unconstrained by sequence
This being only the phenomenal part of the world
And that we can say that which we see
And by discoveries in mathematics
And by salutary disruption of neural pathways fallen into harmful habit
Alter eye to alter all
And we achieve in moods simultaneously sublime and restful
Teasing glimpses in the beautiful the true and the good
Which we perceive if often only indirectly
In art in nature in ourselves and in those we love
Which we perceive even amid the welter of experience that crowds in upon us
To lift the veil and see that space before space
Wherein dwells something prior to sensation substance sequence duration or name
Call it will or consciousness or soul
Or nurturing mother
Our compulsion to name an epitome of striving
To nourish with knowledge ourselves and our posterity
The mere possibility of metaphor an earnest of the unity of being
Of situation of event that happens happens happens
And hence the possibility obtains
If only theoretical
Of restoring peace
And peace is always the return to peace
Before the tumult intervened
Peacefully prior to space time change or distinction
That activates the measurement
That moves the needle
That configures the experience
Whereof we speak for we must speak
Primates being such great singers and speakers
As will or life or unity or consciousness or soul
Or that which is deeply interfused

There was a tree
I speak of many one
Of which variety I can’t remember
Some hardwood not an evergreen
When I was still young
And young too was my beautiful companion
With a yard full of boisterous kids
And this tree bore a wound never healing
At the base near the root
Where from time to time legions of ants
In their perfect pheromone file
Or seeming perfect this being the phenomenal world
Would line up to sup
And gather in their myriads
The bar is open I thought
Identifying with the myrmidons
But the tree to my knowledge
Had not transmuted its vascular fluid
Into alcohol and the ants one would infer
Were lining up for innocuous sugar I must suppose
And not beating their brains with liquor and drugs
Ah the thousand shocks that brain is heir to
Smacking the windshield
In the days before seatbelts
Or the seatbelts were there but we didn’t bother
Major surgeries with their general anesthesia
Earnest of the state outside personality
That excuses from pain but saps cognitive power
Novel virus that obliterates sense and fogs the intellect
The soothing rituals of fragrant smoke
The nicotinic and the cannabinoid
Booze and boogie til you puke and pass out
The self-mangling acts of insult
The self-mutilating acts of folly
That happen happen happen
Again again again
And oh the injury
To the beautiful companion
And to the yard full of kids
And you can display your shame
But you can’t really make amends
Not fully
For a thousand cuts
For wounds beyond healing
And many resort to mystical cult
That the mutilation of the redemptive body
Will somehow substitute for one’s own
And secure forgiveness
From an invisible tyrant
Who dwells beyond the flaming ramparts of the world
Imagined as somehow vertically superior
But earning forgiveness never from those
Whom one has truly injured
Here on the ground
Here where we stand and we fall and again fall
Each fall a unique iteration
And what does earn mean anyway
You can’t earn that which must be freely given
If at all
But in age we grow a little wiser
If we confess our fault
To the world and to ourselves
Even as our mental powers decay
For if I have done much harm
As surely I have done
I have done some service
My children grown to adulthood
And suffering their own painful shocks
From which I have not protected them
And who knows which traumas I might have prevented
Short of those that originated with me
But even those did not originate solely with me
Who am not creator of myself
Plentifully but not totally responsible
The precise contours of responsibility obscure
And the beautiful companion still lives with me
As difficult as that must be
Who am often angry depressed and loud
So she must have forgiven to some extent
Or tolerated the seemingly intolerable condition
Of the ineluctably social human situation
In which annoyances persist daily
Like the fuzzy drone of two- or four-stroke engine
I’m sorry for the wrong I’ve done
For the wrong I continue to do
Though I have nourished conscience and fortified will
But I’m not dead unlike so many of my friends
Who adopted like me the fashionable postures
Of living dangerously or worse
Or who lived unobjectionably but died anyway
Though I so long of the party of dissipation
Will dissipate merely and separate completely ere long
To rejoin the peace before flux
So I’ve been lucky and at least a little skillful
Or at least put my heart in the right place
Or nearly in the right place
This being the phenomenal world
For I have loved beauty
Especially the rapturous pleasures of music
And of the other sources of sensual enjoyment
The wonders of nature the ravishments of art
Gathered up in books and in galleries deep
The vistas of canyon and oceanic horizon
And especially of interaction
With those lovely earthly creatures the humans
Who seem most of them unaware how beautiful they are
With their hair their sweat their bodily functions
Which they attempt unaccountably to disguise
Their selfish cravings
Their noble aspirations
And I have felt the true feelings of others
Their suffering and delight
Their contentment and loss
Their fears and triumphs
Their aspirant striving to nourish and seek nourishment
Whom I am helpless to refrain from loving
Though a baneful voice within denies my worthiness
And yet in my age I have cultivated to some extent the healthy habit
Of responding to reasons
To the extent that I can know the facts
To the extent that the flame of youthful temerity has cooled
And to the extent that I can control myself
An obviously limited extent
But good is not a matter of quantity
Dignity not a matter of extent
And I have taken on the responsibilities of senseihood
Not having possessed all learning
A magus by no means
But merely to help the young to learn
Which they will do in any case
That I might serve to make the path a little smoother
Not too late I dare to hope
For there are moral facts
Indisputable as the facts of mathematics are indisputable
The facts of joy and pain
The facts of being and of situation and of event
And thus I have learned to lean into the good
Though conflict seemingly inevitable has sometimes arisen
And again and again I have fallen and again fallen
My father once said
If you have no regrets
You have no conscience
And thus stupid humans like me
The affiliation whose badge I proudly wear
Who stand upright and regrettably fall
Can learn what’s right
Human biology
Person morality
For they are as little children
We are as little children
Can
For all the persons we know
That is all the moral agents we know
Are human alas
But they are born into the overmuch world
And into the human part of the world
With the capacity for moral awareness
And if they learn the facts
While nobody knows all the facts
And they build the skills
Through long experience and many mistakes
For we must fall and again fall
And we do not learn everything all at once
Or ever
And life is short
They can respond to reasons
That derive from facts
If only once in their life
And thus they are good
And they feel bad when they hurt somebody
And they regret the harm they have done
With their seeming-inevitable mistakes
For they must fall and again fall
And they can try to make things right
Can
And thus they might grow into adulthood
And thus they are worthy of esteem even now
And thus they are lovable
As all real things are lovable
The more lovable for their incapacities
And imaginary things too are real
Alter eye to alter all
For all that we behold is full of blessings
For even when we suffer blessings obtain
As the beautiful companion
Endures the noisy retching of him who helplessly loves
As La Vie en Rose
Freely gives the voice of emotional understanding
As the lights visible on the ground
During a night flight
Even for one averse to flying
Stimulate and refresh
And one can take pleasure in high places
And exult in exaltation
But give me the serene horizon
The round ocean and the living air
The ground to stand and fall upon
And even that which is beyond beholding is full of blessings
The truths moral and mathematical
You don’t have be a mathematician
Just know that there is more
Than forces and particles in the greater world
And you can learn to know value
And learn what makes life worth living
And it isn’t wealth or status or power or getting high or even comfort
For everything that happens involves suffering
And we can feel the sufferings of our neighbor as of ourselves
And strive to nourish and attend
And share gentle companionship
With the lonely the sick the troubled
Let us forgive one another
Those who have loved us
And those who have shunned us
Let us aid the afflicted
Even unto our wounded selves
Let us think highly of ourselves
And let us love one another

