Just a Dumb Old Mountain

and yet those big brains of science, Einstein, Hawking, Kepler, Etcetera,
staring not at stars but at numbers
numbers on paper,
pushing them around like peas on a plate
calculate
with astonishing precision

in unreal units that make it imaginable
the stars’ distance, the universe’s edge—just numbers
nothing real at all
and yet the levers, the imaginary levers,
that move actual planets. So with words
I pretend to penetrate the mystery of all that numbers cannot touch
as if the problem were not simply inattention, lack of investment, the protraction of desire.

Giving Your Love to Passing Things

What are you saving it for

if you can’t give it to the snow now
turning your backyard into a postcard,
or to the dog who can no longer negotiate
the stairs in either direction? She’s heavy
on your aging arms, a good sixty pounds,
she farts every time you pick her up,
squeezing her warm belly close to your chest
for easy lugging; the first time you did it
she squirmed like what the fuck are you up to?
I’m not one of those goddamn lapdogs,
I keep my four on the floor at all times, moron,
but now when it’s time for a meal and for bed
she comes looking for you, clicking her toenails
along the floor, leading you where you have to go.
She stands at attention like a soldier at the bottom of the stairs
or like someone who has already climbed into the cab
and announced her destination. Tomorrow she’ll ride
one last time to the veterinary clinic.
and you’ll sign forms and they’ll fill her veins
with sodium barbital and some frothy white shit
to stop your heart. She’ll collapse in your arms
with the same what the fuck expression she used
when you first picked her up. You’ll put her down.
Meanwhile at home the snow is falling everywhere
on the garden and the trees, on the house and on the cars,
on the crib where you keep the firewood, on the trailer,
and the wellhead, a frothy whiteness erasing
her footprints forever on the frozen grass.

The Sky Tonight

It’s a water balloon you squeeze
It’s coloring outside of the lines
It’s the assurance of music
The push to prove
The rules won’t hold.
 
Like anything.
 
It’s the cold hard empty fact
Against the made-up musts
That soften, enflame, and fill it.
 
It’s the vacuum of the isolated word
It’s the lack of the vacuum.
It’s holding on. It’s letting go
In awesome, awful, autumn wonder.
It’s the coloring of leaves
The lingering lightning’s
Silent thunder.

 

What Dreams Don't Know

 That the goal of life from life's point of view 

is to get everyone on earth to envy you.

That the problem of evil is overcome

when you realize the need of compassion. 

The volumes that need to be written on this title and these verses bring to mind St. John of the Cross, whose only volume (as far as I know), The Ascent of Mount Carmel, includes The Dark Night of the Soul, which is a gloss on a poem of his own composition, which then serves as a mnemonic for the exegesis. The formula is brilliant. Why is it not used more often? 

I doubt the day will ever come when I can put down the reflections that created these or the development that comes from these--with all their hedges and qualifications. But just a couple notes then: Freud was not the first to posit that dreams know more about us than wakefulness, that the unconscious is truer than the conscious mind. It's like believing that children and animals are closer to God than nuns and priests or any adult however devout. But as the other verse says,

I am not who I am

when I am naked

unless I am naked

right now

and I'm not. 

Moments are layers of the past and trajectories for the future piled on the now. But there is only now. If the past exists, it exists now. If love exists, it exists now, in actual acts of feelings being expressed. Do I love you when you are not in my thoughts? Do I see you when my eyes are closed? Or is my belief that I do just persistence of motion? If I sing "I will always love you and I always have loved you" I mean that at every opportunity, at every moment when it mattered I did, when it will be I pledge to (and yet I have failed and will fail). It doesn't cover the moment I'm charging down the field with all my concentration on getting getting the ball past the defender into the net, though the past and the pledge may figure in their way. 

For the first couplet, a short cut, Girard. But so much needs to be added.

For the second, the way around the first, because the goal of arousing universal envy is so obviously self-defeating it's laughable.