More light
Let there be more light that mingles
Let there be more light that separates
Momentarily into the red the blue the metallic green
Light that feeds the little alga
Who like mighty tree regularly performs
Its photosynthetic practices
And oh bioluminescence that cold conundrum
And light that nourishes the enigmatic moon
Who hides betimes behind a month or a cloud
And yes let night occasionally fall
That eases the boon of blissful sleep
And though the night time they say is the right time
To be with the one you love
Delight in afternoon is more than permissible
Let us see what’s happening
Let light shine upon the restless objects
The natural and the seemingly artificial
Even those of mundane familiarity
Alter eye to alter all
The asphaltic pavement that bursts into scintillation
The routines of work that express themselves in motion assured
The animals and the athletes with their balletic moves
Perception’s extravaganza that points to the ultimate
Which we know not yet
But fleetingly glimpse in mathematics
In variegated nature lively paint and moral fact
And the perusal of text multifarious like nature
Read in sunlight candlelight moonlight lamplight or backlit screen
Laws almanacs novels newspapers instructions lists
And didactic poems full of chestnut aphorism
That raise the consciousness above routine however worthy of praise
To touch the one great poem
And the sacrament of images
Those that move and those that rest unmoving
Whose movement the mind supplies
Let there be light and more light
To relieve insatiable curiosity
And forestall the dread dismal mood of foul darkness
And bathe all experience in sanguineous red and burgeoning green

Is it mostly good or mostly bad this mixed bag of a world
This interpenetrative mixture
This mixture of mixed substances
The experiences of goatboy and boygoat
Of transcendent truth and passing sensations
The breaking waves of salty ocean
The wet falling red and green leaves
Tempest-toss’d and wavering
The perplexities of desire remorse past passing fear thought and deed
Pierced with regularity
Reminder of the perfect circle
I’ll answer you when it settles down
And since that will never happen
Although the future remains ever suppositious
As do the present and the past to be frank
Those static concepts those stony composites
Pitiably subject to universal ignorance
The facts being there but nobody knows enough of them
The facts being a network of infinite points of intersection
The facts being mixed and fluxuous
Those facts that we can perceive
Although we can glimpse by exercise of will
Those facts beyond perception
But flux is not mere chaos
For merciful regularities obtain
I will give an answer fragmentary partial
Incomplete hasty casual fraught tentative biased naive
Inadequate unbidden ill-considered impolitic bland
Pecksniffian Podsnappian Pollyannaish
And ignorant as all are infinitely ignorant
But meaning well as many are wont to do
And thank human evolution that we can confer
And thank the human species
And thank all the species
The plants the animals the fungi the bacteria the infinite aggregation of the one great life
The one life within us and abroad
And thank her majesty the moon
And thank his majesty the sun
And thank the educational institutions
And thank the political institutions
And thank the institutions for health care
And thank the institutions of letters
And thank the institutions of light and more light
And thank the gurus senseis rabbis mentors and coaches
And thank Prof Parfit he of good in the reason-giving sense
And thank Prof Thibodeau he of reasons pro tanto
And thank Prof Habermas he of system and lifeworld
And thank the beautiful companion she of the improvement of sensual enjoyment
And thank the mountains the rocky the snowy the green
Even though there might occur an avalanche
And thank the wetlands the murky swamp the fragrant salt marsh
And thank the wide St Johns and the lusty Salmon and all rivers
And thank the railroads the highways the trails
And thank the technology of communication
And thank all the technologies that conduce to wellbeing
Upon which the hominins depend
And thank the artistry of all who create which is everybody
And thank the vitality of all that participate in the dance of life which is everything
And thank the cultivation of knowledge beauteous bounty in itself
And source of indispensable technology
Which is the fall of man fortunate fall
And thank the cultivation of crops
Even though agriculture begat the granary the guardhouse and the empire
And thank the noble products of artistry
The plays the music the paintings the movies the infinite aggregation of the one great poem
And thank the artists who conceive in inspiration and execute in skill
And thank the riddlers the jokers the jesters the tumblers the grinners the gurners and the fools
How is a corvid like an escritoire
How is Marilyn like a mosquito
And thank the oceans the shores and the estuaries
And thank the forests
And thank the grasslands the steppes and the tundras
And thank the dry places the arid and the semi-arid
And thank the life of the seemingly inanimate
And thank the nature of the seemingly artificial
Even unto the articles stamped out in factories some of which can be quite beautiful
And thank the heavenly bodies in our neighborhood
And thank the heavenly bodies at inconceivable distances
And thank the microorganisms and all structures of inconceivable smallness
And thank all the people the fictional and the historical
And thank those who have done wrong which is all of us
For they know not what they do
But they continue to strive
And make their contribution
And thank that busy phlebotomist the mosquito with whom we should make peace
And thank the striving that nourishes all offspring
And thank the mother
And thank the father
And thank all who care for and about
And thank the holy communion of family and friends
And thank the infinitely ignorant which is all of us
For we can confer converse confabulate
And thank again the teachers and the scholars
For we can appreciate
We can step out in the morning agape with appreciation
We can know the truth some of it
We can experience value
And most of us mean well
And therein lies a precious hint
For everybody had a mother
And if something took the mother away
Somebody else pitched in
And like as not they did the best they could
Even as the mother would
And like as not kissed the helpless babe
Who will eventually return the kiss
After learning to stand and to fall and again fall
Albeit perhaps at the deathbed or coffin dire
And while it is assuredly true
That people have committed unspeakable acts
Knocked down cities of great population with the wave of a hand
Stolen the necessities of life reducing children to brittle sticks
Forced people to hard labor for no purpose whatsoever
Tormented the living even unto our very selves
And poisoned the darling planet
We may forgive their participation
In ignorance which is universal
For everyone can know the truth
Some of it
And everyone can understand reasons for their actions
And when we discover that we have acted without reasons
As such discovery we will some time make
Having fallen and again fallen
Though a few of us are truly saintly
Though not I
We can do our best to make amends
And punish neither ourselves nor our precious family
In the endless flow of life
And love one another
While we try to shed a little light
Standing here on this green and pleasant earth
Upon which we must fall and again fall
Even amid the terrible and exhilarating flux
The more fluxuous for the regularities that obtain
Of standing and falling
Of collection and dissipation
Of past and passing
We see and therefore we say
And in our saying therefore sing
That beauty manifestly obtains
That acts of kindness and of love manifestly take place
That people manifestly can reach understanding
That they manifestly can recover the peace that dwells before understanding
And thus we can say with confidence
That good will be good
Circle circle
We gaze into the future
And kiss the child who dwells there
To waken the prismatic radiance of a single tear

Embromeom col pmisti effrent

Why do you sing
Do you think it’s spring and find a mate
The sun drags its bulk to middle height

Why do you sing
Do you approve of these baring trees
Soon your little nest will be exposed

Why do you sing
Are you glad the seasons have gone askew
And I already old race to age

A miracle a bill of goods
A mechanical operation
Devised to bring about a desired effect
Perennial relapse into the umbral arms
When flights of birds augur therapeutically
And deformities express a significance beyond themselves
Taking symptoms and piercing with needles
Displaying images
Sacralizing the profane
Regulating the proportions
Of darkness and flickering light
Subjecting to ordeal
The catechumen of an incremental science
Auscultating the rain the highway sounds
The mysterious whine of buildings
Enacting the obscure observances
Of vestment ablution and hecatomb
The drone of unintelligible antiphony
That emerges from devices
And all things organic and inorganic

The ghostly masses redolent on the page
Of spirit gum and erasure
Of meom and thoieisu
The wind shocked and dismayed
By buildings and transportation
The star fell into the dirt
How can you command appreciation
Much less love
You can at most give reasons
Comprehensive or less so as the case may be
Spectral moon in the high year
Failing beneath the misty clouds
A sentence that attempts regionalism
The aggrandizement of local conditions
Or some expression of attitude or memory
Of solvent lubricant abrasive or adhesive
The sanctuary full of chains and cages
The hungry pursuit
Much less belief
Flesh and the devil
Broken spectacles and a bloodied face
This is not entertainment
This is not uplift moral or affective
Pastime or theoretical armature
Heard the heroes ‘round the random
Unattainable in the phenomenal world
Of measures anologue digetal or gestoral
Of teenagers and commodities
Categorical disparities
Anathegma
Don’t refer to a lacerating inconstancy
For that would constitute a steady state
Embalmed darkness and lights’ tired eyes
Old age and vague indications
Events take place
Situations obtain
All in flux
All in dynamic twilight
But oh that deep romantic chasm

All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

And what do we mean changed
We extract the substances of nature
And we adapt them in the service
Of human self interest
Thus copper’s ductility stands as a property
Inherent and unchanging
But copper does not array itself spontaneously
In strands of wire
Which swoop upward and downward
Between the poles themselves mounted between
US 1 and the Florida East Coast Railway
Which my grandfather helped to build
Through swamp and sand
Palmetto and coquina
And I in the back seat would trace the rising and falling with my hand
As if waving bye bye
We rarely traveled more than 60 MPH
A rate which my father would announce triumphantly
A mile a minute
In the Chevy station wagon seating six
Nor does pigment array itself spontaneously
In Bacchus and Ariadne
Nor language in Easter 1916
We extract the natural forces of image and figure
And adapt them to express
Our fears our conflicts our yearnings and our delight
So yes all is changed
But utterly must be exaggeration
Unless it means changed as much as change can be
And how much is that
While copper remains ductile and salt salty
And eternal beauty hath no birth
In sunrise or sea
Or song of bird
And yet is born
In poem and painting and copper wire

The archers of Isfahan
The portly woman of Willendorf
The Pompeiian copulators
La Gioconda also known as the Mona Lisa
Paris standing in judgment of Athena Aphrodite and Hera
Marianne leading the people
Lincoln Nixon and Obama
Garbo Harlowe and Marilyn Monroe
Elvis Jagger and Beyoncé
That guy who scrapes a growth of beard first one way and then another
Sports pictures
Baby pictures
Refugee pictures
Wedding pictures
Vacation pictures
The infant dead of Wisconsin
The recorded performance of children in joyless synchronized dancing
The ancestors from the age of oil painting their jewelry ruffs and upraised collars
Mug shots
Selfies
Pictures that celebrate accomplishments
Pictures that document atrocities
Pictures that schematize conditions before and after the use of some product or procedure
Surgical endoscopy
Histological microscopy
Satellite traffic imagery
Surveillance photos
Drone shots innocuous or nefarious
AP wire photos
Fingerprint files
News-readers pundits and gameshow hosts their neckties and age-obscuring cosmetics
Skype Zoom and FaceTime
Princess Zelda Mario Brothers and Ms Pac Man
The mysterious and roguish hero his features concealed behind a mask
The unmistakable and completely impossible profile of Popeye the Sailor Man
The anthropomorphic mouse who hurls a brick at the anthropomorphic cat who repays the injury with nothing but affection
The toys that rise and speak when no people are around
The automaton in the shape of a fool
And HAL 9000 yes or no

There’s this ditch though they call it a bayou
Made by humans and a backhoe
Straight across the landscape
Unlike any natural feature
Alongside road or fencepost
Draining the soil oozy like gumbo
The water table nearly at the surface
In a topography essentially flat
As the spoonbills could testify
With their tapas of crawfish
No hills to obstruct the view
Of a traffic light miles ahead
And the lowest place this bayou or ditch
Gives its name on the one hand
To a fragile culture negotiating nature
A name endorsed by local opinion
On the other to filth akin to that of gutter or open sewer
Organic matter rich in decay
Sometime destination
Of a pickup truck discovered in morning
And in this ditch or bayou see
Flowers five-petalled of lavender hue
Languid atop frail vinelike stems
Observed only here in this ditch or bayou
And heart cannot help but rejoice
In beauty that persists the long summer long
And how should we feel
About the blossom in the scar
In our helpless admiration

The big tiger swallowtail a similar mystery
Which science could solve and probably has
How it gets airborne on two slices of playing card
With ragged edges and intricate design
No tipoff of an airfoil
A bit clumsy really
Unlike the dragonfly that darts and hovers
Or the clever mosquito feinting in light and dark
The swallowtail browses in lowest place
With ungainly dignity
Lighting only briefly
Making quick withdrawals
Or exercising the judgments of taste
The human eye incapable of registering
The insect’s rejection or acceptance
Of nectarous pleasure or fonts disgusting or spent
Near shrubs implanted by humans and a shovel
For the express purpose of attracting butterflies
But the butterfly prefers the ditch flowers
As Sgt. York yearned for bottom land
But he came from the hills
These are the judgments that clot our nomenclature
A taste for example for romance and local color
Button accordion and crawfish po’ boy
As seen on YouTube and Food Network
These the names that disturb our judgment
Through which we observe or see
Name and calculate
Ditch or bayou

Who knows what kind of party you were expecting
A robin beats a cricket to death
But with approaching footsteps
Quickly departs careful to retain the prize
But as footsteps approach the new position
The bird flies off again
This time leaving the prey
Surely incapacitated by now behind
Rage for occurrences that conceivably could happen
But manifestly have not nor likely will not
Thus it can’t be the case that everything is gone
Evaporated dissipated tapered to a point
Fallen past desuetude
Compensation finds its way
Through the tangled conduits
The smirking one for the blustering one
The old one for the posh one
The scholarly one for the ingratiating one
And still the retainers pass on their wonted perks
And the abandoners cherish their entitlements
If only in memory
That faulty foolscap
The lawn for example is littered with pinecones
Discarded after discharging
Their cache of seeds and yet still
They play the role of pinecones in size and shape
Varying of course from species to species
Though these exhibit variation only amid uniformity
Having fallen from a single tree
But manageable perhaps as objets
The poet for the sales associate
The fibonacci sequence
Known of seashells cochlea and other seedheads
Other picture postcards
The spiral tapering inward
To a point and what’s a point
For the spiral expanding outward
To infinity and what the hell is that
Though desiccated and altered in color
There you go again
The immature one for the erudite one
That continues to grow like a monitor lizard
I hear the asseveration
That you don’t have to put up with this shit
A point midway between the midway points
Halves of halves
Midway between the solstice and the equinox
Between the fulcrum and the force applied
The equalizer graphic or parametric
The triple beam
The Aristotelean mean
The telos and the categorical imperative

The claim is true as I have heard from hell
And other published reports
As of size shape and other relativities
Aimed at and missed
That all must be one or the other
Though neural pathways haply play a part
The part perhaps of the wild card
And other attempts at cartography
Imposing regularity
No doubt and by broad experience
And what cleverness would be required
To determine how what must be
Not always is

Nobody remembers exactly the routine actions
The motions of hygiene nourishment transportation
The specific instance then rolls in unquiet
Not like the freestone peaches of July
The smoke from the Jamaican restaurant
The drone of motor with its harmonic series
More like a scandal during a mountain hike
An indiscretion when strangers looked askance
Or offended on the crowded trail
We’re all related of course in some dim genetic past
And even in the world around we share
The minerals the plants the household implements
Dispensing with them as we dispense with stars
With the dark tempting ocean

The child says that’s my purple
Concurring I add
That’s my Third Stone from the Sun
That’s my Monsieur Hulot
That’s my Ode to a Nightingale

Fuck the Bukowskyites
The poets who say who say that’s right I said fuck
Deal with it
Battle simulators displaying their scars
Reliving the traumas of their childhood
Their neverending infancy
And demanding in inarticulate grunts
That everybody sniff their greasy turds
Ay very like a bear like a wolf
Very like a hairy ape
Enacting the dainty performance
Of their wildness
Pretending possession by Dionysus
Like they know who that is
Who gives permission to spew
When in fact the creation of significance
Requires much more than the guts
They wouldn’t know a sincere barbaric yawp
A phrase from Walt Whitman
Look him up
If it grabbed them by the balls
They wouldn’t know will to power
A phrase from Friedrich Nietzsche
Don’t believe what you’ve heard
If it bit them on their fat or scrawny ass
Masquerading as homo erectus
Like they know who that is
Posturing as the martinet
Braided and epauletted
Look it up ignoramuses
In an authoritative source
Or maybe just a t-shirt
Emblazoned with the visage of this season’s Führer
But if they would see beyond themselves
Beyond their pathetic little circle
Jerk their head around and see the world
The beautiful world of art and nature
The sad world of starving children and wounded civilians
Of ruined cities where stone stands no more atop stone
Of the forest swept away by napalm and the commerce in palm oil
So cherishing their own little wounds
So riven by nostalgia for the myth of the hunter
The quests of arrow string and bended bow
When in fact
When in historical fact
The plow begat the sword
The harvest begat the storehouse
The storehouse begat the guardhouse
And the guard begat the king
The wielder of rod and steel
Of the merely symbolic orb and scepter
But the storehouse also begat the city
Whence civilization its discontents and its glories
Chiefly the glory of the hand that wields the pen
For the written word comes about
By neither crown nor nature
But by patience
By repetition and slow rehearsal
Unto the achievement of style
Repetition and slow rehearsal alien
To jittery subscribers to suddenness
To acolytes of instant gratification
To devotees of snap judgments borrowed not made
To Monday morning leisure revisionists
To jealous holders of the birthright
Acquired by force or fraud
Silly boys proud of their entitlements
Of their abusive fathers whose crimes they reenact
Of their precancerous lesions
Of their enlarged prostates
Of their opinions hardly theirs
But originating in sewers and septic tanks
And especially of their guns long and short
Of their banners bumper stickers badges and emblems
Of their handshakes and shibboleths
Of their oaths and contracts
Of their pervy rituals and magical formulations
Of their fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck
They don’t appreciate
They believe in nothing
Not in truth not in beauty not in goodness
Not even in the fragrant cunt the stubborn penis
Phrases from John Ashbery
Look him up
They don’t appreciate
They revel in passion without a thought in their heads
Delegating by extortion the tasks they shirk
The dirty diaper that must be changed
The exit wound that must be dressed
The tender ministrations of everyday life
The loveliness of life
They and not the humble scholar
Live on high in ivory tower
Mass produced of polystyrene
With access to be sure
To the conduits of dark effluent
Where they spin from their entrails
Their dollar store narratives
Fictions of foul cabals defeated by heroes
Equipped with sidearms and colorful hats
They call themselves artists who create to violate
They wouldn’t know transgression
If it yanked them by their withered pancreas
All is permitted if you call it gonzo
Talking to you Ted Nugent
You foolish human
You ignorant homo sapiens
Whose rascally feedback I enjoyed as a child
But then I grew up
And shouldered the responsibilities of adulthood
Learned the craft by slow patience of adulthood
Learned the lore of caring for self and other
Learned the lore mostly feminine
Of coping nourishment and functionality
Learned to beware my own ignorance
All are ignorant but you do it with pride Ted Nugent
I admit that you have authored poetry
Anchored in prejudice and pandery
Lovingly cultivating ignorance
A zealous missionary for ignorance
For ignorance acquired developed and defended
Heil große Lüge
Spreading the ignorant good news
Sharing the ignorant wealth
A sordid boon from selfish men
Phrases from William Wordsworth
Look him up
Who praised the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling
But counseled too the tempering
Of emotion recollected in tranquility
Therefore you Ted Nugent you loudmouth boor
With your land and your houses and your animal trophies
Your servants and your sycophants
Your fortress compound
Whence you emerge to murder beasts and fowls
Sport of Tudors and their retainers
You could learn something about courtesy
From those bullies and their toadies
Like them you choose willy-nilly whom to respect
But you don’t appreciate
Your Grand Poohbahness ak acka dak
Now hear my command
Which issues from the legitimate authority of letters
And meditation upon the realms of silence
And dreamy refuge in fair trains of imagery
And not from the spurious claims
Of blood or soil or fame or feculent riches
Try for a minute to be quiet
To see before you the image of the sorrowing mother
To hear the guitar gently weeping
To hear the child squealing delightedly on Christmas morning
To hear the children laughing and singing all over the world
As they caper over the rubble
And I say to your foolish face Ted Nugent
To your eyes glowing dully
Within your conceited smug impassioned leer
To your dull foolish insipid face
That you are a foolish person
The Party of Fools is in the ascendancy now
And you will no doubt continue to prosper for a time
And while you wish to silence me and those who think like me
You have failed and you will always fail
You would love to see me cower
And maybe I will who knows
But that would not make you a success
That would only make me human
You pathetic foolish failure
It’s not too late to practice being a person
But in the meantime
To your face I say you are a fool
So what are you going to do about it?
Shoot me?

It comes in from the west
She can feel the pressure drop she says
Sees things smells things I just don’t know
Like how to behave
I know it
But why don’t I act like it
I don’t know
Raising my voice to express incapacity
An uptick in wind velocity
She sensitive to atmospheric pressure
Its ascensions and descents
I only feel it rise and from inside
In the somatic sense
Until it bursts through the fissures
Shearing the wornout rivets
That might have been placed there
By my mother at Curtiss Wright
Or by my father on the flight deck
Of the Saratoga
But Pete why don’t you leap about
As you used to do
Something about the monitor placement
Something about the incongruity
Of The Who in Duluth
Where they never rode horses
The remnants of disheveled intentions
Moldering on the faulty floor
Willful commission of error
Like a single spike-like limb
Planted in a tuft of turf
The abbreviated head
Falling forward hurled headlong
The simple fact that mental derangement
However objectively harmful
Entails a kind of suffering
The issue is not that they’re all the same
Quite the contrary
But unless they announce their differences
Those obscure facts remain
But obscure means not imperceptible
Then the question of instrumentation arises
Am I a sieve
A repository for browning documents
An archive of miscalculations
In the theater the costumed personae
Deliver fluently their tailored orations
But the organic apparatus
Or the technical flowering
Groping toward a rhetoric of plenitude
An ikebana framed of tropes
At the cost of integrity
Of sepal ovule anther and stigma
Whither is fled

A dark pond in Pissarro
Delicate highlights and what rough beasts
Patrol the interior beneath the opacity
Furtive carp and disenteric amoebas
And God knows what
So we say vaunting aloud
While silently we intone the lament
That we fear not the unknown
But the known the likelihoods the probabilities
Of infections of violence of howling winds
That can displace a dwelling
The innumerable assuredly real displacements
The ceiling lightens somewhat
But only momentarily
And with the effect only of heightening
Rather than relieving the discomfort
Is it even possible to renounce exaggeration
Theoretically yes
But I mean as a practical matter
Among the facts as we know them
We speak of dark clouds threatening
I mean
To experience one’s own bowels
Like the earth’s tumultuous exhalations
Or the dopplerian whine in the flickering hallway
Unfolding in the warped recesses
Tapering to a finitude
Darkening again
Must we then conclude that everything
Has become just a little worse
Despite the ardor of verticular administration
Which proceeds according to its own procedures
For the rank and file seem oblivious
From where I stand in their very midst
While the storm remains in abeyance
The suspense killing me softly
And even I old and insensible
Worn and indecisive
Can detect the barometer’s shift
It’s a bit of both isn’t it
A subjective apprehension
And a secular mutation
That may well amount
To a rend in the fabric of the world
And to a discontinuous self

Feather’d cormorant assumes its customary
Posture scowling over the field of grace
What main or goads are these
What madmen locked

Fierce predecessor who fashioned the creed
Or refashioned it to suit current fashion
Whereupon silence descended
Upon the agriculture the children the bugs

The branching island the labyrinth of mirrors
The mockingbird’s digital glitch
The midnight forest of faulty dilemmas
And Hatshepsut a tyrant for all that

The well-intentioned muster
Only token resistance
To the ancient catalog
Regarded by them as a foregone conclusion

The most natural thing in the world
And yet divergent somehow
Repellent in its uniqueness
Paces into the furled afternoon

We assayed an expedition
Nakedness after nightfall
In a place of daylight bustle
Relieved mostly pale of enthusiasm

The following day the leaves
Remained in their prescribed places
The calm doorposts remained
But we glanced pert disheveled

Such energy to protect the persiflage
Shielding the penumbrae from radiation
From blemishes sores sicknesses
How long can this or any throng keep it up

Words are falling out or were they pushed
Rubber raincoat virtual private network
Intrigue takes place behind the arras
Erosion saturates the selfie littoral

Naphthalene and hydrochlorides
An oriole pursues such actions as it is used to
Nimbolane and hypochondria
The feathered garments on the ground and in the air

The line between brute facts and social construction
Because in the heart post-rehabilitation
The artifact is a fact notwithstanding of art
Beforehand in fact frag g g exigency

A jiggle a minor vibration urges a mammalian corpse
Loosed onto the world of costs and behaviors
Taste the frothy residue compact with pain
The breath of times awry and neglected

Surface and depth above and below
Figure and ground ideal and painfully real
The birds and the trees don’t have these problems
Except that they totally do having inherited them

A bit leathery around the edges
A bit problematic at the seams
Bulging with internal pressure
A bloat an intractable burden

I take a walk around the neighborhood
As you can see in these pages
Privileged suburbanite
Mortgage and a paid-up car
Kids all grown and a grandchild or two
Long long marriage of childhood sweethearts
Still a smile of fondness occasionally
You can see here the weather
When I have nothing to talk about
Except the spattering on magnolia leaves
Beyond the curtains in the Japanese fashion
Not that leaves are nothing or rain
And though one poem butts up against another
You can count the days between uploads
When I’m busy with tasks not unpleasant
Like coaxing a three year-old unwillingly to sleep
You can see the seasons
When butterflies embrace the wealth of flowers
When flowers open an invitation
To the generous pollinators
Or when on blustery days the naked branches
Score and stab the white sky

There’s this one guy I often encounter
I cock twice the right hand’s thumb fore- and long fingers
Pinky and ring slightly tucked
And murmur a hiya
And he rolls his eyes away hard northwest
Or deigns a rapid eye-contact
Frowns and nods quickly once
What message does he send me
That haply I invade his privacy
Out here on the public pavement
I have disrupted him
We both are walking here
Nor headed toward a definitive destination
I have no promises to keep
And yet I should respect his solitude he seems to say
His remote and unpublished agenda
Seemingly similar to my own
Though mine might be looser than most
Perhaps he harbors some pain
He dare not articulate
But I don’t know do I
And I feel treated unfairly
Targeted for disapproval
Author of no misdeed known to me
And thus I compound the injustice
By castigating self-centered myself
For self-centeredness
And I want to retort
You’re not alone like or not

And therefore people should offer the blessing
Of a good morning afternoon or evening
A gesture toward clearing
The toxic fog of misunderstanding
For fleeting are our days
Let them not be sullied
By glowering countenance
And gladly if rarely
Cometh the spirit of delight

Light skims across the tops of trees
Shadow slices across below
From the houses and other trees

Too much consciousness we calculate outcomes
Slaves to experience and sooner or later
Out of fear or greed experts in the doctrines

And yet the body febrile and importunate
Will in the end have its say
Will set down the content of the creeds

The neighbors smile and wave as they should
Some withhold smile or wave
As if you don’t belong in this or any universe

The sunset my sunset this remembered rainbow
This outcropping with rounded shoulders
This prismatic glint of tears

Girls intone elaborate chants of their own device
Boys induce dizziness or a head rush
Hoping to start gurgling poetry

Daybreak pricks the little songbird
And hurts it into song and I hear it
As do the elf the giraffe the trilobite

Forbear
Remove just one of them

Kudzu resurgent as when it arrived
But why did it recede in the first place

A blacked-out Mustang roars
So anxious of manhood the young man

The English intruder sounds the monotonous chirp
Whither is fled the song sparrow

Emily poisoned by markets and autotune
Can’t abide a voice singing in a room

The acolytes fly their colors and their shibboleths
The better to identify the foe

A child dies of diarrhea
In this land of poverty

Long-legged daisies made me smile
But only on one side

During the last percussive century
When savory was in vogue
And the former child star was assaying
To bring sexy back
And what doddard imagined that
The waspish power had gone anywhere

The streets were bathed in yellow
Preparing for the emergent anaphora
A song of whatever witlessism

Furthermore
Index finger crooked aloft
Like the gas line of a flivver
We shan’t
They spoke that way
We shan’t have any extensions
Of this willing fracas
Splendidly generously superfluous

The depth of deep rumination
The length of long winters

Whispered suggestiveness
Let’s forget the gravitation hon
And mosey thitherward
Or amble sashay or promenahd
Some sophisticated intonation

Mood indigo liberating UV

You seem to have forgotten one thing
My honored rival
Where are the snows
What is the signal
Who are the ones
Who remain open to suggestion
To tolerate ambiguity

To the neighbor holding the leash I said
That’s the third dog I’ve seen this morning
Take a great interest in that post

An existence not devoid of pleasure
Nor lacking even in voluptuous temptation
But you have conceded the necessary regulations
And even served your term on the council
To verify trust integrity virtue policy faith
And all assume the meretricious posture

The possibilities are endless
And hence you deny the finality of defeat
But possibility is not probability
And probability not cause
In the substantial series of bitter losses
Only a few of them physical

I maintain vague memories of midnight revels
Of rising to emergent occasions
Of merciless punishments issued and received
Of debts and windfalls
Of cowering beneath cruel expectations
Of delighting in Medusa’s piercing cantata